"It varies. Nothing for a while, then suddenly I'm busy as a hiveful of bees for two weeks, then another interval of boredom..."

"Is there any particular reason it clusters?"

"Well, for one thing, it's a lot easier to run into miscellaneous problems in need of solving when I am out solving problems than when I am at home fucking around on the Internet."

"Oh, these aren't mostly assigned from without?"

"Yeah, I'm supposed to deal with whatever happens to cross my path that isn't already being taken care of. Thanes were originally sort of - I almost want to say knights-errant but the connotations are off - the original job description was essentially 'roam around making sure that no one starves or gets murdered if you can help it', and settling disputes and dealing with miscellaneous troubles was just sort of an obvious extension of that, and then starvation and murder stopped being such a big problem but the rest of it was still useful... I like being a thane. It suits me. Gives me a concrete excuse for my inherently meddlesome nature."

"I'd almost think the position was designed for you."

"My mother does very well with it too, though in a different way. More of an emphasis on politics."

"Oh?"

"She personally knows every jarl and jarl's heir in Thule and she spends a lot of time helping Myriol herd the cats. I could do that too but I'm more useful in places where my mother doesn't already have an angle."

"Are jarls very catlike?"

"The sociopolitical structure of Thule is... not the most straightforward of things. There's a lot of unwritten rules and reliance on precedent and instances of 'I can't work with him, his great-grandfather stole my great-grandfather's best goat' - not that anyone says that out loud, so then you have to know whose great-grandfathers were stealing each other's goats and which of them are still mad about it - but our population is still low enough to sustain that sort of silliness without falling apart like a larger country would if someone tried to run it as a lumbering chimera of a feudal kingdom and a democratic republic."

"Your brand of - affectionately exasperated patriotism - is not a spin I've seen on national pride before."

"I love my country dearly and I would not want to have grown up anywhere else. Also it is sometimes a clusterfuck. I don't think I'd want to be the sort of person who sees a contradiction there."

"It's not contradictory particularly. I found my country of birth an acceptable place to incubate and acknowledge its effect on my accent and tastes and so on, but have no enduring loyalty to it."

"It was only fairly recently that I realized not everyone has the - feeling of home - if you've read my essay on glaciers you might know what I mean - it's a good feeling and I'm glad I have it but it's admittedly not an ideal setup given that I will eventually end up spending the rest of forever living in a place that is not Thule. At least until I invent interdimensional travel. Or I suppose I could hold out a while by arranging to keep getting summoned."

"You and the other Thulian angels could set up Little Thule in a nice cave in Heaven with glaciers."

"Yes but we'd be missing all our non-angelic relatives. And the glaciers would be so inauthentic."

"They have to be genuine glaciers produced by the appropriate meteorological processes, huh?"

"It's just not the same otherwise. Although they're still beautiful."

"Maybe that's why you wouldn't be a demon, a fixation on authenticity."

"Glaciers situated on a freshly constructed planet as though they were produced there by the appropriate meteorological processes are also acceptable."

"Very laborious for an angel, that."

"It'll be nice to have something to keep busy with when I run out of meaningful problems."

"It'll be sort of restful to have run out of meaningful problems."

"For about two days before I get bored. And then I can go construct exquisitely authentic planets!"