"...I have to admit, I wasn't expecting you to be skeptical that it exists."

Wrath lowers her shotgun slightly, pulling a knife with her other hand. She lifts it to her face and drags it down her cheek, hard enough to cut. She doesn't even blink at her own action.

(Pride makes a discomforted sound.)

The wound doesn't close immediately in the wake of the knife, but by the time Wrath's wiping the blade clean, the only indication the cut had been there is the blood that seeped from it.

"Magic or technology?" she asked. "I know the answer."

"It's not my magic, I know that much, and beyond that what difference does it make to me?"

"He's got you there, Wrath," Avarice trills. "I think Wrath's point is that we haven't encountered magic before. And well. Given what we know about our tech levels, magic does seem pretty ludicrous. A lot of people say-"

"Would say!" Gluttony corrects.

"Yes, thank you. A lot of people would say what we do is magic."

"Pretty sure it is a working theory going by the news outlets," Wrath comments, spinning the knife around her fingers. "But it isn't exactly like what you've got here."

"Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be. I can tell when something has this world's magic going on with it, and you don't."

"Small mercies," Gluttony mutters. "Although I still don't appreciate someone ruining my hair by being a couple of hundred tons of water at me."

"You did appreciate the eel."

Wrath shifts her stance, rests her shotgun over one shoulder (gun safety? What's that?). "Given you're claiming you're the Emperor of the world, my guess is that you're worse than anything we've encountered so far. So what happens now?"

"I suppose that depends on whether or not you decide to be a nuisance."

Pride speaks up before Wrath can say something that instigates something. "Just so we're all singing off the same song sheets, and all, define 'nuisance'? I'd hate to think we were working off differing definitions."

"Well, that deserted village I flew over on the way here with all the dead people lying around is an example of the sort of thing I'd rather you not do."

Pride makes a low sound, looks sideways at Wrath. "Well," she says slowly. "We...might have a problem then."

"That's unfortunate."

"How dead are we then?" Gluttony asks, her voice almost peculiarly steady. (Her knuckles are nearly white.)

"That depends on whether you're still going to make trouble even now that you know better."

Wrath raises an eyebrow. "Well..."

(Pride kicks her.)

"...We'll certainly try." (That does not seem to be what she actually intended to say.)

"How long are you actually giving us on that?" Avarice asks, squinting suspiciously at Wrath. "Or yourself?"

Wrath shrugs. "Long enough, hopefully."

"...Do you have some kind of time limit on how long you can go without destroying a village? And if so, why?"

"We get...antsy, if we go much more than two weeks without it. And 'why' probably links back to the bastards who...well. You probably can't see the cybernetics, but we didn't do that to ourselves."

Envy wiggles his metallic left hand vaguely in Pride's peripheral vision, and sticks out his also metallic tongue.

"Probably can't see most of the cybernetics."