"Yeah. I dunno if it's right. It's - closer than the thing I started with."

"That being 'lots of choices for Abadar'? Mm. I think I've been over how not going to get married I am, embarrassing period of my nineties notwithstanding."

"It seems like a very hard thing to do right and everyone who's even trying is compromising on different things but the thing Fazil is compromising is 'not being really uptight all the time' which sure beats compromising on 'basically slavery' or 'dead babies' or 'holding everyone willing to sleep with you in contempt for their willingness to do that' or 'make sure all the work happens behind the curtain so I only see pretty teenagers who are hoping I'll like them' -"

"Yeah. I was a very frustrated ninety-six-year-old by the time I figured it was close enough to impossible to resolve satisfactorily and I don't expect everybody to also settle on being single forever about it."

"Surely with the whole world there's got to be somewhere that's got the right sort of men?"

"So I have this problem where I fully acknowledge that the way my society is about marriage is super fucked up and it should not be that way and any guy would be justified in finding the entire mess a huge repellent dealbreaker and not wanting anything to do with any woman who thought that way about men and also I did in fact grow up there and would feel really weird and dissatisfied and pathetic if I got hitched to some guy who wasn't in so doing planning to regard himself as belonging to me? - I realize that probably sounds kinda horrible."

"I don't think so? I mean, depending what you mean by that it might be something I couldn't advise any guy to get himself into but, like, Mahdi had a nice healthy middle-class Osirian upbringing and wants a wife who'll swear to obey him and then do that, and I don't think that makes him horrible, though if we had to flee to the Underdark for some reason he'd sure have a time finding it."

"It's possible enough time aboveground'll resocialize me. But like if I'd just found some guy who was like, sure, yeah, marital ownership, that's how it works, that wouldn't work either! Because it's not okay in the general case and I'm not really into people thinking it is! It'd have to be somebody who knew slavery was bad and just happened to want to make an exception for the one case because I'm so great or something! And I would also have to do all the normal compatibility filtering stuff!"

"That does sound - uh, maybe not totally insurmountable but like the project of a century that could be better spent. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, exactly. Thanks."

"I would just need to find someone who wanted to settle down in the Dome and have no rights for the rest of their life -  despite, yeah, being correct about what kind of place it is and therefore hating it - and for my brother to get around to having children so mine aren't at much risk -"

"Is this a project of yours, should I be brainstorming what demographics to check -"

"It's not, not really. Uh, the getting my brother to have kids thing would be a worthy project, if drow happen to have a solution to that problem or something. But the rest - nah."

"Far as I know we do not have a spell for that."

Sigh. "Ah well. You'd think someone somewhere would've invented one. Mostly I figure if I make Elysium I can find someone there without nearly so many complications to walk. I guess probably once you are a god you might have satisfactory devotees, too."

"I'm not sure I'll be thronged with people who wanna live in the Dome etcetera. Maybe I'll wind up facilitating slave escapes and some of those will have a taste for purposeless luxury or something?"

"No, no, I meant, for you."

"Oh. I guess whatever mechanism allows cleric picking could pull double duty if I decide said mechanism is not too sketchy to use."

"What's the important thing about someone belonging to you?"

"I mean - it shouldn't be, right, we're clear that I am in fact highly embarrassed about this?"

"Mmhmm."

"There's a bunch of bits to it or I woulda prioritized editing it out of my head. But like - I'm not specifically attached to the purchase bit of it where somebody's like hey lady nice guy you made what do you want for him. That's - it's not cosmetic but it's not the bit that stuck to me. It's knowing that within that one particularly - intimate and vulnerable scope, I don't just mean sex but the whole way married couples get when they don't hate each other - the situation's under control, the thing keeping the situation under control is me and I can trust it the way I trust myself, I can put my weight down there? Also like the 'because I'm so great or something' is operative, like, the being an exception to the rule that people belonging to other people is bad, due to my excellent personal qualities, specifically such that somebody wanted to be mine because they trusted me to be good to them and do good things with their help, would be - nice. And I don't want kids unless they can be demigods born into a paradise realm and I have noticed that this doesn't sit that well with guys in cultures that do not construe things this way. And I don't want to share. And I don't want somebody to be, like, ostensibly married to me but kind of checked out about it and I don't want to - in Osirion you hear wives who want more attention than they're getting and they're resorting to weird psychological engineering where they wear nicer outfits and serve oysters for dinner and that's stupid and I don't like it. And I don't like there being a threshold of commitment that makes somebody I'm theoretically trying to marry go 'wow, that is slightly too real and binding, I would prefer something less real and binding than that', like, why even get married."

Nod. "Lotta that makes sense. The - wanting something that can only break if you screw up, I think that's sort of related to how I feel about places that have divorce - and hating the - marriage as an adversarial game where you try to play your spouse into being whatever you need from them -"

"Yeah, some of this I'm not sure I'd want to compromise on at all but it specifically coming in the form of something ownership-shaped would probably budge if I worked on it."

"Worked on it?"