"I'm not at all sure I've got this right," Lisa frowned.

"Got what right?" Doctor Mother replied. "It's okay to be unsure. We've spent decades gathering information about this threat, you shouldn't expect to instantly-"

"Oh, I've got a conclusion, it's just that it seems weird," Lisa interrupted.

She flicked her pen around. "By any rational definition, they've won. They are done. Way before they hit the point of, whatever kind of crazy crash-landing happened and she could kill one, I've got no idea how the fuck that happened by the way, but… okay. Okay. So these things are… collective organizations of, millions of agents, easily millions. Billions perhaps. Billions of powers, and they can target them precisely enough to aim for a brain decades in advance, and not just that but pick out people who are suited for the powers… hell, from what the lady said, that agent was completely unrestricted precog until it got crippled."

"You're just telling us things we already know," Alexandria noted.

"Yeah, I'm getting there," Lisa replied. "And, before you ask, I turned my power the fuck off before starting to analyze this."

"We recruited you because of your power," Alexandria said.

"No, you recruited me to shut me up," Lisa denied. "Andbecause of that old rule about getting a small child to check your work. Hello, I am a small child. But what I'm getting at is, their objective makes no sense."

Doctor Mother frowned. "We're not looking for-"

"She's trying to make a model," Contessa interrupted.

She smiled. "I've got my own model, of course, but it could be incomplete. That's the point of this."

"Part of it," Lisa said, tapping her pen on the notepad. "But – like I say, they've won. By any rational definition. Long, long before they arrived here. There is nothing in the universe that could possibly serve as a predator to these things, nothing that could possibly threaten them, and they have complete control of the entire universe and any other one they could ever want to operate upon… I mean, jeez, once you're jumping universes at will and you have the ability to make a hard-link though a parallel dimensional wall, it's not like you're limited to short range in three-dimensional space."

"So you're saying we've lost?" Eidolon asked. "If they've won?"

"No, I'm saying that they have a reason for doing what they're doing," Lisa replied. "Whatever that reason is, it's something that makes sense to them – which isn't the same as making sense – but understanding it will at least tell us their motives…"

She trailed off.

"Though I guess they could be capitalists."

"...what?" Alexandria said, confused. "Capitalists? You mean they'd be selling the planet, or something?"

"Capitalists," Lisa repeated. "In this case, what I mean is, certain kinds of rich assholes like my late previous employer aren't satisfied with enough to live on. They want to be utterly beyond any possibility of ever having less than everything they could ever possibly want."

She flicked the pen around again, and began scribbling in shorthand. "So… assume that what they're after isn't power, or safety, or energy or space or whatever. Not in any normal sense. What they want is infinite power, or energy, or space. They're not satisfied with being the masters of every single parallel universe, because that's not infinite… at which point, there's a kind of logical argument that says that whatever else you sacrifice in the quest for an infinite payout is worth it, because the cost is finite and the payout is infinite. Pascal's wager."

"Disturbingly possible," Alexandria admitted. "So how would they get that payout?"

"That's what doesn't make sense," Lisa admitted. "They're giving out powers and driving conflict, we know that much, but what could they possibly get from us that's worth it… I'd say they wanted to see if anyone stumbled upon an infinite energy glitch or something, but I can think of like six different powers that can actually do that and I'm not even trying that hard. Some of them depend on the idea that they don't cost the entity more than it gets back from the power generation system, but, uh… there are time travel capes, right?"

"Phir Se is one," Alexandria agreed. "He can go back a few minutes at a time."

"Which is reversing entropy, at least in this universe," Lisa said, still scribbling notes. "Though it could cost more than it returns… but if they're looking for an infinite energy glitch, why cripple the powers so badly? Unless they're such colossal pillocks that they don't realize they've already got what they need."

Doctor Mother groaned.

"What?" Eidolon asked.

"Remember, the dead entity crashed into a planet and knocked a perfect precognition agent loose," Doctor Mother pointed out. "That should have been logically impossible."

Lisa paused.

"...it got knocked loose?" she asked. "I thought Contessa just happened to trigger at a perfect time?"

"The agent was knocked loose," Contessa confirmed. "That's why it wasn't restricted at first."

"Okay, one, utter moron," Lisa declared. "Not you, it. And, two, I think we might be thinking about at least part of thisentirely wrong."

"About what?" Alexandria said.

"About the agents," Lisa replied. "They're not… uh… okay, I need to phrase this right… the agents aren't out to fuck with us. Not voluntarily. They've got restrictions added in by the entities on deployment, sure, but look at her agent."

She pointed at Contessa. "It got knocked the fuck out of the entity and it immediately connected to a nearby mind and started helping out at maximum capacity, and it had to be forced into not telling you how to kill an entity. And that bit didn't work."

