"That's how long Delight gave him, I don't know if he actually needs that long."

"You should suggest a trial just in case it didn't occur to them because they're Elves and don't have a crime rate to speak of."

"I can, but I'm not sure what that would actually add. The events aren't in question."

"Some semblance of procedure for wrongdoing? If I personally arbitrated every criminal case here I'd be better at it than the courts but the country'd still be worse off, because there'd be so much more uncertainty about which factors would be weighed, which tactics they could expect to be precluded against them, which punishments civilized society regards as acceptable...it's not good to have a system that demands tremendous personal trust in the people running it and makes no substantive effort to make them predictable to the people subject to it."

"...it couldn't have been predictable that he'd be subject to it. Everybody proposing subjecting him to anything is an alien from another world."

"Right, but now you're giving him ten years to sit around and think about it. Rape is a crime. Torture is a crime. I don't see why you'd complicate it by doing a solution-by-committee. He's not special. All the Iobels and all the mes do not get together to try to figure out how to redeem your rank-and-file rapist or torturer. They have a trial."

"Isn't it kind of complicated to try monarchs even without interdimensional shenanigans? We don't have a war crimes treaty or anything."

"Perhaps we should design one and, when we arrive, drop it and say 'if you sign it and confess all wrongdoings in this area so we can immediately correct them you get amnesty on past mistakes'. I just - can't imagine the mindset of an evil me anyway, but saying 'work on this for ten years while we consider what to do with you' seems likely to get interestingly desperate results."

"Yeah, 'interestingly desperate' does seem like the kind of thing he'd do."

"Just be careful."

"Of what?"

"Leaving an evil me unsupervised for a decade with a threat hanging over his head and no cooperative-with-you avenue open to him to make things work out?"

"Fair enough. You could go check up on him yourself, you know."

"And say what? 'I favor executing you but I was at least going to be procedurally clear about it, instead of just letting you loose to wonder?"

"Or not. I do think they're planning to spy on him some."

"Oh, well, in that case I'm sure they'd catch anything he tried."

"Do you have a productive suggestion for how he could be supervised, Mitros."

"Yes, I think that if there is a possible behavior that will make us inclined to let him go or do something else which is tolerable to him, we should tell him what it is, and if there isn't then we should make it the case that he gets less of what he wants if he instead spends this decade giving both sides in the civil war that'll ensue when he's deposed nukes or something, and if there is no way to give him less of what he wants because we're set on killing him and he's purely selfish, then I think there should be another one of him at his side the whole decade."

"I'll pass that along. I think the thing he actually wants is his Findekáno being returned to him though."

He mumbles some inventive curse words he learned from Cricket. 

"He asked if there was a way to make him forget him."

"Is that an Elf thing because it sounds extreme even for an Elf thing. But. If he actually wants that which is tremendously fucked up I could probably do it. Especially if Elf Dad comes through on working memory."

"I don't know if it's an Elf thing. ...It's possible it was a sounding-really-dramatic-so-we'd-feel-sorry-for-him thing though."

"Did it work?"

"On Mama a little bit maybe but she'll know it shouldn't have."