"Good."

"Well, some of the gossip did, but they got a local cultural orientation and toned it down."

"Hm?"

"Oh, uh... human gossip involves speculating that interesting-but-harmless things are true about near-strangers? Apparently? Only some things that'd be interesting-but-harmless back on Earth are fighting words here, so they had to be steered towards speculation that is also interesting-but-harmless locally."

"...ah, gotcha."

"They were good sports about it. I'm sure they'd be happy to talk Earth things with you if you care to drop by more, but nothing's neglected."

"But what if they find out that I'm not inherently boring, they might miss me, it'd be a mess."

"Kids have weird standards of inherently boring, you could sparkle all you wanted at them and they'd still probably spend all their time speculating about your personal ambitions instead of your world-conquering ones."

"Hey, I was fascinated by world conquest when I was fourteen."

"Well, there are no young conquerers in this batch. ...there's the one sub who wanted to be president, this girl told him the president's always a dom but they're not even from the same country so I have no idea if that's true or reason to discourage him -"

"Most presidents are doms but there've been exceptions in some countries. That's mostly an artifact of elected officials being older, though, attitudes have shifted substantially in the last few decades."

"If it comes up again I'll tell him he can dream away. The assumption was that role correlated with competence? Or something else?"

"Competence, general dispositional suitedness to being in charge of things and not caving to pressure or being overwhelmed with responsibility."

"I think I have too small a sample size to even guess at whether there's anything to that, but even if there were there'd be variance -"

"Lots. And switches, too, who were barely acknowledged to exist until relatively recently."

"It's an interesting system."

"It wouldn't really have occurred to me to do without it until I showed up here! There's science fiction about role-less societies, but they usually just map all the baggage onto gender or fail very badly at making characters convincingly role-less."

"I kind of want to read that. It sounds fascinating."

"I'd make a recommendation but I'm never sure what's safe with human media intended for adults and Elf audiences..."

"I think I'll cope."

So Isabella recommends a couple books.

"Thanks."

"My pleasure. The second one you might be tempted to skip chapter fourteen and you can do that if you want, it doesn't have very much plot."

"You realize that most of Elves' prudery is a desire to make sure no one thinks they're the kind of person who'd appreciate that kind of thing, not actual negative experiences as a consequence of exposure to fictional sex? Unless it's something completely different than what I'm imagining."

"That one's a violence warning, actually, but no, I didn't know that."