I also think there is a hinted possibility that when the emperor says he 'finessed his methods', he means his mind thralling powers. If you react to his "seduction" by telling him to stick to business, he'll simply reply "good instincts". But there is a weird narrator line afterwards, where she says your character feels disappointed that the mind flayer was quick to abandon its attention on you. But why would the narrator be able to tell how your character feels? Unless the situation is similar to that of the of dark urge, where it is outside influence. Of course, it could be simply Larian writers overstepping their boundaries.
A lot of these interactions are just reminiscent of a DM with low social skills trying really hard to get you to like his favourite original character. Some of the Emperor scenes were legit uncomfortable to sit through and made me skip some of the dialogue.
But this might as well just be another poorly formulated player answer (Larian seems to love these) where it implies that the player character is somehow interested in the Emperor but would rather focus on the task at hand even though this isn't at all communicated by the prompt you get.
