"Not really but you're kneeling! Like you're her pet or something!"

"...this is a problem but me literally addressing him as 'pet' when I asked for his meal order wasn't? Is there a guide to foreigners about PDA here?"

"Not, uh, as such? The assumption people are going to make isn't PDA, it's that he used his powers a lot and now literally can't stand up and that you're guiding him, though actually it doesn't work through hair so that'd be a really inefficient way to do it."

"The pet thing was also very weird - are you a woman or a man, I'm confused." Isabella being a strangely named man who just looked like a woman would make this make at least a bit more sense.

"I'm a woman. Is... that actually hard to tell? There were short haired women in the 1920s even before it was commonly acknowledged that we can be doms."

"Can be what now."

"Dom short for dominant opposite of sub short for submissive?"

"This is first-meeting information on your planet?"

"It's on my government ID if the hair doesn't clue somebody in!"

"I know women can have short hair it's not just that it's that plus everything else. What do dominant and submissive mean in this context?"

Isabella will presumably tell him if she wants him to stop kneeling and until then he's not inclined to stop if all it is is a bit confusing to people in this universe.

"Well, outside of the context of a relationship it mostly means that I soften my imperatives less than he does, but in that context it means he's the one on his knees, as you can see, literally right now in front of you. Do you somehow not have this, are you all switches or something?"

"Occasionally people have it but not all people - it's a minority - and it mostly doesn't impinge on the parts of relationships that happen in public."

"Is he making you actively uncomfortable and if so will it actually help if I make him get up?"

"I'm - I don't want to insist he get up if he doesn't want to."

[I think it's making him uncomfortable even if he won't say it?]

[Well, I think the thing bothering him is us having a dynamic where he can see it so I'm not going to tell you to, but I didn't tell you to kneel in the first place so you're free to act on this suspicion as you see fit.]

"If bystanders guessed correctly rather than incorrectly about what is going on here they would probably be uncomfortable, which I'd consider a decent argument for cutting it out."

Lucien can stand.

"It was my idea in the first place - sorry for making you two uncomfortable."

"Hey, the last alien intelligences we met started kidnapping and murdering people by the dozen, you're doing amazing by that metric."

"Gee, thanks."

"I'm sorry if I came off angry I'm just very confused and a bit backlashed and possibly that is making me take things more personally than usual even when they're not about me."

"Being backlashed does that?"

"For me, yeah."

"Everybody's is different, mine makes me lonely, but I'm not carrying much now because I didn't have to actually go into the dungeon and I'm just here as my Lucien's guide."