Yes, Abrogail does need to review all the novels for suitability of publication in Cheliax, because if she stops doing that, the novels may stop arriving and they seem quite valuable.  Also the entire universe may cease to exist.  Aspexia Rugatonn can't be bothered to explain all this, she's busy and it's obvious if you understand decision theory.

...alllllll right then.

A thriller/romance novel set during a cold war between two (magicless) fictional states somewhat more advanced than Golarion, which had a brief but very messy total war when the monarchy controlling the region collapsed, about a generation before the novel is set. Their confederation-alliances have imposed strict demilitarization of the entirety of their border regions ever since, but they still engage in a cold war. The Meritocracy of Pernik is nominally minarchist, in practice oligarchic-plutocratic and controlled primarily by families who were lesser nobility or major guilds in the predecessor state. The Vratsa Citizenry is an idealistic direct/liquid democracy* with socialist tendencies which broke sharply from the predecessor's power structures. Also depicted is Ohridski Independent, a university-microstate which stayed out of the war and is neutral ground; the protagonists first met while both students attending the university. The two viewpoint characters trade off perspective, and each switch is made when they meet face to face, whether in the DMZ, in the university's grounds, or another neutral country. The Perniki is the daughter of an aristocratic family who transitioned into the capitalist class smoothly, but are old-fashioned and sideline her due to lingering sexism; she manages an internal affairs bureau and a private security firm for her family. She is not particularly loyal to her country but is attached to the privileges of wealth and status. The Vratsan is also from an old family, but is a committed partisan for the democratic ideals of his country. He is a known field agent, though his service record is classified; comments from his counterpart imply that she has seen the sealed record anyway, and that he is the most highly decorated agent they have.

The action chapters cover espionage, sabotage, and assassinations; the Vratsan side shows him committing them personally, while the Perniki chapters show her making arrangements for others to act or actively directing response when part of her agency is targeted. The meetings involve a lot of trading barbed comments and hinting at knowledge of each other's actions, frequently joking about offers to defect, but also reminiscing about their history at school and romantically-charged comments about each other's competence and accomplishments. There is also a varying degree of implication that they're having sex off-screen, ranging from "meeting for coffee in the afternoon, next chapter picks up leaving town in the morning" to "leaves their hotel room keys under the dinner check when they leave the table"; nothing is shown on-screen. The last few chapters break from the pattern by having a female-lead portion end when she is in the direct line of fire from an unexpected operation she thinks is the male lead - the remainder of the book interleaves the two viewpoints as she acts personally against a follow-up attack, and both protagonists realize they're possibly going to kill their counterpart by morning. She realizes the intended target is a corrupt wing of her family's private police, and when his actions start to blare a meeting of grossly corrupt silencing of whistle-blowers, she hesitates for long enough to lose control, and while she coordinates 'damage control', she's internally conflicted about whether she regrets failing or not. The final meeting has the male lead arrive at her personal residence; she congratulates him on successfully inciting a run on the bank that is the keystone of her family's holdings, removing most of their wealth and power. He accepts it half-heartedly and states he knows she was almost in a position to prevent it, and says that he's unsure whether he wants to apologize for putting her on the spot. She's non-committal, but with some heat declares that she's not going to keep the house much longer, with the power shifting as much as it is. He kisses her hand**, hands her a manila folder, and leaves. She opens it and finds a passport and set of documents tailored for her, along with tickets and itinerary for travel to a neutral country and a destination she recognizes as the barony of a cousin branch of the male lead's family, who've maintained their title and holdings. A three-sentence epilogue describes a view from a window of the barony's seat, the warmth of a fire in the room, and a bedside table next to the window, where the passport rests on top of a rumpled blouse and skirt.

*The translator notes that this is a very flattering and somewhat anachronistic depiction of democracy for the time period; the sophistication of its mechanisms are unrealistic, as liquid democracy wasn't tried at this scale for another half-century, and most democracy in the time period was substantially more corrupt and dysfunctional, exclusionary, or both, than is seen here. The author is an openly-opinionated ideologue for liquid democracy and other direct-democracy-family forms of government. However, it was well-researched; though the succession crisis and particulars of the secession are fiction, Ohridski Independent is directly based on a real historical university in the region, and like several other universities, student government at the time is one of the known examples of small-scale attempts at liquid democracy.
**More overtly/standardly romantic than anything they have done on-screen at any earlier point.

A classic novel controversial in its day. It is set in a period when humanity’s alien benefactors had pulled back a little, out of fear of humanity wiping itself out with their technology. The protagonist is an aspiring politician, in a country whose government is considered too repressive to get to trade with the aliens directly, though of course a rising tide lifts all boats. He hopes to rise through the ranks, reform his government to fit the aliens’ standards, and bring new prosperity to his country. The novel flips between detailing his progress on the campaign trail and a relationship he is conducting with a woman through correspondence, falling in love with her without ever seeing her face. He finally meets his girlfriend and finds out that she is an infamous anti-government terrorist–one of the youngest of a group that carried out several brutal attacks during a failed rebellion a decade ago, and the only one to successfully escape execution and go into hiding.

