"That's as may be but I'm a little preoccupied at the moment."

"I was really expecting a bigger reaction to the pronouns!  Let's go outside, shall we?"

"You can resurrect the dead and have very strange priorities! Why shouldn't you also be willing and able to dig up my awkward personal facts?"

"Why shouldn't we indeed."

Outside there's a lovely garden.  And, directly overhead and very large, another planet.  Rings, moons, visible individual trees.

Well that's astronomically confusing.

"Do you read fiction books, Kerem?  Romances?"

"Occasionally if one comes recommended."

"And have you encountered the kind of plot where one person has to choose between multiple potential partners?"

"Yes."

"If you agree to be one such person in real life, we'll give you the resources to save your crown prince."

"You said a great guy."

"I apologize, I should have said 'one such potential partner'."

"Is... there a catch?"

"To cooperating with the premise?  Aside from us generally having strange priorities?  I think not really, but I'm not sure what sort of thing you might be thinking about and don't want to say no preemptively."

"I don't know either, this is very weird!"

"You're handling it well.  I think I would say that if you accept the offer, you're liable to encounter many extremely strange things, some of which you may find unpleasant, but nothing is immediately coming to mind which I would describe as specifically catch-like.  The other guy - his name's Cam - isn't only into women, or any such thing.  I think you have a reasonable shot at winning his love and coming out of this overall happy with the result."

"And I don't have to win, to - have the resources - what does that mean exactly, are we talking magical secrets or just assistance -"

"Well, if you make it to the final four, we'll probably bring him in ourselves.  Again with only a few seconds having passed for him.  If you lose before then things get a bit more complicated, but you will receive either magical secrets or assistance in retrieving him.  We're open to negotiation at the point when it's time for us to repay you."

"The final four? I don't think I've ever read a romance with more than three plausible candidates."

"There's twenty-eight, here."

"Why are you doing any of this at all, let alone that much of it?"

"It's possible to create impressions of things that have happened."  He gestures to a blank space on the wall, which proceeds to display a clip of Kerem sitting up in the bed.  "Once you have that, you can use it for entertainment, and... things have had a lot of time to get more complicated in.  So twenty-eight is more interesting than three, for a non-scripted show."

"...what happens to the people you create the impressions of?" he asks, looking down as though to check himself for reduced opacity or something.

"Nothing, especially.  It's not even magic; you can do it with clever tricks of light and chemicals, or other completely mundane means."

"Like... bleaching things in the sun with something on them to cast a shadow, only... you'd need a hundred tricks like that together?"