"Okay."

"For a local consultant."

"I said 'okay'."

And someone knocks on the door of a shabby little house on an obscure uncontacted planet in Warp.

A woman - not the Rebecca, probably her mother - with cerise-pink hair opens the door. She is startled. "- s-sir?"

"Hello! My apologies for dropping in unannounced, I'm looking for -"  illusion - "this person."

"Is - is she not at work, sir -" She keeps looking at his hair.

He's very courteously not looking at hers, which she hasn't braided. "She is very likely at work! I am an alien from a different planet and accordingly unfamiliar with where she works. When are you expecting her back?"

"An -? I - I - think she - gets leave on - the fortieth -"

"How long is that, she's invited to a wedding in six days."

"........it's the twelfth now, sir."

"Would you be willing to help me arrange for her to get leave sooner? Assuming there aren't really any resource limitations."

"I - sir, she -"

There is a baby cry from upstairs. The woman twitches but doesn't run off to answer it.

"Is that her daughter?"

"- yes sir -"

"You can, ah, go get her, I'm not a temperamental alien."

...she takes a tentative step back, then another, then turns and looks over her shoulder, then flees up the stairs. She comes back down with a shaved-bald baby and a bottle for her.

He manages to mostly not make a face at the people who shave their babies. There could be a reason. He waves reassuringly. "I'm sorry. I could do the whole shiny-spaceships first-contact thing first but I wanted her to advise me on what the most important things to get right would be."

".......the baby?"

"Uh, no, her mother. Whose name I am assuming has a phonetic resemblance to "Beka" or "Rebecca"."

"...Peka."

"Peka. And the baby is something in the genre of 'Catherine' and 'Kat' -"

"...her name is Katin, sir."

"It is an honor to meet her. Where does Peka work?"

"Peka's in the army."

"So it'd be all kinds of trouble if she just vanished?"

"...sir?"

"I would like to take Peka and Katin away with me, if they would like that, and I think they will. I do not want anyone else to be endangered or frightened or inconvenienced by this, but I'm worried something bad will happen if I wait to approach her until we've made formal diplomatic contact with your world, because bad things, uh, often happen to her."

"...sir I don't understand -"

"Yeah, fair enough. Okay. You're familiar with - the stars are other suns, around them are other planets, some of those planets have other civilizations, right?"

"...yes sir."

"The estimated population of this universe is two or three trillion. There are several different interstellar consortiums. Some of them have a policy of not intervening in civilizations that haven't developed faster-than-light travel yet, and some of them do intervene but they can't help everywhere, just because this universe is so big. And then, complicating matters, there are, uh, parallel universes. And there is a parallel universe where I met a girl named Rebecca with a daughter named Catherine -" illusion - "and married her and embarked on a gloriously happy life together. And there are other parallel universes where by chance we did not meet, and bad things happen to her. But here she's alive, and she's all right, and so I came to meet her and offer her the life she and her child deserve."

She doesn't seem to know what to say to that.

He should probably give her a little bit of time.

"Peka is, ah, red-caste. So is the baby."

"I don't know what that means."

"...we're untouchables, sir."

"Does that mean that Peka will not want me to touch her or just that under local law it would not be allowed?"

"...you are not supposed to touch us, or things we've come into contact with."

"So the local law thing. Okay. Well, in my kingdom we don't have that law and Peka and Katin will be able to go anywhere and touch anything they please."

Blink.

" - we'll do something for everyone else, too, of course, but that's politics and might mostly mean bribes or subsidies - are there countries with better local law -"

"...red caste are untouchable everywhere sir."

"Or we could just take you all home with us. How many are there?"

"Peka has a sister and a brother -"

"In the whole world, I mean."

"- I don't know sir. Millions."

"What goes wrong if they all get the option to emigrate to somewhere that doesn't think they're untouchable?"

"I... don't know, sir..." Katin finishes her bottle. Her grandma sets it aside. "Especially during the war - I don't know -"

"There's a war?"

"...yes sir?"

"Do tell me the war is very far away from Peka."

"I don't know exactly where she is sir but she is in the army -"

"Will you get in trouble if I go and get her right now-"

"Sir I don't understand what's going on."

"I am going and getting Peka out of a war zone because I do not want Peka to be in a war zone. Are they going to come looking for her, do you want me to relocate your whole family to somewhere safer -"

"Sir she needs to keep her job -!"

"Why?"

"We need the money -"

"Okay. I'm going to go get Peka out of a war zone and then I will just solve any problems which result from that because I think you are perhaps underestimating my capacity to do that." Pop.

" - hi Macalaurë -"

"Hi, Epic. Where's Peka." 

Scale model!

He goes invisible. He appears there.

Pitching a tent.

Anyone around?

There are other tents, which may have people in them. Some folks on patrol with various shades of grey hair, not looking this way, in the distance.

