"I am hardly going to complain about you working towards your goals just because they happen to imperfectly coincide with mine."

"Thank you. What do you think I should know?"

"Uh - back home it was an open secret, you're not going to keep it one if there's extended contact with our world, though I guess that's straightforward enough to prevent. At home there was a very sophisticated system to keep me around, he's stopped that. At home there were frequently mind-altering oaths and mind-altering magic, he's stopped that too. He hasn't hurt me since we got here either but that he does infrequently enough I don't know if it's a change of policy, he hasn't clarified. The government is significantly more - I don't know a word - it leans much more heavily on ensuring the unquestioned authority of its sovereign than is necessary? That he's been actively working to fix, and he's been working on more humane ways to keep people in line..."

"Do you think the recent changes are situational, specific to Milliways, or not?"

" - I think the changes to policy priorities are intended to be permanent, he wants to run his country in a way that impresses even people from ones with lots more resources. The personal things - it'd be much much harder here to give me orders careful enough I couldn't find a way to communicate something if I wanted to, so I think he might be avoiding giving me any reason to do that."

"So they can be expected to hold at least as long as it would be inconvenient to prevent you from talking to third parties."

"Well, now you're complicating that. Yesterday I'd have said so."

"It's true that I'd take sudden quietude to be worrying."

"That's not paranoid enough - he could have me swear to share all of his goals, say, which would presumably include appeasing you, and then we could stay in touch while he did as he pleased. I really hate that oath and usually ask for an expiration date and if he tried to insist on it without one I'd probably be difficult, but he could have bought himself a year that way easily enough, and he hasn't."

...Nod.

Raised eyebrow. "Something wrong?"

"If it weren't part of my attempt to negotiate in good faith I'd want to consult my alts for paranoia assistance."

"I don't suppose phrasing it as hypothetical would be very convincing."

"Kib would probably try to guess the rest of the plot for me but he'd take it as threatening."

He flinches. "Yes, that really doesn't sound worth it. Is he going to be okay?"

"Eventually."

Nod. "I can try to give you advice on sufficient paranoia, if it might help. You should assume that he is easier to incentivize to cooperate than he is to corner into it."

"That was my assumption, yes. But unverifiable cooperation calls for a different starting point."

"Is it unverifiable?"

"No, just inconvenient."

Nod. "If you could get him to agree to additional constraints on his conduct, what would you ask for -"

"If possible I'd like to avoid the temptation to think about it in those terms."

"What terms are you trying to think about it in -"

"...I think he's falling short of what is verifiably his potential."

"I appreciate you doing this."