A man steps into a bar and looks around. "Huh, nobody told me they installed a break room here."
With Slayer Juliet.
With Kappa's Dagna.
With Eclipse!Bell.
The girl takes a nickel out of her pocket, leans out the door, throws it, shuts the door before it hits the ground, waits a moment, and opens it to watch it clatter.
"Okay... So are you speaking English or is that the translation aura?"
"I'm speaking English. It's common in the set of connected worlds I know. Lots of worlds speak it already, even before we first contact them. A sort of multiversal standard, and one of the great mysteries of world theory."
"Yes. I work tech support for the principle provider of transit between them, even. Multiversal Thaumics Unlimited, senior tech support, Communication and Transport divisions, at your service. D'you have any magic? Personally, I find magic the most fascinating part of a new world."
"Yeah, I'm a psion. Yours must work differently or you wouldn't be in communication and transport."
"Much of it is using magical tools on other magical tools. You don't need to know how to make concrete to be a construction worker. You do need to have almost a decade of thaumaturgy education to get up to anything useful with dynamically targeted transfer functions. Psion, eh? D'you mind testing my shields? I designed them myself, they use elements of our brand of psionics, elementalism, vegamancy, and glamour. I rarely get a chance to throw something completely new at them."
"I'm not that kinda psion. And I'm sixteen, even that kinda psion at my age would barely be able to poke you. What's vegamancy?"
"I'm trying not to make official contact with anyone unless they really seriously need it, it's a huge headache, and I have enough work already, and MTU's contact teams have decades of backlog."
"Aha. Vegamancy on any significant scale is very expensive, and being precognitive yourself is supposed to be a massive help in learning it. Your versions of psions can do precognition? More varied than the word led me to believe. Now I'm curious what else you can do."
"Psions do all the things that don't physically affect things other than brains and psionic tech, and mages do all the things that do. I can talk to my twin brother - although not from here, seems like - and I'm working on eidetic memory and then I'm going to pick up precog to pay the bills while I learn more. My sub's a mage and she can shapeshift genders and a few other minor things and some self-healing; she's working on healing in general with a view to eventual immortality."
"Fully general, but you have to learn it. Interesting. What's a sub, some sort of assistant?"
"Uh, if that's what you do with your assistants, but sounds like a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen to me."
"...This is a bar between worlds. Cultural differences have struck again. I offended someone by attempting to shake their hand, earlier. I have never heard of a sub outside of likely irrelevant technical vocabulary."
"She's my sub, I'm her dom? There's kissing? She kneels next to me at mealtimes and I feed her if the food's more like toast and less like clam chowder?"
He suddenly looks mildly uncomfortable. "Dom-sub is the normal state- The sort of relationship you're describing ranges from from 'uncommon, vaguely taboo' to 'persecuted against or banned' on worlds I've lived on. In two different ways actually, that you're both women and the fact that one of you is submissive to the other."
"She shapeshifts, I just saw her as a girl last. And she's a switch, actually, not a total sub, but I'm all dom, so. Um, how do you persecute or ban romance in general, or are you just saying everybody else is really really kinky...? Wait, do you not even have a role? I wasn't sure how to read you but I assumed you had one..."
"Well. We don't ban romance. If by 'role' you mean choosing one or the other, not really. I could probably pick if I were forced to. And being a dom or a sub is really kinky to us. Not doing that, being equals or close to it, is normal, and is considered standard, average, everyday romance."
"I mean, switch/switch relationships tend to wind up acting like equals sort of as an average... I'm just not sure what kinky nondynamic people, you know, do. Not that I'm judging, I mean, my brother's nondynamic... buuuut he's asexual too so the answer is 'nothing, he does nothing'."
"Feel free not to, I'm just expressing my bewilderment. But it's suuuuper kinky in my own idiom."
"Eh. There's kissing, the obvious-to-me escalations from there... You tell each other to do something, sometimes, but the meaning is more like a suggestion than an order. 'I think you should...' 'Nah, how about this instead...' 'I want you to...' 'Sure but my turn next...'. That sort of thing."
"Wow, that sounds like kind of an enormous hassle. Then again I don't really know how subs tick either, I guess I could file it under that."