"Some of those seem a little esoteric."

"If not all of them do, it's because I haven't given you enough detail. They're fundamentally unnatural goals and ways of thinking, not made by or for humanity. Even the two that are straightforward on their surface are progressively more alien the more detail you have."

"Oh?"

"It's hard to explain. They're not that far from reasonable human concepts, and I haven't had the time or safety margin to investigate personally - the real experts use Rak, one of its abilities is to deliberately alter your mind to one better able to understand the elseforces. But as an example, it's surprisingly difficult to get Mog to leave nothing. It's most natural to get random noise, not absence."

"That makes sense, for entropy."

"Maybe that's a concept that begins to make more sense with knowledge your people have. It's unintuitive to us."

"Random noise is harder to specify than a vacuum."

"And a thriving civilization harder still, so what's your point?"

"It is a condition of greater entropy."

"Circles, circles. Anything else you want to ask about?"

"What forces do you specialize in?"

"I'm most talented with Mir; I'm unusually good at foreseeing places I've failed to specify a desire in enough detail, which is the major constraint there. But recently I've worked mainly with finessing Koz to integrate new workings into being productive rather than destructive. When I've gotten to elsework at all; governing is less interesting but unfortunately more important."

"What form does your government take?"

"Fairly ad-hoc, since it's younger than me. Feudal in most respects, but with less power attached to titles than was true in the past. A few places, especially outside the Valley, have an elected local government; a few places the local nobility fought to the end rather than submit, and I ended up having to replace them with whoever was left and commanded enough respect to organize things. Certain places that are historically calm I technically administer directly, including my family's traditional land."

"You were involved in setting it up?"

"Yes. When my parents were young, the last piece of the royal line died, and there were conflicts ever since. I've expanded my control under the rule of 'any person who requests protection, or attacks someone who is under my protection, will be conquered.' So far I haven't lost any significant campaigns. Or yet been at peace."

"Sounds like you've been more successful than we, at least."

"I've been mostly fighting other humans. Else-mad and deranged ones, granted, but I haven't made any progress on the rest of the globe."

"It seems like everytime we take one area, the machines push in somewhere else."