"Thanks. So, uh. What sorts of people do you find attractive? The townsfolk seemed to be under the impression that you only snatched women...?"

"I take men seldom enough that the public memory can forget about it if they try hard enough, and they do. It's a little silly."

"That sounds a little silly, yep. So. Specific traits that are attractive, or is it like." He waves a hand, awkwardly. "Difficult to describe auras people have, or something? I know it's kind of hard to distill things like these down to a simple list."

"Mostly the difficult to describe thing. Although you can probably get pretty far just asking yourself 'is this person really strikingly pretty?'."

"I can probably manage strikingly pretty if I can manage to find someone that'll be willing. Do you care if it's magicked strikingly pretty?"

"Not especially."

"All right then. I'll warn you if you should avoid breaking a permanent polymorph or something. I'm assuming even if it's magicked you want it to be... thorough?"

"Thorough how?"

"Like... no parts that are hidden by illusion, everything looks like how it actually is. No secret hidden tails or whatever."

"No secret hidden tails! I might not mind an unhidden tail. If you find someone with a tail I'd be happy to be introduced to them as-is."

"I wasn't thinking of a tail being worthy of being hidden, it just came to mind as an easy example of a disparity between illusion and reality. What's most likely to happen is I find someone, bring them to you, and then we all talk about possible prettying options if you do not find them strikingly pretty enough. So they can be both a thing they're comfortable with and something you find attractive. And I'd be there to be the practical one that'll help figure out how to make that happen."

"Sure."

"What occurs in the torture? Just assume I lost all my squeamishness in Hell and absolutely nothing you say will shock me. Or that if it does I'll be fine regardless."

"I don't keep a list. Why do you ask?"

"I want to be able to let people know what they're signing up for."

"If they're picky about exactly how they get tortured they're probably not a good fit. —and if they don't want it to be sexual they're definitely not a good fit, I realize I haven't mentioned that explicitly yet and I probably should. As for how bad it gets - I make my victims almost completely impossible to kill, or they'd be dying pretty regularly. The spell has a side effect that kills them anyway after a hundred and fifty years, but I'm working on that. Depending how good your mind artifacts are, I might be able to just fix that one, actually."

"Good to know. Do you monopolize their time, or are they free to do other things when you're not torturing them?"

"They're technically free to do whatever they want when I'm not torturing them. Most of them don't, but that's because they're terrified of getting my attention. Somebody who was here on purpose could read my books and admire my lovely gardens or whatever and I wouldn't mind at all."

"That'll help, I bet. If I bring you someone and they decide they don't like being tortured by you, would you be willing to let them go? Ignoring the thing that kills them after a hundred and fifty years, that is."

"Yeah, sure," he says.

"Okay. Um. How many people do you currently have?"

"About thirty, why?"

"Ah."

He has the expression of someone who maybe has a problem with that.

"I wouldn't need as many if I fixed the spell so I didn't have to keep replacing them."

"That... helps." A little. It helps a little. It mostly doesn't, though. "I suppose I can't ask you to let them go until I have a better replacement. What with the exploding."