At around the eight-hour mark, a winged figure can be seen approaching. It'll be a while yet before he lands.

She tracks his position, rising to her feet and seeing if she can position herself between him and her friend when he lands. 

He circles lazily downward.

When he lands, he's a fair distance from both of them, conversational but not crowding.

"Friend of yours?" he asks, nodding to the column of light behind her.

"Mmmhm. I take it you're the Emperor."

She does not look or sound afraid of him. She sounds tired, and not especially impressed. 

"I am. And who are you?"

"I'm Lucia. I hear you torture and enslave people."

"You hear correctly. What's it to you?"

"I'm very tired of powerful men who think they can do whatever they want to people because they're powerful." 

"...well, I suppose I'm glad you're having a conversation about it instead of skipping straight to blowing up cities."

Flinch. 

"As far as I know that oughtn't be necessary," she says--still coolly, but he's clearly struck a nerve. 

"Would you do it if it were?"

"Empirically yes. --Not for you. Not without a lot more damning information. And I guess technically not cities--not the point. Can I interest you in not torturing people any more, I am under the impression you are a kind of thing that is capable of stopping."

"I'm not as sure of that as you are," he says to the last thing. "And blowing up cities won't, actually, do anything about me except make me think my empire would be better off without you in it. It's just that's what happened last time someone who thought they had the power to kill me had a serious go at it."

"--Killing city-like quantities of people isn't a tactic, it's a side-effect. Word of advice! Don't build critical infrastructure on insensate torture-monsters!"

"Can't say the thought has ever crossed my mind but it does seem like a bad idea. Anyway, it wasn't a tactic for him either. He tried to make me be dead; he couldn't make me be dead; he kept trying harder; eventually it... splashed."

"Well, I am not going to do that. For one thing we're a ways away from any cities."

"Uh-huh. So, about your friend. Do you want to make a case for why you should both be alive?"

"Well, first of all, I will say that she thought trying to kill you was a bad idea, don't blame her for me. Second of all that is not the direction this is going in, I'm still trying to see if I can get you to cut out the whole slavery and torture thing without killing you."

"You can't kill me. You can wreck plenty of other things trying, but you can't kill me."

"I can kill anything." 

She sounds not at all happy and even less uncertain about this. 

"That sounds like an interesting little logic puzzle that I wouldn't recommend trying in real life, because of the 'wreck plenty of other things trying'."

"Believe me, I'm really in favor of the outcome where you stop torturing and enslaving people without dying!"

"What makes you so sure you can do the impossible?"

"That would be a very very long conversation that I'm not sure I want to have right now. I will say that 'the horrible torture-monsters that people like building infrastructure on aren't supposed to be killable either' isn't the whole of it."

"So... how long is your friend going for, or do you not know?"

"Well, she doesn't think I should kill you, but she agreed to prevent any civil wars if I do and she survives."

"Preventing civil wars is nowhere near that simple, trust me."

Shrug. "I bet there's fewer if there's someone to step into the power vacuum."

"That really, really doesn't sound like the words of someone who's responsible about power."

...She gives him a Look. "I've mastered 'slavery and torture are bad.'"

"Oh, for crying out loud," he mutters.

"These are kind of non-negotiable points! I get that it must be exasperating for an argument to keep circling around to the same points but they are, uh, important."

"I'm not exasperated that you keep coming back to that. I've noticed it's important to you. The thing that's beginning to tick me off here is that you're acting like since I hurt people for fun it must obviously be true that the empire would be better off without me, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you somehow managed to take it away you'd have no idea what to do with the results, and more people would die that year than have died any decade since I got serious about my responsibilities, and you'd be completely unprepared for it. And, to make matters worse, you think you can kill me, and you seem totally indifferent to my warnings about why that's a bad road to travel. You're fucking around with millions of lives that are mine to protect and you have no concept of what it takes to protect them. That is why I'm exasperated."

"I mean that's...fair...but, uh, you are immortal? And you continue to torture people? So, like, if I kill you, and everyone has a real bad decade, and in a hundred years she and I and some presumed quantity of advisors are as competent at running the world as you are now, but with Bonus Not Torture, then over the next several thousand years it seems like the math turns out in our favor."

