"Oh, nothing!  The mind control is sufficient."

"Does that come before or after they are recruited and with or without informed consent?"

"Varies."

"Charming."

"Mm-hm.  I would presumably mind this if I," he clicks his tongue, "could."

"Nobody above you in the org chart is worried about Empress Belladonna or whatever coming after their ass?"

"Ehn.  Yous are pretty nice even to people they're stopping."

"...so they're fine with it because it will not involve a thousand years in an oubliette?"

"I was being flippant; I'm not actually a party to those sorts of decisions."

"Uh-huh. What are the inputs into how this season is conducted?"

"I confess to having done a substantial amount of the steering, here.  With oversight."

"And?"

"I shouldn't share too many details."

"My willingness to do this instead of being dead and waiting for the tender mercies of Empress Belladonna may, actually, hinge on assurances to the effect that I am not personally selecting mind control victims for Those Assholes. Like there are other factors here but it is the sort of thing that could tip the balance."

"Does this include mind control put in place to counteract peripheral effects of previous, fatal mind control?"

"Maybe not if you explain it."

"Maybe later, if we in fact decide to cast him."  Shrug.  "And if we promise not to mind control contestants that were chosen based on speaking with you?"

"Like, anybody you're throwing in because they come with a sweet advertising deal or because you do not fear Empress Belladonna getting your ass for fucking with her husband's alt is still fair game, but anyone you put in because they might get along with me based on things I say here and now would be immune? That's not really what I meant, my understanding of the structure of the show - though correct me if I'm wrong, since I cannot understate how very, very much I have never watched The fucking Bachelor - is that I get to screen people, like a, I don't know how exactly, a bracket tournament or something. And I do not really care for a situation wherein, and think it will in fact make your show worse at its ostensible purpose if, I have to balance who I would want to win on their merits - maybe Empress Belladonna's husband's alt is great - versus who I most especially emphatically want you to leave the fuck alone."

"...Let's pick things apart, here.  Normally, there's a starting set of contestants.  You have some influence over this, although the producers will still be picking out, for example: people who have traits they expect you to like but which you didn't mention, gold diggers, people into being here for the fame or the power, villains, and audience surrogates.  You will learn the identities of these people when they emerge from their limousines in the first episode of the show, and not before.  With me so far?"

"I follow, yeah."

"The pace of the show is dictated through rose ceremonies, where you'll receive a number of roses that match the number of remaining contestants, and allocate them.  They have different effects depending on their color.  Clear ones eliminate a contestant from the show, as I said before.  Normally, the majority are Red Roses, which give both a power increase and a psychological effect, or other colors which work similarly.  But!  Crucially, I've already gotten the producers to agree that that style isn't in theme with this season.  New set of mind-control-free roses, in the process of being designed."

"It must be so hard to design mind-control-free roses since the common or garden variety is so insidious in this way."

"You'd be surprised!  - Kidding, I'm kidding.  Anyway, producers are not very sold on leaving out all forms of initial brain tweaking, even if they abstain from it once things get rolling.  Care to elaborate on the nature and level of your objections there?"

"What, has Empress Belladonna not published a manifesto, shape up, Empress Belladonna - okay. If somebody is assenting to appear on the show because that is how they can afford your miracle cure for the depression that attempted to end their life, and they get it gratis for agreeing to appear, in the form and manner they expect, that's chill, or, like, as chill as any form of operating this exploitative foolishness was ever likely to be. If somebody is... a lesbian, and would therefore not normally suit the conceit of the season, but you really want her on there for stupid television reasons, so you apply magic conversion therapy, I could imagine my reaction to this depending a lot on her relationship to her original sexuality such that by default it would be a no-go-fuck-you-all sort of deal, but you could conceivably find the exact most mollifying lesbian in the multiverse to do this to if I had enough of her story to be reasonably confident of that. If you do something more gratuitous than that, like making people fall in love with me or bark like a chicken whenever they see a banana or - I do not know what reality TV consumers think is fun when there's magic available, hopefully I have defined a couple corners of this doubtless multidimensional region of horrors? - then no go. I'm being fairly strict here because I'm not aware of any specific reason you couldn't be mind-controlling me so in the world where that has been ruled out I wish to play for something loosely resembling a Halloween costume that was intended to represent the concept of adequacy rather than fall over myself to compromise prematurely."

Journey nods.  "How do you feel about uncoerced alt permission as a standard for things you haven't ruled out?"