He goes visible behind her. "Peka?"

Jump. "Ah -?"

"Hello! I am Prince Canafinwë Macalaurë of the Noldor and I am from another planet that does not have your terrible pointless caste system and I would like to whisk away you and your baby and possibly everyone with red hair. Do you mind."

"...um, no, I do not mind."

"Oh good." Back to her house. "You don't need to pack your things, we can magically duplicate them."

"...Wow. Okay." She goes into the house and comes out with the baby a minute later. "I think you scared my mom."

"I apologize. My teleportation has a range limit, there are two intermediate hops home, I can take them slowly if you find it disconcerting -"

"Nah, not especially."

Hop hop hop. His apartment is built atop Ambaróna's largest concert hall, with a vaulted ceiling and glass windows on three sides looking out on the city skyline and on the palace and out to the sea. 

"Oh wow."

"Welcome to Ambaróna! That's the palace over there, and we're atop a concert hall - I actually mostly copied the concert hall off one in Hell, they have had millennia to get good at the acoustics-with-no-concern-for-material-limits thing." He walks over to his desk, shuffles through what looks like a box of gleaming stylized laser pointers. He selects a dark red one, hands it to her - "you point it at the floor and press the button -"

"Do I? What is it?"

"It summons demons! They can make you all your things back, if you'd like them, or any other things you might ask for. But you should let me do the negotiating."

"Shouldn't I have a shopping list first?"

"I suppose that'd be responsible. - should we go back for your family -"

"I dunno - my siblings aren't old enough to leave my parents and my parents aren't supposed to leave their jobs -"

"I asked your mother what happened if we just gave everyone in your world the option to emigrate to somewhere nicer but she was I think a little flustered by the question -"

"Yeah I think you scared her. Uh if all the reds leave nobody else'll do our jobs."

"And would all the reds leave, given a choice?"

"Maybe not all but a whole lot."

"What're the jobs -"

"Anything to do with dead bodies or garbage or wastewater."

"Could just give 'em robots."

"Every now and then someone suggests that and we riot because we do not wish to be slaughtered as redundancies."

" - so no robots until we've gotten you all out? Or at least gotten permission to take you all?"

"Yeah pretty much."

"Okay. Unless your governments are remarkably hard to work with we can still probably get them all resettled by the end of the year."

"I've never tried, can't help you with that."

"You can help me by knowing about problems I might not think of - like, most societies would not slaughter suddenly-redundant citizens, we might have been taken aback by that if we'd just met them and handed them lots of technology -"

"We're unclean, if we aren't needed to handle other unclean things they wouldn't want us to be anywhere at all."

"Well. Are you pretty much self-policing and self-governing, we could just drop everybody on a nice temperate planet with a set of pens for everyone -" he gestures at the laser pointers he said summon demons - "or we could integrate them into existing communities."

"There's some interface people but we could mostly self-organize, it's just none of us know how to farm or manufacture anything..."

"Demons can make arbitrary material objects. It's just a question of what'll produce the healthiest and happiest communities - your mother seemed skittish around me but I don't know if that means you'd integrate badly if it were announced properly and done more formally -"

"...you are an alien of unidentifiable caste and she couldn't figure out why you were in a red neighborhood. Demons sound useful - you said they need negotiating though -"

"Demons are typically paid in sex or music or other media - or the opportunity to raise children - since you can't really trade them stuff. It's not hard to find some who want something you have, if you're willing to be a bit patient with it, and we've got a list of ones who like learning languages - uh, when a demon is summoned they learn the languages you speak, and the ones on the list would be happy to make you things just for some token payment because the really exciting thing is the new language and all the new media they can accordingly understand."

"Oh, neat! Gosh, I am not at all dressed to exchange sex for stuff unless the demons kink on military uniforms."

" - you're not trading demons sex for things, you're mine, I just stole you. That pen gets someone who likes my music and will do your shopping list for a song."

"Oh! Okay."

"You will probably want clothes that aren't a military uniform on that shopping list, though."

"Suggestions?"

"I can set you up on the computer and you can look up local fashions, see what suits? I like things that are dramatic. And dislike the color blue."

"Gosh, you're gonna hate my planet's government then. It's okay for me to touch the computer?"

"It is okay for you to touch all of the things! Except the demons."

"No demon-seducing for me, got it."

"Once we know each other better maybe I can be brought around on seducing demons. But I haven't even kissed you yet."

"Well are you gonna?"

Yes, yes, he is. 

Eeeee!

He is so delighted!!!

Good!

He picks her up for more kissing and then holds her with her legs wrapped around his waist and is very distracted by her hair. "You're invited to a wedding," he says.

She is super into the being picked up and sitting with her legs wrapped around his waist. Also it is cute that he likes her hair. "I am? Whose wedding?"

