"I'm not personally attracted to any practices of dubious evilness and it's not within the scope of my major."

"I meant why isn't it evil but I guess that answers that too."

"Oh, if it's not evil it's probably just because it's okay to damage yourself because you belong to yourself."

"That must be nice."

"Is that not how it works on your plane?"

"Maybe it is. I wouldn't know. I haven't ever gotten to belong to myself."

"...yeah, I guess that's true."

"Any other ideas about the curse?"

"I think all the other ideas I had besides interfering with your ability to identify imperatives would be worse, probably."

"What are they? Maybe they'll at least be funny."

"I could make you have a seizure every time you start trying to obey a command. I could make it so everybody sounds like they're asking a question whenever they say absolutely anything, though I'm not sure I can make it work for text especially since this place does translation. I could fuck with your vision and the way you perceive writing till you could never be quite sure what any of it said but usually get the gist."

"Those do all sound worse."

"Yeah. I don't think there's any way I could find out an official ending condition just by poking around in your mind. I assume you haven't tried true love's kiss but even if you had it handy it's just traditional, not universal."

"I haven’t tried. ...I guess if you think it would work you can order me to love you."

"Traditionally it has to be symmetrical and also the idea of ordering you to love anyone, let alone me, is profoundly horrifying!"

"...It does kind of suck to be ordered to like things in general."

"I would certainly expect so!"

"But only as long as you’re allowed to think it sucks!"

"What is it like to have something suck when you can't think it sucks?"

"Like... there’s something that’s... gone, like missing a limb or something... and there’s less of you there, and it’s fine until you go up enough levels and you’re looking at yourself from the outside and thinking it's horrifying that you've been carved up like that, and you don’t quite recognize yourself, and - the last thing left is that you don’t feel... at home... in your own thoughts."

"...Does everything suck all the time for you too or just me?"

"Not everything all the time. There are lots of parts of my life that are fine."

"Are people really okay in Heaven or is that a lie?"

"I've never been. I hear it's supposed to be nice."