Finally a woman in a black tailcoat and goggles bursts through the door, for once not carrying any injured capes.  "It's Scion!  Scion's here!  He's fighting!"

Everyone's too worked up to cheer, but the whole room sighs together.

Oh, must be the local archmage-or-gold-dragon-or-similar. Excellent. She'll ask who that is the next time there's a break in the flow of casualties, which seems like it might be soon.

At first it picks up; apparently Field Hospital A overflowed at some point, and now they finally have the teleport resources to do something about it.  But Stabilizing the worst-off arrivals doesn't take much time, and there are plenty of idle patients around to talk to, so Samora can have all the cape tea she can drink.

Scion is the first cape.

The best cape.

No, not best, just strongest.

The strongest, yeah.

Nothing can hurt him.

He's probably punching Behemoth in the face right now. You should go watch, it'll be cathartic.

No she shouldn't, don't be such a tourist, Scarf.

He usually comes to Endbringer fights, but sometimes he doesn't.

Having all that power did something to his brain.

He doesn't talk.

He doesn't smile.

No one knows how he thinks.

Yeah, sounds like an archmage analogue. What's he do when there isn't an Endbringer, hang out in his private demiplane? Who are the other capes everyone should know about?

Demi-plane?  He doesn't need a plane, he can fly.

He just flies around, helping with things.

Puts out fires, stops earthquakes.

Grabs children out of war zones sometimes.

But, sometimes he'll stop a forest fire in the middle of nowhere instead of an Endbringer.

He never, ever explains himself.

For capes everyone should know, well. First there's the Triumvirate, everyone agrees on those three: Legend, Alexandria, and Eidolon.  Leaders of the Protectorate, the organization that led the Endbringer fight.  Well, not leaders leaders, the Protectorate has non-capes in charge, but the Triumvirate are the most powerful.  Legend flies, and shoots lasers, and turns into light so you can't hurt him.  Eidolon has any power he wants, but only three at a time.  Alexandria is super-strong, and she flies, and you can't hurt her.  Lots of capes have that basic combination of powers, to a greater or lesser degree -- they call it the "Alexandria package".

The second tier is a lot more chaotic. There's Panacea, the best healer ("except maybe you now? But she can fix missing eyes, that's pretty big."). Dragon ("the queen of tinkers -- oh but you met her already, right?"). Narwhal ("she uses forcefields for everything, including clothing"). Myrrdin ("he says he casts spells too, you guys should meet"). Chevalier ("he's got a really big sword", but no one can agree on what's special about it). People start talking over each other. Exalt (some kind of air control?). Rime ("she makes these huge ice sculptures"). Lung (he can turn into a dragon, apparently, but everyone flinches when his name comes up). Armsmaster ("he's a tinker, like Dragon, he made this cool halberd...") . Jack Slash (everyone else shushes the person who said this one). Cinereal (there's a big sub-argument about how her power works, something something ash).

If you wanted information about their personalities or anything you're going to have to insist on it explicitly; it is not where these peoples' minds are going.

She wants--well, everything, but mostly she wants information on powers, factions, alignments in whatever sense they understand that. It doesn't all have to be from things they say; she can tell everyone else agrees Dragon is great, and that this Jack Slash guy is bad news.

And she has one other question that's been in the back of her mind since she saw the city and the number of casualties: best guess, how many people are on this planet? 

People will enthusiastically try to tell you about powers!  It doesn't work super well because no one knows where powers come from, and if they have limits at all they're mostly not known, but people will try!  People who can get powers have a specific brain region that nobody else has; there's a big argument about what proportion of people this is.  Then maybe one day you fall asleep (and to Samora's Sense Motive, everyone gets weirdly shifty at this point), and when you wake up you've got powers.  It's called a trigger!  Powers usually don't get stronger over time -- though apparently there's one guy, Dauntless, who does -- but you can get better at using them!

There are lots and lots and lots of different kinds, even just right here in this room: this lady duplicates nearby objects, and they explode after a little while!  This guy summons monsters from peoples' emotions!  Those two little girls are actually one person, and they can split a lot further than that!  Every day is an adventure when you're working with powers!  (Some of Samora's retinue is being sarcastic about that, but not all).

There's something called the Manton Limit, which means that you usually can't use your power to mess around with someone's insides directly.  Like, if you had the power to create kittens, you couldn't create one inside your opponent's skull and give them brain damage.  Behemoth's kill aura does not follow this rule, which is why we stay 100 feet from him at all times.

There...probably isn't mind reading?  Apparently somebody did some research showing that this was impossible even with powers, but not everyone buys it.

