"You named the robots?" Valiant asked.

"Well, yeah," I said. "They're not person-smart, just dog or crow or dolphin smart, but still, at that level of intelligence, you tread carefully, treat them respectfully, and give them names. Which, in my case, involved sitting around trying to come up with some well-known characters associated with perception and finding things. I only needed to name four of them, and thank God for that."

"...Alright, I'll bite," Valiant said. "What did you name the robots?"

"Argus, for the Greek Myth of the hundred-eyed watcher," I said. "Sherlock, for the legendary detective. Franklin, for the discoverer of DNA."

"Oh, interesting, a more well-rounded approach to the idea of discovery," Valiant said. "Let me guess, the fourth one is the punchline?"

"Yep."

"Let me keep guessing," Valiant said. "Discovery... unveiling, revealing, apokalypsi is the Greek word for that, from which we get apocalypse in English, usually meaning 'end of the world' because of the Book of Revelations... Alright, I'm going to guess that you named a robot Apocalypse, because you wanted to freak someone out in a way that lets you lecture them about etymology."

"Damn, that's a better joke than I had," I said. "No, I named the last one Columbo, 'cause they're just one more thing."

"Oh you fucking- goddamnit. I hate you, but in a different way than I hated you when we first met."

"That's what friendship is," I said. "Anyhow. I'm not just here to tell you bad jokes- if I was, it'd be at one of our houses, over a glass of iced tea and maybe a bowl of French-y fish stew- did I tell you about that Adam Ragusea 'practical bouillabaisse' video?"

"You did not, but perhaps you should focus," Valiant said. "Like you said, talk about casual life matters happen at home, out of uniform."

Right now, Valiant and I were in his office in a soberly-designed government building that looked incredibly ordinary and nondescript, without any hint whatsoever that this was where a tenth of the nation's superscientists clocked in every weekday, 9 to 5. He was in his armor- he had multiple suits, but they were all identical backups of each other, and each one was fully equipped for every occasion he expected to face in it, and a few that didn't. Luckily, his tech was compact enough that the armor didn't make sitting in a chair a complete non-starter, even if his chair did have to be custom-made to fit a six foot six man wearing power armor.

Me, I was just wearing a double-breasted labcoat, a headscarf, and some brass-framed goggles with shaded lenses.

"I know you're a grown man whose dignity chafes at the word 'costume,' but that's what we're wearing, big man," I said. "There ain't nothin' uniform about any of this. But you're right, and I'll get to the point."

"After disagreeing with me so that you can get the last word."

"What can I say? I'm Jewish. Anyway, the point. They're equipped with transdimensional scanners, so they can sniff around in the spirit realm more efficiently than Red Fox's spirit hounds. Hopefully they'll turn up a lead that Red was too green to unearth, and that'll lead us to the central basket that Skinner's trail of eggshells is leading to."

"That... metaphor got away from you, there."

"A little bit."

"Well. Hopefully they can turn up something," Valiant said. "Although... you said you'd developed transdimensional scanners?"

"You're wondering about the possibility of opening up a more reliable, insider's line of communication with A-510 and asking for more help," I said. "Well, that's a good idea, and in fact I'm here to discuss that with you, because the treaty says I need your approval to even build that sort of thing."

"You have my blessing," Valiant said. "I'll make sure you get that in writing, too."

"I said discuss, not just ask permission," I said. "Look, fact of the matter is, A-510 thinks B-944 sounds just as terrible to live in as B-944 thinks A-510 is. There are only a few types of people who would be willing to ignore the titans clashing over I-35 every fucking Thursday and making traffic even worse, and they're all duty-bound sorts. And the thing about duty-bound sorts is that they usually already have a duty they're bound to."

"That's generally true, but there have to be people with functioning moral compasses and the ability to decide that a mad scientist enslaving a world of superheroes as a prelude to enslaving her own world is worth the time away from their primary duties," Valiant said.

"First and foremost... no there doesn't," I said. "There doesn't have to be anything. But more importantly, power on A-510 almost always equates to sinking deeper and deeper into a solipsistic nightmare where the outside world, the real world, stops mattering as much. The only exceptions are people like Skinner, who have unpleasant plans for the real world, and people like me, who usually don't like being people like me, because they're constantly confronted with all of the real world's many, many, many problems, living in misery amongst them, and desperately trying to drown that voice that won't stop saying 'it doesn't have to be this way,' because it really doesn't have to be this way, but to actually bring about large-scale societal change with our toolkit is to invariably become the monsters we hunt in the first place. I can mind control people, Valiant. I could, if I wanted to, swing any election in any direction I wanted. I could groom some random person off the street into the perfect figurehead for my own politics, put them in the Oval Office, and then force everyone else to listen when they speak. I want to do that, so badly. But I don't. Because no matter how noble my goals, no matter how well I house and feed the people... There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. And someone willing to cross that line can't be trusted to be stopped by anything else."

