The angel is nodding along. "Yes, I think that works very well as a backstory and is unlikely to meet with any objections in implementation."

"Good."

He nods again, sharply.

"The next step is, then, the threat. There are other states and peoples that exist, out in space; it is a large galaxy, but the Star Kingdom of Villarosa is mightiest of all those that, and most of those are confined to nomadic bases or single systems."

And he continues to pace.

"The Black Fleets are not known. They are never observed to engage in diplomacy, or send signals, or send or accept surrenders, they do not attack planets except to disable anti-orbital, they target only space-based systems and shops and blockade worlds, leaving them trapped and isolated. The first known fleet is believed to have arrived more than two hundred years ago, traveling along hyperspace pathways thought impenetrable, consisting of ships tremendously more powerful than Villarosa possessed - but few ships. There was a desperate battle, they were defeated, they were reverse-engineered, and better ships were created, in case the threat ever appeared again. It appeared sixty years after that, with fleets less comparatively advanced but that Villarosa barely defeated."

Turn - 

"Thirty years after that, and fifteen years before the present, the last war took place; multiple Black Fleets attacked different locations simultaneously, and there were many desperate battles and much heroism as the lords of Villarosa fought to oppose it; the King having died in the invasion before that, the Queen fought - and perished - leading the fleet from her flagship. The tide was nonetheless turned by the heroic action of her ship; when the queen died, the young man who took charge, revitalized the ship, captained it to battle with only a handful of crew remaining and died winning the victory was posthumously ennobled - and his family with him - for this action, in spite of his lack of psychic powers. The young princess was betrothed to the sole member of the crew who survived, an exceptionally gifted young officer - human, noble, in possession of his own powers if not so great - who has had to live with his own scars from the battle ever since. During the war, a number of star systems that had been occupied by the Black Fleet were forced to manage their own affairs, and obtained a taste for independence. They were reluctant to have the fleets return, and many are now independent or 'autonomous', having built up their own forces to oppose the resumption of royal rule. So Villarosa stands on the edge of catastrophe - more advanced in science than ever before, reduced in size, with much of the older generation dead and a new hand on the throne."

And about -

"We are now on schedule for another wave. Both royal children, both of their betrothed, and a number of other interesting individuals - the son and daughter of the kingdom's most important noble, the only daughter of the hero who won the war, a handful of common men and women rushed into the edge of the nobility to make up for the war's dreadful losses - are now on the rebuilt flagship, a hybrid battleship/carrier built strongly but of the last generation, now in use as a training ship, so that they can get the experience they require before the worst comes. Everyone hopes the crisis will not occur, but the royal family have seen that another attack is coming, and that this one ship may be the key to the entire war."

"Any questions, yet?"

"Not yet," she says thoughtfully. She has accumulated several pages of notes by this point. "It's certainly the bones of an interesting story."

Right. More setting comments! The population is slowly growing and nowhere near capacity; trade between worlds is expensive, since populations are tremendously huge and ships can be expensive, and so is largely in luxuries and a small number of very important goods. Planets blockaded by the Black Fleets experienced economic troubles and had to scramble for solutions but succeeded in finding them, with their lifespans not significantly decreasing under occupation. "This is, of course," he says drily, "why so many of them seceded; they could manage without the royal government, did, and saw no reason to resume paying taxes afterwards. They are not especially happy with the - de facto - answer of 'the Royal Fleet.'"

Ships are constructed in orbit, at specific starbase-factories, with most of the metals used to make them coming from asteroid mining. Civilian ships are usually sponsored by major merchant corporations that can muster the resources to build them; military ships by the great lords and the Crown, with the largest fleet by far belonging to the Crown. The actual work is largely carried out by skilled and talented craftsmen, shipbuilding being considered the most prestigious non-noble career. 