"...no??? Okay, leaving aside the part where I very definitely can't die. And leaving aside the part where your friend probably won't survive this because most people don't. And leaving aside the part where you still might not come out on top of the nasty bloody civil war full of every reckless teenager who survives self-dedicating without me around to weed out the troublemakers. I've been running this place for five thousand years. You can't shortcut that kind of stability. It's not possible. It's—" He shakes his head sharply. "These are my people. You can't just—ugh!"

"I don't get you. You're talking like the whole world is your enclave but you're still torturing some of them."

"The whole world is mine. My empire, my responsibility. I don't know what you mean by enclave but—look, it's not that I do everything right, it's not that I don't have flaws. I threw a guy off a roof last year because he wouldn't stop pestering me. A perfect Emperor with no thought but the good of his people wouldn't torture them and he also wouldn't impulsively kill them for annoying him. But I put the work in, to find out what actually makes things better, and do that. It's hard work and there's a lot of it and it never stops, you can't just be like 'nobody starved this year, good job everybody' and call it quits. Things that used to work stop working. People screw up, they cheat, they fuck each other over on purpose. No amount of threats will ever stop them doing that, you just have to keep it down as much as you can and then deal with the rest. And I'm one of the people screwing up, and one of the people fucking each other over on purpose, and it's just—that's the job, the job is to make the best of things even though that happens. Keep it down as much as you can and deal with the rest."

...She nods, slowly. 

"It's not--about not having any thought but the good of one's people. It's just--I don't--understand--how anyone who understands that other people are real people, with interiority, as real as one's own self, can--hurt people just to hurt them. I don't not want to kill you because I'm worried about the stability of the Empire--didn't, anyway--it's just, that I understand, that you are a person, who doesn't want to die."

"I feel like I'm arguing with a wall. You can't kill me! I cannot be killed! Trying to kill me does not work and instead just causes problems, and the nearest other person problems can happen to is your friend, who by the way you still haven't convinced me is a good idea to leave alive!"

”—The question of whether I can or cannot kill you was so far from the point, there!”

"And yet still you said 'I don't want to kill you' as though that's an option you have and are considering."

“Yes! We have established that I believe that!”

"Well, you shouldn't."

“Well you shouldn’t torture people!”

"...???"

Yeah that was about how she felt when he responded to her passionate argument about the interiority of people by bringing up the disagreement about whether she can kill him. 

“Saying I shouldn’t believe I can kill you is about as likely to cause me to actually discard this belief as just saying you shouldn’t torture people is to cause you to stop,” she explains once she has gathered the patience to do so.

"...hearing you talk about killing me is like hearing someone talk about, I don't know, dousing the sun. You can't, and if you could you shouldn't, and the fact that you're so confidently talking about how you can and should makes you sound like someone who is going to mess around carelessly with things you don't understand and maybe cause a lot of destruction on the way. D'you see what I mean?"

"I'm not confident I should! If I were confident I should you would already be dead!"

...Could she douse the sun? Probably she could douse the sun if she tried hard and believed in herself. Well, eat the sun, same difference. 

He takes a deep breath.

"I am very confident I should not douse the sun, which is good, because I expect I could do that too."

"...okay. Let's start from the beginning. Do you know why I'm here."

"Because my friend is self-dedicating a lot and if she's going to be a problem you would like to nip that in the bud?"

"Yes. Because the kind of power you get in a long enough self-dedication can fuck things up on an enormous scale, and can't be taken away once someone has it. So I keep an eye on things, and if someone does a long enough self-dedication to be a problem, and can't demonstrate that they'll be responsible with what they got, I kill them. And now here's you, showing up out of nowhere bizarrely confident, bizarrely ignorant, and claiming to be able to douse the sun. Do you want to explain why you're not an even worse emergency than your friend?"

"...Well, I've been like this for eighteen years and I haven't eaten anyone's soul yet."

"No, I mean, you're objectively right, the thing I am should not exist? I just...intend to continue existing and using my powers for good anyway." 

"...that's not... ugh."

