"Miscellaneous self-injury. Standard issue agony beam. A certain incantation that isn't 'pants', if you're there now."
"I could be persuaded." This section of her village is stylized rope bridges between treehouses and towers. She comes to a stop inside one of the treehouses.
It does! Enormous beanbaglike poufs. Bella flops into one and holds out her arms invitingly.
Snuggly hugflops. "Comes in about a thousand flavors because it was designed for some folks rather attached to their variety," she says. "Got a preference?"
It's kind of weird selecting a type of pain rather than just a nice clean integer, but Aurora contemplates her options and goes with depressurization in a vacuum. Since she's not sure if he even needs air pressure to be comfy, this should be novel. She starts him up at one triangle. "How's that?"
Nudge-nudge-nudge. Ten triangles. "I'm going to be very timid about moving this unless I get actual numbers," she says. "I don't want to spook you."
Bella carries on nudging up in piecemeal increments of ten when prompted and snuggling her boyfriend.
Until, eventually, he takes a mana-coloured star out of his coin sorter and starts playing with it.
"Is that how much stars are?" he muses. "It doesn't seem like a lot."
"Yeah, stars are everything from ten thousand to just shy of a hundred thousand," says Bella. "It doesn't seem like a lot? Wow."
"It's nice," he says dreamily, putting the coin away and wrapping his arms around her again. "I like it. But it's, you know, middle of the road."
"It should not come as a surprise to me that Elspeth wasn't kidding when she judged the Joker Trauma Olympics, should it."