"Well, that seems right, if I'm guessing what 'courtesy title' means right. But the more important fact about me is that my dad taught me to disassemble engines before I could read."

He shrugs, looks more casual than he feels. "I go by 'son of nobody' because the thing I'm trying to communicate is that nobody's ever heard of my parents and that's not for them anyway. Chen goes by 'Li Chen' because he wants to make it clear that this isn't his country and he doesn't use this system. It's not the sort of thing I'd expect to carry across worlds." 

"It's true, I didn't grow up in the system and thus have no sense of how to make my preferences in it maximally obnoxious."

"...sometimes you say things and I forget for a moment you aren't my Asher because it's just such an Asher thing." 

"Aw, now I have stage fright. I have to make sure the next thing I say is completely and unmistakeably me."

"...cute." 

"Did it work?"

"It did!" 

"It's too bad you're only here for a month, I should-- wait, I'm a billionaire, I can totally take you to Disney World."

"You can! What's Disney World." 

"Well, it has rides and shows and cotton candy, but mostly I was thinking about how weird it would be to see people dress up and pretend to be your friends' parents."

"Oh, I've been there, we just call it something else. It was indeed very weird." 

"What?!"

"Apparently Mulan will occasionally wear a dress but if she ever wears makeup it's because she can't get away with not and she's uncomfortable about it the whole time, and for some reason they put Tiana in a froofy princess gown even though she runs a restaurant for a living, and apparently they take 'ice queen' way too literally and portray Elsa as all standoffish when actually she helps kids build snow forts in July. They didn't have anyone I'd have known, it's """disrespectful to the victims,""" which didn't stop them from having a ride called 'Snow White's Scary Adventure' but apparently she signed off on it." 

"...I realize this is a lot coming from me but your home world is extremely weird."

"I think the reasons I think it's weird and the reasons you think it's weird are not the same reasons but you aren't wrong. Celebrity culture is apparently horrifying, Chen used to literally have to hide from people." 

"Yeah, it's terrible. My parents protected me from it when I was little but then I got older and started making bad choices and every time I got drunk it was like 'Asher Stark: Rehab Rumors?'"

"Wow. Not that 'what did anyone expect, you're a villain kid' is great but I'd rather have this than that." 

"I mean, I have unimaginable wealth and I didn't grow up on Garbage Island, there are perks."

"That's true! The Isle of the Lost was terrible! But I got to grow up without morality instead of having to figure it out for myself, so there's that." 

"I mean, morality is an actual thing, it's not just 'it's wrong to be gay or do drag.'"

"Yeah, they say that too, but it's fine when Chad Charming bullies anyone he can get away with bullying or when someone poisoned their garbage but when I got mad about having been poisoned I was told that lack of forgiveness was evil, so it's kind of obvious they're lying." 

"Actually, none of those things are fine!"

"They say that too. But then they say that, well, probably Kaleva must have provoked him somehow, because Chad is a good person and wouldn't do that, and also they're going to report me to the police for slander. And the person who poisoned their garbage didn't mean for anyone for get hurt, even though that's fucking stupid, and if they did they were aiming for someone who deserved it, and anyway how do they know I'm not lying about whether it happened at all. So in practice they can get away with whatever they want and I'm not allowed to object because I deserved it." 

"When I talk about how my weapons killed kids and that's not okay and that's never going to be okay, they're like 'oh, we're spreading peace and freedom, we're fighting terrorism, they're collateral damage, we didn't mean to, you can't expect one hundred percent of the weapons not to murder innocent children.' And-- the right answer is 'no, you do.' If you can't be one hundred fucking percent certain that you're not killing children, you need to not fucking do it, whatever you think the benefit is. Or you're not a good person, whatever the story is you tell yourself so you can sleep at night."