"There's a target effect, and if you sing it, you induce the effect, and it goes away a few minutes after the song ends? I can bounce you what it feels like if you'd like."

"That doesn't itself induce the effect?"

"Not unless you're going to have trouble distinguishing being bounced an emotion from actually feeling that emotion. Small children get confused sometimes and you're not supposed to bounce people emotions absent any indication you're doing that, for that reason, but most people don't find it hard to separate out."

"Hm - just to be safe I'll look ahead -" And then: "Okay, seems fine."

"...do you still need me to do it, or -"

"I only looked at one example of the mood one, I'd still like the others."

So she bounces her what various songs feel like.

"Interesting. ...Anyway normally I'd be all over the balance one but somebody gave me a magic ring, so how about healing, that sounds fun."

"Someone gave you a magic ring? How generous." And she starts singing the healing song.

Oh pretty.

You should really hear my sister, she's astonishing.

I might expire of loveliness.

Are we good enough to acquire units of exchange back on Earth?

I think so. There's probably a lot of complicated marketing and so on going on in addition to raw singing talent but I bet it could be made to work.

My sister would take very quickly to marketing herself.

I'm not sure the market would know what to do with somebody who presented as nondynamic, there's that.

That big a deal? She'd probably be happy to pretend to be the one that doesn't involve cutting your hair off, then.

That's strongly culturally mediated - and people manage to come off as doms with long hair or subs with short hair and switches do all sorts of things. But by default long hair in my culture is a sub thing, especially worn down.

So 'switch' is a thing but 'nondynamic' isn't? Do people just - not have sex that isn't about power -

Uh, kinky people do?

...huh.

I mean, kinky relative to Earth, I don't want to impose our culture on you or anything...

I assure you I wasn't feeling imposed upon, I was trying to guess the degree to which people here are likely to have preferences they don't mention in public for social acceptability reasons and the degree to which this is actually some kind of species difference.

It seems unlikely that it's innately exactly the same. For one thing the gender skew is, not overwhelming, but pronounced, and it's not the way around you have it. In humans - who aren't pressuring their teenagers to pretend anything in particular - the division's about sixty-thirty-ten, with the sixty being subs in girls and doms in boys, the ten being switches. Historically there was a lot of pressure to pretend it was universally gender-matched or close to it so switches would round to whichever and other people would outright pretend; that's eroding these days.

Yep, that part wouldn't fit. All human societies are like this?