"No. But that doesn't seem weird, like, I don't even know who the CEO of Wendy's is."

Nod. "It's looking like we can't really avoid letting him in here, do you see why -"

Nodnod.

"But we can have you very very far away, if you'd like that."

" - I dunno. I do kind of want to know what's happening. But he does keep, uh, killing people. And I guess there's no actual reason why me knowing what's going on would matter."

"We could do a hidden camera, or the thing Elves do with our telepathy which is approximately equivalent. I don't think you'd be in danger in Milliways, going off Spike's assessment of him, but that's only one take and doesn't fully explain all the killing people. Has he killed people in your department?"

" - I mean I don't really know that many people? Or have a team? I just do, like, office receptionist stuff for a couple of the lawyers. Just, people say that he kills people. Of course they've said that about lots of other people, so I wasn't, like, keeping track of him as specifically scary, or anything - "

"Have you heard anything about this Fred?"

Headshake.

"What if we just, like, set up a distracting amount of stuff going on downstairs and when Angel walks in tell him this is the astrology department and we're hosting a retirement party for one of our employees and then probably he'll wander out without looking around much - maybe not this specific idea but you get the general shape of -"

"It does seem like it might be a good idea for Angel's interaction with Milliways to leave him unaware of the existence of Milliways. I don't know how far the bar will cooperate with us on that."

"Did you mean it about not helping him get better because then Wolfram and Hart will probably remove him?"

"I don't know. I do think that making the CEO of a Wolfram and Hart branch into a better person is an unusually low-returns activity but maybe it will be really easy, or maybe they want him there for some reason other than terrorizing the employees in a new and different way. - I take it, Karen, that people haven't tried to quit since he started?"

"You don't quit. Nobody quits. Ever."

He makes a face.

"He wants the job," he whispers conspiratorially to Karen.

Oh.

She is... very unclear on how this is supposed to make her feel about this person.

"I have a better job," he says, "and one of the things that makes it better is that no one is scared and everyone wants to be there, but this does sound like a really interesting challenge. The tricky thing for someone who is trying to be a good person is that if you want to stop being a slaveowner you gotta tell everyone they can quit with no consequences, but if you do that, then everyone who is a good person or has good risk assessment will immediately quit, and it's not clear that the resources you'd have left at that point are actually enough to protect the ones who left. Of course, I have no idea whether Angel has stayed up many nights in anguish thinking this over or whether he hasn't thought about it at all."

Nod.

"Like, from what we know, maybe he's been quietly persuading particularly desperate people they can safely quit and then pretending to murder them if they accept, or maybe he's just planning to dismiss everyone once he can train and bring on competent replacements who don't need enslaving or maybe he can't think how to wrangle it so he's not letting anyone quit until he thinks of something or maybe he's just actually so thoughtless he has not noticed he has slaves.

But - if you were running Wolfram and Hart would you tell Spike which of those was your plan?"

"I guess not."

"I guess maybe we could talk to the Angel from our world and try to guess from that."

"I don't think he's doing an extremely elaborate scheme to gradually extract everyone but I have no guesses on whether he's unhappily keeping the rules up because he hasn't thought of anything -- and presumably pretending to kill the deserters when there are some -- or whether he's just fine with slavery if the victims have ever done a bad thing.

I guess when you say it like that -"

"Kinda depends on whether anyone has said it like that, right?"

"What would you do?"