He smiles at her. "I didn't know dorm rooms could look like this."

His side of the room leans more glass than silk. His bed is the kind you can sink into, with a few more pillows than are strictly necessary. On top of it there's a black suitcase containing clothes much like the ones he has on (which is to say standard 21st century t-shirt and jeans, but a little too tight) and a lap-sized Casio that has seen better days but will still produce mostly the right notes. 

He's also got a set of clear plastic bins that just don't fit the aesthetic at all. They're mostly full of smaller plastic containers, many of which seem to contain yet more plastic packaging alongside metal and glass and rubber in mysterious configurations. Maybe once he's freed whatever lies within from their many-layered prison they will look less weird.

"What're those?" She accompanies the word "those" with a telepathic pointer so it's clear she means the plastic bins.

"Oh, that's mostly just supplies. A lot of it is pharmaceuticals, or drugs more generally I guess, and all the stuff that goes with that, disinfectants and sharps and vials and some reusable things, and the stuff over there is electric, there's way less of it but it's bigger -- I've actually got the parts for an EEG machine but it's disassembled right now. Do you know what an EEG--" He looks at her, considers. "Do you know what, uh... any of that is?"

"Well it helps a lot that I'm reading your mind but I can tell I'm missing a lot of detail."

"Where I'm from, all of this--" mind control, hypnosis, brainwashing, mental programming, whatever you call it "--is a medical specialty. Well, sort of. To my knowledge most medical specialties aren't a level of secret that requires brainwashing and blackmail to maintain. But I was preparing to be a neurologist, and it's pretty close to that." He seems remarkably fine about getting brainwashed and/or blackmailed in the process of pursuing his career. (It might not be that remarkable by Angband standards.)

"A lot of this is just, things I would prefer to have on hand for myself, or want to try out, or expect to be generally useful? Painkillers, relaxants, stims, sedatives, aphrodisiacs, mood stuff. A lot of them are more complicated than that or can be combined in interesting ways, but that's the gist. Basically everything else is there to make the process of getting them into someone's system easier. Including an obscene number of needles because those are single-use, I fully intend to dispose of used ones safely but if you encounter something sharp please be careful.

"And then an EEG is a way of measuring brain activity." In his mind brain activity looks like a lot of squiggles. "I could go into more detail than that because I personally think it's cool and pretty useful but it might see much less use if I can just ask you to read people's minds."

"It's not like it's hard or anything but I bounced off like half the people in orientation and I dunno if your stuff would bounce off those same people."

"Well, it's a bunch of physical objects you attach to their head, they have to be at least somewhat willing to sit still for it. ...Or someone you can tie to a chair."

Joke! He's joking. Obviously most of the people she bounced off of will not be people you can tie to a chair.

Giggle. - oh wow there are CLOTHES in this closet. Pretty Elfy clothes! She tosses the baby onto her bed ("gwu!" opines the baby) and flings off her preexisting outfit with all its bloodstains and haphazard repairs to select a new one.

--Woah. Surprise naked girl in his room. All other thoughts flee his head for a bit.

Wiggle wiggle! "You're cute." But she is not dissuaded from her pursuit of pretty Elfy clothes at this time.

Sure, the clothes are pretty too. He watches the process with deep interest.

...If she wants she could try them all on and he can tell her which ones look the best on her.

"Oh that's a great idea!" She spins around in the dove-grey dress she selected first, does a couple dance steps.

"I like how it twirls." He settles onto his bed, considers the suitcase with his own clothes, decides to ignore it for now.

"It's really soft too!" She traipses over and offers a sleeve.

He strokes it admiringly.

How about his suitcase goes on the floor. There is so much room on his bed now.

Is he implying something?

Well, if she'd rather sit than stand while she's over here, she has that option now.

Sure why not! "I didn't have any nice things to wear at home," she says. "Just all my art." She pulls the dress off again over her head and there it is, tattoos and decorative scarification among the not-so-decorative.

Oh, wow. His hand hovers over a particularly well-done area. "These are beautiful. Can I...?"

"Go ahead! The circle burns are a real fun texture."

He runs his fingers slowly over them, tracing the patterns and exploring the edges of them. "How do you get it to look like this?"

"I had to do the blacksmith some faaaavors but then it was just like it looks like it was, hsst-hsst-hsst all down the shoulder to cover up these bits here."

"Makes it sound like a tattoo." Probably more painful than a tattoo. Maybe he should figure out harder masochism, it seems to have some neat use cases.

He drags his hand down her arm, noticing the bumps and ridges.

"It's like a tattoo, yeah. I'm not actually much of a masochist per se but it does sound useful, doesn't it! It'd just come in handy like all the time." She scootches a little closer.

Maybe his hands can move to her back. "I'm only a little bit. I mostly know how to do it with conditioning right now, I have to hurt myself first and then build in the positive associations. Very inconvenient."

"And how d'you do that?"

Oh look, he's still capable of blushing. "There are some pretty great toys out there." Girls are wayyy more interesting than toys, though. It's more annoying to get set up and induce the right mind-state and everything while taking another person into account and when he's with another person there are usually better things to be doing but it's true.