"An alternate universe version of you named Rebecca. - so, there are multiple universes, and sometimes for unclear reasons they have the same people in them." Illusion-Rebecca. "And one of you met one of me and they fell very much in love and are happily married and recommended to all the rest of me that we go whisk away all the rest of you - in case you wondered if I was in the habit of stealing pretty girls from foreign planets -"

"This place doesn't look lived-in enough to have a harem in it. That's a good reason!"

"I think it's an excellent one! And Rebeccas have this...religion? Does your world have those?"

"...we have religions? I don't really personally."

"And her religion disapproves of premarital sex so they met yesterday and are getting married in six days and requested that all of the yous we know of be stolen by then so you can attend."

"Awww. ...I have, uh, had some premarital sex."

"The baby did not escape me! I'd sooner not run off to get married this weekend, we'd be competing for attention with four others of you and that's nowhere near enough time to plan a spectacular wedding in. But it is important to me you not expect to be abandoned, so if you want it soon -"

"I mean besides that, the baby's dad is a complete prick who doesn't know the meaning of 'wait it's springtime'. What if I do not expect to be abandoned and I'm just horny?"

"I can maybe think of a solution to that but your hair is very distracting, you had probably better tie it back so I can think."

"How is my hair distracting?"

"Unbraid mine -"

Unbraid unbraid.

Gosh maybe she can have a guess at why Elves find hair distracting.

This does not inspire her to tie hers back.

"Elves can get off just from that but I don't think I care to - are you attached to the uniform -"

"I fucking hate this uniform!"

"Oh good." Less uniform. Much less uniform.

Giggle. Tossing her hair.

Macalaurë belatedly remembers to frown at his windows; they go frosty. "Peka," he says delightedly. "My Peka."

Kisses!

Yes, that. 

Eventually Peka's baby will probably demand their attention.

Yeah, eventually. "She's hungry - you said not to pack anything - I still don't have a list, will the demon mind coming back -"

"Not at all. May I braid your hair for you?"

Giggle. "Mmhm!"

He braids both their hair; he doesn't seem to think to put on clothes. He finds her the laser pointer.

"Is it customary to summon demons in the nude?"

"Hmmm? Not customary but not very remarkable and I think I ripped your uniform."

"You may have done." Click laser pointer.

It makes an intricate light picture on the floor; she can't read it. There's a little bit of a wait. And then a person appears, somewhere between Peka and Macalaurë in height, stretching glittery black bat wings. "Macalaurë!"

"Hi! Fill Peka's shopping list for her and I'll sing you something? - you have to agree," he adds to Peka.

"I don't even have an actual list yet but okay."

"Deal," she says agreeably. "He can sing me my song while you come up with your shopping list?"

"Sure - first can I have my pocket everything and some formula for the baby she likes Mountain Flower brand -"

The demon clearly doesn't know what those are but makes them anyway.

Peka feeds the baby one-handed and types up a list on her pocket everything with the other.

And he sings.

oh wow

The demon seems to think so too! She listens enraptured and claps when he's done.

Peka has not made very much shopping list progress!

He is pleased about that. "Sorry. I'll be quiet."

      "He's such a show-off," the demon says fondly. "Who's the girl, anyway -"

"I stole her! She's from this world with a stupid caste system where you can't touch people with red hair and I decided to take her home with me to someplace where you can."

      "Why don't they dye it?"

"I have no idea."

"We do," she says. "If it's not red. So we don't fool people into thinking we're some other caste. I had to when I was little, my hair was paler, looked white - my baby's came out orange but she's too young to dye so we just shave it."

"I mean why don't you dye it not red so you can touch people."

"'Cause that's how you get executed by firing squad?"

The demon makes a face. "Uh. Yikes. - are you gonna teach them summoning because people will, like, object to that -"

      "We are not going to teach them summoning, for that and other reasons. We might steal all the red caste people and teach just them summoning, on a different planet."

"...I also need clothes," says Peka. "Uh, I can list stuff from home to start since I haven't looked into what people wear here yet."

"Works for me."

She names some things she had.

They appear.

"Thanks!" And she puts on clothes.

"Welcome! If that's it you send me home by concentrating on it for a minute."

"Might want you back later when I have thought of more things," she says, but she starts concentrating.

After a minute the demon vanishes. "Oh, a set of your own summoning pens," Macalaurë says, "that should be on your list."

"What am I gonna pay them with? I don't sing as well as you do by a long shot."

"Grab randoms, be like 'you just got my language! Want me to recommend some good books and blogs and TV shows in it?' Won't work forever but will last you a decent while while you're the only one who can do it."

"Heh, okay." She writes 'summoning pens'.

"Also Michael says you have a lovely singing voice."

"Aw, that's nice of him."

"Would you like me to hold Katin while you make the list, it might be a bit easier."

"That will help, thanks." Baby!

Baby!!! He sings to baby.

