"That is itself crazy but noted.  I was referring to my wrong theory about how the magical astronomical phenomena here are applying specific cognitive pressures to people who think about relations between magic and astronomy, producing the field of astrology.  Later I will try to find exact patterns that appear across all the fields where people are mysteriously crazy, like 'astrology' and 'religion' and 'p-values'; but I won't be able to point to any exact patterns like that, or exact borders around which subjects are forbidden, just a patchwork quilt of bad reasoning continuous with many other parts of your society.  Then I will admit that you were right and I was wrong and astrology is just something that happened in a way continuous with mundane cognitive science.  You will note that I was more ignorant than you about this and wrong to think that I could be righter than you in my first few days in a different world, and I will nod and say you were right and update my general heuristics.  I will not feel insulted.  It would be extremely undignified if I felt insulted.  I would have to obliterate your entire world's past history to hide my shame."

Isabella is not immediately sure that's a joke but she laughs a little anyway.

"Just to be clear, that was a humorous exaggeration.  Sorry for the alien enacting the illusion of transparency at you, and you not being able to tell how exaggerated any humorous exaggerations are.  I probably won't feel insulted based on my having been through many similar experiences in my life.  If I failed, it would be very undignified if I acted disruptively instead of just dealing with my own mental problems without burdening others.  It would not be undignified per se if I had to expend visible effort on dealing, or if I asked somebody else to give me a second to manage myself internally, but it would be surprising and people would wonder if there was a hidden factor making things worse for me.  My deontology says not to hide that class of shameful events.  If we ignore that, the utility I lost from the emotional pain of having that much shame exposed would be many many orders of magnitude smaller than the utility over the loss to the sapient beings of your civilization from screening their past, I can try to run ass numbers on that if you like."

"I did figure it was probably a joke, in context, it just isn't obvious to me that your ass numbers on how bad that would be capture all the values I care about since you already grew up somewhere it happened and presumably think you turned out fine."

"We do not know what was lost.  We can guess it must have been a lot.  Our finest and most trusted accepted that and then stepped down forever, so they must have thought it was worth it, and every now and then we send in somebody else to check and they have yet to break the seal.  Somewhere in our history there are people who spent all their lives working so that we, their descendants, could have a brighter future, and they died before cryonics was invented and the worms ate their souls, and we do not know their names or their deeds.  They made artworks for us that we will not see.  Their names are preserved in a station beneath the ice of the north pole of our planet, and maybe their deeds will be known again someday, and remembered when the stars grow cold.  We didn't do that because we were aliens who didn't care."

"So, that was persuasive that you mourn the individuals who died."

"I wonder if they're - someplace like here.  Not here.  You would have noticed.  Maybe somewhere better than this, maybe somewhere worse.  Maybe they're in worlds that allow magic and mindcalling.  Maybe we could find each other, all the people like me, the Lost Dead of dath ilan.  I don't know how we'd find each other, under rules like the ones you have - but I know the names of some Lost Dead who died after history's curtain closed, and mostly ones older than me.  Maybe they know somebody older than themselves, and older, and we can breach the curtain and find everyone who came before, friends who knew friends who knew friends, touching hands across some gap of which we know nothing.  It would be a larger and far more dangerous project than building a portal to dath ilan if that were possible, and dath ilan seems not nearly adult enough to attempt such a thing, let alone Earth... but someday.  The stars are much older than us, and they will go on burning for a while."

"My to-do list includes inventing resurrection. I don't know if it's doable with Earth magic, though, and it'd almost certainly need both psions and mages."

Plus:  Isabella is doing the obvious thing with magic.  This is reassuring because people in Pride and Prejudice don't do obvious good things.

Minus:  Isabella said it was on her to-do list and not Earth's to-do list.  Maybe Thellim got dropped where she would arrive to the sanest person here.

"All of dath ilan would throw the entirety of its strength behind it, if there were any way we could help you."

"I... guess you could send enough people here to see if you can increase the pool of eclipsed or if you have to be born on Earth and then they could go into suitably allied fields. Or just pay me to quit my day job, though I'd probably still work eclipses. It's a long way off if it can be done at all, though."

Offering to cooperate with other people if they cooperate with you:  It's simple.  It works.  It's the core of Civilization.  You hear it before you're old enough to understand the words.  There will not be a bloodbath, and she will find a way to allow Isabella to know what she knows.

