Sadder Cam and Saddest Gregor
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I get the sense I'm still missing something but that's enough of a definition to be going on with, thank you.

He looks contemplatively down at his flying granite canoe.

I would like to find a way to keep in contact with you if you are unexpectedly retrieved, so that I can find you a god eventually.

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Entitle a letter "letter to Cam". In this alphabet - He hands over a piece of paper.

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And then you could make it? How would you reply?

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That's harder, but it's possible you could summon me from wherever you were if I had enough warning to arrange to be home at the time; I'm not sure though because before I wound up in Arda summoning only ever took people to an Earth, not this one.

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If your creation power allows you to receive messages at any distance, perhaps I should be trying to copy it.

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...it does flashier stuff than correspondence and not in an entirely safe way.

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What do you mean?

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I would really like to be able to help you and vice-versa and I am not sure explaining in a responsible amount of detail is conducive to you wanting to do that.

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He pauses.

...When you put it like that, it begins to sound as though I would be irresponsible not to ask for the full story.

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Yeah, probably.

My magic allows the fairly easy destruction of entire planets.

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So will mine, in a few decades when I'm in better practice with it.

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And I destroyed a planet and it had fifty-five million people on it.

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And now you have been interrupted in the process of restoring them?

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Yes. And there's about a million I can't put back.

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He seems remarkably calm for having just learned that the person he rescued from weird psychic jail killed fifty-five million people.

I see, he says. I apologize for asking you about this, but it would be irresponsible of me not to investigate, and you are the only person available to ask. Why did you destroy the planet?

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It had fourteen gods on it and god number fifteen wanted them dead and made a deal with me that if I killed them for him he'd stop torturing people among other things. Couldn't warn anybody on it or they could've stopped me.

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He looks... a little distant. Not particularly shocked or horrified.

And you had some means of enforcing the agreement?

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Most of the species in that world can make binding oaths.

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He is quiet for a moment.

Then he says: Sometimes there are no good choices. I understand that very well. I am not inclined to make this an obstacle to further cooperation between us.

A pause, and - In the spirit of fairness, if you want to know where I learned that lesson, I'll tell you.

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Would it be irresponsible of me not to ask?

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Not on anything like that scale, but the argument could be made.

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If you don't mind, then.

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He shrugs slightly.

In the world I come from, my father rules an empire spanning the only inhabited continent left on the planet. He is a disaster on every level both political and personal, and as his heir I have always considered it my job to wait until he dies and then clean up all his messes. He is disappointed in me for not sharing his interest in rape and torture, so for a few years he kept giving me slave girls for my birthday, to encourage me. The first one I successfully helped escape; the next one died escaping; the one after that, knowing escape was not an option, chose to kill herself rather than stay in my father's palace any longer; and when they put a suicide ward on the next one to stop her taking that route, she asked me to kill her. So I did.

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That's considerably more defensible than holing a planetful of unsuspecting bystanders.

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From some perspectives, yes. From others... Every one of the approximately eight hundred million people in Eianvar is my responsibility, and I am continually failing to uphold that responsibility, and in her case the failure was particularly acute.

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