Asmodia nods along.  She is tracking this; it unfortunately requires that she not process any of her other questions about what usually happens to asexuals in dath ilani romance novels, whether Keltham is suddenly offering her a much better deal on a marriage than she's likely to get anywhere else in Cheliax, or any suppressed panic she has about what Sevar will do to her if she accidentally offers Keltham any confirmation of tropes theory by being 'asexual'.  And how much she may have already given herself away and whether she should try to lie to Keltham about it.

BY THE WAY SECURITY IF YOU'RE LISTENING, Sevar needs to be brought into this loop and caught up; a lie to Keltham may be required very soon.  Please acknowledge.

Light forehead tap of acknowledgment.

"It's really not the least bit impossible, in a world that isn't being influenced by this pattern at all, that I come up with a weird theory about you getting superpowers after coming back from death, which is just completely wrong.  This in a totally natural and ordinary way, causes you to ask me some questions about that, and it comes up in the conversation that you're not attracted to me.  Which girls are allowed to be even if they're not asexual.  Though - if it is because you're asexual and not just unattracted to me personally - it does seem a little improbable that they'd put an asexual in a group that was, I assume, put together the way this one must have been?  Or did they not know that about you?"

She needs to lie; there's no time for Sevar to be brought up to speed if she's not in-loop already, she'll use the lie that Sevar already authorized it doesn't completely not fit.  "What I'm trying to figure out right now is actually more like - if hypothetically I say something like, I've ever felt attraction to a boy one time, or a girl one time, even if nothing happened there because they didn't want me, so I could maybe possibly feel that for you, that means I don't get any superpowers.  So I'd be thinking, maybe it wasn't real attraction and I don't even know what that would actually feel like, because, if it wasn't real attraction, I can maybe still be the asexual and get whatever nice things asexuals get when they're part of a pattern like the one you describe.  Does dath ilan have any way to tell for certain whether somebody is asexual?"

"No, it doesn't.  I'm sorry.  People have looked hard for a test like that and not found it.  Civilization does try very hard not to send asexuals a message that they need to be anything other than they are.  But a lot of asexuals themselves still feel like they got a raw deal from biology, and if that's the way you feel, well, there are all these cases where somebody thought they were asexual for years and then it turns out that they started being able to feel attraction to this one person they eventually met or got to know well enough.  It's not even all that rare.  Which means that for the rest of the asexuals, if they don't want to be what they are, they can never be sure."

"It's one of the more genuinely awful fates in dath ilan, that a pretty significant chunk of the population gets handed, that Civilization hasn't been able to fix.  There's been a massive search for drugs that will induce sexual desire in asexuals, not because it's wrong to be asexual, but because there's so many of them who do say for themselves that's not what they want to be and are offering huge drug bounties on it.  As of when I left Civilization, all the drugs they'd ever found weren't very good and had large side effects."

"On the plus side, from my perspective - because I don't actually want to be in a pattern like that - an asexual who isn't sure she's asexual, who doesn't want to be asexual, who might eventually end up attracted to the protagonist and not have to be asexual anymore, is some degree of evidence against that pattern holding here.  Actually fairly strong evidence against it holding, at least in this particular case.  Because, like, that is a Problematic Message they'd never put in there, flaming shit would that end up in the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods store."

"Does that hold here?  I notice you were careful to say 'hypothetically' and so on."

The desirable lie to Keltham seems obvious given her goals and Sevar's goals, but Asmodia will look down uncertainly and give Security a moment to tell her something, just in case Sevar has already been caught up on the transcript.

"Yeah," Asmodia says quietly after that pause.  "Does that mean - you're not interested in, doing the thing you'd do inside the pattern, with somebody who knew she was asexual and was happy about that?"

Carissa is in the middle of catching up. 

- okay but Asmodia does have superpowers. She's pretty sure. And is actually asexual. She's pretty sure.

.....is tropes theory actually true. That's not how Keltham would think about it, just balances of evidence, either way - but the balances of evidence weigh in favor of tropes theory more than they've let Keltham realize -

- is she actually a secret cleric? The Grand High Priestess's reassurance was carefully worded -

- no, that's stupid -

- does Asmodia have superpowers and how -

"Ask her," she says to Security, "to ask Keltham what superpowers she would've gotten if asexual." Because she is. So maybe she got them. 

"We can always make our own 'eroLARP' with our own rules for it, if that's what we both want.  I mean, the reason why that's part of the pattern in the first place is that it's something a lot of people would want for ordinary reasons, that there's somebody in the pattern who they can talk to without worrying about whether that's leading to sex."

