"Not these ones."

"I haven't tested the doodad on anything quite that long."

"I can repeat it within a designation and then magically attest that the content of the designation is true?"

"That probably works, in the sense that the ways I can think of for it to not work all require you to be more emphatically fucking with me than I am presently assuming."

"I suppose that's all I can ask for."

Shell Bell's doodad looks like a puck of white ceramic with four holes scooped out of its edges equidistantly; one hole currently has a blue glow emanating from it.

Journey bookends the amended statement with 'chandelier', then addresses the puck:  "Everything I claimed between the last two times I said 'chandelier' is true."

The doodad agrees.

"Cool. I appreciate your investment in my sanity."

"Mmhm.  I realize the 'stick' part of the motivation scheme here is probably more salient, but in the long run I do hope the carrots will eclipse it."

"They seem like probably really nice carrots, just, uh, in a way where the tension with the sticks calls into question the adequacy of the involved carrot-selection-and-design skills, in the same way that I would not expect a dog trained to fetch slippers to successfully retrieve the international space station even if it sounded like it was dragging something really big and I heard yelling in Russian."

"See, the fact that you say things like that is part of what makes you such an enticing casting choice."

"But you don't want me to be sarcastic in front of the contestants!"

"Was that sarcasm?  But I did speak imprecisely, then.  It's not that all forms of sarcasm are banned, it's that... this is a show with a narrative, a fantasy, for both the viewers and the contestants, and there's a certain amount of going along with the premise necessary for that to work."

"It was generated by the same general process that produces sarcasm and will be difficult to suppress one without the other."

"Mm, I mean something like..."  He sips contemplatively at his teacup.  "You may understandably dislike the situation here, but it is completely within your power to come out of it with a lasting, happy marriage.  This despite the show ending by default at the proposal and divorce being legal most places within the CRC.  But you're not going to accomplish that if you don't take the actual dating a certain amount seriously.  There are going to be villains, and people you could spend loyal centuries with, and the only way for you to tell those apart is to genuinely get to know them.  And there's a difference between clever quips and being dismissive of people who are here through no fault of their own, and indeed between clever quips and using those quips to distance yourself from something that could instead be a chance to really connect with someone."

"People play out romance plots on my television-related problem too to placate the showrunners but I suppose the incentives are different because the participants are never both alive at the end."

"I am getting such a concerning picture of your television-related problem but I suppose it does sound a lot worse than mine and I should be appropriately calibrated for that," Cam tells her, and to Journey, "Can you like, paint me a picture of how I get to know these people in the proposed - so to speak - setup, I reiterate that I've never watched anything like it."

"Of course!  It starts with the limo exits, during which you have a few minutes to meet each suitor one at a time on their way inside the mansion.  You'll receive one First-Impression Rose to give out to the person with the most strikingly positive introduction once everyone is inside.  Then there's a cocktail party where everyone mingles and people may 'steal you away' from each other for one-on-one conversations.  You'll have some time to deliberate suitorless before the rose ceremony, where you'll be given a set number of Clarity and other Roses to distribute to the contestants.  We'll work with you during deliberation to come up with an order to present the roses that's appropriately dramatic.

"From there, it'll be a combination of unstructured time, where people can roam freely around the Bacheloret Dimansion; group dates, where you and all the suitors participate in some sort of planned activity together; one-on-one dates, where you pick a single contestant to whisk away to same; two-on-one dates, which are like that but with more narrative tension; and cocktail parties and rose ceremonies.

"Normally many of the dates would involve real travel to actual destinations, but since the security measures are a bit nonstandard this season, we're instead going to have your 'home base' be on a planetoid within this dimension and bring in replica locations on separate planetoids.  We'll have our two establishing episodes here, then a string of 'destinations' until we're down to the final four, when you start eliminating only one contestant per episode.  From there, it's Hometowns - or, facsimile Hometowns, for the aforementioned reason - Fantasy Suites, and the Finale."

"...I suppose I don't know if I would have resisted the temptation to name something a Dimansion or not," Cam muses. "Why is it necessary to present roses in a dramatic order instead of just cutting it to look like I did, do people have very dramatic reactions to it - they probably do, ugh. Do you have an example of forbidden dismissiveness you expect me to produce without guidelines against it?"

"They'll also be holding the rose after you give it to them, even if they were all completely stoic.  Examples are, hm, we've had this alt of yours in the audience reaction department for a century or so.  Nabbed him out of a torture fortress that uses... well, you know how I said the one guy thought everything was a simulation designed to torment him?  That but for real, lot of memory erasing and running scenarios over and over with slight variations, lots of rescues that turn out to lead right back into torture - these are the levers I have for helping with this sort of thing, putting him in the audience - anyway.

"His comments, when we can get him to make them, are biting sarcasm over every aspect of everything.  This is fine, some of them add an acidic bit of lightness to the dish we're trying to make here, and we can cut everything else: this is less true of a protagonist.  If something goes obviously wrong with something we've set up, it's fine to poke fun at that; it would be obviously inauthentic if you didn't.  If you catch someone egregiously lying for drama, it's obviously fine to eliminate them.  But sketchy though we may be, we are not torture simulators, and I hope that you can cultivate an amount of buy-in to the premise that doesn't involve going, 'wow, a romantic boat ride on the romance show, how original,' every fifteen minutes.  And similarly, that you'll be aware that the drama between contestants is very serious and high-stakes to them, and that if you take pot shots at someone you consider to be an obvious bad actor, you're more likely to harm someone who's trying to care about you than you are the villain."

"How did our alt get into the torture fortress??"

"I also have that question but - hm - okay, not 'how original' about the boat ride, but what about 'you'd think they'd have stalked me effectively enough to know I'd have trouble getting into the boat without falling in the water' -"

"Oh, we're going to fix that, with your permission.  Carrots."

"Carrots," agrees Cam. "...can I make references to carrots as a running gag, I might want to do that."

"If you have found my assistance useful and you feel like not hilariously lowballing me I would also like one of those."