"Yeah, there's aesthetics. My brother would be way better at consulting on this - I'll make him get me some pictures and I can at least identify how a non-fashion-forward person would read them -"

Alex gets her some pictures. The clothes are hard to get a sense of from such scattershot samples; the hair is mostly consistent except here's a dom rocking long hair, here's a buzzcut on a sub, switches are doing all kinds of things with their hairdos; the most invariable difference is subtleties in carriage.

"So if these are both poses I might want to strike with different performances I say switch?"

"Yeah. Still slightly weird but not as weird as 'nondynamic alien'."

"And less likely to rob the audience of their fantasies."

"Yep."

"Okay. I think I know some good places for a photo shoot, too, if it's like portraiture."

"It's like portraiture. Except faster and people who are better than me at photography know fancy things about how to make it turn out well."

"Well, I'm happy to spend a while experimenting with what turns out well."

She is ridiculously good at achieving the desired role aesthetic with posture cues.

Then she will have a delightedly fantasizing fanbase of all roles. Isabella takes a lot of photos to make up for how little she knows what she's doing and sends them off and receives a completed album cover to show Macalaurië.

"Looks all right to me - that's not exactly how we do it here so I don't have a perfect feel for it yet, but I'll get there -"

"What exactly isn't how you do it? I wouldn't expect you to have album art without recordings."

"I mean - image management, the performance of being a performer, is different here? In a lot of ways, I haven't quite catalogued them all yet which is why I'm less confident than I will be."

"Ah, gotcha. And I'm sure somebody could explain it all really well but you've got me instead and I don't even have interworld communication quite yet."

"We're very glad to have gotten you, don't worry. It's just - Maitimë's thing is people? Mine is performance, and we're both of us terribly off balance at there being all these aliens to recalibrate for. And excited, definitely excited, but excited while off-balance."

"You'll catch up. You're doing great."

"So're you!"

"Thanks!"

The festival goes off without a hitch, and she asks Isabella for reading material about Earth governments and Earth charities and Earth problems.

She can have all these things! It goes a bit faster once Isabella's got the hang of talking to her brother and then other people across the dimensional divide.

She's so jealous. She's so impressed.

She considers putting her hair up and decides not to do that and can't explain why even to herself. 

Does Isabella want to play Governor again sometime?

Yes, yes she does. Cheating or no cheating?

Cheating, of course. "One of these days I'll figure out how to play you even anyway."

"If I get careless, perhaps."

"Even if you're flawless."

"Now that will be an interesting game."

Isabella is not careless. She cheats. She pauses to wolf down platesful of delicious Valian cuisine five separate times during the game.