"Can you talk about what the curse does?"

"...There's things I can't do, or think, or feel. It's hard to explain the details because some of them I can't think about in the right way to talk about them. It was—I did something. A crime. Several crimes, I guess. And it upset a Stonestrider—those are the ones that do curses—and she did this, and now I can't do any of the things that upset her, or any of a lot of other things, or want to do them, or try to do them, or decide to do them, or think of myself as the sort of thing that could do them. And I can't get angry. Or have sex. I guess I could have sex but it wouldn't be much fun."

"...That's horrifying."

"Yeah," he agrees, with a not particularly happy smile.

"...I don't know how our magic systems will interact but it is at least plausible that true love magic would break it."

"Love magic?"

"True love is... basically the most powerful magical thing. If you genuinely love someone, and you're near someone, and you desperately desperately want something to happen to protect them, it will happen. --It also has to be monogamous and heterosexual, sorry about that."

"That sounds, uh, totally useless to me? Unless I'm misunderstanding something."

"Well, if someone monogamously and heterosexually loves you and is physically near you and really really wants the curse to break, it'll break."

"That... sounds unlikely to happen."

Shrug. "I just met you. I have no idea how likely it is to happen. --We can try to get Fairy Godmother to bibbidi-bobbidi-boo you if you want."

"Given what happened the only other time I've seen her do magic..."

"She's usually more reliable than that!"

"Still. —I just don't think 'here, we found an otherworldly vagabond who's missing some emotions and can't explain which ones, do you want to date him so he can get them back' is going to excite very many girls. Maybe your girls are different."

"Oh, you'll be terribly brooding and mysterious and then they get to break a curse, that's very exciting."

"Really?"

"Having a dramatic and mysterious and slightly bad reputation is how I get all my dates."

"What slightly bad thing did you do?"

"Well, the reason I have my bad reputation is that I've fucked men, and women who were married to someone else at the time, and the occasional virgin."

"Sounds like you lead an exciting life."

"I try! --The first two are crimes, although Ben is ratcheting back enforcement, and the third is socially disreputable."

"If my curse ever breaks I'll make sure to ask you where to find the—what was it, 'underground queers'?—before I try to fuck any men."

"I was going to offer to kiss you to see if that helped your curse but I think maybe curses work differently in your world."

"Kissing generally does not do anything for curses," he agrees.

"In our world, true love always breaks curses and curses have to have a way to break them, so lots of people use true love or something related to it-- a kiss or a marriage proposal or something-- as the thing that breaks the curse."