"...toys, what a cute idea." Has the narration mentioned that she's currently naked recently?

Do you think his thoughts would be looping on how great girls are if he wasn't very aware of the one in front of him?

He's not sure he's done this before, come to think of it. --Not fondling a naked girl, obviously, he's done that several times by now. But to the best of his recollection everyone he's had sex with has either been in charge of him or drugged to the gills and neither situation has involved much in the way of verbal lead-up.

He's going to move his hands from her back to her front now, which incidentally pulls them towards a reverse hug.

How friendly! "This is sorta weird for me too, usually I'm getting kinda thrown around by this point. It's fun though."

In that case he's going to wrap himself more thoroughly around her.

...Is the baby a concern at all? He doesn't know much about babies. She's all the way over on the other bed, it's probably fine?

"She's fine, I'm reading her mind too to make sure she doesn't need anything."

The baby has got ahold of some of the bedspread and is squeezing it in her little gray hand.

She's the expert! He will return to his comparative advantage here. Would she like his mouth on her neck.

She would like that! That would be lovely! She's gonna take the long bits of her hair out of their braid now.

Maybe he should be doing something with her hair too, now that it's so conveniently arranged. He combs his fingers through it and tugs a bit.

That gets a reaction that is rather outside the human distribution!

--Has she considered turning around in his lap so he can make out with her while he pulls her hair. He can maneuver her if that would help. It's really urgent.

She is considering that right now! While she does exactly the thing he had in mind! Mindreading is really good for this application.

Okay good yes now she should make all those sounds she just made again. He's going to stick his tongue in her mouth which will create a barrier to this but he's also going to do very many things to her hair so it shouldn't be too hard.

She can moan telepathically to resolve this quandary. And also squirm encouragingly.

He wants to see how close he can get her to mindless bliss without a single drug involved.

She's naked but he isn't, at some point in the proceedings he'll need a hand free to unbutton his jeans.

Oh is that how buttons work! Cool! She can try this out live right now.

Jean buttons are a little fiddly, she might need both hands for it her first time. The zipper is dead easy, though. (His remaining coherent thoughts are 5% on that and 95% on what else she could be doing with her hands.)

The zipper is interesting but closely investigating it can wait for later. She's very suggestible, you could say, and needs operate it only the once.

He was previously doing a really good job with her hair but it's suddenly gotten very hard to concentrate on that.

That's okay, her standards for partner generosity are distressingly low and she's having a lovely time. Does he make fun noises?

He's been moving in a smooth gradation from heavy breathing to vocalizations. His breath-rate keeps moving around, vaguely following her own tempo.

Oh she has really good breath control. She's a singer. But it has other applications. Would he like a demonstration?

He would love that thank you

Yay!!

Yay~

Is he done after that? She is vaguely aware that Elves aren't and Maiar definitely aren't either, but orcs usually are and she is not sure which one he is more like.

Well wanting anything else would require him to have thoughts, and he doesn't have those right now, so.

Wow that's very quiet. Did she break him.

He is comfy is what he is. This is the state known as nirvana.

...He was trying for something. And partway through he got distracted... what was it...

Does it help him remember if she nudges her head against his hand?

...You're right, that's what it was. He idly runs his fingers through her hair.

"I should go in with a plan next time," he says thoughtfully.

"Hmmmmmmmmmmmm if you say so," she croons, snuggling up.

"I usually have a goal I'm trying to achieve when I walk in, and then I pay attention to... to metrics, and responses, and... you know, if you had been my patient this would have been highly unprofessional, I didn't write anything down and then I stopped paying attention entirely and forgot it all. This is why you're supposed to wait to have sex until after there's nothing left to chart." There is nobody else in the world with this model of professional conduct and it's a faintly ridiculous one but if you don't hold yourself to some kind of standard then what good are you. (He doesn't actually seem distressed about any of this. Closer to amused. She isn't actually his patient, even if he does want to experiment with her.)

(Speaking of experimenting. What if he just keeps petting her hair.)

If he keeps petting her hair she will continue to be snuggly and giggly and pleased and squirmy! "I've never tried being a patient... mmmmmmm..."

"Do you have something like that where you're from?" Lovely girl. Pet pet pet.

He mentally wanders through what he means here. It's nonstandard usage, usually a patient is someone who's sick or injured or so on (vague concept of medical treatment). What he does is more elective. In another industry he'd instead say client but in this one a client is a separate person in the process, the people he treats aren't the ones who make decisions about that treatment.

When he meets them they're generally somewhere on the scale from confused or stressed to loudly struggling. Usually he can fix that pretty quickly, but it's unpleasant and inefficient and he's been thinking about how to speed that up. Once they're cooperative he can start testing things (this is where the electrodes come in) and making more significant changes, which is the fun part. He's relatively new so he mostly gets the standard wireheading cases: no higher thought, no fear, no stress, submissive and suggestible and eager to please, few to no memories of their prior life. (Sex isn't standard procedure but it usually happens deep into that last part.) He's had two more complicated ones so far and he liked them, he's hoping to get more. They also make him nervous, though, they're so easy to get wrong and it's possible nobody would notice and any problems he introduced would never get fixed.

