"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..."

"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'."

"It's not kinky. And I'm very unsure how much detail you want me to go into here."

"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."

"It is a bit of a hassle, imagining myself as a dom, but it is how it is. Ideally you're sufficiently invested in making the other person happy to take their suggestions, or you know them well enough to suggest appropriate things."

"I mean, we have versions of that. It's just not all... timid."

He shrugs. "Unless one of us wants a practical demonstration I think we'll have to keep having trouble picturing the other's thing. I want to talk about magic. One gets magic, is the mechanism for getting it known?"

"Mechanism, not as such, circumstances, yes. Total lunar eclipse - anywhere in the world - closest to your twelfth birthday, you maybe get magic. One kind or the other, not both. And then you can't control it and everybody starves their kids for a couple days leading up to the relevant eclipse because that helps keep it limited and non-fatal, and precogs catch the most dramatic accidents. If you don't want to go anywhere with your magic, you get locked down by a psion who learned to do that and then your magic can't do anything and you lead a normal life, unless you get unlocked later. If you want to be a mage or a psion, you go to virtuality, also run by psions - mages have all kinds of career options too but they aren't involved in any of the critical infrastructure steps here. We hang out in a simulated setting that manages via psionic trickery to convince our magic - either sort - that that's where the world is, so we can't mindwipe anybody or nuke a city block or whatever flailing around. Takes two years, average, to get out of virtuality, if you do - some people drop out and get locked down instead. Every now and then they starve us a couple days, wake us up, get us some exercise. And when a psion deems us not a danger out we pop, usually with a small trick or two - I learned to talk to my twin, in virtuality, and lucid dreaming, lots of psions pick up lucid dreaming because it's easy. And we start working on whatever else interests us in earnest."

"Yeah, before that you'd wander around in the wilderness not eating very much for a couple years, it sucked. People differ on whether you're 'born with' magic or not, but it doesn't seem to run in families at all, it looks really statistically random."

"There's no trend by sex or role either in my world. Why's there so much sex-linked magic?"

"Nobody knows. We have stereotypes of behavior and style and psychology based on sex rather than role, since we don't do roles. One common theory is that magic likes thematically fitting things, certain kinds of magic fit 'female' and don't fit 'male' so that's how it gets stuck. But the data doesn't support it in my opinion."

"I mean, we have gender, as a thing, but if you're loading all the role baggage onto it too, wow, talk about concepts straining under their load. Even back when practically everybody instead of fringe fundamentalists thought that subs were girls and doms were guys they were still separate ideas."

"Women tending to be subby used to be a thing for us, too, though we didn't call it that. Sub-and-dom and the baggage thereof is just not a thing. I suspect if your world had wizardry it would tend to go to doms because wizardry tends to thematically imply commanding the world to behave and witchcraft tends to imply working with it or convincing it. These things are mysterious and more the purview of a Philosophy of Dimensionality major than a Gen Thaumo one."

"Fair enough. The stereotypes reflect what seems to be an actual statistical imbalance, but it's only sixty-thirty, extras are switches."

"I'm curious to see if you can operate, or learn to operate, psionically powered interfaces. They're ostensibly very easy for anyone with mental abilities to use, but I wouldn't know because I can only pretend to be psionic using a different interface."