Oh, someone is definitely counting.

Hour seventeen finishes, the fire fades, and -

- there stands a sixteen year old, who promptly begins to swear.

"Son of a bitch I could have had the full set!" he snarls, to no one in particular.

The Emperor bursts out laughing.

The sixteen year old glances at the source of the noise, considers it, then decides that after seventeen hours of dancing with an agony hurricane he doesn't care enough. He flomps to the ground to swear some more.

"Fucking damn it, I had to go be responsible. Responsibly irresponsible. Ugh." He rubs his face, annoyed, then growls again, quietly.

He decides to stop wallowing in favor of glancing grumpily at the source of the laughter. "Hello. Your majesty, I presume?"

Giggle. "How'd you guess?"

If he hadn't just been tangoing with the agony hurricane he would probably have a better answer to that. As it is, he's not feeling very eloquent.

"Who else would be watching me set myself on fire, then laugh instead of looking at me like I've gone mad. Hi, would you have just killed me during if I'd gone for Land, Sea, and Sky too - nevermind, don't answer that, it'll just piss me off more if the answer's 'no.'"

"People don't try this often enough for me to have a rule about exactly how long I let it go on before I kill them. So which did you pick?"

"Death and Fire. I know how those sound, I was dedicated to Life and the other three in the easy starter kit." He waves a hand vaguely. "Not planning on being a crazy fiery murderer or whatever, I was aiming for synergy."

"How sensible of you. And are you planning to use your newfound power to make my life difficult?"

"Why the fuck would I do that."

"You'd think no one would, and yet it keeps happening!"

"Ha. Okay, let me just lay out how terrible of an idea it is for me to make your life difficult. First, and most importantly; in a fight with you, I would lose. I would lose so hard."

"True."

"There isn't a way I could get around it, either. I couldn't - I don't know, make an alliance with other magic people and assassinate you with our combined powers, or something. You're just immortal, you'd win. Best I could do is be a huge annoyance for a while, which: no, that sounds stupid. Because, and now we move on to my second point, I have actual things to lose, and if I annoy you too much you definitely have space to escalate beyond just flat out killing me."

"Yes, that one's true of most people, although not all of them realize it."

"If I'm motivated I can definitely be annoying enough to earn serious escalation, so it's important for me to realize that doing that thing has consequences. Putting aside whatever the hell you could even do to me with omnipotence and a grudge, there's all of the petty things you could do to my family. I don't really know if you'd go there, I just met you, but you'll excuse me if I would really rather you not ever touch my parents or my little sister to get to me."

"Very reasonable of you."

"Yep. So now that we've gone over whether I'd lose against you and what I have to lose, let's move on to the third point: it honestly isn't even that hard to avoid being a nuisance to you."

"You pretty much just have to not get in my way or disrupt my empire," he agrees.

"It seems like it's pretty easy to stay out of your way. As for the empire... why. What would disrupting it gain?"

"Not very much, generally!"

"I'm not a random acts of chaos kind of guy, if I disrupt things it'd be for a reason. Most of the things I could disrupt with magic would be better handled without; I could go on a big dramatic crusade to end slavery, I guess, but then you kill me and we're back to square one. No actual change."

"Yeah pretty much."

"Right. I'm better off finding a solution to things that doesn't involve pissing you off, that's both more likely to actually work and better for my lifespan in general."

"Well, congratulations. You get to live."

And he turns and walks away, disappearing through a brief shimmering hole in the air.

"Yay," he says, then flops backwards onto the grass to mutter cursewords to himself and slowly work up the impetus to go home and face his parents.