"Nah, haven't met him, haven't heard anything except what you told me last night."

"Right, sorry. So, uh, it turns out that the reason his Maitimo had been keeping him captive was, uh. Not purely political."

Blink.

She replays the memory of not-evil Maitimo telling her why he was so angry.

"Okay, so when time starts up again we conquer that place, too, should be really challenging, I hear they have spectacularly shiny swords."

She snorts. "It's a country ruled by an Evil Maitimo and you think the military part's liable to be the hard part?"

"They've got a population of under a million, right? We break the place up and distribute the people among all the dimensions ruled by nice Maitimos. Or, like, not ruled by Maitimos, I love you but I don't actually think you're the only way a society can be functional -"

"Nor do I."

"He uses oaths pretty damn casually. I am not convinced it's going to be that easy."

"Wait, he's here?"

"By 'uses' I mean 'coerces' not 'swears himself' but yes, we left a heavily-coerced-oathed Findekano unsupervised too long and he let him in."

"Okay, how do we not make that mistake in the future -"

"I knew what to do but felt like it'd look really bad and was accordingly a coward."

"'what to do' being 'render him unable to swear anything new, render it physically impossible for him to make progress on any things he's sworn to do' - yeah, that does look kind of bad - why the fuck is there an evil you, is there an evil me."

"I don't know and it seems callous to suggest 'because the landlords are fucking with us'! Also I'm trying to make friends with him so please don't mess that up."

"With evil you? Does this involve, like, lying through your teeth about what you think of his life choices, or just going, like, 'you're my brother and I love you and that's why I am not going to let you pull this fucking bullshit' because I can probably do the latter, if it helps."

"I'll let you know if I think there's an opening for that."

"Do you think your evil alt psychicked it out that I'm dating--no, wouldn't have had to, I mentioned it to Findekano--kind of surprised it didn't come up."

"He was extremely distressed the whole time because being around people who hate him is unpleasant - for me too, actually, and at least I can go 'well, they wrongly hate me' - if it's psychologically possible for you to stop hating him if he shapes up, and you think about that when he's around, that'll be a more useful form of leverage than death threats - he actually likes Cam best of any of us because he's way more comfortable around people he has a way to hurt - he's correspondingly more comfortable around me to the degree he thinks he can hurt me by hurting Cam - he's not going to try to get any information by directly asking us, he was also trying to suss out who he's comfortable having the Findekáno interact with -"

"...lovely. To what extent does this require actually staying put and listening to him if he actually stomps that button and how much does it just require passively having it."

"I think it's theoretically possible for me to stop hating him but I'm not confident yet that it would happen under any circumstance where whether or not I hated him was a meaningful concern."

To Cam, "This doesn't require anything at all, I'm telling you what's in his head, I don't even have a fully mapped strategy for getting him to let his boyfriend go yet and it's not going to be one that depends on letting him hurt you -"

And to Edie, "that's fine, I don't think I can stop hating him and I definitely don't expect it."

"I can actually handle people bringing it up occasionally, I wasn't planning to try to enforce a zero tolerance policy."

"The obvious situation in which I stop hating him is one in which he realizes the magnitude of what he's done and hates himself enough I don't see the point in bothering," she clarifies.

"That's not gonna happen. It's okay, I'll find other currency." And to Cam, "Was today - stomping the button -"