"I also need to learn enough about your world to see if there's any knowledge I can apply to become wealthy - for example, if you have psions who can discern truth, it seems like you could have mate-matchmakers whose oaths are even more trustworthy than ours, perhaps you simply haven't had the idea.  I am also dath ilan, in this place I am all of dath ilan, and I will also help if I can."

"There are psions who can do that but I'm not sure you can make a lot of money by trying to matchmake people - at least not any time soon - I don't think you have a good enough handle on the way Earth relationships work - but maybe I'm wrong, like, if you were trying to find me a sub what would you do?"

"Fair point, I'd need to understand more to know that I wasn't participating in making a bad situation worse.  But in broad, the way the problem scales, it's not about finding you a sub, it's about getting to know a large enough pool of people that you can find some matches among them and get paid bounties on the ones you do find."

"Wow that was a face. Uh, if this worries you about me in particular I am not myself that into hitting subs. I did watch an instructional video on caning once because I go around with a cane and might attract subs who expect me to know how to use it, but it's not something I'd look for."

"I either need to read a cognitively realistic fiction written from the perspective of a parallel-dimension human who arrives in this world and is initially horrified by submission but slowly and gradually finds out the information that changes everything about that, which part of me is even horrified that I am saying out loud as a possibility; or I need to persuade you that certain things are not okay, so we can throw the entirety of our strength behind also making that better; or we have to diverge our ways because of values differences, with me acknowledging that I owe you for initial help and also still helping you with resurrection if I can and bloodbaths still never being in the cards; or I have to read enough research to be really really convinced that my eclipse will not turn me into a masochist; or I have to write down all my knowledge of dath ilan that could be useful to you, and then kill myself before my eclipse and try to go be lost and dead somewhere else; or make my meliorizable plan about this be something sometime soon, because my current emotional state is not sustainable on a timescale of months."

"Okay, uh, of those, I think the one where you research how eclipses work until you're confident they do not prompt masochism is the most promising but I can try to dig up weird books about interdimensional travelers but the specific thing you mention is likely to be written mostly by people who specifically kink on the idea of introducing someone to the entire concept of relationship dynamics and I would expect the category, if there is one to speak of, to contain a lot of sex scenes."

"I can handle sex scenes, I think.  I cannot handle masochism scenes until after I understand why this is not a horrorworld.  It would not be very surprising if you had negative evidence against eclipse times visibly shifting locals, it would be somewhat reassuring, the problem is that this seems likely to not be enough information to reassure me to the necessary level that generalized weird phenomena didn't turn the natives masochistic and won't turn me masochistic somehow with lunar eclipses still being an obvious point of peak risk.  Knowing somebody will kill me if the eclipse does turn me masochistic would be reassuring.  Being convinced of the inconceivable conceivable world where masochism is morally wonderful would be reassuring.  I can try to think of other things that would be reassuring."

"Do you... want borderline-cutesy videos aimed at teaching consent best practices to teenagers in which subs are spanked while giggling the entire time, I never thought I'd be grateful for high school sex ed but thanks to it I know those exist."

"Are these in the genre of stylized movies where real people don't act exactly like that or in the genre of maximum realism to expose teenagers to statistically representative reality?"

"Uh, they're... instructively stylized? Like, do you have... repair manuals for appliances, or recipes that tell you to sift flour and use room-temperature eggs, which are not incorrect but they are exaggerated in the direction of doing everything just-so, where an actual expert who did not need to consult a manual would know what they'd be trading off if they were sloppy with any given step?"

"It might help.  I don't know.  The more ideal version of me is fine so long as nobody is visibly suffering and screaming.  The actual version of me is having traumatic memory occurrences of that video, but I'm going to have to deal with that eventually anyhow.  But if there's a critical fact I don't know, it's not going to be that there is some particular protective procedure that subs go through to get matched with caring doms who only hurt them the way they like.  It's going to be something about what it is like to be a masochist, which algorithm runs to generate the experience."

"Conventional wisdom is that it is not unrelated to liking spicy food, the stereotype is that masochistic subs love peppers and will order hot wings or pile wasabi on their sushi to flirt with their dates."

"No, sorry, not updating off that.  If that were true we'd have masochists in dath ilan and I've never heard of anything like that..."

Would she actually know if that was a thing in dath ilan and people turned themselves in for psychiatric treatment if they noticed?