"- yikes, yeah, that - really sucks? Have you at least had, like, books?"

"All the written material I've had has been filtered and edited for imperatives. And... I have no way to check if that's all."

"Wow, ouch, that sucks so much. - Bar might be able to redact stuff for you if you want to trust her, she's at least not the same person as your usual person."

"I haven't decided if I want to trust her but maybe it's silly not to since it's not like I can just not be at the mercy of whoever happens to be nearby."

"Well, you can not be at Bar's mercy specifically since she can't talk out loud, but she seems nice to me."

"And it would be extra stupid to not trust you because even if I weren't cursed you'd still have cool powers."

"I'm not sure it would be stupid not to trust me but it would be sort of - ineffectual."

"It's stupid because I can only not trust you if you let me, and if you let me then you're probably trustworthy. I guess you might not know how not to give orders by accident yet but you've been doing okay."

"I'm doing my best, at least. I don't know how to do every possible thing that someone with my powers could learn to do and actually the bar has security that would stop me if I tried to hurt you, though I don't actually know if it'd cover giving orders that wouldn't injure you right here and now? - Bar says that's up to the discretion of the Security personnel, which is not really helpful for predictions."

"I guess that's good. How do I talk to Bar?"

"She can hear you but she expects you're nervous about reading things so she hasn't been making any napkins at you."

"Yeah. I am. I guess I’d like to read a bible with all the imperatives rephrased, if that’s available."

"She says she'll have to do that manually but she can probably do it faster than you can read. - that's the first chapter."

"...That is faster than I can read." He knows this part, though only from retellings, so he can just skim for now to see that it isn't somehow notably different - it doesn't seem to be, though.

He slows down a bit in chapter four. "This is new."

"Mm?"

"I guess no one ever promised me they’d even mentioned all the stories in here. But they didn't. I don’t know if that’s really a bad sign, though... I didn’t really expect to ever need to know much."

"Well, how long is the book?"

"...I guess we'll find out when Bar finishes redacting it."

"...Bar has sent me a mental image of a pretty darn long book."

"Maybe it doesn’t mean much, then."

"Yeah, not by itself."

Read read. "...This part is different. I know everyone told me two of each animal and this is fourteen - when God sent a flood to kill everyone and everything that wasn't on this boat for being too evil."

"...well, I don't know if whether there were two or fourteen of them is important but that's a weird story either way."

"Huh. What's weird about it?"

"I mean, even Good gods are still gods, but genociding tons of people because they happen to be Evil is - out of ethical fashion where I'm from, I guess it's not weird if it remains in vogue elsewhere."