"Humans like to have an expectation that their children will be well provided for after they die, so there is a social custom that after someone dies their children can have all their belongings, with the eldest getting first pick of the things that are difficult to subdivide. This works better when their belongings do not include rulership of a continent-spanning empire."

"...in breeder fairies one's children are pretty much just more vassals, as far as I know."

"It is very common among humans for close relatives to also be close friends. Not universal, but very common."

Nod.

"So. My father and his friend the Wood mage have ruled the empire together since I was a small child. My father is not only an unpleasant person with unpleasant hobbies, he is also very bad at ruling the empire, and the Wood mage is most of the reason why it has not already fallen apart. He holds all the power in name, but she holds much of it in practice. Early on, I noticed that I was the only person in the world both willing and able to rescue it from him without bringing about yet another civil war. I've been studying law and history since then, learning as much as I can about how the empire ought to be run, so that if and when I ever inherited, I could fix all the things he broke. And then one morning I woke up stranded in a strange, empty world, with no idea where I was or how I had come to be there, and I acquired the local magic and spent a few years alone there constructing my immortality and this boat. The first trip I took put me in that room with you."

"It's a good thing you didn't land somewhere somebody would've tried to catch you."

"Yes. Although it's possible they might not have succeeded. I have an unusually fast and effective means of running away."

"If they'd said 'hello, I'm Blossom, what's your name,' without touching you -"

"Then it would depend on whether they managed to say that without sounding suspicious and whether the first thing they said afterward prevented me from teleporting away."

"They'd usually start with 'stop'."

He shrugs slightly.

"You have no idea how you got to the empty world?"

"None at all."

"If I did unreservedly agree to help you what would you want me to do -?"

"I would want to neutralize my father and the Wood mage as quickly as possible - if being ordered to stop worked unproblematically on the Wood mage I suppose you could ask her for confirmation at that point, but I might not want to rely on it holding her indefinitely; she is the sort of person around whom it pays to be more cautious than you can reasonably imagine you might possibly need to be. You would be free to talk to my father while I made political arrangements. I haven't worked out a specific plan for that part yet because it depends on things I am only going to find out when I get there, but if you do end up commanding my father through a peaceful transfer of power, it shouldn't take longer than a few weeks at most. Afterward, if we managed to extract a coherent preference from him and it ran in that direction, I might not object to keeping him imprisoned indefinitely rather than killing him, but it's possible that the political situation would be best stabilized by at least the appearance of his death."

"...is it safe for me to go partially and very briefly into your world to see if sorcery works there?"

"If the gate opens onto the eastern shore of the Lake of Gold, you're very, very unlikely to be seen. The lake is too bright to look at during the day and difficult to navigate at night, so people mostly don't cross it."

"Okay."

She turns invisible and leans into the gate.

That lake is really fucking shiny.

And she's still invisible.

She leans back.

"Sorcery works."

"That seems useful."

"Relevantly it means I can open and close the gate from either side instead of just this one."

And therefore she can easily be on the other side with it closed, right.

"I see."

"You obviously don't think fairy orders are too horrible to use ever or you wouldn't be inviting me to help at all and you could make me and you're not but I don't know if that's actually for ethical reasons or because it would be harder to make use of me if I were hostile and you haven't given up on not needing to do that yet - you seem very nice but -"

"I feel that fairy orders are too horrible to use ever, but I judge that in the case of the Wood mage I can't afford not to if I have the option, and in the case of my father the potential benefits are too great to ignore the possibility. If you do not agree to help then I do not have the option. Not only for ethical reasons but also because if I did that I would be unhappy enough to cease to function."