"That like, he's not allowed to think anyone deserves torture just because that person is him and also crazy.  Ish.  That thing."

"...yes, that does seem important."

"I'm just right!  And I'm better than him.  But if he improves enough to meet me, then... I don't know.  I still - really want to exist..."

"To - meet you? You think you could both be around at the same time?"

"...To meet my level of being better than him."

"Ah, okay, to be, like, your moral equivalent, shall we say."

"- I'm being flippant on purpose and that sounds well-defined enough that I'm not sure I want to agree with it.  'If he grew to agree with me about this particular thing,' maybe."

"Moral equivalent is a little bit of a double meaning, actually, but okay."

"I think the double meaning was a part I definitely didn't like about it but maybe I'm wrong about what the other half is??"

"Eh, it's not important."

"Well, I am going to worry about it forever if you don't tell me except for how I might not do that and also maybe it doesn't rate next to everything else."

"Moral equivalence sometimes gets used loosely to talk about equivalences that are not moral in nature, like... what's the last time I heard this... how emailing something to yourself is the moral equivalent of... I forget, some guy in a dungeon was very agitated about how there are still use cases for emailing things to yourself but I don't remember what he thought was an appropriate comparison."

"Oh.  I still don't know what that means but it's not the thing I thought it meant and didn't like, which is the important thing.  Which was like, I don't think he's less worthy of moral consideration or having nice things or getting to exist just because he was wrong in a slightly evil way while being magically scared of everything."

"Yeah, no, me either."

"....I don't think I really thought that you thought that, but I thought there was a chance you were - being flippant in your own way to make me think you were on my side more than his, to manipulate me.  Or just being condescending or something, I'm not sure."

"Man, to want to manipulate you I'd need a much more coherent model of how you and he and your backlash work and also a goal more important than not being a manipulative jerk that could be best served that way."

There are a couple ways he could respond to this...  "I am magically suspicious of people wanting to harm meeeeeee."  Snuggle.

"Yeah, fair enough, should I stop trying to defend my character against the magical aspersions?"

"I don't really know."

"Then I will continue to make random guesses as it comes up."

"Okay.  ...I was doing really well at being very scared but also having positive experiences and I'm not really sure how to go back to that."  And now he's going to have a bad time during the second and final time he's ever existed and he'll never get another chance.

"Soup's supposed to be here in ten."

"Maybe that will help."

"I believe that was the idea."

It really, really feels like he broke the spell and got bent out of shape and will never be happy (or its approximation) again, and also, if he's not in the shape that he was how does he even know whether he's the same person he was five minutes ago?  It felt clear then but now everything seems arbitrary.  How do you even tell what is and isn't a person, once you abandon the clear and obvious framework of one per body?  What if there really are six intermediate identities, and what if this is one of them?  Don't they all deserve to live as much as Bug does?  This is a moral atr -

...Also he is being magically forced to believe things are worse than they are.  Hm.

"I think I want not to be guided any more until it arrives."