#thote

one of the things i love about the hands of the emperor is that both the setting and cliopher himself is batshit in very subtle ways. absolutely funniest possible pov character for these events. cliopher has such strong Just Some Guy energy that he had to mention that one time he was stuck in a thousand-year fugue state doing paperwork like three times before i realize "oh he actually literally means he's over a thousand years old." he's like "oh it didn't feel like a thousand years while we were doing it haha" and i was like "haha sounds legit" and it was only later that i was like "wait what? a THOUSAND years??" the crisis of the first part of the book is trying to take his boss on a vacation. he legitimately could get executed at any point if he does this wrong but he looks at a guy whose whole schtick is to be god on earth and is like "gosh that guy seems like he'd like a vacation" and not only was he right he also didn't do the sane thing which would be to bury that thought six hundred feet deep and throw away the map. no. he said well if my boss seems like he'd enjoy a vacation i guess i'll give him a vacation. he got the job that made him the most powerful man in the world by cracking a joke in front of a guy that previously wouldn't have been able to help burning cliopher's eyes out if they made eye contact. the relentless competence is def a big thing but the relentless normalcy is i think his real superpower. he's like hi yes my boss would like to book a vacation bungalow for the week. yes the whole week. well he's the god-emperor of all seven worlds so he would really like a place where he could get away from it all, you know. i mean yeah implying that he's human enough to feel things like "work stress" is high treason and i could be killed for this but he looked kinda tired so what's a man supposed to do but take him to the beach.