"I didn't know if you might be the sort of person that thinks it's possible to politely rape a pretty girl," she points out. "But yes, all right. Fair enough. I'll take a guest room, if you're still offering. It'll be easier to get somewhere I know from where I landed at, anyway."

"Sure. Are you a books sort of person, a gardens sort of person, an ostentatious decadence sort of person...? So I know which rooms to show you first."

"Books, gardens, possibly some side decadence if it's not too gaudy, in approximately that order."

"So we'll see what you think of the hall nearest the library." He turns to start walking toward the castle, along the path that separates the line of cottages from the lakeshore.

She trails along behind him, idly cleaning all traces of blood from her armor with magic as she goes. She'll need to repair it, too, but for now she can try to keep tempting the man of questionable power to a minimum.

"I have a daughter," he adds, "her name is Irikaino, she lives in the northwest wing. I'd rather you didn't go there uninvited."

"I won't," she agrees, nodding.

"Thank you."

"... What's she like? If I may ask?"

"...We have a somewhat difficult relationship, mostly because she's a much better person than I am."

"Ah. I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

Walking!

"To continue my trend of invasive questions, what makes raping pretty girls, ah. Appealing? If it wouldn't make being polite more difficult to answer."

He shrugs. "I can talk about it just fine but there's not a lot to say. Making attractive people suffer is hot. Especially when they bleed. Or cry. Or both. Also if I stop torturing people for a week this mountain explodes, but that's my own fault and you needn't feel sorry for me about it."

Blink.

"Why will the mountain explode if you stop torturing people?"

"So, pain magic. It's a thing. Notoriously unstable, but I invented a way to build structured spells out of it anyway because I'm just that good. Except that in the early days when I was designing myself immortality I wasn't good enough to make the structure fully stable, so the best I could do was to make it stay stable as long as I keep pouring power into it. I've been refining it ever since, but given that if I fuck it up it will kill me and my daughter and also level a handful of cities, I'm not just going to tear the whole thing apart and rebuild it from scratch, so it's slow going."

"So then there are two separate dilemmas here. Is there a quota of torture you have to reach per week for the mountain?"

"Yeah. Two separate dilemmas?"

"There's the fact that your mountain will explode if you don't torture anyone for a week, which is unfortunate but straightforward enough. Then there's the more personal and difficult dilemma of - I hesitate to phrase it as 'not having anyone that matches your kinks around,' but can't think of anything else that's quite so diplomatic. Would you be happy with someone that enjoyed suffering and was happy to be your victim?"

"I wouldn't object to volunteers, but it's been three thousand years and I haven't had one yet. Well, a handful of 'I told them they'd regret it and I was right' cases, nobody who actually enjoyed being tortured."

"Well, what kinds of torture do you usually conduct?"

"I don't exactly keep a list. Why, are you offering?"

"That would depend on the torture," she points out, a little wry. "I'm not offering to do anything I don't know the full scope of. But I dislike suffering and want to help you find something you find personally acceptable that avoids it."

"...I really can't just give you an exhaustive list ahead of time of all the things I might ever want to do. But if you did offer, it'd be 'all right, let's try some things', not 'okay, you're mine now', you know?"

"... All right. If I were to offer, what would you be tempted to try?"