"How does your - native morality-like system - handle tradeoffs?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could imagine a situation where conventional morality would pull in multiple directions - stealing to feed the hungry, or something - does yours do that?"

"...not exactly. I can't think of a situation where everything I could possibly do would be wrong the way mercy is wrong."

"I'm not sure I currently understand it well enough to make up my own examples, I assume something trivial like multiple possible targets it would be inconvenient to go after in parallel isn't a good one."

"Yeah. I don't know, I've never tried to explain it to anyone before. And I think it might be different because... I'm not trying very hard to be the person I feel like I should be, I'm mostly trying to live my life without letting that person get in my way too badly. So as long as whatever I'm doing doesn't feel actively awful, I don't bother too much about whether it's better or worse by that measure than something else I could be doing instead."

"So you're not optimizing on this metric, that's good."

"If I was doing that, my empire would be a giant flaming mess, possibly literally."

"And that would be undesirable on so many levels."

"Yes!"

"Are there - components of mercy, here?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, hm, you like torturing people but you don't require that they be unhappy about it even though that's the typical result, are there things that come apart like that here?"

"Mm... maybe, but it's hard to say, I'm not used to thinking about it in - out-loud terms."

"I'm really curious to hear about it if you ever come up with anything."

"I'll let you know if I do."

"Is mercy the only - unusual item, or was it just an example?"

"Most of the problem is mercy. When I took all the elements and then killed my father to become Emperor, that was about - needing to seek power - but I've sought enough power by now, even if I found something else as big as self-dedicating all the elements I wouldn't feel like I had to take it. —that's also what I was talking about when I said that being Emperor is what things being important is for."

Thoughtful pause.

"I think if I couldn't be Emperor without having to do the work, I'd want to get out of it, but as it is I've got a solution that works and I don't see a reason to stop. And I would be so annoyed if I let someone else have a turn and they somehow managed to do a worse job than me, or even just do some particular thing wrong that I've learned not to..."

Nod.

Shrug.

"Do you think you feel like you have enough power on a permanent basis or might it come up again someday?"

"If it comes up it'll be something like 'something threatened the empire and I needed more power to deal with it', there'll be an actual practical reason, it won't just be that I wake up one day feeling like I should have two world-spanning empires or something like that."

"Oh good."

"Yeah."

"Any other things?"