"You're the team leader so I suppose you can do whatever you want. And the whole 'team' thing might not make as much sense anymore, depending on how these interuniversal shenanigans go."

"I mean, things are... sometimes done in groups? Depends on what you're doing. We don't have much precedent for one-off idiosyncratic superpowers, mostly they're closer to interchangeable or at least reproducible."

"Do your Earths have superhero comic books?"

"I don't know. My world has comic books but I usually didn't read them..."

"The way we organized was—heavily influenced, to say the least, by the genre. People go out in costumes and masks like, uh, this," he says, gesturing at himself and Hero. "And organize hero teams to fight against supervillains who are similarly attired. It's a bit more complicated than that, because we did have the end of the world to prevent, but you won't go far wrong by betting on that aesthetic."

"Magic rocks have magic outfits to match and some departments have uniforms of one sort or another, but masks are not so much in vogue."

"The idea is that you use that to protect your loved ones from harassment and violence that might be caused by your actions while in costume. It's probably not really strictly necessary but the idea stuck, and we—Cauldron—encouraged it. It helped with some of their—our plans."

"It's generally safe to be a loved one of a Vanda Nossëo operative. Or a Mîr one or an Elendil one, there's three affiliated multiversal consortium deals here."

And Legend, while not the official team leader, is still fully capable of addressing at least the surface-level details of integration with one of these consortia—presumably not all with Boots, who said she was here mostly for Epic.

Other Bells are capable of doing basic onboarding work and feel sufficiently confident in their mental defenses to operate in the world.

Speaking of mental defenses, turns out the way thinker powers and precognition works is by brute-force simulating the future with a lot of fidelity. Contessa's power is basically simulating all worlds until it finds one where her goals are achieved, for instance. The reason thinker powers interfere with each other is a specific routine to avoid infinite reflections of each other.

"Well, that's fucked up. Initial assessment on the feasibility of making them all cut it out?"

They will probably be extremely unhappy about it! Contessa in particular won't, she finds herself relieved about being put out of commission, but most thinkers use their power as much or more as they use their regular senses. It would be akin to blinding them.

"Volunteers to go get a magic rock style replacement wished on?"

Depends on how they PR this, they were not really planning on telling everyone about how Scion was an alien who wanted to eat them and that makes it somewhat harder to share the info that also their powers run simulations. Do the various consortia have tried-and-true methods of broadcasting how lots of people will need to choose between going to another universe to make a wish and going blind?

Inconveniently, no, this will be breaking new ground. She has experience telling people they have to stop eating humans but that's really sort of different despite the emotional importance of eating humans to some vampires.

It also doesn't help that Cauldron doesn't actually run the world, it just has a lot of influence, political and otherwise. Do they have a way to send a message to every thinker? Because otherwise regardless of the strategy they will in fact accidentally miss some people.

"What I'm hoping to do is a trial run to see if a wished-on version works. We want a batch of maybe five to fifteen, I'm hoping one Thinker's wish can cover several others. Once it's determined whether or not that works, then if it does, someone whose converted power works to track down other Thinkers can be signed on to do that, and if it doesn't we need a new plan."

Cauldron definitely has the resources to call on fifteen Thinkers of lots of different flavors.

Ones who ideally feel strongly about replacing Thinker powers with versions that don't casually create and kill people.

Does "feel strongly about not losing their power" count?

It'll probably do if they're willing to channel it appropriately.

Yup, can do.

And they can go over wording and wish for replacement powers!

It turns out two of them are sufficiently dependent on/desperate about their power that they can in fact cover everyone who has loosely similar powers.