"Oh, fun!"

"Hm. I find myself questioning again whether this might be a hallucination brought on by the cranial trauma that I otherwise have to assume killed me. That is a bit dream logic."

"If it's a hallucination it's at least a very interesting one. Anyway! We have finally concluded our business with hair! What's next?"

"Next! Right. Next you get to decide if you want to be a human or an elf, which is to say, a member of the baseline population or a better and shinier version that you have to take a flaw for. What 'human' and 'elf' actually look like in practice is fully customizable, except that hair really is mandatory."

"Ooh. Elves have wings," Naomi says immediately.

"You make a compelling case. I mean, you don't make a case, but nevertheless I am compelled."

"What if everyone has wings and elves have better ones? ... I can see possible use cases for it being plausibly deniable whether one is an elf or not. Especially but not exclusively if everyone else is naive."

"I see what you mean but I want the wings to be a bonus, not something the whole society is designed around. Like, if most people don't have wings, then not having wings is fine, if most people do have wings, then anybody who breaks one is a lot worse off than somebody on Earth who breaks a leg. There's no such thing as a sky crutch."

"I guess...people should get to fly though. And it's high magic so maybe there is such a thing as a sky crutch actually. Or just really really really good healing so you don't need one. And maybe the ascended aliens didn't have wings and we're only two generations old so we haven't built much not that stuff yet."

"I'm definitely in favour of really really really good healing. But what would better wings even mean, anyway?"

"Prettier? Stronger?"

"If being an elf is going to cost an entire flaw they should have something other people don't."

"I was assuming being an elf also had other, non-wing-related advantages."

"I don't want to assume them, I want to list them in exhaustive detail and then invent more."

"Hear, hear."

"I didn't mean we should assume them and ignore them, just that the presupposition that they would exist was one of the background assumptions on which I built the proposal that everyone gets wings."

"By default, elves are prettier, smarter, stronger, longer-lived, more magical, and, where applicable, holier."

"--I'm fine with most of those but can we make longer-lived moot, just make everyone age to adulthood and then stop? I'd rather have winged elves and non-winged non-elves than immortal elves and mortal non-elves."

"I note that by default we are all already going to be prettier than most people," says Ghys. "But I don't object to making everyone immortal."

"Making everyone immortal will fuck politics," Naomi observes. "I guess you can be planning to assassinate your own parents or something but like, for the rest of us. We're all essentially supposed to be heiresses, this implies that eventually we inherit. I don't know if I'll go as far as objecting, but it's a downside."

"I don't want my parents to die! I mean, I guess I could just get lousy parents again, but I'm not going through another childhood with lousy parents just so I can kill them and take their stuff without feeling guilty about it."

"Right, yes, sorry, Ghys is the one who I assume is planning to assassinate her parents, you I expect just weren't thinking of it or don't care."

"I mean, I also don't want to kill my parents by letting them die of old age. Is my point. If I have reason to want them dead I don't actually see a lot of difference from my perspective whether they die of old age or I have to kill them! I would kill my old mother in a hearbeat given sufficient reassurance that I wouldn't get caught!"

"...huh, okay, I see what you mean. Sure, then. Immortality for everyone. And we'll be in the second generation of everyone so we're getting in on the ground floor, good for us."

"We're going to be living in a high-tech high-magic setting, I bet there'll be plenty for everybody for loads of generations. If you want to be queen of something you can create a splinter nation when the population gets too high for one polity to administer effectively."