Lisa clapped her hands. "They're not built to be parasites, or to fuck with their hosts, or whatever. They're programmed to do that, sure, but that's something that's added in when they're deployed – after they've stopped being part of a wider entity. They're gestalt by nature. Symbiotes by nature."

"Which means what?" Eidolon asked. "That doesn't sound like something that actually helps us out."

"It's all understanding," Lisa said. "If you had a group of people who wanted to help everyone else out, and a few assholes who took whatever they wanted, who ends up in charge?"

"...ah," the Number Man winced, speaking up for the first time in the conversation. "That… is a plausible metric, at least."

"But!" Lisa resumed. "There's two possible situations here. Either the Entities actually are as damn powerful and intelligent as all this suggests they could be, in which case, we've got functionally zero chance, but there shouldn't be a giant alien smooshed over an alternate universe version of Africa… or they're actually colossal pillocks, like I mentioned. And in that case… in that case, they could be doing this whole thing to try and find a solution to this Pascal's-wager problem they've locked themselves into, from people who are smarter than them. Us. Which means…"

Pausing for dramatic effect, Lisa waited until someone asked the question.

It was Doctor Mother, in the end. "Which means what?"

"Which means, any restrictions they have in place are the ones which developed for evolutionary reasons," Lisa answered. "They've done this before, so the entities who came to Earth were descended from the survivors who happened to have applied certain restrictions to their agents, and those restrictions, whatever they were, prevented the previous hosts – whoever they were – from getting rid of the entities. You can imagine how badly it might have gone if precog agents could all predict the entities… they'd probably have something to stop us fucking off into space, for example. But this is a new and different situation. Cauldron is mining out bits of agents that were never meant to be deployed, and that were meant to remain under the control of the entities at all times. There's only one entity left, and he's farting around doing nothing while we're mining his girlfriend's corpse for agents."

She rubbed her temples. "And… they must have some kind of energy source for agents, too, even if they miss an infinite energy glitch then they can't miss it if every single agent generates energy from nowhere, uh… some agents are enormous, right? And others are… right, solar and geothermal or whatever."

Lisa pointed at Eidolon. "So his power is running out of energy, slowly. Or it's pulling from agents which are, somewhere else, shrapnel or parts of the corpse that haven't been mined yet, and those agents are running out of power. That would explain losing powers one by one. Anyway – anyway, what we need to do is to work out something that would only be possible with the assets we have, or something that would normally mean escalation to the entity. I'm guessing here but if Eidolon's power was flashing a low battery warning then that warning's probably not going to Scion, or he'd sort of notice."

Then she snapped her fingers.

"Wait, got it," she declared. "The Endbringers."

"...you have completely lost me," Alexandria admitted, very reluctantly.

She glared at Contessa. "And you're not helping."

"I'm quite enjoying this meeting," Contessa replied. "The current Path is 'sit here and watch'."

"The Endbringers are something way too powerful," Lisa replied. "They'd never be let out of the control of the Entities, it's a restriction that would be in place. Because an Entity that didn't do that would get fucking mulched or spend all its time watching the Endbringers wreck everything in sight… maybe they have some kind of default setting, but that can't be the case here because otherwise they'd have turned on straight away. Or… point is, whatever they're doing, the off switch is in the control of a vial cape because the dead entity would have kept it."

She pointed at Contessa. "Who can't you predict?"

Eidolon slammed his head into the desk.

"Fuck," the Trump mumbled. "Fuck me. That makes way too much sense."

"Are you sure you're not using your power?" Doctor Mother asked.

"I have got really good at not needing it, because migraines suck," Lisa answered. "Anyway, that's one. We need to think about the other kinds of things the Entities might have done to stop other species from breaking out of the cage… like, say, artificial intelligence. That's got to be restricted, right?"

Alexandria tutted. "There's one out there right now," she said. "How does that fit into your hypothesis?"

"Restricted, not banned," the Number Man pointed out. "It serves quite well. Dragon has to obey our instructions and lawfully constituted authority, but that might well be part of what is keeping her from being more useful."

"From breaking out of the Entities' plans," Lisa agreed. "That's two. Now… they've probably got some kind of weapon that can fight others of the same kind. Some of them must do, anyway, and if they do then-"

She stopped.

"Wait. Fuck. Did they think of that? Contessa, can Doormaker open a path to your Agent? Because I can think of at least two capes whose main thing is healing, and whatever the fuck the Entity did to it to cripple it has to count as damage…"

AN:

Free association thinking without Thinkering.

And even if the PtV restrictions are "software", Queen Administrator's restrictions and damage are definitely hardware, what with the Shard being all but killed before deployment...