"My alts or theirs?"

"Theirs."

"See, I feel like I'm able to extrapolate quite a lot about how the benevolent Empress and I would get along if we met, but I could be wrong about that, let alone about whether it's remotely normal if accurate."

"We'll check whether we can scrounge one up for you to have a chat with, shall we?"  He snaps his fingers in signal to the room.

"Again, mine or somebody else's."

"Yours, this time, for calibration.  Many people are pretty dissimilar from some of their alts, but it would be good to know whether you thought it might ever be sufficient."

"I would be delighted to meet one of my alts; it would help a lot if they are themself background aware of alts existing and can be expected to have more than wild fabrications on how that works."

"I know you would; I'll see what I can do.  Care to elaborate on the sexuality-adjusting standards?  Does it matter to you if we're making them bisexual instead, if we're expanding their gender-based attraction in a direction with less baggage than ones conversion therapy was typically used for, if we're narrowing it instead, if we're decreasing their inclination toward polyamory, if we're adjusting it along lines that are not so broad as gender..."

"Making them strictly more - I'm not coming up with a better word than 'permissive' but it doesn't have the right connotations - is better than doing anything that would, like, replace or recontextualize their past attraction, but still sketch. I have no idea what the cultures you're drawing from look like, baggage-wise, the tradition on my planet of attempted conversion therapy informs but does not constrain my outlook here. I... don't have a cached opinion on how strongly exactly I feel about leaving people's inclinations to polyamory alone... but the 'it's worse if it replaces or recontextualizes something that has actually come up for the person in the past' thing remains, like, if you're kidnapping people with three girlfriends that's worse both because they're being kidnapped away from more preexisting attachments and because they will be less able to cleanly reintegrate therewith after we all go home. If you have people who... dislike my eye color, or who are... taller than me and really do not want to date people shorter than them, or something... that seems probably less sensitive than either the gender or the polyamory thing but I reiterate that I really do not like any of what is going on here besides the part where I am not dead."

"It may reassure you to know that for narrative reasons we don't ever break up existing relationships to bring people on the show.  Though sometimes people have left their partners and signed up when they saw the bacheloret; that happened even back when we were constrained to one planet."

"Can you put out a PSA that I find that really unattractive."

"Absolutely.  How do you feel about personalities constructed from the ground up without altering any existing person?"

"That's the sort of thing I would probably trust a really careful non-sketchy person with doing!"

"If one had already been created, would you object to her being on your season?"

"This seems like it probably has weird incentive implications but I am probably not in a good enough negotiating position to play hardball about those so I guess y'all can go for it."

"Anything else you feel like mentioning at this time that you find unattractive?"

"Uh, contestants should be psychologically of age, I can get over it if your created person was created last June as long as she doesn't act like it. Full-throated naturally-occurring defense of this operation is disqualifying. I assume you pick generally telegenic people and I don't think I have weird appearance preferences particularly..."

"Upper limit on age?"  But he sounds weirdly like he's telling a joke.

"...not inherently?"

"Got it."

- He puts a hand to the side of his head as if to touch an earpiece, but there's not one visible there.  "Oh, they found an alt for you to consult with."

"That was either fast or agonizingly slow, I'm not sure what dilation factor they're working with here."

"Fast, I think."  He looks to the hallway Cam came out of.

She looks about thirteen and malnourished and not particularly well-dressed, but she does pretty strongly resemble Renée apart from how she's making Cam's facial expressions! "Hi! I'm Shell Bell."

"It rhymes," he says, nonplussed. "I'm Cam."

"Shells count as currency in this interdimensional bar that sometimes lets me into it so I act weird and superstitious about leaving huge bags of shells near any door I regularly use and it stuck. This is actually the first time I've met one of my alts but I've been recognized before, in the bar."