"The... Is that a self-appointed title or...?"

"Mm. Somebody called me that when I was starting out, and I... took to it. Encouraged the nickname to spread. Nowadays hardly anyone outside of payroll even knows my name."

The manikin from earlier comes out from behind his leg, flashing him a rapid series of signs. He looks down and signs something back, then flicks it in the forehead. It shiver-giggles again.

"Well, I would love to say it's nice to meet you, Thoma, but the circumstances aren't the best. Um. Why are you called that, and was that little guy at one point a person who died or something?"

"I brought a man back from the dead, why else? He wasn't dead long, and he didn't do well after, but it was a breakthrough. The little guy," whom he lifts onto his hip, "was never anything other than he was. He's one of three, I'm sure you'll meet the others."

"Isn't there a spell for that? The bringing people back from the dead part."

"There is. But I didn't use a spell. Nor did I use a Skill. I used a simple chemical formula, which I made, which anyone could make with the right tools."

He glances at the breakfast plate and pulls out a pair of sticks, about the length of a pencil, with the hand that isn't holding his homunculus. "Mind if I have some of the vinegar pork sashimi? Ari brought your breakfast first."

"This is too much food for me," she says, while her brain processes the other thing he said. "Wouldn't it be easier to reverse-engineer the Skill? ...I guess maybe not easier but more complete? Then anyone could do it too. ...maybe it'd cost too much mana, though. And you'd need a cooperative priest, probably. You know, if it weren't for the part where presumably you or your company had kidnapped and killed that person that sounds like a pretty good research agenda." Which is basically the whole entire problem Rekenber has, as far as she can tell, "pretty good research agendas" coupled with horrifying methods. "And I bet you could do a hybrid thing, some easy Skill that can make up the difference after you use the chemical formula to bring the person back..."

"I believe we have someone on that, actually! A Skill to reconstruct the parts of someone that die, when they die, that the Formula can't bring back." Thoma pinches the strip of white-pink meat between his sticks and lifts it to his mouth. He chews for exactly five seconds, then swallows.

"And, yes, the Churches of Odin and Freyja enjoy their joint monopoly on healing and resurrection far too much for us to perform a properly comprehensive study on their Skills. And, yes, I kidnapped the man I killed and brought back. Would it help you to know that he beat his wife and ran a cockfighting ring out of his basement? He did. The loss of his faculties was not, particularly, a loss to the world."

"That does help, actually, but I know for a fact that's not the only kind of person you kidnap and kill."

"No, of course not. The profit margins on assessing them would be indefensible."

There's irony in his tone, not bitter so much as fondly exasperated.

"I can't tell if you're not being serious or if you really don't care or what."

"...I am being serious, to the extent that's relevant. Many of my superiors at Rekenber care very deeply about money, and any plan to do something more ethically at a cost in zeny and efficiency would die unborn. The rest are monsters or fools. I am probably a monster, but I am not a fool. And I care about people dying, but... mm. How to explain it."

He absently strokes the homunculus along the seashell-curls atop its head, and it looks like it might purr, if it had a voice.

"I do try not to kill people when I don't have to. It's a maximization problem - I imagine you know them? Unless those mechanical trousers were a gift from a friend."

"They were not a gift from a friend. Can I have them back, by the way, I kind of outgrew chairs a while ago."

"Put a pin in it, ask me in five minutes, we'll talk about it. Do you already how maximization works."

"Yes, I do."

"Thanks. I'm maximizing on not killing people, but that's not the only factor. I also have to consider leverage, which comes in many forms, like 'becoming a more powerful alchemist' and 'not inspiring anyone at Rekenber to have me dumped into the Roterfluss in pieces'. And, of course, my terminal goal. Which is weighted very heavily. So, when I balance all of those out... I prefer to experiment on those I've personally evaluated and kidnapped, when at all possible. When it isn't possible, I put a mark in the moral expenses column. I don't try to change Rekenber's internal policies on subject acquisition, because that would be a great deal of effort and danger without significant expected reward. That's an ongoing moral expense, though only a small one, since I'm really not very well positioned to affect the situation. And... to get back to the earlier point.

"I care about killing innocents. It's inconvenient for my goals, and I think it's bad. It'd be convenient if my superiors didn't make me. But it doesn't serve my goals to get upset about it."

"Why is it inconvenient? What are your goals?" If the villain wants to monologue who's she to stop him, the more he talks the more time she has before whatever he's got planned for her begins.

"It's inconvenient because my goals are, fundamentally, about making the world a better place. Killing innocents makes the world a worse place. Like I said, it's red ink under moral expenses."

She blinks and... doesn't actually have something to say to that. That sounded far, far too much like what a villain from a novel would say and she's having some trouble wrapping her head around it.

"Anyway. You want your legs back. Very understandable. I would like you to have your legs back as well. I would not like you to try using them to crush my skull, or spray burning accelerant at me, or disassemble them and construct a teleportation device so you can leave and tell whoever you'd like to tell about all of the things you saw in the laboratory. And I'm quite confident you could modify them to do any of those things, if you could make them in the first place. So we find ourselves at cross-purposes.

"Would you like to impress me by coming up with a solution?"

"...I can just not do any of that? It would be—" How does she put this. "If I were the kind of person who'd screw over someone who had helped me less than they could, using the exact thing they helped me with, that wouldn't result in me being helped more in the long run, would it?"

"In the long run? What long run? If you die here, Lucky, you don't pop back up at Kafra, telling everyone how you stuck to your principles. You die."

"Okay but that's... you can't just throw away the kind of person you are just because you might die? That just means that you aren't that kind of person in the first place. And, yeah, that too, if I try to be funny you could kill me or worse so if you want to just trust that part that works too."

"...good enough, I think." He sets the homunculus down, and it runs off.

"...oh, score, that worked. And by the way I could not create a teleportation device with what I've got in those legs. At least not quickly, I'd have to figure out how to use those crystals for that and I really don't think they're at all specced for it."