... That causes her to giggle.

Lord Tanaikon giggles too.

(Giggle.)

"Might I ask what brought on such a quick revisit?" she wonders, once she's recovered herself.

"I keep finding girls I don't want to torture," he says. "It's beginning to get inconvenient."

Well, now she's giggling again.

"Perhaps your party method has failed you. The nobility have begun anticipating your visits. Not by cancelling all parties, but by being people you don't want to torture."

"If this keeps up I really will have to go elsewhere for my victims!"

"Poor sorcerer. Will you slowly accrue a new group of outliers, until at last in a thousand years your mountain is overrun and you must find another?"

He laughs. "If I can't find anyone to torture there'll be a problem well before then, I'm afraid."

"Oh?"

"I don't just do this for my own entertainment. If I stop feeding pain to the mountain, it melts and falls into the sea, taking a significant piece of Nathureme with it. Which is entirely my own fault, of course, but nevertheless."

"Ah."

He shrugs.

"No need to worry; I've kept it going this long, after all."

"Worry is not precisely the word I would use for a description of my thoughts, but thank you for the reassurance."

"Oh?"

"It seems like it would grow very tiresome," she observes, "to live such a long life, and to be forced to do something, even something you love, on threat of your home and I assume all of your power melting into the sea."

"You're not wrong."

"Is it that the people have changed," she wonders, "or have you?"

"Both? Neither?"

"Life so rarely aligns with simple answers."

She seems sympathetic.

"It managed to be simple for three thousand years," he says. "But now all of a sudden I'm surrounded by surprises."

"Life itself must have become frustrated with the simplicity, and decided you'd cope too well with only a single surprise."

"Well that's a worrying thought," he says with a laugh. "I wonder what else it has in store?"

"I couldn't tell you. Likely the only way to know is to live, and find out."

"Well."

He looks down at her for a moment, smiling.

"You didn't seem to be enjoying that party much; is there somewhere else you'd rather be?"

Shrug.

"Nowhere in particular, really."

Which is something of the problem, isn't it.