"I'm not attached to the inherent mortality of my species, but if anyone's going to mess with us they'd better be really sure it's not going to do something just as stupid like make it impossible for any more people to get magic. And I really do not want your omniscient creator deity anywhere near my world."

"If he sent me here, which seems likely, he can already in principle access it."

"I find that possibility very annoying."

"Alas."

"Learn anything interesting from spying on me? —is it me or my government? I'm sure you've noticed those are very different things."

"I did notice that. Some of both. I didn't come to any novel conclusions."

"Does that imply that you had conclusions beforehand and the spying didn't dislodge them, or...?"

"Hearsay only."

"Well. Now you also know that sometimes I go around pretending to be an architect named Sekar so I can have a friendly conversation with someone who isn't pressingly aware that I could torture them to death on a whim."

"It seems an understandable impulse, I can imagine that would overshadow most social interactions terribly."

"I haven't even tortured anyone to death on a whim in the last several hundred years! And my empire and my imperial social life both work much better this way, but..." he shrugs. "Not that I blame people for being terrified of me. I am objectively pretty terrifying."

"I suspect the mere theoretical ability to torture people to whatever end state you had in mind would not be terrifying at all."

"Oh, sure. But I think you might be underestimating what it would take for me to stop being terrifying. I go to great lengths to arrange my life so I never have to risk losing my temper at anyone, and I still sometimes end up throwing somebody off a roof because I have less impulse control than I'd like."

"What have you tried to arrange to have as much impulse control as you'd like instead?"

"...?"

"If you would like to have more impulse control, have you done anything to try to make that happen?"

"...yes but I haven't got the first clue how to say what it was?"

"Oh. I don't know how to help you with that."

"Unsurprising," he says wryly.

"I write thoughts down as a way of processing them and deciding if I like the process that generated them. Sometimes I have to make up words. And by and large other people do not adopt my system for one or another reason."

"Yes, that sounds excruciating. When I need to think hard, I fly."

"Sounds fun."

"I can give you wings if you'd like to try it!"

"That would be interesting, how long does it take to learn to fly?"

"The way I do wings, they at least come with the ability to move them properly, but I haven't given them to enough people to have a good idea of how fast you'd learn the rest. And you'd need different clothes, but I can give you those too."