"--Look, I get that you're trying to figure out what the fuck is up with me? I am not going to tell you what the fuck is up with me because while I am confident I could kill you now, I am not confident that I could kill you if you knew how."

"...it's not even that I want to know what specifically is going on with you so much as—well, to be honest, the likeliest explanation is probably that you're insane and don't know what you're talking about, and the more you keep saying things the more I keep hoping that it's that one, because the alternative is that you have magic that does not work like normal magic, that you did not get the way people get normal magic, and you think you can douse the sun with it, and you're terrifyingly careless about the consequences of your actions. And I really am trying to find a way to resolve this situation peacefully, because it seems only fair and because that's how I prefer to handle things when I can, but you're really not giving me an inch here and it is very frustrating."

"I have magic that does not work like local magic. I am from an alternate universe. Where magic is hereditary and also there are horrible monsters running around that like eating magic children, so my being very very murdery resulted in about two-thirds of my yearmates surviving adolescence, as opposed to one-quarter."

He breathes. "Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. —how'd you get here? How many more people who think they can douse the sun and might not be wrong do I have to worry about?"

"How I got here is complicated but it involves a magical accident that I don't especially expect to be replicated. I'm currently unique but I wouldn't be shocked if my dad decides to make another one once he realizes I am not going to be Daddy's Obedient Little Superweapon." 

"Concerning, but could be worse. Okay. Thank you."

He sighs.

"If you're not interested in having the conversation I want to have, what do you say to going to sleep now and waking up after I've had time to calm down, wait for your friend to finish, talk to them when I'm less stressed, and find somewhere to put you where I don't have to worry about the sun going out if you try to kill me?"

"Okay, first of all, I'm very sure I would have to actually try in order to put out the sun! I'm unique in being the only thing-like-me that is a person who can take actions towards goals, not in being the only thing-like-me at all, and I'm reasonably confident that if you chucked another thing-like-me into the sun then the sun would win! It did not even occur to me that I could probably douse the sun if I tried really hard and thought a lot about how to do it until you suggested it. Also, uh, if you want to fly off and calm down somewhere else I promise I am not going to do anything big and stupid while you're gone but I really do not trust you enough to let you magically put me to sleep?"

"...okay. So. Let's suppose that you tried to kill something, and the thing you tried to kill could not actually die, no matter how hard you tried. Think about all the worst ways you can imagine that going wrong, including ways where you screw up or do something stupid, because sometimes people in stressful situations screw up or do something stupid. Think pretty hard about that, because last time this came up I don't think the guy who was trying to kill me knew in advance that he was going to get a hundred thousand other people on the way to failing. I won't insist you tell me what you expect to happen, but what would I have to do to keep my people safe from it?"

She considers this thoughtfully.

The obvious answer is that there’s no reason anything would happen to anyone else, if she tried to eat him and, somehow, failed.

But…getting creative…if she were imagining things that might be “the thing that goes wrong” if something were definitely going to go wrong…

The obvious answer is that she would eat something else, if whatever wards he has made her slip off instead of just gnawing ineffectually on them.

So, how would she prevent that?

“…Bring me somewhere even more isolated and cast some sort of ongoingly magical effect around the two of us,” she decides. “Like, a reasonably strong one. By your standards, not normal people standards.”

"Sure," he says. "I can't stray too far from your friend until they either fail or succeed, and I can't move them. So going somewhere more isolated isn't going to work until that's dealt with. But I can pile up some magic in the meantime."

He makes a thoughtful humming noise and walks in a wide circle around the column of light. Flowers spring up in his wake in a riot of colour, each unique and beautiful, spreading their petals and reaching their leaves toward the sky.

"Why can't you stray too far? Is it can't like can't, or can't like I might be lying about how long they're going to take and if I am they could abscond while you're gone, or can't like the fireworks might blow up something important...?"

"You weren't very specific about it in the first place, and you might not be telling the truth, and when the moment came your friend might not have decided to go quite as long as they said they were going to. If I want to be here when they come out, I have to, at very least, check every hour at just the right time with enough margin to be sure I get the right time and not ten minutes too late."

