"The Brood? Has the Domain had much troubles with them in the past?" With how accessible the city was, by air, water and land, it could be an easy target for the Forsworn "What about the VII?" The Kindred boogeyman. The ones hiding under your bed, in your wardrobe... everywhere. Boo!
Free will. Adorable "And you've made your decision in accordance with the character you inherited, your life's history and current stimuli. You could have abhorred your father's practices and become a police officer, and that still would be only because a certain set of external and internal factors acted together to make you the way you are. That is why free will is impossible - for every supposedly uninhibited choice there is a set of factors that made this choice true, and the others false. True freedom is therefore not to know one's desire, but to learn of its causes" He needs barely any time to formulate the thoughts, as if he's thought it out long ago and had this talk many times in the past.
"Ah, but the truth is never in the middle. The truth rests where it rests - even if I told you that two plus two equal one, and you told me that the answer is nine, that wouldn't change the real outcome of that equation, would it? That's what I'm getting at - you need to make your due dilligence, or trust that someone else has done it. In the recent dispute, Moretti was right and Simmons was wrong, there is no way around it. If the matter concerned politics, it'd probably be the other way around" He smiles, shrugs. For all her merit and skill, the Daeva Sheriff didn't seem like the political mover-and-shaker type "At the end of the night, I suppose the question all rulers face is if they are better off with a bunch of drone bootlickers or a set of people who make their voice heard and back that voice with reviewable evidence"
Of course, that is all in the past. The future, however...
"And how would you like to... move forward?" Ah, shit. Seems business crept into an otherwise pleasant conversation, like a centipede crawling into a shoe. Yet, it would be interesting to know what the Prince has in store for Sacramento.
He kind of expected his mention of stealing books would bring amusement "Arson, two counts of manslaughter, four counts of burglary and one kidnapping, and that's just the ones mentioned in the arrest warrant back in Colorado" He deadpans at the Prince, aware of the joke's intent but sounding no less serious because of that "I'm not telling you that to impress you, but if you allow me some unsolicited advice - when you think you have understood the final layer of a secret, most of the time it means you are not studying it hard enough"