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 -"