Well that's just distracting. ...She manages to simultaneously pick her way through local fashion pictures though.

Elves have very pretty clothes. The lingerie section of their online stores is apparently for married people only.

She can't read Quenya. "Why doesn't this link work?"

"Hmm? - oh, because you're not married. We are a very conservative society and like to pretend we wait for marriage."

"...how can the Internet tell I'm not married?"

"It's my computer and I do not have the marriage blessings installed."

"Marriage blessings?" She investigates hair ornaments.

Hair ornaments is a clickable page though of course all the models have their hair neatly braided. "My species has a computer chip at the place where the spine meets the brain, it does continuous backups of our minds and you can install all kinds of software enhancements for things, and they're called blessings, and a bunch of them are paired and specifically for marriage."

"Aww, that's cute."

"Some of them are pretty neat. There're thought-sharing ones, that kind of thing."

"But you prefer to steal chipless aliens!"

"Maybe none of my subjects would put up with being stolen."

"It might be niche."

"Little bit. My alts had to reassure me that you were going to be happy and not go 'help! police!'"

"One does not cultivate a habit of yelling for the police anyway with pink hair but nah this has been awesome."

Kiss.

Kiss!!!

If Katin will tolerate being set down he thinks they were in the middle of something.

Katin will tolerate that!

Oh good!

So very good!

A different Macalaurë messages Sybil to say that the descriptions of the roles thing are, uh, all a little confusing, how should he take good care of his Rebecca who will shortly be reembodied.

Uh. That depends on what she's into.

...sex? Probably. Her alts are into that.

Quelle surprise. But seriously, even if they have a solid guess on which role - and he should maybe not assume they match, some templates have more variety than others - there are miles of difference between, like, "digs elaborate ropework and calling you Master and needing permission to eat Skittles" and "enjoys fireplay and getting slapped for being a brat and weeklong orgasm denial" and those are just literally things she picked by clicking six times on the first google result for "random kink generator".

Uh.

She has an alt who liked being held prisoner and all of them seem to like being stolen by alien princes?

Is he actually going to be able to cope if she likes being held prisoner or kept in a locked box at the foot of his bed or something.

I love her!

That seems maybe premature! It may be that she should wait till we find another human you who can cope with the range on sub interests that exists! They didn't have Skittles in 1805 but they had lockable boxes!

I - if she was okay with my reading her mind so I knew she wasn't suffering -

Some of them are into suffering! Some of them might be into suffering yet not into mindreading!

Your planet is so weird!!! I think being into suffering is a different kind of suffering than the kind I am worried about.

How do you know?

I don't. 

Like, you could get lucky, but it is completely possible to have flat-out incompatible situations going on and I can in no way guarantee you that Rebecca is not, in Eclipse form, one of those edgeplay types who likes getting put through the wringer as bad as possible because it feels so good to stop, or something.

Beka's into way more intense stuff than her Macalaurë, I will ask her what she thinks I should do.

And he does. 

(Her Macalaurë has gotten the message from his alt and now visits her every day.)

Being visited is so great! (Does he have opinions on whether she should go get her free will revoked.)

He wonders if there's a way to get marriage but not oaths. If there's not she should maybe wait until she has a teleport so that nothing horrible can happen.

She's not in a huge hurry. Anyway her approach to the thing where she is into intense stuff is to tease her Macalaurë about it till he does it anyway! And then being conspicuously delighted the whole time! She doesn't mind having her mind read and bets that's template-consistent at least mostly.

"That sounds pretty workable. But would you be happier if he'd - had more warning in advance and required less teasing into it -"

"Nah he makes awesome faces when teased."

"Oh good. Okay." And he skips happily off to Lórien to wait for his Rebecca to be resurrected. 

Do you want me to spot you in case it's obviously not going to work from the word go.

Yes, thank you.

- you report in later in a state I'd describe as "optimistically freaked out".

He giggles. I'll take it. All right.

And this Rebecca will be able to breastfeed fine, they were careful about that, and wakes up in a similarly cheery Lórien.

She is delighted by Lórien! She feeds her baby! She goes wandering about and bows to the apparent singing angel and sits down to listen!

He keeps singing for a while because he's sure he won't mess that up. But eventually - hello, Rebecca.

Hello your holiness.

Come up here and sit with me.

She gets up and goes to kneel by his side.

He is totally successful at concealing a startled glance! - well. Mostly successful.

He reminds himself firmly that she is human and that she is sort of soon to be his wife anyway and he runs a hand through her hair. Very gently.

It has been two hundred years since you were last alive. If you would like you can be alive again, now, you and Catherine, in a safer world.

- or -?

You can stay here as long as you'd like. Or you can go back to whatever the last two hundred years were but it doesn't sound like there was much to them.

I don't remember anything about the last two hundred years, your holiness.

