So does she. It doesn't work that well.

Yes. And they don't have forever to spend thinking about it.

"I haven't been able to think of any good alternatives," he says, next time he sees her after a few hours of trying. "Have you?"

"You'd know better than I would if there's some way for me to corroborate - no I haven't."

"So."

He lapses into a pensive silence.

"Do you want to just tell me the whole story, maybe it will seem very unlikely to be made up -"

"I can do that," he says. "With plenty of historical context. It goes back sixteen centuries, to when the last gods destroyed each other and their home continent in a war. At the time, the empire of Eianvar spanned most of the northwestern corner of the remaining continent, far away from the southern coast where all the exciting destruction was happening, and therefore it was one of the least badly affected countries. But the event was still disruptive enough to fracture the empire into multiple warring pieces, which fought one another and conquered everyone else and then fought one another some more and lost some of their holdings and started over, and this cycle went on for approximately one and a half thousand years, until the latest heir to the original piece of the empire—I should think of a nickname for him, on principle—"

He pauses briefly.

"—let's call him Justice, decided that he preferred a more orderly world than the one he found himself in. He reconquered the rest of his fragmentary empire, turned loose the most recently acquired of the outlying territories and established sane diplomatic relations with them, and restored peace and good government to the extent he was able to do so, which was considerable. His reign was long and prosperous. Then, as mortals tend to do, he died of old age. His eldest son - let's call him Clover - inherited the empire. Clover was irrationally terrified of usurpation, and in his desperate attempts to avoid it, only brought it on himself; he tried to have all his living relatives killed, was incompletely successful, and provoked a civil war which my grandfather, a survivor of the purge, eventually won."

Another pause, ordering his thoughts or perhaps trying to nickname more of these characters.

"Grandfather, given what he'd just experienced, was understandably not very confident in the wisdom of continuing to pass the position of utmost power in the empire from parent to child. He spent years thinking about the best possible way to transition to a more stable form of government less dependent on the competence and moral character of his descendants. And just as he was about to implement that plan, his son, my father, had him assassinated and claimed the throne."

"...even the fairies who have families do not work anything like that, that's confusing."

"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.