You can go to school to learn about powers, but you'll learn about tendencies and patterns rather than hard rules.

People are willing to talk demographics.  This planet has about seven billion people.  The city you're in, Denver, apparently has either about 2 million or about 600,000, depending on whether you mean just the city core or the whole area.  There's a little pause after they settle that, where someone could say "fewer now, of course", but no one does.

People...are a little reluctant to get into factions.  The Protectorate is the organization that's running the defense here, and the Triumvirate are all members, but lots of people here aren't.  Some are members of other teams of heroes (this seems to be the general term for "person who is trying to use their powers to do Good").  Some are heroing solo.  Some are mercenaries, just using their powers to get paid.

And some, apparently, are villains; people who use their powers to commit crimes.  A lot of the time, the Good heroes are trying to do is to catch them and put them in jail.  But there's a thing called the Endbringer Truce: if you show up to fight an Endbringer nobody's allowed to arrest you or mess with you, and you get the same healing afterward that everyone else does.  They're not even allowed to try to find out your real identity.

That's another thing that gradually becomes obvious, now that Samora has brain space for things other than channels and Stabilize.  Except for her and Sanguine, all the powered people here, all the "capes", are wearing masks, and they have codenames like "Acrobat", "Leitmotif", or "Sanguine".

They're just starting to try to explain how that works in practice - 

- when a tall, muscular woman in black and gray floats through the factory doors.

All eyes turn to her immediately.  Voices cut off in midword.

"Behemoth has retreated.  While he did great damage, and was able to destroy the Tinker lab which we suspect was his primary objective, we were able to hold him back from the city center for long enough for Scion to arrive.  This was a good day, and you should all be proud."  Her voice is low, and utterly commanding.

Her focus had been spread through the whole room; now it bears down on Samora.  "Endbringer battles are always difficult, and always bring terrible loss of life.  But today was remarkable: fewer capes were killed than in any other Behemoth encounter.  And for that, as I understand it, we have our visitor to thank."  She floats closer, until she's just outside Samora's personal space.  "Samora, may I speak to you privately?  I want convey our thanks for your extraordinary work today, and discuss your future plans."

Unless prevented, she'll lead Samora back up to the rooftop where she met Sanguine.  "I'm also here," she adds on the way up, "to answer your questions about our world, and about the conflict in which you found yourself.  My time here is sadly limited, but I want to make sure that you're oriented enough to be able to rest and recover over the next few days.  Assuming, that is, that you're not able to return to your own world."  She gives the sense, through her featureless gray visor, that she's watching Samora very closely.

Goodness that's a lot of people, especially when you consider that that's only the ones they know about.

The Endbringer truce is a great accomplishment of their civilization and Heaven rejoices in it.

Samora is happy to talk to the important ~government person who's probably Alexandria. "Whether I return to my own world depends on some things I don't know yet, but I'll definitely be here until tomorrow morning. One of the things I'm considering is that I may in fact be able to do more good here than there, with your lack of healers and the possibility of getting more people powers similar to mine. To that end, I want to know about the strategic situation. The next fifty years." Is this someone she can ask straight out? Yes. "I need to know if you're winning or losing."

Hah.

It isn't usually Alexandria's job to make this kind of approach. Legend is better at gladhanding, at being welcoming and reassuring - and at not scaring people. He'd guessed, when they were arguing about who would float down to meet Samora, that she would be stressed from being dropped unexpectedly onto an Endbringer, and that spending hours healing strange people would have frayed her nerves still further, and so she'd appreciate a friendly, low-key invitation to a quiet bedroom somewhere. Alexandria, watching Dragon's footage after that first glowing-ball attack, guessed differently.

She expected to be right; she typically does. She had not expected to be proven right that quickly.

What answer serves Cauldron's goals, and thereby humanity's? With most people she'd be tempted to lie, much as she dislikes it; everyone, to a first approximation, likes a winner. But there's a certain kind of person who sees giant monsters, and wounded heroes, and weak infrastructure, and the wholescale collapse of civilization, and finds it motivational.

She lets herself smile, just a little.

"Perceptive. We're losing. It's happening slowly; our best Thinkers loosely estimate that we have between twelve and forty years before our civilization reaches an unrecoverable breaking point. Today was a good day, but it will not alter that trajectory. We're all deeply interested in finding something that will."

"On that subject, what do you mean by 'getting more people powers similar to mine'?" Samora didn't say, 'more people with powers similar to mine`, which suggests that she has...something analogous to Cauldron vials, maybe.

