"But then couldn't you also shapeshift your ridiculous hair clean? Maybe shapeshifting is, like, a little bit hard, so it's more luxurious and stuff if you just have somebody to style your hair and/or groom your wings for you."

"Well, I'm the only one who took ridiculous hair, and I specified, like, unnecessary amounts of braids," she points out. "Cleaning by shapeshifting is just a matter of, like, getting rid of the thing and putting it back, I don't think you can shapeshift hair into braids, that's too much fiddly stuff with dead tissue. Which is not to say that feathers would be nonzero a status thing but if elves can shapeshift and humans can't and have membranous wings then it would be a status thing because it displays shapeshifting, not because it takes so long to clean."

"Man, am I the only one who... never mind, grooming feathers can be a sex thing instead, I'm on board."

"I'm not saying grooming feathers ever doesn't sound fun, I just don't want to add another mandatory time-consuming hygiene item. Making it a sex thing sounds like an excellent plan. Ooh, do you think we can do that thing where--I read this one wingfic where angels have this sensitive spot on the back of their necks because of some kind of bird behavior--"

"You know, I bet elves can decide where to have sensitive spots. Or were you thinking for everyone? I could go for that."

"For everyone, yeah, at least as a default. Elves shouldn't hoard all the nice things."

"Can't say no to that. All right, what else?"

"Next is your canonical counterpart's game ending. Your options are death, being sent off to a nunnery, being forced into servitude to the heroine, being stripped of everything you have and left to eke out a living on the streets, being exiled to a foreign political marriage, and simply being dumped and humiliated. The first one gets you an extra perk and the last one costs you an extra flaw."

"I'm inclined to go with death," Didyme muses, "not because of the extra perk, but because it seems like the most straightforward one for my siblings to rescue me from after a suitably inconvenient interval, and my siblings will try to rescue me, and I don't wanna see what happens if your bosses decide their hands need tied." 

"Is death even worth that extra perk, at this point? If it's the easiest fate to escape, does that not imply it's the one that costs us the least?"

"The rules are the rules," the angel says dryly. "It would probably take resurrection longer to be invented in that case, but the rules were not originally designed for people with intelligent world-building faculties. And I can guarantee that death would be more inconvenient than getting embarrassingly publicly dumped."

"Ah, I see. Perhaps resurrection will even be invented by your siblings for the purpose of retrieving you," she says to Didyme. "Wouldn't that be charming?"

"Personally I plan on just not dying," says Naomi, "but, that said, I'm probably taking death as my fate too."

"I mean, I am also planning on not dying, I just want backup plans in case the imp of murphy decides to gang aft agley all up in my plans. So we should have a backup in case my siblings don't need to resurrect me and so don't invent resurrection. Maybe resurrecting the heroine's dead parent." 

"Oh, that's a point, yeah. The heroine will probably want to resurrect her dead parent even if nobody suggests it to her but we should, like, make sure that there's hints that resurrection is possible in the divine messages or whatever. And that part of what people should be doing with their lives is figuring out how to make it work."

She contemplates this idea for a few seconds, then says, "For some reason it feels really aesthetically correct that resurrected people come back as humans? But if you guys don't feel like it then whatever, not important."

"I can sort of see it but in that case it'd better not be too difficult to get re-elfed. We should probably come up with better words than human than elf."

"Can I request that we do not lean any more heavily on the mythology associated with the term 'angel'?"

"Dang, and here I was totally about to flippantly suggest 'cherub'. Hmm."

"I don't think cherub would work anyway because cherubim were supposed to be, like, the second most powerful kind of angel after the seraphim. The naked baby things aren't cherubim, they're something called putti which is not an angel. Uh. Not that you probably care."

"In the colloquial sense the naked baby things are totally called cherubs and there's nothing you or I can do about it but okay let's use a different source of terms."

Thougtful pause.

"I can't immediately think of anything and if nobody else can immediately think of anything either then we should move on to the next thing and come back to it later."

"Sorry, my big brother's huge nerdery rubs off on me sometimes. It would've bothered me regardless of the colloquial usage. We could do something with the wing number? Quarto and duo?"

"Hmm, maybe... alternately, we could use a different mythology. Elves could be fairies, because after all they totally could have fairy wings, and humans can be... sylphs, I guess?? That's some kind of air spirit type thing, right?"

"I wouldn't mind that. And I think it lends itself better to emphasizing the divide between angels and the rest of us than counting wings."

"I like fairy but I'm not sure about sylph...it doesn't seem to mesh well with membrane wings in my mind. What about Fomorians? They were a race that coexisted with the Tuatha de Danaan in Irish mythology, and the Tuatha are basically a fairy varietal."

"Hmm, sounds to my ear like a nationality and not a species? ...man now i'm remembering that the fae are sometimes called 'lords and ladies' and I feel like it might be kind of aesthetic if the common folk didn't have a separate name besides 'common folk' or 'commoner'."