He also tries very hard not to think about how all of his alts have killed someone. This time, he's not as successful. Edarial's not sure if Prime's killed someone before the fiasco that was finding him, so he might be absolved for that, but the other two certainly chose to. Neither of them regret it in the slightest. He knows this because he asked, quietly, privately. It was in the defense of their matching Bells. That's - he doesn't know how to feel about that. That's worrying.
Obviously, the solution is math. He asks both alts for their - mental numbers, the factors behind them, and then he scurries off to crunch his own and compare with what they have. Iobel didn't want to have a competition, but - this isn't that. He's comparing notes. If he's - likely to kill someone in defense of her, he'd like a heads up first.
Copious amounts of math is completed. Edarial is - kind of frightened by the results. He gets up, and he goes to find Iobel. Because according to Adarin-math, he is probably capable of killing people in her defense.
He nods. "Phis is planning to fix things, which is great, but you are already working on fixing them by being queen. And have shown that you are capable of doing so. So you're definitely winning there. And - it's only about two points behind Phix. Ice is about six points ahead of her, if you'd like a comparison scale."
"Seven point six for intellect, twelve for wanting to help the world and using monarchy to do it and actually manage it, three point five for being systematic and logical about it, two for sticking to morals, four point eight because you're good with magic and trying to figure out immortality with it. Then, token point for being alive. And the - remaining four point six is - um. Complicated."
"Sold it to you. Maybe if I had politics on my mind I'd have asked how you were planning to do some particular thing, if there seemed to be a rapport, but I didn't like to overdo customer interaction, I never liked it when I was held up making small talk while buying jam and bread and sardines."
"It's huge," she says, and it is. "I'm probably going to wind up pruning it into a few versions, each with its own massive drawback, unless we find alts with magic that handles working memory - I checked Phix's notes on runecasting and it doesn't have anything like that."
"These marks here signify branches I can omit to shrink the spell, in the likely event that I can't make the whole thing fit," she says, pointing at an example. "I really hope we find an alt with good memory improving magic, it would be so useful for cheating at spellbinding. We could do anything, and then it wouldn't matter so much that we could only do it six times a day."
"I swear," he mutters, once they are out of spellcharts to look at, "if someone drops another building on us after we manage these I will be very unhappy."
"You're welcome. I - I think sometimes you've seemed to think I'm fishing for compliments that I haven't earned or something, but a decent fraction of the things I'd like to have recognized about me include such glowing personality recommendations as not literally malicious enough to want an innocent person to die."
"... That... Okay, he wasn't in a coma for the five hundred years. He was doing stuff and accomplishing important things and changing the world, and honestly as of right now, his New Kystle is the best of all of the planes. Even Chamomile. So he's - not only is he so vastly different from the rest of us, but he's validated by all that he's done? I think?"
"That he's obviously gotten along just fine without, so he doesn't need to look for people to romance. Which may or may not be true. This is - just guesswork, I don't actually know what's going on in his head, just - what I would be doing if I were in his situation."
It is careful and snuggly.
"Obviously," he murmurs, "the solution is to figure out how to resurrect the dead with spellbinding. And then we can corner the economy of the entire planet and make a robot army with the proceeds and technology from other planes, and after all that I'd be insane if I don't look at you like you're a deity."
Lean. Sigh.