As the formalities are concluding, Sesnai receives a text message from Tefano. Should she investigate its contents, it will prove to be a somewhat stiltedly phrased inquiry as to when would be a good time for them to have an informal chat 'in a social rather than a military context'.

Oh, any time, texts Sesnai; after all, (she doesn't text), Nairia's unpacking and she doesn't have classes yet and she wants to avoid running into That Woman, so seducing encountering Tefano is really the most useful thing she can do today.

In that case he suggests that they meet fifteen minutes from now in her quarters.

Sesnai is fine with that, yes.

He knocks on her door fifteen minutes later, not quite precisely to the second but unreasonably close.

"Lord Eshiaf!" She's there to welcome him in! Nairia has, of course, already magically decorated the room; it does not violate any of the Official Rules for how a cadet's quarters ought to be decorated, but it also doesn't look like the quarters of someone who is not Sesnaiilaisa Adaitan, either. "Please come on in and have a seat."

(Nairia is, in some mystical sense, no longer around. Sesnai is not chaperoned but they are engaged, after all, and it hardly damages her long-term plans to have rumors that they are closer than they in fact are.)

"Thank you."

He is, for some reason, carrying a space clipboard standardized semi-disposable data tablet. He sits down, spends about half a second fidgeting awkwardly with it, then holds it out. "I have been advised against presenting you with a questionnaire about your relationship preferences, but it strikes me as dishonest to try to conceal from you that I am the sort of person who draws up a relationship preferences questionnaire to hand to my affianced at the earliest reasonable opportunity. I will not be offended if you refuse to fill it out."

"I think the people who gave that advice rather assumed you would be affianced to someone else," Sesnai says. "I think that is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and it may mean I need to solve aging rather faster than I'd intended."

And she'll take the tablet! 

"Oh," he says, with a small, surprised smile that may be the most genuine expression she has ever before seen on his face. "Well then."

"I'll forgive you not knowing this time," she says lightly, and starts on the questionnaire.

It is thorough, inventive, and despite carefully neutral phrasing it advertises some fascinating things about Tefano's mindset. For example, there is an entire page of the questionnaire that covers the subject of extramarital affairs: whether she would prefer to have them or not, whether she would prefer that Tefano have them or not, whether she would prefer in each case that the other spouse know about the affair in general terms or in very specific ones or not at all...

There is a section about sex that provides a 'skip this entire section' button, and further skip buttons on each of its many subsections. There is a section, for some reason, about home cooking, both whether she anticipates doing any herself and whether she has an opinion about Tefano doing it. There is a section about how much space she thinks would be reasonable to devote to hobby paraphernalia in their future home, and it reveals what may be some interesting priors about a reasonable amount of space to devote to hobby paraphernalia. There is a section inquiring after her thoughts on children. Every time she is asked for a positive/neutral/negative opinion, there is a standardized scale with a separate button for not being sure what her opinion is. There is a freeform section at the end for anything she has to say that the questions themselves did not cover, and another for feedback on the design of the questionnaire.

The whole time she is filling it out, Tefano is sitting quietly, apparently doing nothing, wearing his Generic Neutral Facial Expression. A keen observer with well-developed psychic senses could, however, catch him doing the psychic equivalent of twiddling his thumbs, a sort of intricate imaginary fidget that is nearly invisible because it doesn't project any power outside his own body. It's sort of a bizarre thing to be able to do at all, actually; it's like someone started with the very most basic exercises that you learn for getting a handle on your psychic powers before you've learned to actually do anything with them, and went off from there in sort of the same direction you would go from letter-folding to arrive at fiendishly complex origami.

Before starting on the form, she does a quick camera-kill, just in case there's something in her room, and severs all shipnet connections on the tablet but then gets started on it.

