"Power, usually."

"I mean, I can give them that too, but only if they don't suck."

"If they didn't suck they wouldn't be evil despots, would they?"

Hannah looks at him quizzically and he murmurs an explanation of the word "despot" to her.

"I mean - if there were sufficiently rational evil despots it would work. If it were Elves it'd work because Elves can promise stuff."

"Promise stuff?"

"Bindingly, I mean."

    "Oh. That could be very useful," nods Nathan.

"Or mean, depending."

"Yeah, sometimes it ends up being a disaster. I'm not going to swear things carelessly."

And Oliver shows up. "Hey, I brought some video games—oh, you're back, hello!"

"Yeah! I went to Brazil but Brazil's being difficult."

"You—why did you go to Brazil—did you talk to the government there—they're a dictatorship, you know that, right?"

"Yes, everyone's said. I don't mind dictatorships inherently, Arda's are all monarchies and it works okay except for when there's a civil war but that's mostly Melkor's fault - anyway, Brazil seems bad and I dunno how to fix it but I want to put São Paulo back and they're being nice for now, it's possible they'll shape up because they want to keep me around?"

"Wouldn't count on that—and I'm kinda worried they'll want to use you to build secret weapons or cameras or something without you noticing."

"That shouldn't be easy to do, but yeah."

"That said... putting São Paulo back would be pretty great."

"Yeah. I am gonna at least stick around long enough to do that. They think I'm sleeping now, I should go back in like seven hours."

"—I don't suppose you'd want to engage in some corporate espionage on the side?"

"...what does the PRT want to know? I'm going to be super annoyed if you turn out to also be secretly evil, you know."

"Totally not evil," he says, drawing an X over his heart with the tip of his index finger. "And the most curious thing is how they... keep power. We're pretty sure they have some thinker and perhaps stranger helping them control the media and dissidents but we have no idea who or how."

"I would love to help figure that out!"

"Yeah. ...did you tell them about the other universes and all that?"

"No. Just said I could make stuff."

"And they thought you'd triggered there?"

"No, I said I'd triggered in New York - people might've seen me in New York -"

"And how'd you say you arrived there?"