"Control challenge?"

"...Has no one mentioned torturer's control?"

"No, and it sounds like this may have been a very serious omission, please explain."

"It's mainly to stop sentences from struggling inconveniently, I think. Torturers can control someone else's body as though it were their own, overriding the original owner. Contractors are immune; no one else is. A control challenge is what happens when one torturer tries to establish control on another; some combination of effort, experience, and willpower lets one of the two win, not always the one who started it."

He shrugs.

"I think that might be the worst thing I have heard about this place. Unjust justice system, sure, violent types picking on random people in the streets, sure, those things are par for the course of places I or alts of me don't personally run as far as I can tell, but handing out body-control superpowers to people whose job title is 'torturer' - when we can't even die again and expect a time limit on that basis if nothing else - fuck." She chews her lip. "How much contracting do you have to do to get contractor's immunity - how does it compare with the rate of senseless violence on ordinary denizens? It's probably not a good tradeoff, but maybe my guess is off?"

"You only need to voluntarily take a sentence once," he says. "But you do need to voluntarily take a sentence. If you quit in the middle—or try to—it doesn't count, you receive no immunity, and the torturer has to go find the person you are supposed to be covering for and administer the sentence to them. Some of them find that annoying."

"Eugh." Shell Bell finishes her tea. "I think I'll try not-attracting-attention, first, and if I fail at it at least I'll get information about where that falls on the scale between difficult and utterly impossible, for me." She shudders. "I wish my girlfriend were here. Well. No. I wish she'd managed to resurrect me without splitting me. But if I start from the assumption that I have to be here I wish she were too and I hate that I wish it but I do."

"Good luck," he murmurs.

"Thanks. May I have another cup of tea?"

"Certainly."

"Thanks." Sip, think, sip, think. "How does the inability to die again interact with other stuff? Do I need to sleep, again? I assume if I don't eat I'll get hungrier and hungrier until I reset or whatever it's called."

"Torch," he supplies. "It's called torching. And yes, you can starve into it. I don't actually know if you can get there from lack of sleep, but I don't recommend trying."

"Torching. Okay. I really liked not needing to sleep. It's not the first thing I'd wish back if I got a pile of wishcoins, though," sighs Shell Bell. "That'd be the memory. I need to get a stack of notebooks and something to write with to substitute. It's probably too much to hope for that someone will trade me for a recorder like the one I had."

"I have a spare pen," Strat offers.

"I would love a spare pen."

He fetches her his spare pen.

She pockets it. "Thanks very much. I guess I can put the really important stuff on the back and in the margins of my sentence papers until I accumulate enough junk I don't need in my apartment to trade for paper. How convenient that I was such a prolific 'kidnapper', I have three whole pages to work with."

"A city on the moon, you said?"

"Oh yes. A big city. Millions of people. Utterly toxic culture. I magicked them all up and then sorted through them and let some of them move back to the Earth."

"Well done."

"Thanks." She sips at her tea. It's really rather good. "I think I was a good empress. I was at least better than the previous dictator. But Coin never nuked him. I guess it was harder to trick him into an isolated location and she didn't want all the fallout near where she lives. If she still lives. My girlfriend may have killed her with her bare hands after finding out what she did."

"Violent, is she?" he inquires with a slight smile.

"My girlfriend? She had to be. The aforementioned toxic culture involved seizing a couple dozen teenagers from poorer parts of the country every year and putting them on a TV show in an arena that only one of them got to leave alive. She left alive. It was the shortest Games in history."