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"...You've thought about this for a while, haven't you?" Valiant asked.

"I've got a long, written version, if you need something to keep you awake at night," I said dryly. "Anyhow, people like me, hunters, who are powerful enough to make a difference in this hunt, are very rare. Chances are all the others are already occupied with their own world-threatening hunts. I don't know for sure, we don't talk to each other that much. We might be able to get Jason Thronebreaker to agree to come through, but then we run into the next problem: very few people are capable of actually traveling across the dimensional barrier. And I'm reasonably confident that druids aren't among them."

"Alright, so our only hope is that people capable of interdimensional travel come over to help us," Valiant said. "What about time travelers? The people who you said, in your notes, not only existed but almost definitionally were also capable of interdimensional travel unless they didn't build their own time machine?"

"The Eternal Watchmen will only help us if the timeline requires that they do," I said. "I can't see the future, and neither can you, so let's not get our hopes up about the Eternals coming to save our asses. Standard operating procedure."

"What about time travelers besides them?"

"They'll only come help if we lose. Trust me, we don't want to warrant their help." I shuddered.

"Did one of them help you already?" Valiant asked.

"Yes, and while she looked absolutely nothing like me or anyone I know, she called me 'Mom' right before she disappeared," I said. "I don't ever plan on having kids, and have never had unprotected sex in my life, so I've always been reasonably certain she was just fucking with me, but it still keeps me up at night every now and then."

"Your life sounds like a nightmarish layer-cake of insane bullshit," Valiant observed.

"And the price I paid for getting away from it all was moving to an alternate dimension where there are even more wrecks on I-35. C'mon, would it kill you people to install some proper commuter rail? It's not that hard. This technology was everyday and unremarkable when Bram Stoker was writing Dracula back in the 1890s!"

"Look, I would absolutely love having commuter rail and fully-separate bike networks," Valiant said. "Reducing this country's dependency on cars would be a dream come true for me! But I'm not in charge of it any more than you are. I'm just the guy who heads the superscience department."

"Why do you head the superscience department, and not Doctor Sakurai?" I asked. "...And why doesn't she live in Austin?"

"She lives in Houston because she works at NASA," Valiant reminded me. "Because she is a legendary rocket scientist who makes Werner Von Braun, the only Nazi scientist to ever amount to jack shit, look like an eight year old playing with cheap fireworks, boasting about how high he can make a can jump in the air when he fills it with firecrackers."

"Oh right, forgot about the NASA thing," I said. "I thought Akane made us all watch the latest space shuttle launch just because she was into aerospace engineering."

"You weren't paying close attention, were you?" Valiant asked.

"In point of fact, I was, but more to the explanation Akane was giving of all the principles that went into the new space shuttle and why it looked the way it did," I said. "And in the middle, for the countdown to launch, we held a moment of silence for the old toroidal aerospike engines, which looked way cooler than the new, more efficient linear aerospike engines."

"...You know what, that is something you nerds would do," he said, with no small amount of affection. "Anyway, we're getting distracted again. So, if we can't call for help, what do you expect to accomplish by establishing a line of communication with A-510?"

"I expect to be able to gather a lot of information that we've been sorely missing, and which we greatly need," I said. "Mostly to bring Red Fox up to speed, but bringing Doctor Sakurai the Younger further up to speed on some more mad science shit wouldn't go amiss. There also might be information that lets me safely install mad science implants in druids and superheroes, which would greatly increase the efficacy of our team; implants are my specialty, after all, and being able to share those would make a huge difference."

"Fair enough," Valiant said, nodding. "Well, that alone is a perfectly valid reason to use that line of communication. It will need to be monitored, of course, but..."

"Of course," I said, nodding. "Don't say anything I don't want an AI based on my girlfriend's middle-aged dad to read."

"Correction: don't say anything you don't want to be read by an AI based on your girlfriend's twenty five year old dad, out loud, in an argument with her actual middle-aged dad, to piss him off."

"...That sounds like bad infosec."

"Liquid Courage talks a big game about how much Randall sucks, and he's right, but Liquid just sucks in a different way. Anyway, is that all you've got for me?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Robots are scanning, I wanna build a device to talk to A-510, and we cannot actually use it to call for help. Could've been an email, but I couldn't resist seeing your pretty face."

Valiant's featureless helmet stared back at me, and yet I knew he was rolling his eyes under it. "Yeah, yeah. Get out of my office, punk. Dismissed."