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When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.
"It's a nice option to have in case there's ever a situation where it would obviously help."
"Yeah. ...Also I think the electric chair was a really early use of electricity on Earth but I'd have to look it up."
"The impact would be different here... and I'm not sure I like 'conduct a secret project to electrocute our prisoner' much better than 'openly electrocute our prisoner', considering the sort of thing that would happen if people started getting the impression that we sometimes conduct secret projects to do things to prisoners, even if they didn't find out exactly what. It's a mess."
"Yeah. I wonder if he's unconscious while he's stabbed in the heart. We could toss him an icicle occasionally if he'd rather. I don't want to be inhumane to improve our PR for how humane we are, but..."
"But we have a prisoner who desperately wants to die, and if we wanted to kill him we would have to keep trying drastic and awful-sounding measures until we found one that worked. Yeah. And the other thorny PR problem is that any hint he might have been given a chance to escape could send a mild panic around, and actually letting him escape is pretty likely to start a major one, even if 'letting him escape' means something like 'throwing him into a volcano' where we took him out of his cell to kill him but can't verify that he actually died."
"He was loose and there wasn't an active hunt for him for years and people lived with that, but - yeah, it's different if we had him and let him out."
James sighs.
"I wish he'd just asked nicely. I mean - I think I understand what he means when he says there's no way he would ever have thought to do that. But I still wish he'd just asked nicely."
"Yeah. Then it could have been 'Eternal Winter wishes only to pay for his crimes with his life, which is logistically difficult but please don't be alarmed' - and now that would just freak out poor bunnies and dryads and so on who never did anything to deserve it."
"Well, maybe you can - psychologize him enough to figure out how to make the best of the situation."
Then she goes down to the dungeon.
Winter is still huddled miserably on the floor of his cell, but no longer actively weeping.
"You're not going to kill me, are you."
"Does it please you to know you have condemned me to a slightly worse eternal torment than I was already suffering?"
"...You want me to go away and leave you alone so I don't get upset thinking about your eternal torment?"