[But you think you make sense as a dom no problem?]

[It's a bit of a stretch but yeah, I can imagine a dom version of myself. I took a fair bit to figure out I was a sub and in retrospect it makes a lot of sense it doesn't feel like I'd have to be a whole different sort of person to be otherwise.]

[Ah, I was obvious very young. My mom took me to a protest and had me hold a sign that said 'my mom deserves rights because I said so'.]

[Oh that's very good - what was the protest about exactly?]

[Switch rights, she's a switch.]

[Good cause to be brought to a protest for.]

[I have slightly mixed feelings about kids as props in politics but it didn't do me any harm.]

Nod. It would definitely have been a bad idea for Lucien to show up at a protest for his parent's rights, though that's a more extreme case.

Once they've put away their dessert they can go back up to the hotel room. And sleep! In a real bed! She's got some accumulated sleep debt from the lean-to being such a poor approximation of a bed.

Lucien lets the nouns lull him to sleep, as usual.

"So that's interesting," Haru remarks when the psions are in their Uber and heading for the hotel.

"That's one word... I found it disconcerting. Though possibly this is because of my backlash making me focus on the bit where there's a strange version of me instead of the bit where there's a whole other world with different powers."

"I also found it disconcerting but I'm really very excited about the other world with different powers, which apparently we'll be able to talk to soon! If only through Isabella. I'm so tempted to leave this dungeon alive - it's not my call but I can make a recommendation -"

"I'm definitely in favor."

"Both of us together might swing it but I'm at all worried that if we make this recommendation and Cricket doesn't find the core it'll look like I told him to sandbag."

"I guess that's not great but it seems worth that risk? Transit with another world could be really important."

"We won't be able to control it. There was only the one portal, it didn't open to a population center - I guess it may have opened to a population center on that specific planet - and the dungeon will probably fuck off for years even if we let it live and appear somewhere random. We will be getting like forty randos from, like, Helsinki, kidnapped and bitten by four-dimensional insects for a chance at another portal which might not happen at all or might not be useful at all."

"Still seems worth it but it's not great, yeah. I'm happy I don't have to make the final call."

"How about you make the recommendation and I abstain until and unless Cricket finds the core."

Lucien can do that, texting his agent about it.

"So uh. You have a better understanding than me of what was up with the submission thing I-my alt was doing?"

"Only in the sense of having been on the internet longer than you have. Some people get turned on by bossing other people around in bed or being bossed around and they've turned it into an entire - gender, or something."

"I'd normally guess that that would be gender dependent already."

"...well, it's not, or at least not very."

"Huh."

"It's one of the more common kinks? Kink here being a term for anything odd that turns somebody on."