I'm not an angel. I'm just here because I asked for you to be resurrected and promised to provide for you once you were.

Oh.

Thank you, sir.

Of course. He runs his hand through her hair again. 

Shiver. I would very much like to be alive with Catherine again, sir.

Oh, good. I can take you home once you're ready, then. There is a very faraway but legitimately Catholic church that will marry us.

Really?

Yes. It was harder to find one that was all right with my being from a different world with a different god than to find one all right with you, really, the Church decided a long time ago that sacramental marriage was for any Catholics who wanted to enter into it.

Thank you sir.

Of course. - I can read minds. Do you want - no - would you like - no -

- I would like to read yours so I know exactly how to take care of you.

Shiver. Yes sir.

(She is assuming he's a psion; she's been assuming that what with the telepathy since she was told he was not an angel. It has not even crossed her mind that being brought to life (with her baby!!!! who is okay!!!!! and who she can feed!!!!!!!!) by someone who can absolutely pass for an angel and wants to marry her might not be awesome. It is obviously awesome.)

Okay. That's - okay.

He pulls her into his lap and kisses her. 

Oh gosh he is so strong he could probably pin her to a wall without her feet even touching the ground and not even be tired by the time he was done with her. She squirms enough to set sleeping Catherine down on the grass (such heavenly convenient grass) and then throws herself unreservedly into melting in his lap.

aaaaaaaaahhh yes he could do that - and it does not involve any Skittles or prisons or whatever the fuck fireplay is, what a relief - and she's so happy, she's so happy, he holds her close and hums and thinks about how glad he is that she is so happy -

Flicker of wondering about whether he will wait till he has good and married her before nonkissing things happen but it doesn't do much good to worry does it and he's so cozy to be held by -

Kiss. "It's important to you to be married first."

Oh he talks aloud. "Yes sir." Wonders what his name is. She could just call him sir - probably he would say if he preferred something else - but it would be good to know what her last name is going to be and who she should tell anybody she meets she belongs to.

"So we'll wait." Kiss. "I mean to do right by you. Where I'm from, that means you may refuse me. - and it's Prince Canafinwë Macalaurë."

Oh a prince wow. ...the refusing thing will not be operative post-marriage.

"Where I'm from it stays operative forever. I don't do very much running a kingdom, for a prince, I like singing better."

Forever? Really? ...oh well. "Yes sir." Running a kingdom is by no means the important part of princeness, princeness is intrinsically appealing, almost makes up for having to be allowed to turn him away even though that is so unhot.

He's so cozy. Not dwelling on how half the appeal of being married is that then one goes about one's life in a state of perpetual availability (barring the needs of the children) there for the taking good and proper, nope, not dwelling. ...prince! That's exciting! Where of, she wonders. Name sounds foreign, which one's the surname.

"Canafinwë's the family name, women where I'm from don't usually change it on marriage. Explain - the appeal of not being able to refuse -"

"...sir?" She has never had to think about that before. It seems very basic, hard to put into words. If she's going to marry somebody she wants to be his, like his dog or his shoes or his chair, she doesn't want to be less his than anything or anyone else, she wants to be most his, chairs splinter and shoes wear and dogs balk but she wants to be able to find a way to belong to her husband whatever the circumstance -

- well. He can read her mind and stop if he wants to, and 'would refuse if she could' is a state in which he would certainly want to - "Mmmhmm. We can have it like that if you'd like."

"Thank you sir."

"My people form permanent soul bonds when we marry. It's one-way, for now, when we marry a human, but I think there are psions working on letting humans have it to. We get new senses - for your partner's wellbeing, for their proximity, for their emotions, things like that, always suited to the person."

Oooh. That sounds so nice.

So you can be mine without any weird stuff, he doesn't say, since it won't be helpful. He kisses her again.

Oh it has been way too long since she has been kissed and neither her manager nor Catherine's father count really they were never going to marry her so it has been approximately forever and that is too long to go without kisses. She hopes they can get married soon, her mind is so in the gutter. She wonders if he is into hitting or not, weak ambivalent preference for not (it's plenty interesting to think about but she doesn't know if she can develop a taste for pain and doesn't currently have one that wouldn't be plenty satisfied by some biting and scratching and being generally manhandled).

And not horrifying fire things! Yay! Kiss kiss.

She contemplates no fire things! She wants to be kissed and petted and nibbled and held down and fucked. (After they are married.)

In a Catholic church from the 23rd century! He turns her around so she can see illusions if he sings them and then he draws up Vanda Nossëo for her.

Oh wow, it's so beautiful.

Quendi love pretty things. - sometimes we even drag them out of the 1800s to take home with us.

She likes feeling pretty. She leans on him and squirms contentedly. Gosh, if they were not wearing clothes this sitting in his lap thing could get a lot more interesting slow down Arden not married yet.

