"Oh. Yes. I think - a lot of the things you seem to want for my empire are the same things I want, or near enough. Although maybe you have more complaints than you've been letting on."

"I also object to slavery but do not think I can solve that by withholding electricity either."

"—the slavery and the torture are related, that's part of what I meant about the laws of the empire working better if I follow them. People are better off if they know when to expect that sort of thing - they're still mostly terrified of coming to my attention, but back when I used to pick up whoever I felt like, it was much much worse."

"I suppose that makes sense."

"I probably don't need things to be nearly as bad as they are, and I don't mind if you try to improve them, but if you get it to the point where there aren't enough slaves for me to choose from, then I have to figure something else out and I don't know what it'll be."

"When you say you'd have to, what do you mean?"

"I mean I don't want to stop torturing people and I don't want to go back to the days when everyone was terrified they'd be next, so I'd have to find some other way to make it - obvious and predictable and legal and something that most people are safe from and know they're safe from."

"Why is it you don't want to stop?"

"Because it's fun. Right up there next to architecture among my favourite hobbies. —I don't think the part where they don't want to be there is necessary to the fun part, if that helps at all, you could plausibly solve this problem just by finding someone who thought being tortured by the Emperor seemed like a desirable lifestyle, but I've never run into such a person and I'm not sure they exist. It's not like they wouldn't know where I live, if they did."

"I'd know where to start asking around if I had access to my planet but I do not."

"Well. I can work on that."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." He makes a portal back to a different, also-pretty unoccupied park.

She steps through.

"If it's not their not wanting to be there what is it, exactly? Maiar can operate physical bodies but have to do everything manually and could just not do some things..."

He follows, closing the portal behind them and exchanging his wings for a shirt so as to be less recognizable. Feathers turn to smoke, then recoalesce as fabric.

"...I think... what I get out of it has to do with making people afraid, and I'd like it just as well, maybe even better, if I was making them happy instead. Godlike beings pretending to have bodies but not pretending hard enough to get hurt would be the wrong sort of thing on a lot of levels."

"Hm. Elves are prudes so I have no idea how common this sort of thing might be in the population, and I don't know about orcs or Dwarves because it didn't come up when I visited them."

"I can imagine it wouldn't, it's kind of a niche interest to say the least."

"And not the sort of thing you trot out for Elf tourists on their honeymoon."

Giggle.

"It would be so awkward! We're notorious monogamists!"

"If only you'd known this information would be useful someday, you could've said something! I suppose that would've been nearly as awkward."

"I could have checked a library."

"Would it be in libraries?"

"Maybe!"

"I doubt you'd find anything in a library around here, but you're welcome to look."