"Alright, so, here's the fundamental situation," I said. "Demiurgy is fundamentally geared towards a smaller scale of effect. Mind control devices almost always require being within, like, ten to fifty feet of the person being controlled. They can still achieve high degrees of control, but only really with one person at a time, or, at most, a small-medium room full of people."

"I follow so far," Valiant said, nodding.

"However, as literally any scholar of any subject can tell you, humans are pretty good at taking small-scale effects and making them impactful on the large scale," I said. "Among other things, this is, fundamentally, what the practice of politics is about: affecting large-scale policy changes by cultivating the right relationship with the right person."

"And so you're about to speculate on how Doctor Skinner will attempt to conquer our world with the mind-control tools she has at hand, instead of going out and looking for her like an actual bounty hunter," Valiant said, nodding.

"First of all, nix that 'instead' bullshit," I said. "I have the toolset of a supervillain, and you know damn well that I already have robot minions to do my pavement-pounding for me, and better than I can do it. Second, need I remind you that I did, in fact, try the pavement-pounding approach and discovered that Skinner is operating through even more decoys than I thought she was. So, while I wait for people who are not me to do things I cannot do in order to track her properly, I am going to pursue another potentially productive avenue of investigation, that being setting a hypothetical thief to catch a thief."

"Point," Valiant said. "Alright, what's your idea for how she's going to circumvent her limitations?"

"Well, she doesn't consider this world to be worth ruling for its own sake," I said. "As far as she cares, it's a pocket world where she can harvest some powerful slaves before going back to the real world that is worth ruling for its own sake. Therefore, she only really needs to mind-control superheroes to get what she wants, and for that, she can just suborn a few superheroes at a time, aiming for the ones who are in charge of teams, who can then easily isolate and suborn their subordinates one by one."

"And here, for once in my life, I get to be smug," Valiant said. "Because this is not a new threat to us, and is one we've addressed with psychic shielding superscience mandated for everyone who is in charge of other heroes. Psychic shielding is not foolproof, and we've had incidents where it's been overpowered, but it's hard enough that it's the path of most resistance. Especially since part of the standard design specs require having a failsafe alarm that goes off if the shielding is bypassed or removed from the wearer, or anything like that."

"...Fair enough," I said. "So, if heroes are getting mind-controlled, that's kind of an all-hands-on-deck emergency of the sort that's very hard to hide."

"More or less, yes," Valiant said, nodding.

"Counterpoint, though: Iron Beak."

"Remind me again who Iron Beak is."

"One of your subordinates?" I prompted. "You know, the hero who got kidnapped and mind-controlled by Hordemaster a few months ago?"

"Ah, that," Valiant said. "Well, you'll be pleased to know that Iron Beak was not in charge of anyone; while many heroes who aren't in charge of others still have psychic shielding of their own, Iron Beak wasn't one of them until after the incident, at which point I gave them a psychic shielding implant I'd made myself. Then, upon learning of the Doctor Skinner plot, I made it department policy that everyone in Austin would require such shielding from me- not necessarily implanted, but definitely at least semi-permanently attached to their person- until this particular crisis passed."

"Ahhh, I see," I said, nodding. "So, the government hero infrastructure is... more-or-less safe from this particular mode of attack."

"Pretty much, yes," Valiant said, nodding. "It's the sort of thing that's only really possible if she's already suborned huge swathes of society, at which point we have bigger problems."

"Hrm..." I frowned. "...She probably already knows that, and yet is going ahead anyway, so her plan can't be that... Has to be something else. I'll think on it."

"If that order of business is concluded," Valiant began.

"It is, yes," I said, nodding.

"Then perhaps we can address something else of concern," Valiant said. "Namely, that clone of Princess Vega that Doctor Sakurai adopted."

"Oh, her," I said. "What about that is bothering you?"

"Questions of the long-term," Valiant said. "In the short term, I anticipate she'll be useless-"

"In point of fact, she's a crucial clue, whose spiritual scent has been thoroughly mapped and analyzed," I said. "Being as, metaphysically, her mother was Doctor Skinner and her father Princess Vega, and we are trying to find Doctor Skinner, having more things that are metaphysically connected to her should increase our chances of finding Skinner."

"You know damn well that what I mean is that her active participation is wholly unnecessary," Valiant said. "Because, for right now, she is still effectively a child, according to you."

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"More or less, yeah," I said, nodding. "But, children grow up."

"Indeed they do," Valiant said, nodding. "I recall you saying that, post-decanting, Violet's hyperneuroplastic 'childhood' phase would last for two to three months, and, when pressed for specificity, gave the figure of seventy days, with a fourteen day margin of error in either direction."

"That is what I said for Skinner's cloning tech, yes," I said. "She's experimented with it but never found it worthwhile compared to simply mind-controlling existing people."