FTL consists of rare stable paths between systems through 'hyperspace', which are quite small on astronomical scales though huge compared to, say, a person; lanes are of varying stability/ease of navigation, anything leaving the lanes is lost forever (a fatal process), and the Black Fleet's ability to navigate difficult unstable lines is only now being equaled. Technology to stabilize and carve new lanes is possible by the laws of physics but at least a hundred years to prototyping, and probably much slower at the speed Villarosa is progressing at. Ships traveling on these hyperspace lanes may encounter each other unexpectedly, triggering battles if the ships are hostile, but since this environment is extremely unsafe as many battles take place in systems as outside it. Only ships with the required large and expensive piece of equipment can enter or leave (or survive) hyperspace; hence the importance of carriers, which can secure escorts from the dangers of the travel method. Leaving hyperspace can put you in a fairly wide area outside the gate, somewhat unpredictably, limiting the ability of the attacker to simply mine a known exit.

Full-scale warfare on the ground essentially never occurs; orbital bombardments would defeat any ground-based threat but are not used because there is a clear consensus that if you would be orbitally bombarded you instead surrender. When there's ground-based fighting it's either duels between nobles (in which case the stronger psychic almost always wins) or attempted assassinations or bombings, or troops taking control of territory opposed by guerillas who didn't obey the surrender notice. 

The legal system varies depending on the individual region - most planets take care of their own affairs, and their ground-level legal systems do not particularly impact the adventures of spaceborne aristocrats or aristocrats-to-be, but all nobles have the right to appeal to their liege-lords for crimes committed by them or against them, and, ultimately, to the monarchs (who may decline to hear the appeal, but who always have the right to). Noble courts go by traditional methods of determining the truth that are sometimes just copying what local systems are doing, which can work well, and sometimes frank exercises in aristocratic power to decide the "right" answer, ie the one more favorable to the aristocrat; they sometimes use trial by combat to provide a pretense of fairness in what the judge who chose the method knows perfectly well will be the execution of a weaker claimant who dared to challenge the nobility. "In the interests of keeping the ineffable Will of the Multiverse happy," he says drily, (and to let him import his preexisting skills) "symbolic, psychic-assisted swordfighting is common as a mode of duels, since you can channel your psychic powers through a sword and cannot thorough a rifle."

(Sandor is well aware of what the nobility tropes in Roses of Villarosa are supposed to look like, and is prepared to play to them.)

The most common ground-level options tends to vaguely resemble Anglo-American jury trial systems, since this works fairly well, but there's a wide variety between worlds and between jurisdictions on individual worlds.

Advanced technology in common use does not include any mind-reading or (at all reliable) truth-detection machines, but does include cameras. There are no robots smaller than medium-sized birds, and miniaturizing them further is quite difficult; artificial intelligence is tremendously expensive and there is a reasonable expectation that it will stay this way forever; people-quality AIs require huge amounts of money to construct, and cannot easily copy themselves, and although manual-labor machines you could call robots exist, the line between those and any other manufacturing technology is not very sharp.

There are system-wide internets and ship-related internets, and near-total internet anonymity; the easiest way to discover someone's online identity is to get video evidence of them and their computer screen together. This does not work very well on psychics, who can interface with the computer without touching a keyboard or looking at a screen that anyone else can see.

Scientific progress on ordinary planets is usually limited to commercial uses, which includes medical technology or healing drugs for sale; science is also sponsored by monarchs or nobles for their specific ends, most of which are military - specifically, the construction of more advanced ships less expensively. There is very little research into non-applied science or social science except insofar as governments think it serves their purposes.

(So far no equivalent of heroin has been invented and the entire line of research that is dangerous addictive drugs is correctly considered a dead end. Even their painkillers are nonaddictive.)

She notes all this down, then mentions, "It's possible, though unlikely, that the lack of addictive drugs will be revised to add drama. It seems to me that the premise contains plenty of drama already, but I'm not in charge of any creative teams."

