"......I probably should regret that my actions led to his death because every human life is precious and all but in fact. You're not slaves and you don't have to obey me if I'm being a dumbass." 

"Oh. Well, I'll be sure to tell you if I think you're being a dumbass."

The first genuine smile he's had all day. "Thank you.

Probably at some point I will have to leave the moon and go to my mom's house but I don't actually want to. Which is really not a sentence I expected to ever say."

"...um I don't want to stop you if you want to go to your mom's house but Santa has a cottage."

"I am in this situation in the first place because I hate that house enough to make suicide jokes when asked what I'll be doing for winter break. Can we come back to the moon?" 

"I will not become miraculously incapable of teleportation."

"Santa's cottage it is, then. I assume it is on the North Pole -- I guess given teleportation I can just go and grab my books and things later if I need them."

He's not sure what he expects Santa's cottage to look like but he steels himself for 'a Thomas Kinkade painting but somehow even cutesier'. 

Lev teleports them into the bedroom.

It's painted dark blue. The bed is just a mattress on the floor. There is an enormous skylight, clear enough and clean enough to see the stars.

...huh. 

"It's -- nice," he says, instead of putting his foot directly into his mouth and explaining that he'd expected it to suck, because since middle school he has learned two thirds of a social skill. 

"It adjusts itself to be what you would ideally like in a house."

"Well, that'd do it. -- Sorry, I'm trying to figure out what questions to ask first, there are a lot of them. Why doesn't everyone already know Santa exists, you'd think adults would notice they hadn't bought those presents." 

"We mind control them to make them think they bought it."

"Why." 

"Last Santa thought that the Christmas spirit should be about childlike faith in things for which there is absolutely no evidence."

"Wow. I hate that even more than I already hated Christmas, which is a lot." Maybe if he hates Christmas enough it'll stop being a thing entirely. He's not totally sure what to do with that thought?

"...can you come up with positive feelings about Yule? Hanukkah? Kwanzaa? New Year's? Omisoka? Yalda? Pancha Ganapati? Bodhi's Day? Saturnalia? Isaac Newton's birthday? Zamenhof Day? Human Rights Day? Uh, Hogswatch? Life Day? Festivus?"

"...I can try but the entire season kind of got -- infected, I guess. Human Rights Day is good, I didn't know that was a thing." 

"Um, we're kind of-- we are the elves of spreading joy and cheer especially to children in the winter when everyone is miserable because the sun has gone away, that's the thing that we are, it doesn't have to be Christmas but--"

"And you got someone whose hatred for Christmas, much like Christmas itself, has expanded to fill the entire month of December, significant portions of November, and is encroaching on January. I'm really sorry. In my defense I feel like 'whoever killed the previous Santa' is among the stupidest selection mechanisms possible but in not my defense it's not like you picked it out.

I don't, uh, know what some of those things you listed are, what's Zamenhof day?" 

"The birthday of the creator of Esperanto, traditionally celebrated by hosting information sessions and cultural gatherings to promote the Esperanto language."

"....okay, that's cute. I can get behind that. That and Human Rights Day and -- I can read up on the rest and there'll be something worth liking, probably." 

"Kids need to get presents. That's important. They can get-- Human Rights Day presents, probably. A better choice than Zamenhof Day. More flexible present choices."

"Human Rights Day presents works. As long as we don't keep mind controlling parents, that's so horrifying and pointless." 

"I really, really, really do not like lying to children."

"I am fine with lying to children to basically the same extent I'm fine with lying to everyone else but this is -- not the kind of lying I'm fine with." Also he feels like it's really more centrally a lie to adults but that's not something he wants to figure out how to say right now.