"Maybe you could make it more efficient by watching Jack change shape," Sheila suggests. "Or is that not how it works?"

"Not really how it works," she says regretfully. "Blessings are the most mana-efficient form of magic in my system, can't really get better than that, but shapeshifting itself is very complicated so very expensive. What I might be able to do instead is copy whatever he's doing, though."

Jack shifts his form a few more times, in a rhythm with his steps. "Does it look like something you can copy?"

She watches, fascinated. "...maybe. It's not obvious that I can't, anyway. Would need to stare at you for way longer than that to say for sure, but I'm told it's impolite to do that without asking someone out first."

Jack coughs a couple of times with surprise. "Uh, I'm. Taken. By Alex. I'm willing to let you stare at me while I use my power, though, that sounds like not a problem."

"Hey, you're not allowed to use me as an excuse not to go out with pretty girls," Alex admonishes him.

"But you're the only pretty girl I want," Jack says.

"Dammit, stop being cute," Alex groans. "I'm trying to chip away at your monogamy, not reinforce it by acknowledging that it's adorable."

.....d'aaaaaaawwww.

"Does that mean I should ask both of you out, then?"

"I'd accept," Alex says cheerfully. "Only for a casual thing, I'm not looking for a new primary, you know? But casual can still be fun."

"And despite Alex's best efforts I'm still monogamous," Jack says.

"It's very inconvenient," Kostas stage-whispers.

"We're all entitled to our strange preferences, I suppose," she stage whispers back.

"Oh, it's more inconvenient than it sounds," Gav says. "He's a power mimic, but unlike most power mimics he's got an extra layer to his: to wit, if he sleeps with someone, he gets a copy of their power for good. It's got to do with the source of his power, the god Nem-Shar, who was once a trickster god and, like many trickster gods, had sex as part of his domain."

"But he doesn't want to sleep with anyone," Kostas says tragically. "Even though he's got a permissive SO, and a pretty face, and sex powers."

"...you're joking." She looks at him. "Why."

Jack's shoulders hunch a bit. "I don't want to have sex if it's not because I love someone. It'd be like... selling myself, or something."

She looks at Kostas again. "Is this some cultural thing? Do you guys buy slaves with sex or something?"

Gav's eyebrows rise. "What? No. It is a cultural thing, at least partly, prostitution is very frowned upon and that's what he's gesturing at. The Greeks had a much more sensible way of doing things, as usual."

"They also had slavery," Sheila points out. "So there's at least one point in the current zeitgeist's favor."

"What were the Greeks like? And why is that past tense?"

"There's still Greeks," Kostas clarifies. "But they don't have much continuity with the ancient ones, the ones who worshipped us. It's been three thousand years, cultures shift."

"How to summarize a civilization..." Sheila muses. "They were very invested in the pursuit of wisdom and beauty, or at least that's how they thought of themselves. They thought everyone who wasn't Greek was a barbarian, a word which they coined to describe the animalistic grunting they heard whenever these non-Greeks opened their mouths. They were eventually conquered by the Romans, who were stricter but who carried on the worship of the Greeks' gods, though with different names."

"And they didn't think prostitution was bad but also didn't think slavery was bad? That's a combo."

"Rather," Sheila says drily. "I believe the philosophers worked out that slavery was morally wrong at some point, but their leaders didn't care enough to do anything about it."

"And you guys don't have slavery anymore, right? I think someone said it earlier."

Sheila nods. "There was a war two and a half centuries ago and the slaves were set free - largely as punishment against their erstwhile owners, but slavery was outlawed as a consequence. The rest of the world had mostly already gotten around to it, and the ones who hadn't followed suit."

"That's a pretty cynical view of the Civil War," Jack comments.

"When you've seen three thousand years of history, it starts falling into patterns. Noble reasons are often given for effecting change, but are rarely responsible for it."

"Hear hear."