She is not. He goes back to singing and petting and listening for passing thoughts of 'but what if I didn't want to marry this powerful stranger' or anything.

She is all in on marrying the powerful stranger. The petting feels so nice and the singing is so lovely and he wanted her so much he brought her back from the dead, wow!

That is exactly what the emphatic briefing co-signed by Rebecca and Beka and their respective lovers said would happen but it still feels weird. 

After a while he says 'would you like to leave Lórien now? I have a place for you to stay in the palace until we're married, if that'll be less temptation or more propriety than living with me."

She looks up at him adoringly. "That sounds lovely sir." She does wonder vaguely if, were she sufficiently tempted, she could then likewise be sufficiently tempting, but mostly as an entertaining mental exercise; she is still pretty clear on the being married first thing. Definitely it would be improprietous to be living in sin. That's why they call it that. Also: palace. Palace!

He makes sure he has a firm hold on baby Catherine and then pop pop pop pop pop palace! It is so excessively lovely!

He is holding Catherine correctly, good. The transportation method is interesting! The palace is so gorgeous, she must twirl. She spreads out her arms and twirls down the hall till she's dizzy.

Awwwwww. We mostly telepath the servants but you can ring them with this - and this is called a computer, come sit in my lap and I'll show you how it works -

She traipses over to sit in his lap and learn the thing!

Computers!!! Not freaking out very much at all as she continues to not think about horrible things!

When she gets hungry she thinks about being hand-fed, is that horrible?

No! Cute and not- horrible and totally doable, even, he asks someone over osanwë to bring them food.

Palace servants! She's going to be a princess and have servants!

She's so happy! It's so adorable! He hand-feeds her and it is not horrible!

She maybe nibbles on his fingers a little bit.

That isn't horrible either! Nothing is horrible except for the thing where it would ruin her day to be able to refuse him but he is pretty sure he has a workaround for that!

And she is not thinking anything that seems to invalidate his workaround! She is thinking about how handsome he is and how tasty the food is and how good it is to have her Catherine back and about how lovely the singing was and about how pretty the palace is.

He writes his alts that everything is all right but, uh, what a weird preference.

In Ambaróna he reads the message and starts giggling.

"What?"

"Oh, so, we're getting everybody resurrected in time for the wedding, and there's this world where there's this thing - uh, literally everybody is kinky and they built the whole society around it, if your world has that concept -"

"...how do you build a society around people being kinky? Do you have to wear a badge saying you're into feet?"

"I think you put your role on your driver's license next to gender and there are hairstyles and restaurants are set up in the expectation a couple will have one person sitting at the table and the other person kneeling at their feet and there's great controversy over same-role marriage? It's weird."

"Oh, that kind of kinky."

"And my poor alt was very worried that he and local Rebecca would not be compatible - he couldn't, like, torture her, even if she was into that - but they're all right except for the weird thing you all have is more pronounced."

"...we all have a weird thing?"

"You all have a weird thing! It's that - I understand being delighted to hook up and therefore not urgently needing to know what would happen if you didn't want to, but - most people I know would eventually want to know the answer to that, because they wouldn't like or respect someone if his answer was 'well, what are you going to do about it' -"

"...it might've occurred to me to wonder but, like, if one of the outcomes of asking a question is 'now I'm having way less fun' and the other is 'I have some information I did not even need' why go there?"

Nod. "The notes from your alts said that I was much likelier to - mess up at making you feel wanted - than do something you didn't want and didn't know it was safe to refuse - because I'd notice if you weren't happy and because you, uh, would be happy. So I didn't worry. But apparently my alt with the kink-world you explained to her that where he's from even after marriage she can turn him down and she was terribly disappointed because that's not hot at all."

"...well, it's not! I mean, I don't find it anti-hot, personally, but there is nothing actively hot about being allowed to shove your spouse off you, so if one expects more than no hotness in that vicinity of one's life..."

Snort. "I suppose. He found a way to cheat, so they're all right."

"Cheat?"

"He can read minds. I can't, you shall have to use your words or at least make faces, but he can, and she doesn't mind, and he can obviously decline when he pleases and obviously prefers to whenever she would refuse it if that were allowed. Without the mindreading it'd be so so hard to be sure enough but with it I suppose they'll be fine. Maybe he'll get a helpful marriage blessing - they get them at random instead of selecting the ones they want like civilized people -"

"Oh that's cute," says Peka, of the mindreading. "Maybe a little much for day one? I'm getting the impression that I am maybe less the thing we are than all the rest of me."

"It might be environmental? The early 1800s on Earths were really absurdly sexist and I am not sure they'd invented consent as a concept and they didn't have divorce - and then Beka's from Angband which is, whatever you're imagining, much much worse than that. I do not mind if you are not the thing at all, it's not - I wouldn't raise a daughter believing it, at least, even if I can see how under some circumstances it'd be adaptive -"

"I have a concept of consent!" Peka assures him.

