"Saniah's been telling funny Elf anecdotes at Amentan dinner parties."

"Oh really, like what?"

"'So then Larya says that if it'll make people happy the Elves would probably be happy to execute their royal family, but for an afternoon, not for a week or something.'"

Snort. "Aren't they supposed to be patient?"

"I bet my father isn't."

"But he'd be dead! You can't be impatient while you're dead."

"You can be annoyed in anticipation of missing things! And refuse to be executed, at which point I get the sense Elves would be totally stuck."

"Oh no, poor Elves."

"Saniah says 'so I asked how they'd enforce this. And she looked at me and said 'oh, they'll show up'. And I said '...okay, so you don't mind if I add a contingency for arresting them if they were to not show up'. And she just looks at me very much the way you look at a child who wants you to wear a bike helmet on the train for added safety'..."

Iobel laughs. "But if there is a contingency, then they would have to arrest people! That would be so awkward!"

"It would! I'm being a bit unfair, they by all accounts waged war very effectively."

Nod.

"But you wouldn't know it talking to them. I - I was hoping we'd have met more worlds by now..."

"Maybe the door is just doing it to spite Cam."

"I hope we didn't make it mad with our colonization operation."

"Bar has experienced a ludicrous amount of subjective time and if it's not filtering out colonizers with perfect accuracy we can't reasonably be the first."

"But maybe it got annoyed the last time also."

"I suppose. But we haven't met anyone here who is cursed to wander the hallways, groaning about how they should have stayed home."

"True! We haven't met other patrons at all, actually, though there must be some..."

"Cam's met the security and infirmary people. Several times, he keeps checking back."

"Always the same people or just always people who can't help?"

"Some different ones. The security office keeps repeating, they may have a limited roster of people who can take daeva."

"It does seem like it'd be challenging - how would they prevent Cam from killing someone if he wanted to -"

"There is a guy who can do useful magic but only in the bar and his home world; he can just lay ambient effects that forbid it. And there is a weird obsidian pillar that won't talk to Cam when he talks to it, no idea how that one works."

"...huh. No one has broken rules around the obsidian pillar?"