[Yeah, exactly. How do you get started on that here?]

"Good question. Though I can guess that speaking English is step one." She looks it up. "Looks like you want an EMT certificate early in the process."

[Anything other than learning English that I should do about that right now or should I just keep trying to learn English now?]

"If you need to be working on two things at once to have something to switch to when you're sick of English I could try to come up with something but if you can stand it I think frontloading English as much as possible is the way to go here."

He tries to learn English.

After some number of days of this he asks what the polite way to increase the amount of torture in the world for the sake of the Midnight Lord is.

"...I think people pretty much have the amount of it they want in their lives."

[I could have more torture in my life but I'm concerned about making a mess in your home and the possibility that it'll get in the way of looking like a dom.]

"I appreciate that and it would definitely throw off your presentation. I guess you could be trying to matchmake people, though I don't know you to have any advantages at it."

[Seems hard to do without being able to talk to them.]

"Exactly. You'd need to meet people, or learn to code and do a website about it or something, or have enough of the language to teach a class in safe decorative scarification or whatever."

[At home I would definitely not know enough to teach a class about that but maybe I'm an expert by local standards.]

"Well, possible you qualify as 'expert' but there's also the alternative, 'accustomed to hideously lax safety standards'."

[I'm from the ass end of nowhere, we couldn't afford lax safety standards because we only had a cleric on circuit.]

"That... implies things about where you were on the safety standard spectrum considered within the range of possibilities accepted in your society. Not necessarily much about where that is relative to the United States."

[I guess it's possible the entire country has worse safety standards than anywhere here.]

"I assume you don't have any readily quotable statistics to compare straight across?"

[I don't think so? Uh... I guess if you never have problems, then I'm used to worse safety standards?]

"I think there are sometimes hospitalizations but that most people will not know anyone who went to the hospital that way, and the overwhelming majority of hospital visits associated with taking classes in recreational injury are recovered from completely and nonmagically. A death originating from a class like that would be news, millions of people would hear about it and consider it notable."

[...I don't know of anyone having gone to a hospital but I don't think that's why. I think - it depends on what you mean by "recover completely"? I knew a guy who lost feeling in the tips of his tongue after getting it split but I only know one person who had that happen and everyone gets their tongue split. But maybe you wouldn't count having a forked tongue as completely recovered - it's definitely not an accident, though.]

"Well, here that wouldn't be a class, that'd happen in a hospital in the first place or at least, like, a piercing shop. Classes are like. How to cane people without fucking up their kidneys or their tailbones or whatever. Fancy rope nonsense. I don't know."

[I'm okay at that.]

"... again I don't know your standard of okayness at that."

[I've beaten someone who didn't even end up with scars and I did hurt them. But at home nobody would go to me for advice about it.]

"Not leaving people with scars is the standard expectation unless you negotiate something else here. It's not an accomplishment, it's just not fucking up. That's what people take classes for before they try it in an actual scene."

[So, it's just okay here too.]