"Oh good. You could of course stay here in arbitrary material luxury forever whether you wished to have a whirlwind romance or not, and no matter what you do we'll do the same things for all the reds on your home planet, too - well, I guess, if you marched across the street and told them I kidnapped you then I would not be involved in the handling of your planet because of being arrested and that might affect minor details -"

"I am not going to go attempt to turn you in for kidnapping. This has been the best kidnapping."

Scoop. Kiss. "I was assured of as much in advance!! - but it does, in fact, make it hotter, at least for me, that you could, that the only thing on the scales for whether you are in my bed is how much you want me -"

"You're so wantable! Did you not know?"

Kiss kiss. "It actually hadn't escaped me! Though I haven't been taking advantage of it, we've been really busy ever since the end of the war and - Elves are very socially conservative, though catching up with the universe a bit, and running off with a series of girls would look vaguely exploitative even if they all had a lovely time."

"Aww."

"During the war we fed my home planet into a black hole. I helped plan it."

"...uh, why?"

"The Enemy agreed to stop the war if we did it. And could bindingly commit to that with magic. And the war was really terrible, and we could bring most of them back. - all of them, as it happened, but we didn't know that at the time."

"Oh. The war I was in was over the other guys letting reds handle their food exports."

"Is that dangerous or something?"

"Just unclean."

Sigh. "Our war was because Melkor was uploading and torturing people and using biological weapons to wipe out whole countries at once and extract the chips from their bodies for more uploading and torturing, and put out the suns of an inhabited star system, and had several billion orcs enslaved."

"What the fuck."

"He was kind of the worst. - dead now."

"Good."

"We should probably get on solving yours."

"It's not as bad as that, I'm pretty selfish and they were this close to killing my baby but still."

"They were what -"

"Did Mom not explain - we were leasing a child credit, if we missed a payment Katin wouldn't have one -"

"She said you needed the money, I had no idea - oh, Peka - oh, Katin - are there other babies in danger -"

"Not that many. We have perfectly good birth control, orange boy just didn't, y'know, warn me."

"That's a hell of a phrasing - uh, my species is not cross-fertile - I should have -"

"- it's summertime, now, I can't get pregnant in the summertime. I guess if this planet has different seasons I might re-cycle but this short a visit won't have done it."

 Nod. "If you want more kids while seeing my kind of Elf a demon can do it, we don't have population controls."

"They do kids too? Gosh. Demons sure are a thing. I dunno, I'd wait till Katin was at least two."

"You have all the time in the world."

"Demons fix the end of the fertility window, too?"

"Our general anti-aging fix has worked on all Warp - your dimension - humanoids tried so far."

"Ooh!"

"They're great - we met a species recently that aged and died before hitting three of your years."

"- wow."

"Yeah. One of the things I work on is a immortality thing that scales better. But you and your family can have them no problem."

"Thanks!" Snuggle.

"I want to go before more babies die, though - go and fix it -"

Nod.

And he sits up and starts taking notes. "What else needs fixing -"

"Uh, gosh, am I a consultant? I don't know if I'm cut out for consultancy. Or what standards 'fixed' is supposed to match."

"Uh, I think the standard is 'no suffering for want of material things that can be straightforwardly provided, no one living in fear of - being randomly murdered or attacked or evicted - and a process for everyone to remedy wrongs they experience, a real process they believe in and expect to produce redress.'"

"Okay, so, like, we have poverty - my family's actually well off for reds, just wasn't budgeted for surprise baby especially since if you get credits aftermarket they're marked up - uh, there's the war, there might be more wars, I'm not up on geopolitics - population controls more or less murdery depending - there's a police brutality thing, mostly a problem for us and maybe purples I don't know - you will probably have a problem getting reds to trust you unless you trot me out and kiss me at them, and then nobody else will want you around -"

"Won't trust us just on general 'authority is always bad news' principles, or -"

"Kinda, yeah, everybody thinks we're garbage, why wouldn't aliens too, everybody's going to tell you we're garbage and they have university degrees and fancy titles, why wouldn't you believe them -"

"My brother has red hair, would it help any if he went - he might have to fork for it, he's very busy, but I bet he would if I asked -"

"Could go either way. The hair isn't actually what - like, Katin's is orange. Mine used to be white. We're still red, the hair's a - standardized advertisement -"

"So if I show up with fancy robots and tell everybody that we're trading them the robots for their reds, the reds will - what, panic? Riot? Try to hide?"

"Be really scared, probably - there's not anywhere good to hide, we're not supposed to be outside our neighborhoods except for work with shoe covers and gloves and marked vehicles and everything. Rioting maybe, but it always gets at least some of us killed so maybe not if it looked really inevitable."