"Sorry, I wasn't trying to be inspecific. I meant everything. I guess you're right about last-minute nerves though."

"...everything? And you expect them to live through it?"

“I mean, she might not? But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you kill her.”

"...it's not a question of whether you'll let me. I don't need your permission."

He finishes his circle of flowers, gazes critically at it, then makes a casual sweeping gesture. In a wave across the circle, following the arc of his hand, living plants turn to delicate crystal, translucent and sparkling—but they still grow; their faceted leaves still reach for the sun. When the breeze plays through them, they tinkle like a field of ethereal windchimes. He listens thoughtfully, then makes an adjustment, warping the shapes of some kinds of petals just slightly; the next breeze sounds a little better.

“I’ll kill you if you try even if this is definitely a terrible idea for the Empire. I’m not strongly expecting this claim to motivate you but pretending it wasn’t true wouldn’t be better.”

He sighs, and shakes his head, and adjusts his flower-chimes again.

“Killing things that are trying to kill teenagers is what I have spent approximately every waking moment of the past four years doing, like, this isn’t entirely a matter of what I think is a good life choice. But, like, also, I promised her I wouldn’t let you hurt her while she was in there.”

"That was an ill-considered promise."

He starts walking around the circle again. The breeze follows him. He appears to be marshaling it to blow in a certain way, to bring forth gentle music from the crystal flowers.

“I mean, if you can’t not kill my friend, that separately doesn’t bode well for how good an idea leaving you in charge is, long term. From my perspective if nothing else.”

He gives her a quizzical look, but focuses most of his attention on adjusting the tune produced by the chimeflowers.

Well, if he doesn’t want to talk, that’s fine. She can be patient. She keeps half an eye on him and otherwise admires the chimeflowers.

After he finishes tuning the ever-circling breeze, he takes a step back outside the circle, looks it over thoughtfully, and starts walking the perimeter again the other way. Clouds bloom in his wake, a white rippling curtain of fog that streams out behind him like a banner, twisting and furling and eventually condensing into a sparkling stream of water undulating around the circle in counterpoint to the ever-flowing breeze; then he makes another one, and another, until there's a dozen of them weaving and tangling and racing one another around their narrow course.

He steps over the chimeflowers and back into the circle. Stone chairs and a round stone table rise from the ground with barely a glance from him. He sits in one before it's done growing a comfortable cushion of moss.

"Enough magic for you?" he asks, gesturing at his improvised art piece. "Or would you not be able to tell ahead of time?"

“It’s hard to say. I think, if I tried to kill you and failed, nothing would happen—nothing that originated from me and not from you, anyway. But if I assume that something did go wrong—hm. Let’s say, metaphorically, that what I would do is like…stabbing you with a poison dagger. It’s not very much like that, really, but it’s more like that than like throwing an explosive at you, which is what it seemed like you were imagining. So I expect that if you weren’t a thing that could be stabbed, the blow would glance off you and do nothing. But if something were to go wrong, it would be because, through some mechanism I don’t expect, the blow ended up hitting something else. Having the magic around provides something else to stab, in that scenario. Certainly this is enough that I could stab it.”

"Fair enough."

He gestures at the other chair.

"Have a seat if you like. You've helped me handle my concerns, seems only fair to hear out yours."

She sits. 

“Why don’t you think you are a thing that can stop torturing people?”

"Less that I don't think I can, more that I don't think I will. Because the fact of the matter is that no one can stop me."

He sighs.

"I'm not, like, attached to the part where they're upset about it. To tell you the truth I might even be happier if they weren't. But I've yet to come up with a good way to find people who might not be upset about it and convince them to trust me enough that they actually aren't."

“—Hmm. Okay. That sounds solvable, actually.” She relaxes slightly. “Does your magic do information-handling at all? Yours specifically.”

"—??"

“Do you need me to expand on that?”

"Yes."

“Information-handling means—is there a way to, hm, have magic autonomously move around information or information-bearing objects—like, my kind of magic contains both divinations and magic libraries, those are both examples of information-handling. And when I said yours specifically what I meant was was it a thing that could theoretically be done, even if it isn’t something that anyone else could do.”

