Grant: Why did you call me here?

Xander: To keep me from doing anything…rash.

Xander: I’m off to confront Kore and make her exert some of her influence over…

Xander: …the archangel who’s pushing the riot button.

Xander: I’m not who he thinks I am. I am not that man. I won’t be that man.

Xander: I’m terrrified of becoming that man.

Xander(telepathy): Kore, Help me!

Xander(telepathy): make him listen.

Grant: Where to?

Xander: Lethe park.

Grant (thought): Now the entire city will be demolished. Just as the winter rains are beginning in earnest.

Grant (thought): There will be endless lines of blue0fingered mendicants that I’ll be instructed to turn away from the palace. For their own good.

Grant (thought): That’s right. Because why should they be rewarded with a crust of bread when they burned their livelihood and their neighbors house…

Grant (thought):…one impetuous wind0driven evening under the deluded idea that by their act of civil violence they could change for a brief instant the facts of their tragic existence.

Grant (thought): People will suffer. There will be extra hard work for the brigades to feed those not subject to compulsory labor. There will be famine again, when Xander could have provided a feast…with a single generous thought.

Grant (thought): It’s his fault the people riot, surely he must know how he provokes them! If he was only more generous with his power, they wouldn’t be forced into this terrible destructive violence. It’s impossible to argue social issues with a telepath who executes people in the street without getting emotionally upset. How would he ever understand the plight of a family forced to steal for bread? How would he ever know the wrenching poverty that drove youths to smash store windows and escape with the treasures inside? Or the broken identity of the man who strangles the mother of his child, crying in shame that he couldn’t provide enough material advantage to keep her from straying to another wealthier home? Xander will never be able to understand these people, not from his position of winning the genetic lottery. You have to feel, deeply, how desperate life is outside of the beautiful manicured gates of civilization.

Xander: Look, Rhelan. I don’t ask this often, but do you mind not thinking so loudly?

Xander: Here I come up with the most dastardly evil plan of my entire life…and you have to go on moaning about hypothetical poor people? Don’t you think of anything else?