"We don't want to badly scare people either, though. - we'd resurrect anyone who died in riots but it's still much better not to let it come to that - I don't mind in the slightest kissing you in front of everybody but if it'd get in the way of everything it might make more sense to kiss you in front of everybody on the planets we bring reds to instead of the one they're leaving from."

"Maybe, yeah - I don't really know how to reform planets, sorry."

"Don't apologize. I don't either, and I have advisors who do. I just - don't want to ignore you on something with personal stakes -" Hug. "Maybe we can set up a really pretty district of the city for them here, and then from there they can decide if they'd rather be self-governing or citizens here or what, and I can suggest to all your terrible governments that they let a few red emissaries come tour the place in advance for riot-prevention reasons -"

"They might go for that. It'll pollute the place like nobody's business, kill your tourism, but maybe that is fine."

"I do not think we were counting on tourism from your world. Anyway we can misleadingly imply it's a safely segregated district while we still need their cooperation for things." Kiss.

Kiss! Snuggle! She's so snuggly.

And he would like nothing more than to snuggle her forever and will in fact snuggle her quite a while.

But the next day enormous shiny lightleapers coast into her home planet's star system broadcasting in a rotation of the local languages - "Hello! This is a diplomatic envoy from the Noldor of Endorë, and we greet you and your people. Please identify to us a convenient location for us to disembark and meet you."

Several competing locations are offered. Tapa has the prettiest one.

He has four diplomatic teams and can send one to everybody!! He'll go to Tapa, though, because it's where Peka's from. Elves dispatched to less pretty ones pout. Macalaurë makes a face at them. They never pout at Maitimo.

They teleport to the offered locations.

This surprises the people who are there to meet them and seem to have been expecting shuttles. They are greeted by various mixes of blue and green and yellow. One of the greeting parties includes gray-haired guards.

He will enquire politely about the caste system rather than confess it was already explained to him by his kidnapped red girlfriend.

A green person explains to him that among their species different people are suited for different tasks. This runs in families and is typically indicated by natural hair color (it's customary to dye to match when there's an irregularity).

How interesting!! That's not typical, though (having had some warning the topic might come up) he can offhandedly list a few other species who have something vaguely similar - "and gender of course functions like that in lots of primitive societies, though less so in advanced ones."

They don't have much gender division here! While they can imagine that aliens might find some dimorphism there they don't seem to have much except as pertains to pregnancy and things directly related thereto.

Yep, some societies have more dimorphism than that - Elves don't especially - and also in some societies the childbearing are more or less continuously pregnant or nursing, which produces some of the same incentives with respect to educating and training them. Anyway a caste system would be inherently prohibitive to meeting the humanitarian standards of certain interstellar federations he knows of but not his.

Gosh, interstellar federations. That's sure exciting.

They are!! They have abolished material scarcity and can help fund the terraforming and colonization of new planets, as well as ensure the safe passage of ships to and from those new planets, and interworld portals are in the final stages of development. His interstellar federation additionally does resurrections and limited distribution of a cure to aging and age-related mortality and has technology-sharing agreements and is very generous with trade terms among members and - "we won't enable military interventionism except in exceptional cases, but we'll happily give our members the means to a secure and absolute national defense."

This is all extremely exciting. They have some military stuff going on right now but it's a matter of food, if the food thing were sorted out cleanly they could withdraw.

The food thing can almost certainly be sorted out at once, even if they don't happen to find Elf food edible. Is it a temporary shortage or a potentially ongoing one?

Long-term; they don't, without the farmland they're currently trying to capture, have independent food security. They're on rationing now and were planning to divert the summer harvest from the area they're holding.

If they clear a location and describe precisely what they want there, food can be dropped off this afternoon. "It doesn't need to be things we'll have heard of, we can make arbitrary amounts of material goods if they exist or if a precise blueprint does. But that's a stopgap. Who'll want to compare notes on agricultural productivity -"

They don't have a minister of agriculture on hand but if the aliens would like to come to the capital they can sure find one!

The aliens would be delighted.

Off they go.

He can talk more about interstellar consortiums along the way! The Federation is very popular but prohibits contact with worlds which haven't developed faster-than-light travel yet, in order to avoid cultural imperialism. " - we don't worry as much about that. Most cultures do better with more resources, and the practices we exert influence to oppose, like slavery, shouldn't really be considered sacred cultural institutions."

They assure him that they don't have slaves.

Yeah he deliberately picked that one because it was one of the few horrible things they weren't doing! "I am so glad. Very few societies have all the standards for membership on their own because it's so hard to achieve them while in a state of material scarcity. But once that's fixed it often goes very smoothly. And even if you didn't end up deciding to apply for membership you'd benefit from the end of scarcity, so we really think pre-warp contact is in general a win-win."

They agree completely.

Oh good!! He shows them illusions of Ambaróna and Vanda Nossëo and a few of the new colony planets.

They ooh and aah!