Edie was perusing the latest correspondence from her fork. She still should have been paying enough attention to realize that the door didn't go where it ought before it swung shut and she couldn't sense anyone else anymore, but she wasn't.
After opening and closing the door a couple times to make sure she hadn't just been abducted somehow, she looks around.
"Okay. If at any time you are less confident about the war-ending capacity of this - bunch - I can like actually show you the roomful of Fëanáros if hearsay won't do or something. Um. I am pretty sure that in both other worlds the relationship between your alts and his - when it existed; both sets are now broken up - did not. Involve oaths."
"Oh.
Well, if this one's not going to want anything then I'll just stay here quietly until you have the war-ending technology ready - oh, he'd probably want me to commit - I swear that if you make the war-ending technology conditional on concessions from him or from me I won't take it or help you get into my dimension to use it or bring that outcome about by any means-"
"Do you have to actually blurt out oath wordings you come up with that quickly on it occurring to you that he might conceivably want one?"
"Best effort at exactly what he wants, if there's a chance I'll be prevented from doing it later and more carefully - you can in fact ignore a positive oath for a while, it's very unpleasant but it can be done, but if I spent all my time resisting I'd have fallen apart hundreds of years ago -"
"I mean, there are objectively much more important criteria in evaluating whether someone's a good king than how they treat their - toys - and I'm not going to pretend I'm impressed with him but it's really not something I'd prioritize - he asked me once if I wanted a clean execution, I said no -"
"That's not what okay means, okay doesn't mean not worse than death. - Is toys in fact plural."
"No. ...plausibly would have to give you that answer anyway. But no."
"Believe me I'm acutely aware of the myriad ways in which your answers may currently be filtered."
"It doesn't sound to me like that makes very much sense, but okay. So. You're gonna be here for a while. Do you need to like, avoid this Maitimo, and/or his entire family, or anything, to let this while serve double duty as a nice long break from all that crap in addition to being a holding pattern while you wait for war-ending stuff to pop out of the engineers?"
"That would be - nice, but - if he's going to be emperor of the multiverse I probably shouldn't avoid him -"
"I - disagree with mine, about how empires should be run, and sometimes he'll give me things on that front, and that game's more important if he has more power..."
"...d'you wanna see our notes on multiversal empiring? I understand why you would need to err on the side of caution with respect to What Maitimos Are Like, I did that too for a bit and for way less reason, but this one seems legit."
"You want one of the fancy demon-security control-it-with-your-mind computers? The notes aren't high infosec but I'd still slightly hesitate to distribute hard copy."
"Uh, if your kind of Elf turns out not to tolerate the chip as well as the other kind of Elf I maybe have to run you to the infirmary or the security guy who can also do healing and is more capable than the infirmary lady of handling complex problems. Bar might be able to know in advance, she has more biology than one person can reasonably know because she has to be able to feed literally anybody without poisoning them or even making them go 'ick'?"
"Okay. This is - not the same kind of chip that allows for you to resurrect people..."
"No, totally different, I have one of the computer controlling kind, allows nothing of the sort."
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