"I would have thought we had a great deal, yes," the Tyrant says drily. "Considering psychic duels, spaceship battles, swordfights, and a corrupt aristocracy engaging in complicated political maneuverings." He doesn't think ways of hiding from the world add any drama at all, but then he's never wanted to hide.

Still, if there's insufficient drama, he can go on about the major corporations whose true resource that they are founded on is noble access; about the difficulties that can be caused by the fact that the engagements are made by parents for political advantage rather than the children for love, the brave explorers searching for hyperspace pathways to new systems, and all the other fascinating elements of a science-fiction setting that doesn't need to worry about a budget or a plausible historical-development pathway.

(He'll also toss in that it's a universe where total mass+energy is increasing, and so entropy isn't an issue and the universe is expected to continue existing forever, because why not?)

"Oh, that's an element that the more optimistic members of the worldbuilding team will love," says the angel with a slight but genuine smile. "Immortal universes are a certain sort of person's favourite thing to build."

"Do they have other preferences? I'm happy to assist them, where practical."

"Often hard to guess in advance what a particular team will favour, but the optimistic contingent also enjoys making magic grow in capability or availability over time," she offers.

"Already present," he says, amused, "since the fraction of the populace with psychic abilities is increasing thanks to reproductive differentials, but it could be increasing more. I think there are going to be important developments in a few centuries regarding the development of procedures, chemical or otherwise, that can trigger psychic powers in individuals born without them, as well as - eventually - devices that can empower the abilities of those who already possess them. Anything else?"

"I suppose given reincarnation, increasing the proportion of people born with magical power does increase availability, but it's not what 'increase availability' usually means," she says wryly. "Anyway, hmm, most of the other suggestions I could make on that score are... more speculative? There are all sorts of things that specific worldbuilders might get excited about while other ones wouldn't care. I suppose, looking at the picture you've painted so far, the team you're likely to get is going to be optimistic, interested in the science fiction aesthetic, interested in politics... you could entice a more creative team into the job by providing more opportunities to combine magic and technology in interesting ways... you could make whoever's designing the biospheres happy by making interesting suggestions about animals with psychic powers... oh, the planetary design subcommittees always like to be included, and they're happy with just about any notes on planetary design that aren't planet-wide biomes, though I've also seen someone sit down and produce a brilliant justification for planet-wide biomes that sent their planetary design people into fits of delighted giggles... I shouldn't tell you what it was, it's so famous by now they'd recognize it instantly."

"Overall my objective is less to get an extremely creative team than it is one that considers me their collaborator rather than their taskmaster," he says. But Sure, he's happy to talk about planetary designs! He's curious just what inhabited tidally-locked-to-their-planet moons the size of worlds would look like, and how about a ring of habitable moons with sub-Earth gravity in orbit around a world at fixed speeds so that it takes much less propulsion to get from one to the other. How about a world that ended up with limited heat output from the sun and so deliberately set up high levels of greenhouse gases to trap all the heat they generated (and got from their planet), that would have a very narrow temperature range across the entire surface but a wide variety of biomes and he bets they could get solar output levels that were plausible to produce it. He also thinks that the idea of settlements deep underwater to protect from planetary bombardment is clever, maybe on one of the newly-independent worlds?

He also thinks that the idea of prey animals with psychic senses to detect strong emotion (so they can run away from it), which were then bred into a distinct subspecies that can detect hostile intent but not at all reliably, would be interesting, and similarly that you could do some interesting things with telekinetic animals moving themselves as a means of getting implausible weight/speed combinations of animals on land or on the air. He'd prefer to keep psychic animals rare, though, and to avoid giving them any of the rarer powers such as compulsions as much as possible - he'd like to keep those unusual, at least for the moment...

She nods along to all of this and takes copious notes, affirming as they go that these are indeed the sort of interesting details that will endear him to his worldbuilders.

