"Charming."

"A point on which we're in agreement."

"It might not be possible for humans and Elves to get Elf-married in general, let alone under circumstances where things other than a participant not being an Elf would interfere."

"It's probably not, though if a psion turns up with the ability to erase marriages it wouldn't be that shocking for them to end up with the ability to create them too..."

"...in which case it would actually be very weird if it only worked on opposite sex couples."

"...it really would, come to think of it."

"There's some weird apparently-hard limits on eclipsed powers, like 'no backchaining precognition', but that one would be really peculiar."

"Can only create opposite-gender Elf marriages. Might be you can't affect Elf marriages at all, but if you can - of course, maybe Eru'd mediate directly, she being the one who apparently designed the current setup."

"And we're back to the 'should we provoke the deity' question..."

"The deity who made me attracted exclusively to girls and then made it divine law that relationships are only between a man and a woman."

"That's the one, yes. I didn't say 'would it be really satisfying to provoke the deity'."

"I know. There are millions of people who need a stabler place to live, it's not remotely defensible to risk my ability to offer that for personal happiness -"

"Could try for a portal to one of the other planets found through those portals only mages can go through, if you do think Eru's locality-limited - humans won't care unless you go around actually identifying as a dom -"

"No, no, we can do whatever makes sense with humans - and it might just be wishful thing, Eru having limitations -"

"On the 'sneaking around' front there's fun psionics I could pick up but I don't have any right now - well, precognition but that only gets my perspective on whatever we'd have counterfactually been doing, not yours - branching off lucid dreaming into shared lucid dreaming would take a couple years at least -"

"Is this something you want to figure out how to make work-"

"I'm not planning to invest a couple years on shared lucid dreams for it without a clearer idea of the details, but I don't want to decide not to without knowing what I'm deciding, you know?"

Nod. "It's more that - if I were giving myself permission to try, I'd be - doing something different than this -"

"- hm?"

"If it were a good idea to actually flirt with you I would derive a lot of satisfaction from doing better at it than this. And I'm just not clear on whether it's a good idea."

"Ah. ...well, what do you mean by 'a good idea'."

"I don't know. It'd be convenient if - we were better at ruling the world if we were happier, or something. But I doubt I actually would be."

"I might be, but probably not to a significant enough extent to affect the calculus."

It's not fair.

Yeah.