Sesnai thinks that extra-marital affairs are something she would strongly prefer to default to not having but worthwhile in some situations, and worth discussing in general terms since they are likely to have significant effects on the other's life as they are both public figures; she notes that she will end up married to other people for political reasons and this will impact both of their lives. Sesnai is mildly sadistic, moderately dominant but both of these take a back seat to hating people having power over her madly and furiously without limit in any context whatsoever, and doesn't have opinions on most of the content in that section. Sesnai is not going to do home cooking and has no objection to Tefano doing it but her expectation is that it will mostly be done by a cook. Sesnai thinks that it makes perfect sense to have a wing for your chemical laboratories, a wing for your smithy, and a third wing for wargaming historical campaigns to try to outcompete history's best generals, and really Tefano may be thinking too small with his hobbies. Sesnai wants children long-term (a stab of pain) but expects to be busy while she sorts out the whole Black Fleets business and is a little worried that if they don't fix aging that may preclude them for Tefano's life.

Her freeform section points out that she is actually a major political player and fantastically rich and that these are likely to have a much larger impact on their lives than Tefano seems to be considering; for instance, everything she does is automatically of extreme public interest to lots of Court schemers, which is why she is going to be erasing all her answers as soon as Tefano has memorized them and before the tablet can leave the room. Also, at some point Tefano will need to tell her how his psychic origami works, since she wants to learn all psychic skills she doesn't currently possess.

Other than that the questionnaire is fine.

He absorbs her responses at a truly phenomenal reading speed that is entirely in keeping with his burgeoning reputation for never missing a detail no matter how lengthy the report.

"The tablet is military issue and has a hardware switch to completely sanitize its memory. I can offer you my own answers but I think the highlights summarize reasonably well: to a first approximation I've never experienced sexual attraction in my life; I am solidly against having children until such time as I can offer them a life I am not afraid or ashamed to bring them into, which may well not happen during my lifetime; I have no objection to extramarital affairs and may eventually want one if I ever meet someone I am sexually or romantically attracted to, but I don't prioritize that aspect of my life highly enough to want to indulge it over your objections; I have some bizarre notions about what constitutes an uncomfortably intimate situation, but I needn't bother you with the details unless you wish to be bothered. I would be happy to teach you my 'psychic origami', what a lovely name for it."

"I actually think Villarosa is good enough to be worth bringing children into," said Sesnai, "though I am not sure I could convince you except by reference to suicide rates, revealed preference, and performance on standardized questionnaires, I just need to fix the galaxy before I can spend nine months on the project; I think that the highest priority in your extramarital affairs is to avoid causing serious political trouble since if you do fall in love, my annoyance is relevant but much less important than how relations with whoever it is are going to affect the galactipolitical system; it is probably worth going into that at some eventual point but not now and please, I don't like not knowing interesting things."

"I know this is very inconvenient of me," he says, "but I loathe politics to a truly unfortunate degree and if I had no external demands on my time or skills I would spend the rest of my life reading books and inventing pointless new psychic techniques in a room by myself without ever again having to take into account anyone's opinion of any of my actions. Anyway, the origami. I assume you had far better tutors than I, but the first psychic technique I ever learned was aura pulsing—"

He demonstrates, flaring his aura (respectable for any ordinary noble, downright shocking for a human like him, still just about nothing compared to Sesnai's) and then damping it again.

"—which has virtually no practical use, but the interesting thing about it to me at the time was that it wasn't a simple matter of on or off, I could pull my aura in farther—which gave me some ideas about stealth, though I haven't yet developed them to any useful purpose, and I suppose that makes sense since if psychic invisibility were that easy everyone would be doing it—anyway, while I was pursuing that ultimately futile endeavour I did discover that in addition to extending or retracting my aura I can, hmm, twist it? Like this." He demonstrates again, with his aura extended slightly to make it easier to view, and only making a very simple perturbation to start with. It looks really weird to psychic senses, sort of like watching someone with hypermobility fold their fingers backwards. "It's much less uncomfortable than it looks. And once I had that, I started doing patterns," he chains the first twist into a second, "and cycles," he adds a few more and loops them around so they form a pretty little knot of power, an experience somewhat more like watching a contortionist fold themselves into a suitcase. "And then I combined that with my otherwise inadequate stealth techniques so I could do the whole thing much more unobtrusively. You've got a very good eye to have caught me at it, I've been keeping myself occupied that way in boring meetings for years and nobody's noticed. I suppose that's what I get for doing bizarre psychic things in front of a member of the royal family. So, did you get all that or should I repeat or elaborate on anything?"