"I think... my magic doesn't... think in those terms? Which makes that a hard question to answer without knowing what you're driving at."

“—Okay. So. In my world there is a thing called the ‘internet,’ which is a sort of extremely distributed information network, like a giant library that anyone can access, and people use it to talk to each other, and it’s very useful for, like, finding people who are into a specific thing. In my world I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to find someone who was into whatever it is you specifically like to do, as long as you could credibly promise that they would be able to walk away from it unharmed. If you couldn’t credibly promise that there’d still be someone who was down for it but they’d be some amount harder to find. —Admittedly my world has like seven billion people in it, I don’t know this planet’s population.”

"I wouldn't even begin to know how to invent such a thing. It might be possible but it's sure not trivial. And yes, a lot of the problem is that people don't trust my promises, for which I really can't blame them."

“Have you broken promises in the past or is it just a power difference slash scariness thing.”

"Power difference slash scariness. I try pretty hard not to make promises I might end up breaking, but there's only so much that helps—only so much it can help, when what people remember is the tortured slaves and the people getting thrown off roofs."

"Huh. In my experience people are pretty good at looking past the horrible things powerful people do in order to suck up to them."

"I do my best to avoid that sort of person because when I don't I always seem to end up throwing them off roofs."

"Huh. I...guess...maybe they are less persistent when the ambient death rate is lower. Or when you throw them off roofs but that I would mostly just expect to make them more subtle."

"Anyway, how'd we get onto the subject of people sucking up to me? Do people where you're from like sucking up to powerful people so much that they'd put up with personally being tortured just to be able to shower me with their bad opinions? Eugh. I guess there's a sense in which that's better..."

"So, remember how I said my year had a two-thirds survival rate instead of a one-quarter one? That's not distributed evenly. People with powerful families and alliances have a survival rate of four in five, in a normal year, and anyone who manages to get an alliance with them has a higher survival rate than everyone else. I am not exaggerating when I say that in the environment where my intuitions were formed, sucking up was literally a survival skill."

"...I can see how that could happen, but... eugh?"

"Really fucking eugh! Not that most of the enclavers felt that way--but--" her words stutter to a halt and she wraps her arms around herself and takes a few deep breaths. 

"My ridiculous powers meant that the people who everyone else sucked up to sucked up to me, if I gave them half an indication it would get anywhere. I absolutely hated it and I could not blame them, because I was safe and they were not."

He shudders empathetically. "What an absolutely shit position to be in, I'm sorry."

"Varanda. Is her name." She gestures in the direction of the exploding girl. 

"She's the first real friend I've ever had who wasn't my mom."

"One up on me, then," he says wryly.

Okay yeah she's gonna get up and hug him. 

—he startles slightly at first, but by the time she's taken a step he's already relaxing.

"I have two options, see," he says, "I can tell someone who I am, and let them be so terrified of me it warps every place our lives touch, or I can not tell them who I am, and let the lie eat me up inside until either I tell them and it's all terror and betrayal or I stop talking to them because I can't stand not doing that. Or they die, sometimes they die while I'm still making up my mind. It's not any better."

He sighs, and hugs her back.

"I can see how that would happen. I mean, it still seems improbable that over the course of five thousand years nobody cared to look past the fear...but I can see how it would happen. I just--don't see it--not being horrible."

"It's pretty horrible! I've mostly made my peace with it but I do not deny that I would be happier if I had friends."

"Well, if you want to be my friend you have to not kill Varanda, but if you find a way to replicate the accident that brought me here you can chuck her into my universe and let her be our problem."

"I'm not dead set on killing Varanda or anything. What was the accident that brought you here?"

"So, when I say the survival rate is one in four, that's not for every magical teenager, that's specifically for people attending the Scholomance. That's a magical school in a pocket dimension--enclaves are pocket dimensions too. It's harder for mals to get in because you've got much more limited contact with the world. Every year, sixteen hundred magical children are magically 'inducted' from spots all over the world, and every year, everyone who's survived their four years is dumped into the hall at the school's connection point with reality. The hall is full of monsters because there are a lot of protective measures between the hall and the rest of the school--monsters get into the rest of the school anyway, of course, but a bunch of them pool in the hall. Usually about half the year survived to enter the hall, and then half of those make it out again."