"What I want to know is why," Valiant said. "I want to know what challenges are going to be faced in integrating Violet Vega-Sakurai into society in a healthy, peaceful, and preferably productive manner."

"It's kinda simple, really," I said. "A big part of how adult humans survive independently is that they very much actually don't. Nobody is an island, we all rely on others pretty heavily, that's what it means to live in a society. And it's important to have direct personal connections to other people, too- you need specific people who have a relationship with you in particular who you can turn to and say 'I need help, please.' Your typical human person who came out of a vagina and took twenty years to reach adulthood has spent those twenty years not just developing the personal skills necessary to survive in the world and accomplish things in it, but also developing personal connections to other people who have skills that they don't, as well as connections they don't."

"And so," Valiant said, connecting a few dots.

"And so, Violet Vega-Sakurai, at the end of her first ten weeks, is going to be just as personally skilled as an above-average high school student, but she is not going to have nearly so many people she knows as said high school student," I said, nodding. "Thankfully, you and I are both well aware of people who exit high school with pretty much no personal connections outside of their immediate family, and then later go on to make friends, become properly socialized, and become better able to function in society. So, my best guess is, come the end of next spring... Violet Vega-Sakurai is going to be enrolled in some summer courses at a university or maybe a community college, and get an opportunity to meet new people and learn to socialize in an environment where socializing isn't the main point, and the price of failure is pretty low."

"And that should, in a few years, produce a functional adult who won't need to be institutionalized?" Valiant asked.

"It should, yes," I said. "I mean, bear in mind that this is the domain of mad science, and Violet is always going to be at least a little weird as a person. She is, among other things, going to be incentivized towards maintaining some distance from ordinary humans; she's a product of mad science, and while being a person makes her more resilient than most of the things I build, physical intimacy like medical care, fighting, and sex will pose a serious risk of making her go haywire, which is, uh... kinda really dangerous and life-threatening."

"Mm. Fortunately, in this universe, Earth's supernatural community exists quite openly, and finding other supernatural people with whom to be intimate will not pose a challenge," Valiant said. "A shame she isn't asexual like I am, though; it'd make things far less complicated for her."

"...Wait, you're ace?" I asked.

"Yep," Valiant said, nodding. "Aromantic, too."

"Huh. Is that just, like... are you aro-ace naturally, because that's just a thing people can just be, or is it because you're a psychic who did a fucky-wucky with your brain?"

"The former," Valiant said. "It was a difficult thing to come to terms with, due to my personal history of social isolation and deeply unpleasant loneliness. You know how it is for men- we're taught that emotional intimacy, a basic psychological need for humans, is something they are only allowed to experience with a girlfriend or wife, and thus is born part of the reason why so many men act as though they are entitled to a girlfriend. But, well, then I made a few friends who didn't have their heads up that particular asshole, and came to realize that this was what I was missing, not the sex bit. Which I had tried! And then did not like."

"Mmn."

"The question of whether to be a psychic and do a fucky-wucky with my brain was one I considered, but ultimately decided against," Valiant continued. "If it wasn't necessary to maintain the emotional bonds I needed, then there really isn't much point in acquiring that particular taste."

"Fair enough. Which does raise the fact that, very likely, there will need to be several transformative procedures, physically and mentally, performed on Violet at some point, but, and this is crucial, only if she decides she wants them, once she's gotten out of the hyperneuroplasticity phase, which is even more volatile than regular childhood and adolescence on account of being like a hundred times shorter. We don't get to make those decisions for her, either. Even if Lady Vega tries to insist that Violet not looking like a hentai character is offensive to her cultural sensibilities."

"I hate that you have made me learn enough about Vegan culture to understand how much you are not joking."

"The more I learn about their society, the more it feels like it was designed by one particular guy with a very specific but only mildly weird boner, and the more I wish I wasn't so genuinely curious about this weird fucked up society out in space."

"Sigmund Freud would have a fucking field day with the Vegas explaining why the phrase 'mommy milkers' is, in fact, the most accurate English translation of their idea of what feminine authority is supposed to look like, visually-speaking."

"In complete fairness, we're having a field day with that, too," I said. "Besides, Sigmund Freud would have a field day with anything. Cocaine tends to have that effect on people."

"Mm, true."

"And while ordinarily I'd love nothing more than to exchange incongruously erudite discourse on the subject of some fat fuckin' honkers, I think that, for the time being, the responsible thing would be for me to cut this line of discussion off here, ask if there's anything more you need from me, and then go home and get back to work."

"I think you've addressed all of my concerns regarding..." He grappled for the right word, like Seven-League Strider attempting to throw me over his hip. "Your weird adopted speculative fiction daughter, who you've pawned off onto her adoptive grandmother."

"In that case... see you around."