She observes that she doesn't feel surprised. An attack like that, in a random location, multiple times a year? This civilization is very impressive, from what she's seen of it, but not enough to survive that, not when their strongest ally has multi-hour response times and every engagement is at a time of the enemy's choosing.

"I'm assuming Dragon briefed you; let me know if I need to back up. I don't know why the gods who intervene so often on my planet intervene so little on yours. If I need to leave, it's because whatever that reason is applies to me. If I can stay, then I can explain my goddess and Her allies to others, and some of them may be chosen as I was. They'll start out much weaker than I am, but grow stronger by facing danger and challenge, and even the weakest priest can heal and create clean water and cast Stabilize. And there are benefits just from having people who are known to be aligned with a particular god, who would lose their powers if they betrayed that god's principles."

"I would not share information about the Evil gods, or the Neutral ones who make civilization weaker. I cannot guarantee that they will not intervene here if the Good ones start intervening. But the Good gods can find allies freely and those allies can work together, while the servants of the Evil gods are mostly desperate fools who fight each other as much as anyone else. I believe I can create a significant asymmetric advantage for Good. I can tell you more about the risks if you want to know; I welcome additional considerations."

"I don't think I can save your civilization alone. But I'm not alone, and maybe with Heaven behind me I can help you save yourselves."

Alexandria has met one god, and eaten from the corpse of another. They gave her incredible power, and put her in place to decide the fate of nations. And yet, on the whole, it would have better by far for everybody if she and the gods had never met.

Now, those gods clearly aren't the same kind of thing that Golarion has. Samora's type makes capes clerics that start strong, and get stronger over time. Modulo the occasional second trigger, powers just don't work that way. The things infesting Golarion have their own way of working, and their own values, that this child thinks she understands well enough to label as 'evil' and 'good'. She may even be right. But Alexandria didn't get this far -- didn't get humanity this far -- by hoping for the best. The burden of mankind's survival belongs to Cauldron, and they don't dare cede it to any ostensibly higher authority.

Though, no, she didn't call them 'good', did she. She said 'Good'; the capital letter was audible even through the cultural gap. This is a fundamental concept for her, maybe for her whole society. Striking that our languages are so similar, even though the underlying idea must be - wait.

She smiles more widely. "That's a heroic response. If you do choose to stay you'll be welcome; that much I can promise myself. But before you explain your goddess to anyone else, I want to understand her, and the philosophy behind her, for myself. In aid of that I have another question, one which may seem strange.

Are we speaking the same language?"

"Oh, no, almost certainly not, I have Truespeech. Is something translating oddly?"

Ah.  Truespeech.  Of course that exists, and Samora has it.  "And that means that you speak in your language and I understand you in mine?

I ask because I think there was a miscommunication earlier, close to the heart of what I want to understand. You said to Dragon that Holy Smite does 'Good' damage. We took that to mean that it was an effective, powerful attack; one that did more damage than a merely 'decent' attack, but not as good as an 'excellent' one." Alexandria hates spelling things out this much, it's so slow and inelegant, but she's not sure what else to do with a translation power like this. "But that wasn't it, was it? You meant that your attack was in some sense ontologically Good, that it hurt Behemoth through its Goodness instead of through its sharpness, or heat, for example. That suggests that Goodness as you know it is very different from our understanding.

So. You say you have a Good goddess. I believe you - " well, she believes that Samora believes it, close enough for this conversation " - but I need to hear much more, before I could hope to understand what you really mean. What is Good?"

A powerful person from another world has asked Samora about the nature of Good! Samora visibly takes a second to Lock In.

"Good is the flourishing of all beings. Good is life and health and freedom and happiness and friendship and love and laughter and peace. My goddess is the goddess of prioritization and defeating Evil and She's Good, and the god of farmers and hunters and family and duty is Good, and the goddess of love and art is Good, and the goddess of travel and dreams is Good, and the god of courage and parties is Good. Not all the gods whose works are helpful to humanity are Good, because a couple of them are Neutral, but all the Good gods are helpful. Good is helping people who need it and protecting the weak and building paradise in this world and the next. Good is driving off the Endbringers and healing the casualties and repairing the city, and it's raising your children well and sharing with your neighbors and doing your job as well as you can. There are a lot of ways to be Good and they're all necessary."

"And if you're thinking that something is missing from that description, the thing that's missing is Law. Law is keeping your word and being someone people can predict, being someone your allies can work with and your enemies can surrender to. It's telling the truth, and fair dealing in business, and taking your grudges to the Watch instead of settling them yourself. Whenever you benefit from something you could only get because someone knew what you'd do with it, that's Law. The Endbringer Truce is Law."