He's excited to get more practice with customization in a lower stakes environment. And with people who want to be there, even.

"Oh, I guess a little bit. I know a couple of magic songs? But they don't really last, or, not the ones that poke people's minds instead of doing healing or something... I guess the people back home do all that kind of thing with oaths."

"Oaths?" His main association is the Hippocratic, which doesn't make much sense here. 

"Huh! You don't have them, I guess."

"We don't have anything magic that I know of. I don't have very high clearance, though." She can do magic, then? Cool.

"Yeah I can do magic. I might sing the baby to sleep sometimes and if you don't cover your ears you will go to sleep too."

"If it's a reasonable sleep hour I might even appreciate it!"

He has things to unpack and he'd like some food and they probably have places to be but he doesn't want to get up and pursue his goals, he wants to give his roommate headscritches.

They're goooooood headscritches.

He's going to try a more methodical approach this time, since he is for the time being distraction-free.

...Not necessarily a slower one.

Her haircut is... "eclectic" would be polite, it's got some very short parts and some bits that are past her shoulders. The latter get pleaseder noises, but she will still definitely react to the former being scritched, breath catching and some involuntary twitching.

(An undercut or a fade would be a nicer-looking way to achieve that effect, if she wants to keep it at all. You can go through a decent number of hairstyles in a year.) He tries out different ways of playing with the longer bits, twirling and yanking and running his fingers through.

Fingers run through is definitely her favorite; twirling is also pretty good; yanking gets a response more like handling the short parts.

She can have several more variations on gentle ways to play with her hair. In general he's going to keep picking the nicer option until he finds a local maximum.

Yaaaaay what a nice boy snuggly naked orf squirms for the nice boy.

Someday he'll be the kind of person who immediately gets pulled back into a sex haze by squirmy naked girls and he'll enjoy being that person quite a lot but it is in many ways convenient that he currently has a hard-to-circumvent cooldown. It gives him the upper hand.

If he keeps her at that maximum long enough will it push her over the edge?

It does not look like it is very likely to do that but she's not complaining! If he would really like to accomplish this she can move her leg out of the way?

Alas, the exotic hair thing has its limits after all.

Well, he also knows a few more traditional approaches. They can find out together if these straightforwardly transfer to orfs. (Leg should move, yes, there we go.)

Yes, the transformation to orfs is very straightforward in this regard.

Cultural exchange is a truly beautiful thing.

It is! They have learned so much today.

Snuggle.

Snuggle.

At some point: "I think you were going to try clothes on."

"Yeah, that sounds familiar." She nuzzles his shoulder, gets up, puts the gray dress back on its hanger with some trial and error, and models a green-and-white one.

Green looks nice on her! Maybe less so white, he might need more examples to tell.

He might as well unpack his suitcase now, he is capable of multitasking. Laptop goes on desk, headphones go also on desk.

A blue one with shiny satin trim! An amber-golden one!

The blue one goes well with her hair, kinda gives her snow queen vibes. The amber-golden one is very elegant. His own clothes start disappearing into drawers. (They are basically like the ones he has on but in different colors.)

"Oooh, snow. I've never seen snow, do you think it might snow here?" Silk dress with big sleeves and a sash, a watercolor-esque painting on it in blue and green and pink!

The sleeves are too big but the painting is excellent! More clothing should double as artwork, it's always delightful. "We'll be here a full year, right? If the neighborhoods are following the seasons at all it's bound to snow somewhere."

"Maybe there will also be RAIN." Off with the painting. On with a robe-dress in red-purple brocade.

"If there's weather at all there will definitely be lots of rain, in my experience. --Is that a kimono?" This is kind of a silly thing to find surprising in a fantasy wardrobe. "That's really cool-looking embroidery." 

"I don't know, maybe! These clothes look Elfy to me, but maybe by coincidence they have some of the same dresses." She spins. Brocade isn't very spinny but she seems satisfied anyway.

"Are you an Elf? Possibly I should have asked that" before having amazing impulse-sex "when we met." He doesn't seem embarrassed.

"No, I'm an orf. My birth parents were Elves and my baby's an orc, I'm in between."

"How does that happen?"

"If you get a pregnant Elf and torture her a lot you get a baby that's not quite an Elf and then if you torture them too they will stay not quite an Elf and can have orc kids."

"I'm sorry that happened to you," he says, which narrowly beats out several other inanities like "torture is really bad" and "did they have a good reason to make orcs this way" and "it's pretty cool how well-adjusted you are" because the only thing he's really sure of about her backstory is that she's excited to be out of it. 

"Well if I'd turned into an Elf they'd've probably killed me. Or tortured me a lot more but only after it was too late for it to work maybe."

"Do they have... objections to Elves?" 

"Oh yeah big time."

"It seems good that you became an orf instead, then?" This is a weird conversational path. He's mostly used to discussing traumatic(?) experiences in contexts where the right next move involves a lot of artificially-induced oxytocin, and that doesn't seem indicated here.

"Yeah. Elves seem to like being Elves but it really would not have worked out with my adoptive family at all if I was one."