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"Thank you."

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"I think the situation you're in comes out on top relative to any attempt to move to the second-place planet, just because there's no good way to send you directly to their empress without anyone else having the chance to interfere. And interference could get unpleasant, and I'd have no leverage there to help. Well, very little leverage. I did rescue their empire from civil war one time, which is how I know how trustworthy their empress is in the first place, but I didn't get much lasting public recognition out of it and I definitely couldn't get you all the way to a private audience with her while maintaining all necessary secrets."

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"Barring any further sudden epiphanies about the implications of the situation at hand, I think my major medium-term goal here has to be getting you in a position to overthrow the Queen, and making sure you have appropriate protection afterward. Which might mean you overthrow the Queen and then rule Fairyland as a Vicereine answerable-by-custom to my Emperor, unless you have somebody else you'd like to appoint to that job once you've secured the Queen."

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"I... don't know who else would be good for it. Answerable-by-custom?"

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"Well, in practice, I'm the only one who can actually stop you from doing whatever the hell you like with Fairyland, and if I thought I might have to do that I wouldn't be trying to hand it to you in the first place. A Vicereine or Viceroy is supposed to do what the Emperor tells them, but the ways in which this is enforceable against mortals mostly don't hold up against you even without all of Fairyland in your pocket. We would pretty much be trusting you to just politely refrain from spending the at most two hours it would take you to find out your own Emperor's name despite our best efforts to hide it, and in return for your forbearance and general cooperativeness with imperial directives, you could fold yourself into our galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer, and have the assistance of our military in protecting yourself and the Queen against external threats."

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"Sounds fun."

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"It sounds pretty farcical to me. We'd have to redact the Emperor's name from the loyalty oath, assuming you could even take the loyalty oath since I doubt Eleven wants to let you in the same room with the Emperor long enough to say anything, and you couldn't ever learn what the vast majority of planets and interplanetary governing bodies in the galaxy are commonly called because any one of them probably shares syllables with a few billion people's names. For that matter I guess I'm taking your word for it that you're not analyzing everything I say for possible name contents. But even if you're being nice and not peeking, most political entities aren't named things that are otherwise words."

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"I am not laboriously rendering your utterances into phonemes and juggling them into sequences that might theoretically sound nice to a human parent."

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"Good. Also, in case you were wondering, my professional analysis of how easily you could in fact conquer my planet is 'very quickly, but for at most a couple of weeks before the inevitable civil war started'. We have a galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer for good reason."

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"I have no reason to think your planet needs conquering, not that I'm basing this lack of impression on much information."

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"I wish you could meet my Emperor in some sort of minimally fraught social context. I like him. He's... the sort of person an Emperor should be."

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"High praise. Is he the letter writing type?"

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"Oh, probably."

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"Seems easy to redact."

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"You'd think that. And, well, it is, but... he's the Emperor. I get to be only mildly paranoid about how I interact with you, because I don't rule three planets. The Emperor can't take the risk that you might secretly be scamming us about how this whole system works. I don't think you are, he doesn't think you are, I'm not even sure Eleven actually thinks you are, but security is security and... the magical unilateral liege relationships are an especially upsetting possibility, I think."

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"Not that I want you to be more paranoid, or anything, but it's more or less traditional to ask a new vassal for all the names they know anyway."
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"Which would save you two hours. Concealing the Emperor's name from you if you really want it is a lost cause; that's why everyone is so aggressively paranoid about making sure you can't communicate directly with him in any way. For similar reasons you're very unlikely to meet Eleven."

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"...I think I won't extensively theorize about how I'd conquer the planet if I wanted to. It sounds much less hassle all around to just buy one."

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"Yes, I agree."

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