"Depends on how long you're going to want this, maybe. And whether it bothers you or just me, I guess -"

"It'd bother me a little but not insurmountably and therefore not indefinitely. I don't really have a timeline in mind..."

"Yeah, I wasn't expecting you'd put a countdown on it. I'm an Elf, we have been known to consider a couple of decades a fling, I don't want to scare you by planning on the scale of millenia and so much will have changed by then anyway -"

"So maybe don't anticipate dealing with a PR handicap you could just route around."

"I'll think about it."

"I did know I was kind of buying myself a life of obligate minimal political involvement and emotional unpleasantness," Cam says. "It didn't just happen to me."

"Not the point. It's - it's not like the calculus would have changed based on personal costs anyway. It is entirely plausible to me that you'd have agreed to something even more personally unpleasant than this, if he'd asked for that instead of Valinor, and - signing up for it wouldn't have made it okay -

It is unappealing to run the universe while scouring around for magic so you can sneak in and out of the palace and conveniently not make anyone uncomfortable."

"What's this sneaking in and out you speak of, don't I get to live in the belfry pretending to be a gargoyle, what a ripoff."

He laughs. Weakly. "Shall we go relieve Edie and my brother, for all I know they've been in there a week."

"Yeah, sure. Although I'd think they'd message us."

In they go.

"Got magic music from Bizarre Arda?"

"I've been calling it Mirror," says Cam. "And yes."

"Ooh, what kinds?"

Cam sends her a list, and a copy of his notation translator.

"Oh, some of these are really cool," she muses. "I bet the grace one has real potential for being incorporated into aerial ballet."

"Be careful, some of them do mind control and it's going to be a real hassle to enforce laws against mind-controlling singing."

"Be delighted to field ideas on that."

"...Oooh, yeah, ouch. It'll probably help if we find something other than demonic powers for hilarious infosec hazardry."

"I'd ask Mirror how they handle it but for some reason I feel like the answer'd be 'oh, yes, here's how to use mind-control to run your society'."

"Eugh."

"I wonder what evil everyone-else is like."

"So, we don't actually know that any other specific people are evil, just that there's a lot more violence and a lot more societal acceptance of it - which is an axis human societies vary tremendously along anyways, and more modern societies are less violent so part of that may be attributable to the 'tech level: swords' thing. It's possible most of the people we know are pretty okay - or, okay as far as they can be while not objecting to him - I do vaguely expect alts of me to be influenceable by prevailing norms more than, say, alts of Tyelcormo -"

He snorts.

It's one of the endearing things about you.

What, that I have enough problems with authority I'd probably keep having them if authority were my evil brother?