My year, about two-thirds of the class made it to graduation, and all of those made it out, because I killed every monster in the place before they could touch them. Well--almost every monster, but that's complicated."

And I...I didn't want to leave. Because I'm from an enclave, and my father made me--must have--and I didn't want to go back, didn't want to face him."

My kind of magic responds to desire and belief. I walked through the gates anyway, but I wanted so very badly not to go where the magic would put me. And my kind of magic runs on a resource called 'mana.' And I get mana from monsters I kill. So I had a lot of mana when I walked through those gates."

Anyway. I didn't end up where I was supposed to be. I ended up in Varanda's village instead."

"...that sounds... hard to replicate. Probably not impossible. Very few things are impossible. But hard."

"Inconvenient but not shocking. I had no idea there even were other worlds with humans before then." Sigh. "I didn't have any plans to get all the monsters, or anything. Just wandering around picking them off piecemeal wasn't going to help much in the long run. But I'm gonna miss my mom."

"Well. I can try to get you home. I just can't promise it'll happen anytime soon. Which unfortunately means it doesn't solve the problem of whether Varanda is safe to leave alive."

"...I have no idea what you expect her to do besides 'kill you,' and she definitely does not want to do that. She...won't...make...monsters? I assume when you have powerful magical people making poor life choices this does not usually involve making monsters but you can see how my priors ended up skewed towards monsters."

"The kind of power I've got lets you do a lot of things. More things than you might think were possible. Starting with—if she has the kind of temper I had at that age, she'll have to learn how to stop killing everyone in sight whenever she gets mad. It's not that hard to learn! But it takes some practice. And then there's just..." he gestures at the chimeflowers. "Casually reshaping the world around you. I had to kill someone once who was thrice-dedicated Land because he'd just... walk through a city, neatly unfolding all the buildings like paper until they lay flat, and then leave it that way. He mostly didn't kill people but it was absolutely fucking the treasury, we couldn't afford to put it all back up—I could personally put it all back up, but I just got too fucking tired of it to keep going, and I couldn't always put things back just how they'd been before, and I couldn't get all the trinkets and keepsakes and tools and valuables that got crushed along the way, and he was killing people, not on purpose, just now and then when they happened to be in the way of all the wood and stone he was moving around. So I told him to stop and he said he wouldn't and I told him he was stopping whether he liked it or not and he said he would and then he did it again and then I killed him. And—with the kind of power she's going for, she'll learn how to make herself immortal eventually, and then I can't kill her anymore. So I need to find out ahead of time if she's going to turn out like that guy, and make sure she doesn't get the chance to start, because if I waited for her to start unfolding buildings it might be too late to stop her."

"Why would anyone do that???"

"I wish I knew! He was really insistent! And, you know, it was very pretty, the first time, I hardly minded having to put it all back, it was just that he refused to stop doing it."

"I do not think she would do anything like that but I have no idea how to guess whether someone would do that because I have no idea what would make a person do that!"

"So you're starting to see what I'm up against."

"Okay, yes, fair. In my defense I am familiar with the phenomenon where many people are unreasonable? And she struck me as a reasonable person? As opposed to the unreasonable people whom I have met--many of whom I would also be shocked to find out had decided to...unfold...cities..."

"Reasonable is good! I like when people are reasonable! But... the best way I've found to catch whether someone is going to unfold cities, or just... be too caught up in their own shit to think about how they're using their catastrophic power... is to talk to them. And it's not really that good. And... the more power someone is going for, the less room I have to be generous with them, because the consequences of letting a bad one through are worse. If your friend gets a taste for unfolding cities and can't stop even if she tries—and I do think he was trying, at least some, that last time—and she's immortal and a match for me in power, then I can't protect people from her."

“Well…you said she wouldn’t be immortal right away, right?”

"Yes, that's something people have to actually figure out how to do, it doesn't come free. But it didn't take me that long to figure out and plenty of people are smarter than I am."

