Wow. Every time Leareth thinks he's starting to get used to Elfyn and the bizarre way she thinks, she comes out with something like THAT. 

:...I am suddenly very curious how you would do that, physically! I am not sure I actually want to know the answer: This is pretty tangential but it's easier to talk about than the SCREAMING HORROR at this concept. 

"You know, lots of people go into their first sexual experience without knowing exactly what they're doing! But they have instincts, and they have a strong sense of when they're getting warmer, so to speak, and they fumble blindly towards the thing they can feel that they desperately want. If you fuck enough abstract concepts you get to be a fumbling virgin a hundred times over, with no idea of what it even is you want or how to reach it, just hungry and desperate and hill-climbing for pleasure wherever you can find it."

Leareth feels like he maybe needs to see some concrete examples of this before it makes any sense! 

"...Huh. Can you fuck abstract math concepts? That sounds as though it could be hot." Wait what did he just say. 

"Well, I don't know. You'd have to explain an abstract math concept for me to try."

"....Do you want me to do that?" 

"You wave something it might be possible to fuck in front of me and then ask if I want you to let me try to fuck it? Of course I do!!!"

Then Leareth, grinning, is going to explain the complex exponential function. Complete with an illusion'd visualization for her:

Elfyn flops down in the bed Leareth just got up from, closes his eyes, and concentrates. "Are you just able to visualize it? Can you describe how I visualize it, that seems like an important skill to ~~~~~ for sex with math concepts."

"I can visualize it but it's harder to hold all the details purely in my head. I suppose it might help if you were the one casting the illusion yourself and shaping it..." 

He can explain how he does the mental calculations for how to fill in the shape of the function, and how he maps it visually so that it's pretty, and - ooh, hmm, actually fractals might be especially fun for this. They rate very highly on beauty and visual compellingness compared to how conceptually complex they are." 

He can show her one he thinks is particularly sexual-feeling.  

She has, at it happens, not picked up the skill 'sexy math visualization' before, so at first she's slow at it, and has tons of questions about how substituting a different number would produce a different image, and whether there's a change that'd make the image close in a different place, or be thicker, or be thinner.

But the nice thing about skills is that once you level them enough, they get easier, close to automatic; you can do them without errors and without mental effort. Math visualization is apparently a difficult skill to level, compared to sexy dancing or sexy fruit-eating or sexy naked sparring or something; it takes half an hour before the pictures start coming easily, without lots of fussing around trying to imagine what's going on and checking it against Leareth's illusion. 

Once it does, though, then it's there, clear and beautiful in her mind's eye, and she can see -

- another illusion that'd go with it, that'd take where it gives, give where it takes, see where they won't overlap nicely and which numbers to change so they do -

- she puts up her own illusion, overlapping his -

Leareth would not have thought of this activity as very related to sex, if not for the entire existing context of their "relationship", such as it is. But it's certainly compelling, and it's genuinely hard, it fills all of his attention - and Elfyn is getting better at math visualization at an objectively absurd rate which it turns out is really very attractive - 

This is not at all having sex with math, it's flirting with your supervillain, she's going to need way more levels in math visualization and then she'll unlock something like immersive math visualizations and then she'll be on her way to having sex with math.

It's fine. She's patient. She can wait. As long as it's only like a day or two. 

She bites her lip and concentrates and calculates how her illusion could reasonably run out of its bounds and go wriggling over to Leareth and boop him on the nose.

If she's patient and persistent she can eventually find an opportunity where she can bring back in a previously-described math visualization and have that end up where Leareth's nose is, though unless she's modifying the illusion to include a physically solid mage-barrier, it won't be especially boppy. 

Probably no physical force until he's less jumpy. She will make a 'boop' sound when she gets it to hit. 

Leareth is mildly startled, enough that his own illusion freezes and jitters for a second or two, but not startled enough to lose it entirely, or to be upset. 

:...Is that you indicating that you are bored of this and would rather move on to a different activity now?:

He can read her mind! Does he not like to! 

"I think I'm not going to ~~~~~ to the point of being able to fuck the math today," she says. "We can keep going if you want."

"This is enjoyable and I am not going to get bored for a while but I - do feel that it is no longer at the point where it is especially making me feel closer to you? And I - think in order to feel closer I need to at some point tell you more about my life and my current plans. Though that does sound much less fun." 

"The High Khan of Gharabar," vaguely Mongolian low-fantasy world with ancestor spirits and bullet-time archery and not much else, poorer even than Velgarth, "slaughtered his way across the continent and left probably several million dead people in his wake, because he wanted to be honored by all and be immortal in the memory of his people. And the tutorial zone was one of the villages his soldiers were sacking. 

