"It wasn't very much blackmail.  Honestly, like, worryingly little blackmail was required, given the powerset and stuff."

"I suppose it's sort of against the spirit of blackmail to tell third parties what you were blackmailing her with."

"Oh, no, I mean.  Just the vampirism and assault and stuff; you already know that.  Or - this was all really vague insinuation so I'm not actually sure but it might have been more the lesbian-ness more than either of those?  Because the Berrys are just.  Really great people, really stellar folks.  - Not that I think, um - probably against mind control it doesn't really matter what your actual inclinations are . . ."

"Clippy has not been telling me that I can make people specifically more attracted to me but perhaps it just omitted to mention."

He can make people find him more or less compelling!!

"That's - it's not - I - I haven't been poking at it or anything.  So it could be included and just not - telegraphed, or it could have been an interaction with the thing where she was already feral, or.  Any number of things really.  I wouldn't want to assume."

"It wouldn't surprise me if Ancora did not really understand human attraction and was just letting vampires et al pull on all the levers that there happened to be for making people like each other without separate labeling."

"Yeah."

"Maybe I will simulate telling them that this is sketchy." Hey, Clippy, does he have enough juice to cover that?

Yes!!  Not indefinitely but he can certainly start!

How long is "not indefinitely", Clippy.

A while!  It depends on specifics of the situation which it can't determine ahead of time!  But while he's running a sim there will be moment-to-moment sensory feedback about how much magic he's using!

Can he get an order of magnitude, as there is not much point if the sim will last three seconds.

It depennnnnnnnnnnds.  He could totally spend it in seconds, or he could cover a span of months!  There are lots of options!

"...how long do you usually get sims of Ancora to last, Clippy's being surprisingly unhelpful about estimating that."

"Usually like, uh, two to tenish minutes, maybe; I dunno, I'm not great at tracking time.  With the exception of the omnipotence ones, which, obviously the first one kicked me out immediately and I think the second one was maybe an hour or two.  In terms of what it covered, not real-time.  And some of them I cut off before I strictly had to."

"Okay, cool." What happens if they have Ancora come back and Cam says the liking people power is Sketch.

They ask why he thinks that.

(Clippy declares this to be a moderate pace which he can sustain for a few minutes.)

Cam points out that Ancora said that vampires didn't get any unethical psychic powers and heavily implied that they could only decide, themselves, how much to care about others! Making others care about you is different.

That seems like kind of a trivial difference.  If people decide to change their feelings towards each other, does it really matter which of them is the one spending magic to do it?

...yes, that matters enormously, because a decision comes with consent for oneself but not for others.

. . . . . . . . . . . confusion.

See, people in general should get to decide things for themselves, not have the processes that make their minds work intervened on by outside forces! The making people like you power does not wait for a decision on the target's part and could be done on someone who was very much opposed.

oh no

In retrospect it probably should have been predictable that Ancora's test group who ended up murdering each other would have maybe misled them about that sort of thing.  Everyone where Ancora comes from has that power but defense always wins, categorically - it doesn't even occur to people to try and force anything because it just would never work - they're so sorry - how does Cam suggest they fix it - is he also going to mislead them -

...gosh. Uh. If Ancora doesn't want to take Cam's word for it they could read moral philosophy from Bar or something?