“Honestly I don’t think it would be her highest priority to figure out? She was—excited, about being able to do—cool things—and not dying is not an exceptionally cool thing, on a scale of a few years, when you are sixteen, and not a wizard.”

"What kinds of cool things was she excited about doing?"

“I told her people in my world had gone to the moon and she was like ‘I want to BUILD A CITY ON THE MOON’ and I told her the moon would be multiple kinds of impractical for normal people to live on and maybe she should pick a planet instead of the moon and she got me to tell her about astronomy for a while and I don’t know that much about astronomy actually but I know some poetry about astronomy and so on and she was like ‘I want to build REALLY MAGIC cities on the moon that people can live in, and DIFFERENTLY MAGIC oceans and jungles on the REST of the moon full of things designed to flourish in normal moon conditions.’”

"...well, that's... adorable, frankly, and speaks well of her general benignness... but is she going to be frustrated if people don't want to move to her moon city, or upset if she gets the magic wrong and the first people who move there die because she didn't know enough about how to keep them alive on the moon?"

"I think most people would be upset by that last one!"

"I don't disagree. The question is more what kind of upset, and whether it's the kind with destructive consequences."

"What, like, throwing a tantrum because her vision was executed imperfectly and destroying the city with survivors still in it? That seems, uh, shortsighted and dumb."

"Everybody gets a little more shortsighted and dumb when they're really upset. And it doesn't even have to be throwing a tantrum and destroying the city. Could be some other bad decision. With my kind of power it is very easy to make bad decisions with big consequences."

"I won't say I'm as smart when I'm really upset as otherwise but, like--man, I dunno, I'm having a hard time imagining doing something big and dumb without being, like, super cornered."

"Well. It happens. The easier it is to do something, the easier it is to do by mistake under pressure."

"--Yeah, that's the thing, 'whoops I fucked up real bad' doesn't seem...like...pressure? Not, like, relevantly so--it doesn't have an, immediate time element?"

He shrugs. "Depends what you fucked up and whether you think you can fix it by making another mistake real fast."

"I'm...not sure how trying to fix a moon city so it stopped killing people would make the situation worse? Like, if, if you don't do anything, everyone in the city is going to die, it seems like there isn't much you can do in that area that would make the situation worse, unless your kind of magic has something like malia that I haven't heard of yet where doing a thing is just categorically a bad idea even if it seems like it wouldn't be."

"...I don't know much about the moon, but, say, before I was good at controlling my magic I once cracked a mountain in half trying to dig a tunnel through it in a hurry. I tried to enchant a bell that could be heard anywhere in the empire and ended up making a bell so loud that if you stood next to it when it rang you'd be blown backwards and crushed to paste. I have a whole bunch of awful 'tried to heal somebody without knowing how' stories but most of them aren't me, the big mistake I made when learning to heal was I shoved too much information in my mind at once with magic and when I came to a day later my head felt like that bell from before was going off in it and also I'd been on fire the whole time and the ground where I was lying was torn up and covered in rubble because I'd been hitting myself in the head with boulders while I was out of it, probably because it felt like getting hit in the head with a boulder would make it hurt less. I make having this much power look easy because I have had five thousand years of practice. Having this much power is not actually easy and—you can't just think 'what kinds of things might a reasonable person do in that situation, and what might happen because of that', you have to think 'what kinds of things might a panicked idiot do in that situation, and how would it turn out if they accidentally did a hundred times as much of it as they meant to, or they were wrong about how something worked and accidentally did something different and worse than what they meant, or both'."

"--Oh. Okay. That makes sense, actually--it's hard to overpower a spell by accident, in my system, but you can do it, and weird things can happen when you do."

"It's hard not to overpower things, with a full slate of self-dedications. And even once you've got it mostly worked out, it's still easy to screw up when you're upset or in a hurry."

"It probably helps, for us, that our strength doesn't come in all at once."

"Hmm, I see what you mean. Could be."

"I was an unusually powerful small child but I don't think I ever caused a disaster by over-charging a spell. Of course, I had plenty of other outlets for destruction."