Good. He also has notes on spread of species from different worlds (he thinks there's a very small number of initial seed worlds that evolved life and it was transplanted elsewhere by spaceship, often slower-than-light before the Elves and their faster travel arrived), evolution, and adaptation, and interesting ways to contrast plants and animals the elves brought with them and ones they found when they arrived. (He also has the Giant List of Everyone He's Bringing In with him, which is not, quite, everyone he's ever met.)

It's very nice and distracting and means he doesn't have to pay attention to the fact that he's going to be reborn as a girl, forced into love with someone and then have to save the world while fighting Fate or be enslaved for six centuries.

They have, approximately, all the time in the world; she's not going to be the first to suggest they get back to the business of finalizing his mechanical choices, not unless he starts to show clear signs of deterioration.

But, alas, all good things must come to an end, and the Tyrant must eventually stop petty worldbuilding and move on to more important topics, like the rest of the supporting cast!

"The Admirer is the Noble Prodigy's younger brother, also gifted - but not as gifted, also capable - but not as capable - who has the misfortune of falling desperately in love with his brother's betrothed. As they are both human, he has some doomed hope that she will take both of them if he can help her enough, but it is... rather unlikely, if not literally completely impossible. He takes a dislike to the heroine because she seems not to get on with his beloved, and has enough charm and popularity amongst the class to cause significant difficulties for her."

He pauses.

"The Heroine. Clever, plucky, charming; new to her psychic powers, which were late to awake, she learns quickly but does not start knowing a great deal. She's loyal to her conscience and her father's legacy and the Kingdom, and she has trouble whenever these conflict, too inclined to take the higher and harder path as a heroine must whatever that may be, something she gets over little and with great difficulty. Her main weakness is pure power; lacking her rival's sheer strength and ancient tutors, she relies on swift learning and clever plans." Except, of course, that I'm cleverer. "Her main strengths are that she is utterly fearless and determined, prepared to push and fight for what she values however great the odds," the Tyrant prefers to fight people who will fight back, "an exceptionally gifted warrior, pilot, and captain," let's put her specialties where they won't cause him problems, "and also basically competent, which surprisingly few people I have met are." And they will then stack as much intelligence and charisma on top of this framework as they consider necessary.

"Will this serve?"

"Yes, I think it will do nicely," she says. "Though do note that it's likely they will change at least a few minor details about the Heroine, just to avoid the issue of having you go into the story already knowing everything about her."

"Unfortunate but understandable," he says. (He would like to go into the story already knowing everything about her.)

The Heroine's Mentor. "She's an experienced veteran who is one of the senior staff; calm, reasonable, intellectual; she has a great many bad experiences with defying authority when she was younger, which ended in her-caused disasters, and so is careful to respect the chain of command. She was friends with the Heroine's father, and intends to keep her safe, but is somewhat hampered in just how extreme measures she can take, both to investigate incidents and resolve them, by her need - personal as much as legal - to stick to procedure." And if Minerva lands there, well, he has no objections. He's beaten her before; she's predictable enough.

"What is there that I have missed?" Is it just the Dark Secret?

She consults her notes. The clipboard has grown to be rather a brick at this point, with new pages appearing at need. "You haven't specified your Dark Secret, which of course you're not obliged to but I imagine you have something in mind."

"Oh, yes."

So he explains it.

The angel smiles.

"In that case, I think you're all set!"

She pulls the enormous stack of notes off her clipboard, neatens it by tapping it on the desk, and somehow in the process transmutes it into a very large spiral-bound notebook; then she readjusts the form remaining on the clipboard, tucks a pen into the clip, and passes all of the above across the desk. "Feel free to look over everything and sign the form when you're ready to finalize," she says. "It's been very nice working with you!"

He rereads it all, carefully, intently, to make sure he understands. He goes over his mistakes, and corrects a few minor details.

"You as well," he says, and, hands held from shaking by main force, signs.

"Good luck!" says the angel. "I hope you find happiness!"

The cozy little office winks out like a shuttered lantern.