Andrea produces a hand-crafted mug from a cupboard and offers it to Cam before circling back to pour herself some tea.  "I expect it might be best for you to start with a description of your situation, abilities, and desires.  I wouldn't want to risk anything that might happen if the one provided by my gemini Mr. Russel was incomplete or incorrect in any way."

Cam sips his coffee which is there now. "I am a magical being from another universe. I can conjure arbitrary material objects - material here is a real constraint, I can make crystals but not working omnilol - at quite a substantial clip. I favor universal sapient flourishing."

"Working crystals?"  She sets down her tea in favor of a landscape-oriented legal pad and begins writing.

"Yeah, we tested some."

"Some people are going to be very excited about that, I expect.  Others less so."  She takes a sip of her tea.  "To be entirely frank, my geminis and I favor non-universal sapient flourishing.  I hope we can work productively together regardless."

"Is there a reason you prefer it to be non-universal as opposed to having a priority list for whose flourishing is most urgent to you?"

". . . Suppose we establish a convention where when you say 'you' and when I say 'we', you and I are talking about the group of all of my geminis taken as a whole, without consideration to any uncommon attitudes or beliefs I personally might hold.  Unless specified."

"Sure. I might say 'y'all', I don't know if there's an equivalent here but it's short for 'you all' in some dialects from home."

"As you prefer.  We like it when things go the way we want them to, because we made them that way and not by coincidence or someone else's actions."

"They like control," translates Felicity.

"One could describe it that way," Andrea concedes.  "I would say that flourishing definitionally requires a great deal of control over one's life and circumstances, would you agree?"

"I don't know about definitionally. I think small children can be flourishing without that and indeed it would be kind of hard for most of them to pull it off with it."

"Ah.  I admit I don't have much experience with children."

"Me either but my mom has adopted a few in a different afterlife from mine and this is what she tells me, and that's with kids who cannot possibly come to physical harm."

"That's sweet of her.  Should I assume that you would be telling me about your afterlives situation if you wanted me to know, or isn't requesting details rude."

"Oh, go ahead if it's pertinent, there's just a lot to cover and I don't actually have in mind an order in which to do all of it."

"There's a similar puzzle on my end.  I expect you would know better than I whether this is pertinent."

"Our afterlives involve people showing up in another universe, either with one of three types of active magic powers," wave wave, "or not, depending. My parents both went to the 'not' one. It's pretty unimpressive there but people don't glom onto other people to form new hybrid people."

"Do people keep telling you your world seems lonely?"

"I think someone did say that about not having geminis but I don't think anyone's said it about not having star clouds."

"Something to look forward to, perhaps."  Teasip.  "I might as well say explicitly that my goal for today is to reach enough of an understanding with you that you don't come back in a week or a year having discovered something you feel betrayed to have not been told about, and that would motivate you to enact vengeance or justice.  But as I've said it's hard to know where to start."

"My understanding is that y'all are into creating setups for yourselves in which it is practicable to have power over other sorts of people, and there is an extremely broad range starting at 'inoffensive establishment with carefully managed consent verification protocols where patrons get really intense hand massages and stuff' and it's all downhill from there. I'm not actually sure it's constructive for me to know the details of how bad it gets unless I'm about to be looking at a huge influx of refugees released from whatever they have been doing with their lives thus far and I need to know what that was to take care of them."

"I wouldn't say that's the end of the range.  Otherwise your description seems accurate."

"Okay, yes, starting at doing weird amounts of research on what treats will be most appealing to one's brother's cat, or something."

"It's not uncommon for us to spend a relationship with a - speaking bluntly, victim - gradually giving them more resources and a stabler life, and leaving them flourishing much more than they would have been without our intervention.  It's less common, but not unheard of, for us to do this without the victimhood.  But perhaps nailing down this end of the scale isn't important either."