"The most common outcome in Civilization is for asexuals to marry each other - to the point where it's an issue with respect to assortative mating prevention - but there's more female than male asexuals, so the second most common outcome for a female asexual who wants a stable heterosexual relationship is that she finds a man who can manage multiple relationships, who can have enough sex for himself with other women, but he could still use additional cuddles or emotional support or everything else that isn't about sex."

Asmodia gets the Security notification, and feels the ice slide through her because it's obvious exactly what Sevar is thinking.

She doesn't see any way to avoid it.

"What superpowers would I have gotten if I'd been all the way asexual, according to the pattern?"

"Most probably, the superpower of being the best at math.  And being in on the ground floor of Project Lawful, and having a chance to revolutionize Golarion and someday ending up incredibly rich.  I mean, speaking of sending Messages that aren't Problematic, that sure is one that most authors will take an opportunity to mention, at some point, so that everybody in Civilization doesn't get a constant bombardment of fiction carrying the message that you need candy powers or prophecy powers in order to ever be important or worth dating."

Okay, but, if there's a thing in the genre of prophecy superpowers or candy superpowers, do you know what it'd be.

Still no way to avoid it.

"And in the less probable case where there's something like prophecy superpowers or candy superpowers?  I'm curious what I missed by, apparently, this time, not being asexual enough."

"Not really the way I'd recommend thinking about it, but -"

"Well, first of all, you'd be much more likely to be a Combat 'Ace' or an all-anti-powerful Nullifying 'Ace' in the version of the pattern where everything is much more sexualized and we're constantly fighting off sexy Zon-Kuthon agents bent on dragging us away to have sex with us.  In which case, the classic form of the 'trope' is that they can't use sexual mind control on you, and maybe you can also bop somebody on the head and make them snap out of the mind control."

"I admit that is not what I was expecting to hear," Asmodia says.  "And if it wasn't that?  I'm still trying to grasp what this whole pattern is."  It's not a good look on her, at this point, if she makes Sevar force her to say it.

"Those actually are the top two obvious possibilities.  If it wasn't that, if it was a 'deconstructed' version of the 'trope' where it's supposed to be a nonsexy shadow of the sexy thing... something about nullification, maybe, something you can prevent or that you're immune to?  Or something that conveyed, like, how people can care for each other in a way that has nothing to do with sex."

Well she needs to say something before Keltham starts getting suspicious.

"I was thinking that this pattern you keep talking about was the dath ilani equivalent of awful pre-Asmodean books, romance novels, full of, how did you put it, Problematic Messages, about women who stand around being pretty and conceited until a man decides he's really attracted to her and wants to do all the work of giving her a happy life without her having to be clever about it at all.  I'm increasingly confused about what this is instead of that."

"So imagine that you started from there, took up the average Intelligence of the reader by 6 points and the average Intelligence of the author by 8 or 10 points, and then there was a Civilization of people many of whom had sufficient spare time for things to get really really really overcomplicated, and you may understand why I am not even trying to explain what an 'anthropic selection' effect that looks like a meta-'eroLARP' based on 'deconstructive secondary-literature' of an 'eroLARP' would be."

"It's looking like a moot point; a lot of the theory's predictions seem increasingly like false starts and - looking up at clouds, that weren't shaped to be faces, and trying to identify a nose and a mouth until you twist yourself around to seeing faces in the clouds."

Are we done here, Sevar?  This looks like a good outcome for the Project, maybe the best possible one, and Asmodia very much wants to quit while she's ahead.

Yep, all done, you can pursue your not-romance with Keltham or not as you wish as long as you're in good standing.

"I - probably want to go off and think about this."

"Do you already know whether you'd want an almost-asexual in your pattern, if other things worked out?"

"I do not think that quickly any more than you do."

"By the way, I notice I have a pending question you didn't answer, about how somebody like yourself ended up in the group of girls that got sent here?  I'd otherwise imagine there'd be a screening question, like, are you liable to be okay having sex with Governance's sperm-harvesting target after a relatively short acquaintance."

This seems like a really bad question to even visibly hesitate on -

"I mean, I can still have high-Intelligence kids with somebody?  I did not plan on going the rest of my life never having sex with anyone even for purposes of having kids, and I was okay with having more sex than just the minimum for those kids."

She knows that's an unauthorized lie, Asmodia's judgment was that it would have looked very suspicious to delay to ask for authorization.

Yep, fine.