The adventures of Botswana et al will make a nice chaser.

Botswana et al visit a new universe. A native hits on Botswana and he explains that he has a wife back in Limbo, though he is flattered.

" - huh?"

I'm finding the copious loanwords unavoidable, here, was it 'wife'?

"We have the concept, it just seems kind of irrelevant to mention there?"

Bringing it up in this context is meant to imply that he and his wife are monogamous, although this is not true of all people with wives.

"Man, I'd just turn people down, I wouldn't bring up a partner's kink over it."

It's not customarily classified as a kink, just a - relationship style? Also it's sometimes considered an especially polite way to turn people down because it doesn't imply anything about their personal appeal.

" - huh. 

Do you, uh -"

Uh. I wouldn't describe it as a kink and I don't know that it's necessary for my happiness but it'd be my preference by default?

"It is not really a thing with fairies so I don't really - have a good understanding of what its boundaries would be or what things make it desirable or -"

I assume it varies. I guess in my case it's something like the corollary of how you think I should be with somebody who thinks I'm the best thing that ever happened? I'd naively interpret somebody having me available and then going off to other people all the time as implying that I was not actually that great. I don't think I'm indelibly attached to this opinion but it's the one I seem to have natively metaphorically installed.

Lean. "I think you are all that great."

Snuggle. In case it was ambiguous, this preference doesn't kick in this early.

"Okay. We can talk about it at some point then, I guess. Maybe if we read more I'll get more intuition for it."

Maybe! I suppose if you specifically want to triangulate this sort of thing I should preferentially be picking stuff published in English when I was a teenager.

"I really want to know what happens next in this story! But maybe later."

Then Cam will finish the second adventure of the admirable Limboites. Nellie Bly Ironclad gets up to some investigative reporting and Cam explains why this is funny in the context of the canon of the setting they're in.

"Sounds like a neat job. I'm impressed with societies that pay people to do that."

She was a pioneer in the field! The pricing model got more challenging in the Internet age, though, it was much easier to make a return on articles that were more like 'ten potato chips that look like celebrities' and things like that than on stuff requiring upfront investment. Summoning becoming common didn't help in the sense that it made it even less remunerative but it did make the cost of living so low that people who found it interesting could do it for nothing.

"Ten potato chips that look like celebrities.

- well it seems like a really valuable career."

The ten potato chips that look like celebrities articles were well positioned to claim a minute or so of people's time when they were, say, in an office job and flinching away from work for a moment but didn't want to admit that to themselves and commit to something that would take half an hour, only then they'd read a couple dozen in a row.

"What a - tragic sort of society. Not as tragic as human society now but - differently tragic, in a way I hadn't thought of before."

I never actually thought about potato chips that look like celebrities in quite that way. Exasperating at worst.

"Maybe it was just the way you described it. Sitting in work they hate, flinching away from doing it, reading about things they don't care about very much but can pretend they'll be done reading soon."

They don't necessarily hate the work! It's just not psychologically realistic for most humans to do work continuously for the hours they wound up being set. I think the hours were mostly set against the benchmark of manual type jobs it's generally more possible to do for eight hours in a row with a couple breaks, people can often do that unless actually injured.