This is without question the most animated she's ever seen him. The Generic Neutral Facial Expression is nowhere to be found.

Great! Sesnai is also into this, which mostly just involves intensifying her usual expressions while she starts playing with her aura.

"I'm afraid that I love politics," she admits. "Well. Running things. Getting there, less. If I had no external demands on my time or skills I'd try to make it to Fleet Admiral, and limit my physical and psychical experiments." She tries to flex her aura; it roils. "I think I follow what you're doing just not how you're doing it - I started with force, I was two, and sometimes I'd make things explode and I wasn't sure why -" and Nairia would have to sort out why the two-year-old wanted things to explode "- and that's when they called in the tutors. I don't think I really have a grip on it -" it isn't that it's uncomfortable, it's just that it's slippery - "so I spent too little time on fine control and too much just on - basic control. My assumption was that I'd have time to depth-explore after I'd finished breadth-exploring and I haven't finished breadth-exploring yet." All right, so pulling it in - pushing it out - twist - 

"My 'eyes' are, alas, better than my 'hands'." She pauses - "Have you been following the hyperspace-manipulation research, though -"

He makes an intrigued noise. "Perhaps not in as much detail as I should have been. Go on."

"So, our main crisis is obviously military; there's an exponential decline in the gaps between Black Fleet arrival times - that's mostly not being published because of worries about panic, but everyone's done the math, the next fleet will be in the next year or two and we're hoping prophecy will get it more precise but we aren't expecting it - and we're building better ships and catching up to them, but things are not looking optimistic and this is one of the problems I need to solve. We're still trying to determine just how the Black Fleets are using the paths they are, but it appears that they aren't just using ship devices but actual powers to navigate, fluctuating the hyperspace corridors out to clear paths we can't take."

She grins. "But if they can push it out, we can pull it in. On their fleets, if necessary, or on every path leading outwards from Villarosan space. Duke Feian's clique has been testing the theory - it looks like it's possible to fluctuate the rim more in one direction than another if you get close enough, using some of the same techniques pilots use to maintain themselves on the rims of their carriers' hyperspace bubbles, the key element - by Ravera's paper - is that you need to keep your aura's signature harmonized with the rim instead of with the generator, but if she's right that means that we just need six different order-of-magnitude improvements and the war will be over."

"Fascinating," he says. "Well, thank you very much for dramatically increasing my level of ambient temptation to desert the military and become a full-time psychic researcher."

"It is, isn't it! You're very welcome. It will only end up mattering if we aren't conquered soon, though; we do have some more urgent problems to deal with."

"Alas, I am still needed for now."

...he hesitates.

"I had one more question, which I felt was inappropriate for the questionnaire, because as of the questionnaire we had not... really had a conversation, I don't think." They have exchanged words several times, but never like this. "Do you... hmm. This is more difficult to phrase than I anticipated. Do you... see yourself as open to having an honest and emotionally intimate relationship with me?"

Well, no, they hadn't talked; Sesnai hadn't known he was important and had been badly amnesiac.

"I..." she pauses, chooses her words very carefully. "There are things I cannot discuss with you, state secrets, and things - that cannot be shared with those people who do not already know them. Some of them I might be able to tell you in one year, or five, or ten; some of them I don't know if I'll be able to discuss with you this century, and not mentioning them imposes some limitations on my ability to be honest with you, or to tell you the reasons behind my emotions. But within those limitations - yes. Yes I do."

"I feel similarly, I think. I am, in general, not very good at trusting people, or at expressing myself emotionally. But I would like to be able to have that sort of relationship with my wife, and it seems a shame not to try." His smile takes on a wry edge. "And I understand about the state secrets. Feel free to tell me when there's something you can't tell me, or in extremity discreetly omit references to a secret I should not know the existence of, and I will do the same in cases where there's something you shouldn't know. I don't expect it to come up much on my end but I do, technically, command a military vessel, so it would be remiss of me not to plan for occasionally needing to classify something."