"Magical girl stylist is a highly paid job in my world. My brother wanted to be one."

Minerva's nods on the screen, and off the screen quietly slots it with all the other information about Magical Girl World.

"There are a number of other powers that could be potentially useful, or potentially dangerous - if there are any magical girl powers that protect against or use mind control, for instance, those would be very important to know about before first contact is made."

"I don't think there are - a defensive one'd just look like not having a power, since magical girls don't tend to throw mind control powers that anyone could defend against. Should I be wearing a very decorative tinfoil hat?"

"Thank you." Mental note.

"The Gorgon Queen is in her sixties and poor health, the Messiah of Mozambique is contained by international treaty, and Hecatonchire has never been known to target anyone superpowered, but if you see a woman with wings, dark clothing, and no other identifying features you can call to mind when not looking directly at her, I would suggest avoiding her; Shoriel may be dead or may be retired or may be a hero, but while she does not have powers of control, she can certainly cloud the minds of unmodified humans."

"Thank you."

Given a pause, Minerva is going to suggest potential hours (reasonable), pay (high) and work conditions (you are currently in a sample office, also, though Minerva isn't bringing this up specifically, it is not in fact incompatible with growing spidersilk) for the job writing down everything Twentieth Century Foundation can get them to remember about an alternate universe that she's offering Bella and Xander. Benefits include an on-site cafeteria and that the building can survive and has survived airstrikes.

"It's a compelling offer. How long do you envision keeping us on in this capacity?"

"Presently, only a few months. There may be other work you can do for us afterwards - having an outside viewpoint could help in a number of fields - but I doubt it would be as highly compensated, and I suspect we will not be your leading option after we've built up a model of your world, though I would still expect to call you in on occasion to check it."

"And with a model of our world you'd do - what?"

"First and foremost, improve our model of what the world would be like without superheroes, which is generally useful for determining whether we approve or disapprove of attempts to increase the superpowered population; secondarily, get a more general pattern of what alternate worlds we could expect if more began to make contact - it's very difficult to know what is unique about us and what is inevitable about all worlds - and tertiarily to know what to expect if other travelers from your world - magical girls, civilians, or swarms - began appearing here. We'd also attempt to determine if it was worth spending the resources to prevent or cause a permanent link, on which I very much would want your and your brother's advice if that seemed a likely possibility."

"How would you increase the superpowered population? Magical girls run in families a little but not that strongly, do superpowers?"

"Yes. First-order powers are ultimately genetic in origin; anyone with two recessive alleles of a certain gene will obtain powers if they are placed under sufficient stress, and while their mindset and the stress they are under can both affect what powers they obtain, no one without the gene can obtain first-order powers. There exist second-order powers as products of first-order power-granter powers, but those are normally both less - user-friendly - and less powerful."

"...less user-friendly?"

"There is a brief period where you are manifesting first-order powers where you can continue manifesting other powers in response to stress. If your muscles grow too strong and would injure you, you will get increased durability to withstand your own strength, for instance, or fire resistance in response to fire creation. This does not apply with second-order powers, and the death and injury rates for attempts to give yourself - or others - powers are both very high, especially for attempts to give second-order powers to those who already have other first- or second- order powers of their own."

"Moreover, first order powers almost always feel instinctively easy to use. This does not normally apply to second-order powers, with the occasional exception of tinkers experimenting on themselves; every person has their own natural interface for how to use powers, and attempts to use others' interfaces are almost always much more clumsy than attempts to use your own."

"Huh. Does this make it a very strong rule of thumb to not go looking for extra superpowers or is it feasible to do safely?"

"Your first guess is correct. Gadgets are fine if you can afford them, armor is fine if you can afford it, purely physical powers if you have no powers or they are purely mental is only normally risky, and anything else is likely to be deadly."

"Gotcha. ...are there very cool consumer-grade gadgets on offer?"

"For rich enough consumers, yes, but tinker equipment is hand-crafted as a rule; there have only been two tinkers that could build factories, I am dead, and Steelstorm's specialties are munitions and military robots."

"Dead, you say."

The woman on the screen nods. "My physical body died almost forty years ago, and with it my first-order powers, leaving only the small army of identical hive-minded robot duplicates of myself running my uploaded brain that I had previously constructed so I could be in multiple places at once."

"So I am dead, but not yet gone."

"Oh. Wow. How's being a hive mind treating you?"

"I enjoy it."

(This is one of the many cases where Minerva is so glad she can just lie now that she has an inhuman amount of processing power to direct to doing it well, not that she thinks she'd enjoy being down to a single body any more.)

"It sounds kinda cool! But, I gather, not very consumer grade.

"Do we get a relocation bonus if we take you up on your offer after discussing it?"

"I provided backups for three other people before my death. I had wanted to do everyone, eventually - so far none of the immortality methods have been anything close to mass-produced - but it had not made it to the top of the agenda when I died.

"And yes, absolutely under the circumstances." She will name numbers.

"I'll go talk it over with my brother when we're done here. Anything else to cover sooner than later?"