She relaxes a little bit but doesn't say anything immediately. Nom.

Plants and plant derivatives.

"Sorry about that. I just - I don't want to - I'm not going to hurt you but I'm paranoid right now. Um. It's your name, it was your real name, that counts even for someone who's already your vassal. You haven't exactly given me reason to be suspicious I just -" Headshake. "Never give me an order that I do not expressly request of my own uncommanded will, or that you do not sincerely without mental contortion believe to be in my best interest as you genuinely understand it, except for a copy of this order should you so desire."

"I suspected as much," he says. "I'm not going to copy your order; the design doesn't agree with me."

"Is there a different one you'd like better?"

"I might come up with one after I've had more than twenty seconds to think about it. But I don't think it hits the optimal balance. As stated I think it needlessly prohibits me from giving you permissions if I happen to be confused about how they relate to your best interest, which seems silly, but I haven't come up with an elegant way to change the wording."

"Permissions are in general beneficial to my interests."

"But are you relying on me to reliably know that? Whose assessment of my assessment of your best interest is operative here?"

"Yours, because I can't very well oblige you to read my mind - reading my mind is not in my best interest, if there was confusion on that - but you can incorporate things I tell you, like 'permissions are in general beneficial to my best interests'. I wasn't expecting this to seem very complicated, I confess."

"Weren't you? But you have clearly observed that the entire system is new to me."

"The system isn't especially complicated. New orders take precedence over old ones, independent of source. Imperatives and permissions can be enforced, or not. None of the details like that have to do with whether you can figure out that I would rather be allowed to do things than not."

"It could have been the case that the words are decoration and only the intent of the speaker matters, or that your own definition of your interests was to some degree silently encoded in the phrase, either of which would have addressed my objection. Instead, apparently the burden of interpretation falls to me. What guarantees do you have that my assessment of your interests is going to be anything like what you expect? I'm not necessarily thinking about myself in particular, here - my genius is decidedly not of the interpersonal variety, but I get by - but if you'd thrown that instruction set at someone who happened to have a conflicting cultural background, or a patronizing authoritarian streak, or who was just very very bad at guessing what other people want, it could've ended poorly for you."

"I probably would have left it at the simple version if you didn't seem to have at least a passable set of defaults based on the last several hours."

"Fair enough. But it still doesn't sit right with me aesthetically."

She shrugs. "How about, 'never give me a non-permission order except as requested by me of my own uncommanded will'?"

"Eh, I'll think about it."

"Well, you've gone and made me nervous, so consider my original phrasing replaced by the more recent."

Snort.

"There's just the one bed, isn't there. Will there be some sort of horrible danger if I just go sleep in a tree outside instead of on the floor?"

"Oh, many sorts of horrible danger. Individual risks are fairly low, but they loom in aggregate; this is the sort of town where any random passerby might think you a fine target for their particular hazard, whether that leads to you being eaten, kidnapped, dissected, set on fire, pelted with rocks, sacrificed to dark gods, something entirely different, or any combination of the above."

"If somebody tries to eat me they won't get very far, but I suppose if you don't object I'll sleep indoors."