That was - before I'd accepted the supervillains quest, I'd asked for some place where the bad guys were just doing bad things it'd be better if they weren't. Massacres, not wars. It threw the 'harem of supervillains?' plot at me about a month in when I had assembled an army of my own by fucking most of his and had - realized where it was going and refused to march on him. 

Anyway, he's - I don't want to say 'he's a nice person'. He's a person. One of the worst there is, I guess, if you were ranking. I enjoy his company. 

Should I go through the other five?"

Leareth....is pretty sure that he would be tempted to actually just fight this person and make sure that he was left with no remaining opportunities to use his resources for - the things he was using them for. Ma'ar would - probably just have done that. 

It feels like Elfyn is trying to go somewhere different from that, with all this. 

Maybe the thing she means is that she doesn't see people as 'good' or 'evil', 'friends' or 'enemies', that she sees them as just people. Some of whom she likes, personally. 

...Then again, she has some kind of provider-of-magical-powers that can apparently cause her to be sexually attracted to things like gods or Heartstones or abstract math, which...really seems like it's some kind of modification applied to her, even if it doesn't touch the core of her. 

"...It might help and I am definitely curious," Leareth admits, "but to the extent that your angle here is - conveying that are not going to decide I am your enemy, whatever I say, because you like me and you have liked worse people than me... I think that would be more reassuring if I were sure it was not some kind of mind-effect on you, coming from the source of your magic. That would not be a dealbreaker for talking to you or anything, and I would not judge you negatively either way, just - I do want to know who or what exactly I am negotiating with, here." 

"Oh, it might be. It doesn't feel like it, but I think the source of my magic could do it and not make it feel like it'd done anything, if it wanted. 

Why - is that important? Are you worried it won't do that for you? Or that it will but that's not a change you want to give it an opening to make?"

"I think more the latter? And I would be much less worried in either direction if I understood the power that is providing your magic. I am just - very reluctant to trust any kind of vaguely godlike entity to modify my me in ways that could affect my values. I might feel differently if my formative experiences had been in a different world with different gods and god-like entities, but - I am not sure. I think I do just have some intrinsic drive to - be in charge of myself and the person I become." 

"Yeah, makes sense. That's - not something you'll unlock when you know me better. I don't - know what the thing that gives me my power wants, aside from - stories, romantic ones, people discovering themselves by having lots of fascinating sex. I - have never gotten the sense it was trying to screw me over. When things were hurting me, even in complicated ways I was trying not to notice, it changed them. 

But it's totally messing with everyone's heads all the time. It might not be doing it - directly - it might just be giving me the cues about exactly the ways to blink and move and lick my lips, but I'm not actually sure that's very different."

Leareth nods. Smiles, slightly. "I suppose that, as very powerful alien forces with not-fully-understood values go, that one is - more reassuring than most? I cannot claim I personally care strongly about - romantic stories - but an entity that did would probably be much more value-aligned with me, and with human flourishing in general, than the existing Velgarth gods." 

"I think a little bit of me makes most places better. I'm not sure about a lot of me, because that's the point where -" She doesn't have words for it, because she's not that smart. It's kinda the thing where it's bad when Twitter gets too good at showing you the Tweets that'll keep you on Twitter the most, and kinda the thing where if you breed dogs hard enough they get weird breathing problems.

Leareth is pretty sure that he knows what she means! It fits together, clicks into place, almost instantly in his head.

It's still oddly hard to put together an explanation that he thinks will work for her. 

"I think you are - not wrong, to have that concern. And -" this thought is terrifying, but also isn't new information, so he ignores it, "- and to be more concerned about it to the extent that a powerful alien super-intelligent entity, the one providing your magic, can...directly affect what you can notice and perceive? - So far I have not lived under the assumption that the gods of Velgarth could directly control my perceptions enough to interfere with experimental results on purpose."

Pause.

"But I have still had the same concern. I think it does not require an adversarial actor for there to be a problem where what you can perceive and measure is a limited subset of what is actually happening - this might be a phenomenon that is almost unavoidable– actually, I suspect that even the Velgarth gods fall prey to - to reacting and updating and changing their plans based on what is visible to Them, which is not, actually, everything that matters to the myriad smaller entities whose lives They are meddling with...." 

Leareth feels like this is maybe getting off-topic. It's definitely nudging him toward being more upset. And it's not that he doesn't want to communicate all of his thoughts and plans and emotions to Elfyn - he apparently does want to do that, even though he's not sure this is a reasonable plan - but Leareth is noticing that he would maybe prefer it if he could poke her sore points slightly less? 

He would maybe also prefer if they could find a topic that would poke his own sore spots less but Leareth is very much not inclined to make conversational decisions based on what is or isn't upsetting.