“How come?”

"Hmm... I'm not sure how to explain just yet," she says consideringly. "Perhaps later, when I have come to a deeper understanding of the situation."

“Well, I don’t mind being the heroine, but I can’t say ‘you should just give up your fiancé’ the way I can say ‘I could just give up my fiancé,’ and I don’t wanna fight you.”

She looks at the angel. "What are the consequences for giving up my... fiance... and what are the means to avert those consequences?"

"...I should maybe start at the beginning," says the angel, "and we'll get there eventually."

"Yeah okay that's fair."

"So. You will be reincarnated into a romance story; the default title of the story is The Roses of Villarosa. As described, one of you will be given the role of heroine, the other the role of villainess. Based on the choices you make among the options on my forms," she hefts her clipboard again, "and on the suggestions you make on top of those, our worldbuilding and story teams will first write the story as a story, then create the world that the story depicts and insert you into it, along with whoever you choose to have reincarnated alongside you. You will by default wake up at the beginning of the story, when the villainess is already engaged to the love interest and he is about to fall in love with the heroine; all of you will be attending school together at the Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Villarosa, unless you make choices that contradict that premise."

She taps the clipboard for emphasis. "The choices on the form allow you to select, out of a number of predetermined options, your hairstyle and hair colour—which have effects on your character design and therefore on your personality and attributes—your backstory, your species, the level of technology and magic available in the setting, the backstory of your love interest, your fate should you fail to win his affections, and the minor character or characters who will be provided to assist you at the beginning of the story. Then at the end of the form there is a list of 'perks' and a list of 'flaws', which are meant to be in balance so that beyond the two free perks you start with, each perk costs a flaw to obtain. Some of the preceding options also cost flaws; some of them instead grant perks. Does that all make sense?"

"I still have so many questions I hardly know where to begin, but I think I am following so far."

"So...I get to have hair next time around?"

"There are possibilities for translating hairstyle choices into a species without hair, but by default, the two options for your species are Humans and Elves, with Elves being an enhanced version of Humans and Humans being ordinary human beings. However, if you don't like that default, you can make whatever suggestions you like to the worldbuilding team about what attributes your world's Humans and Elves should have, as long as Elves are maintained as being better than Humans along some meaningful axis of measurement; alternately, if you do not want to make one type of people better than another, you can choose to both be Humans and ask that Elves be omitted from the world entirely, and still customize your world's Humans to whatever degree suits you."

(Raivethrani can't quite stop herself from making a bit of a face about Elves.)

Lucy notices. 

"Are elves real? I know lots of things are real, like Mi-Go and Shoggoths, but I thought elves were made up."

"...Elves are certainly real in my world, which, as established, is not yours."

"Both humans and elves exist in many worlds, but humans are more consistent across worlds, whereas elves can vary considerably," Tabitha explains. "I don't think there are any elves in your world, Lucy, but I'm not sure."

"I think there aren't either. None of the books with real things in them that people don't know about have elves in them. Anyway, just doing humans and not elves sounds better, if humans can be anything."

"Hmm," says Raivethrani.

"Hm?"

"I'm not sure I agree. It can be very useful to be more powerful than most people."

"...I guess I see your point, but if we pick elf, then all the other elves will be just as much more powerful than the humans as we are."

"Is there any reason we cannot make elves very, very rare?"

"I don't see why not," says Tabitha.

"I guess that works. So can the humans have all the things that are just nice to have, and then elves have some stuff that it would be dangerous for everyone to have on top of that?"

"Potentially suitable," Raivethrani allows.

The angel nods.

"I want to have hair, so humans should at least sometimes have hair, and...should be able to breathe water, probably, Deep Ones live underwater...and fly in space! Humans should be able to fly in space. Mi-Go can do that and the Elder Things could back when they were around. And fly not in space obviously."