"....I would like to be immortal."

"You'll be immortal. Even if somehow you die of something, we'll get you back, and you'll wake up in a garden with your family and then be immortal again. No one's gone for good. It's just a lot of hard work to get them back, and there are lots of us working very hard on it."

"I see. I'm - sorry for being upset with you."

"...why?"

"Because I'd like to be kinder to - I was going to say people who mean well, but I think I'd like to be kinder to everyone."

"That's really good of you. But, well, you told me that your country is ruled by an evil demon embodying Scandinavia, it seems pretty reasonable to be really upset."

" - yeah I've been holding some of that in for a while."

"He sounds awful."

"He is, uh, a very complicated person who is also evil."

"That's charitable of you."

"He's not really the sort of person who you can accurately sum up with a single word. Not that there are likely to be very many people like that, I suppose. But if there were he wouldn't be one of them."

"It seems like it'd be a very good thing if more of the people he's hurting were out of his reach."

"...I think it would be. It would probably be complicated in several cases. And most of his country seems to... love him."

"I know much less about this than you, but it does seem like living in his palace you mostly wouldn't hear from the ones who despise him."

"I suppose that's true. Perhaps I'll get the chance to ask the Russians what they think of him at some point."

"Are those some of the people he's warred with?"

"Most of Russia was taken from its Buddhist king in a holy war several years ago. I think he's probably warred with everyone at some point, though not all in this lifetime."

"That does sound like a recipe for a lot of people to hate you. Even more once we get them all back."

"Less than you might think! Traditional Norse pagans used to get upset if their liege failed to declare any wars for longer than a few years, and they'd typically forgive their conquerors in a generation or so. I'm sure their Christian victims were quite upset, though."

"There are lots of Earths but yours is weird. Usually most people in Europe are Christian and Norse pagans are teenagers who are upset about religion. I'm not from an Earth, I just read an article about this this morning."

"...wow." She's going to process 'lots of Earths' later. "There are Christians in Italy and there are Christians in Hungary and in whatever's left of France, and of course there are some Christians in occupied lands, but the emperor rather objects to that."

"There're Christians everywhere in Vanda Nossëo but mostly on Earths because Earths are where they start."

"Well. Vigdis is going to have such a time deciding which of her warring gods won."

"That's an interesting theology."

"It's the sort of theology you develop when you're a very combat-minded eleven year old and your aunt keeps telling you that her God is omnipotent while his followers are slowly driven into extinction. I think."