"Still working out how much is dath ilan and how much is Law and how much is Keltham."

"Surely any sensible feminine 'gendertrope' would take for granted that if you had a choice of men to have sex with, the first element determining your choice should be how good he is at decision theory.  I'm just saying this because it's obviously true, of course, and not because I'm the best decision theorist on this planet."

"Shall we all to dinner?"

PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Evening

Keltham will, at dinnertime, inform Yaisa that she's been quite successful in her goal of causing him to be occasionally distracted at various times during the day, and he does not want to spend all of dinner like that, and he is therefore going to go sit by Gregoria and Tonia and Peranza instead.  Keltham will be seeing to Yaisa shortly.

He had better, Yaisa tells him cheerfully.

Meritxell and Carissa are sitting right near Gregoria having a not-not-for-Keltham's-ears discussion of how you would define Cheliax's gendertropes if you were doing that, but Gregoria is pointedly not participating in that in favor of talking with Tonia about experiment design for checking whether Security/the washout girls make the Law error to do with inconsistent ordering of three preferences.

Of all the darned times not to be able to run two streams of verbal interpretation simultaneously!  Keltham will try to listen to both conversations anyways while also eating.  Tonia and Gregoria are hopefully going to end up on basically the right track and only require a few hints from him?

Tonia and Gregoria seem to basically have the concept figured out, minus knowing enough statistics to interpret their results, which is a problem for future Tonia and Gregoria. 

"I'm not sure that 'mad scientist' is a gendertrope! To be a gendertrope I think the way women do it has to be different from the way men do it."

"I think that there are some differences between women mad scientists and man mad scientists, though! Like, the archetypal mad scientist woman is Areelu Vorlesh, or Nefreti Clepati, or Felandrial Morgethai, and they're going for a different vibe than, say, Manohar, or the Archmage Nex, or Tar-Baphon -"

"'lich' is definitely its own gendertrope and not just a subset of 'mad scientist'."

Keltham will listen attentively, somewhat more so to the female side since these could be eventual future dating prospects.

      "Are there any female lichs?" says Meritxell. 

"I mean, not that I've heard of, but they might just not advertise it."

     "Then I don't see how it can be a gendertrope at all."

"Honestly I'm not sure exactly what a gendertrope is."

"Standard, recognizable patterns that men and women fall into.  Or women and women, or men and men, or asexual women and people who looked male at birth but want to become as female as they can, but those are rarer and get long words instead of short ones."

"We definitely have some of those, I just don't think 'lich' is one of them. Dangerous bad boy who will definitely hurt you and walk out after sex and never see you again, that's a gendertrope. 'lich' isn't."

"I could better pass judgment on that if I knew what a 'lich' was, aside from a supervillain-related personality type that commands undead armies."

"With very powerful magic you can separate your soul and your body - this kills you, but that's not prohibitive - and contain your soul in an object, which presumably you hide in an extremely secret and inaccessible place, making you impossible to permanently destroy; this is becoming a lich. The powerful magic is of the kind that allows for the raising of undead armies, so lichs usually have undead armies, because if you're really good at that kind of magic anyway and can hardly piss off Pharasma more than you already have, why not. The ability to raise undead armies is - the kind of power where the more you have the more you can accumulate - so people usually coordinate to put down lichs that seem to be raising particularly notable armies."

"And not everyone wants to be a lich because..."

"How exactly to do it is secret but I think requires sacrificing large numbers of people? And is also incredibly difficult, like, decades of work. And many of the gods disapprove, so people who care what those gods think wouldn't do it."

"You end up as mostly a skeleton and that affects your sex life, along with your ability to enjoy food and most other emotions too.  Unless you're Takaral, but most liches will never, ever be that good."

"Thank you, Ione, that is the context I was missing."

"Yaisa.  This cookie is to congratulate you on having joined that select group of individuals who get advice from oracles.  Your advice is that if at some point tonight you can think of something very hot that Keltham could do to you, that you would genuinely enjoy and that would move Keltham a little further away from obligate Lawful Good sexuality, you should tell Keltham honestly what you want, and offer to pay him exactly half as much money as the most that service is actually worth to you.  My curse says that it can only say that this will not harm Asmodeus's interests, because if my curse told you it would advance Asmodeus's interests, you'd have to do it and that's not the way for your true feelings to reach Keltham."

" - what?" says Yaisa. "Um. Okay."

"Great."

Security, copy that to Subirachs priority, and to Sevar sometime when it won't distract her from her conversation, in case anybody wants to override that.

"I don't suppose you can explain the plan," Yaisa says. "It'd help with doing my part in it."