"Whoop de doo, no one asked you."

He sighs and turns to leave.

The human starts crying and she pats him, glaring after Fharlanghn.

He gets back to work.

None of the prisoners want to debate prison reform with him.

He brings them home. When he's done, he goes back to let the fairy know.

She has convinced the human to go to sleep in one of the cells. She herself is swigging coffee.

He hangs back again. "Do you want me to bring you back to Earth?"

"...what, and leave him out here alone?"

He rolls his eyes. "Both of you, of course."

"And the building?"

"I can."

"Put us back on Ganymede. The inspector's still there and everybody else on staff who wasn't in this section."

"All right." He concentrates, and the starscape around them abruptly changes.

"I really do wish there'd been a way of doing this that you liked better."

"Internet wasn't out very long. Doubt you tried that hard."

He sighs. "This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me, you know. It doesn't work to sit there and hope you figure it out if you're not even trying."

"I have no idea how often things happen to you, or you happen to things. You're just a one-man alien invasion, committing terrorism and trying to sound like you attempted diplomacy, and everyone stuck in a closet for a hundred years will be your fault on top of lots of other things that are your fault that I guess you don't care about."

"If you don't want to understand I can't make you," he shrugs.

"I hate it when people say 'understand' to mean 'agree'. I have the gist. You have a real big gun and you don't like it when folks go to prison for blowing up space stations or torturing half a dozen people to death or whatever. You spent possibly as long as a couple days attempting interdimensional diplomacy from a cold start with no historical research. You didn't instantly win a bunch of hearts and minds so you used brute force and now you're being full of shit about how hard you tried."

"I don't mean agree - half my own clerics don't agree with me on this. I mean - neither of us can be injured but that's what it's like, for me, when something like this happens. And I'll sit there with a broken arm for a year if I have to, ten years if I have to, to stop other people from being hurt, but I won't sit there forever, and I won't just sit there if you won't even consider if it should be fixed."

"You didn't ask me. I don't know who you - pardon me, your clerk - even talked to. For less than a week."

"I did ask you. You were barely willing to talk to me."

"I mean before you started. At this point you've burned bridges where you didn't even know there were rivers."

"I don't think I have. People never understand that I'm serious about this without seeing it for themselves."

"Well, I guess we'll never know unless you can fucking time travel, will we."