I was going to try the opposite, promising Maitimo I'd slaughter cities for him until he gets annoyed enough to shut me up about it, but perhaps there's a way of being unlikely to support massacres that'd get through to him.

Yes, but I'm not sure if it would be interesting in a good way, right now.

'angry' is a good mood on Maitimo, he thinks more strategically and moping and sadness are not strategic. I expect it'd be in a good way.

I can suggest it, then. I think I will be very good at atrocious Governor. It's not that horrendous things don't occur to me, I just don't actually do them.

No? I am pretty sure that the problem prophesied is definitely not 'unexpected human appeared, deployed imaginary bioweapons'. The problem is that somewhere between now and later a bunch of shit goes down and it results in copious warfare.

I mean, if as prophesied Maitimo ends up running around massacring people, we don't want him to be good at it.

...I'm not actually sure of that. If we can't stop him massacring people then by much the same logic he might choose to take over an inevitable war it might be better for him to be efficient at it.

You think he had a goal much narrower than all the civilian slaughter?

The presence of the shiny rocks seems suggestive in retrospect, actually, although I don't know what they're for besides counterfactually restoring light to the world when everything's gone dark.

Maitimo raises an eyebrow. "I'm pretty busy."

"I," says Kib, "need a break from trying to correlate prophecies, but if you really want me to go away instead of playing Governor-with-atrocities to see what happens I can probably find something else to do with myself."

"Governor-with-atrocities is a very interesting choice of games."

"Well, sometimes we're playing Governor and I think of an atrocity and I can't commit it."

"...I also sometimes have that problem. What, you think suppressing the impulse is what went wrong with me?"

"No, I have no idea what happens except that it may centrally feature stupid shiny rocks, but I really don't think you're just going to burst out some long-held repressed desire to actually stab people."

"Alright, let's play."

So they set up starting conditions and by turn seventeen Kib has incited religious warfare, had several different people's children held hostage, and, indeed, deployed an imaginary bioweapon.

Well. He can set up an instrument in his headquarters that allows reading thoughts osanwë has coded private - a necessary measure to protect peoples' children from being held hostage - and force an unreliable agent of his into a marriage with the threat of execution so he can take advantage of her new husband's ability to read her emotions at any distance.

Kib introduces the concept of the suicide bomb to get rid of the device - oaths can control thoughts just fine, right, if you swear them that way? possibly in a language you don't know? to get them past the mindreading long enough...? - and sneaks someone in to take advantage of that death-in-case-of-rape feature that Elves have and now the unreliable agent is a suborned widow.

The only one of these to genuinely rattle Maitimo is the oath; he stares at Kib in fascinated horror for a moment before saying, slowly, that yes oaths can control thoughts just fine and all his operatives should just swear to want whatever he wants them to want, shouldn't they, that would be efficient.