"Helluva deadman's switch. Yeah, that'd be one of the reasons--it probably doesn't speak very well of me that I'm more likely to hunt down rapists who can't put up enough of a fight to make my life even more unpleasant but there we are.

I killed the silver dragon but that was because he was an ongoing problem, if he'd just fucked me and flown off I wouldn't've bothered."

"I'm also not going to rape you but I figure you'll notice that on your own, the other thing would've come up as a nasty surprise or not at all."

"I hope you won't take offense if I don't entirely take your word for it? I mean, I totally believe that you intend not to rape me, but, uh, if the curse didn't think it could make you one way or another it probably wouldn't've let me get dropped here. Or would've let me walk off the mountain."

"Your curse evidently doesn't know me as well as it thinks it does."

"Either that or it's got more mind-control options up its sleeve than its displayed so far, I suppose."

"...I'd say I can leave if you don't want to risk getting mind-controlled, but, uh, I demonstrably cannot do that. No hard feelings if you wanna dump me somewhere, though."

"I'll think about it."

"Sorry. It probably doesn't have more mind-control options up its sleeve, for what it's worth, I went a month without getting raped once a few centuries ago and it didn't pull anything like that then."

"How'd you manage the month?"

"Stuck in the desert with five other people, three of whom were women and the other two of whom were delightfully honorable. Slept with one of 'em anyway, he was a real sweetie, but sadly the curse isn't appeased by consensual sex."

"I really don't think much of this curse."

"It's really dumb and petty. And, like, I can game it a little--if I tell someone about it and swear up and down I won't have any hard feelings if they succumb to it but don't, like, actually invite them to have sex with me, that works at least sometimes."

...he laughs.

"It's a fine line, very easy to be just a bit too consenting-by-implication."

"Sounds inconvenient."

"It's so inconvenient. On the other hand, it's not quite as inconvenient as being dead, of old age or otherwise."

"True enough."

"How old are you?" she wonders. "You look human, and humans usually live less than a century, but you did say you were immortal..."

"A little shy of three and a half thousand."

"Oh, huh, that's more than three times as old as me. I've never met a human older than me before."

He laughs.

"And I mean literally never, there weren't many around where I grew up, I didn't meet one until I was a hundred and ten."

"It's been thousands of years since I wasn't the oldest person in the world."

"Do you have literally anything other than humans here?"