He is horrified, but she cries and begs him to give her another chance; she deeply regrets what she did in the war and just wants to stay out of politics now, as reforming the government isn’t worth any more bloodshed. The protagonist grapples with divided loyalties as his campaign advances. He has to choose between his dream of a political career and his girlfriend. In the end, he wins the race, but he never gives his acceptance speech–he has fled the country with his girlfriend to build a new life in a new place. An epilogue, a decade later, shows the protagonist and his wife reading news of their old country, which has reformed enough to resume trade with the aliens; they are hopeful that someday they will be able to return and show their children their old home.

(Cultural context notes at the end explain that execution is no longer practiced in the modern day, though euthanasia is offered if wanted to those whose crimes were so heinous they must be exiled to an island or imprisoned; while the aliens have relaxed their standards enough to trade with humans who do it, humans’ own moral standards have advanced to the point where any politician who proposed bringing back the death penalty would be voted out.)

A doorstopper novel about a newly oathed Committed of Truth having a handwaved physics lab accident while there as a witness to the experimental results, and landing in an alternate universe where being committed to tell the truth is a serious liability. He wins over a local girl after she's initially incredibly suspicious of him because sliders are rare and sliders who aren't just pretending that they have to tell the truth as a thin tactic to make their lies believable are rarer, but he sticks to his oath through dangerous situations and she realizes he means it and helps him navigate the world in which they find themselves. They manage to send his family a letter but he does not go home.

A story about the household formation process for someone who has assumed for her entire life that one day she would live ALONE and no one would BOTHER her and she would listen to LOUD MUSIC and she would pick her nose in ANY room of the apartment she damn well pleased. She gradually accumulates friends and a love interest and realizes that it is possible to find living with other people actively desirable. The epilogue has the main character's toddler picking her nose in the middle of the dining room and the main character going "you know what, fair" about that. Also, everyone in the story has a prehensile tail, and there is light worldbuilding about how that would affect things.

A romance in which a mystical antlered forest-spirit meets, learns to communicate with, and falls in love with an ordinary person-who-has-a-pickup-truck-and-runs-errands (this occupation serving in lieu of a job). The author appears to kink on the antlers. The couple sublimates the forest spirit's trepidation about paths being made through their forest into kink.

A series of novels set in a world where there are regular people and also people genetically engineered to have wings and other features convenient for flight; the ancestors of the population of this planet did this so that the winged people would be able to perform certain maintenance on inaccessibly-located legacy technology after the underlying engineering knowhow was deliberately lost due to weapons having been developed to such a high level that they were soured on the entire concept. At the time of the novels this is not common knowledge and the maintenance procedures have fossilized into ritual, history having been rendered down into vague legends, and the books are mostly about the winged-person-run basically-benevolent theocracy's politics and the winged people romancing regular people. (Most of the series's books have an A- and B-plot structure, with a winged/non couple to accompany each plot.) The arc plot, over the course of several books, ultimately allows the characters to piece together the history and decide that they are as a civilization ready to try again at the whole technology thing.

Novel series in which a villain, shaped both by the traumatic circumstances of her childhood and the subtle but forceful consequences of the ways she has used her magic since then to survive, brings up several kids younger than her whom she managed to save from the aforementioned traumatic circumstances when someone went through their home and killed them all for what are remarkably understandable reasons given the givens. There's layers and layers like that, in several different places, every resolved conflict just peeling back a bit of an onion, every opportunity to button-mash the moral complexity button taken without making the main character and her love interest remotely unsympathetic. The main character and her love interest are profoundly adorable.

A forbidden romance between members of two fantasy species who have been at war for generations ends in the death of the woman whose side is losing; the guy basically suppresses having any reaction to this so he can remain functional in the other areas of his life but is confronted some years with her reincarnation who, upon having her memory jogged a bit, is pretty ticked off that as soon as she was dead he went right back to soldiering against her people. He is very apologetic and solicitous about this (once he's convinced of her identity). After many complications and more helpings of trauma they figure out how to scale up the process her father-figure-guy used to reincarnate her so they can bring back the war dead in a faraway place where the old conflict won't come till they've had a chance to build a more peaceful society.

This novel that immediately appeared is labeled (after a Comprehend Languages spell) a smartmagic-contemporary-mystery-horror-thriller-romance! It contains a request that the reader not publish subcategories of fiction based on it out of "gratitude," (possible translation; the alternate possible translation is about sixteen words long and most of them are Abadarian nonsense about cross-temporal trade) and then opens with the plot, set in a disturbingly alien world. There are only humans, all of whom are fantastically rich, with their own houses and machines that can project light and communicate instantly across continents and all sorts of lightning-powered devices to replace servants and pills and ointments that can almost substitute for divine healing, but very little magic and no gods or afterlives. In between writing instantly-arriving letters to each other using complicated machines that can access all information not actively concealed and traveling vast speeds in giant steel wagons fueled by refined naptha, the male teenage hero (a low-level rogue, probably, with Locate Object as a supernatural ability?) full of wry humor and a breathtakingly idealistic (by Cheliax standards) perspective on the world investigates a series of murders amongst his friends, all of whom have supernatural powers which are widely believed not to function by society at large; he meets a the heroine, initially as a suspect, who is an immortal Chaotic Evil demihuman with a love of nature, a sadistic sense of humor, and magical powers which allow her to live forever as long as she continues murdering others and - using her aforementioned magical powers - devouring their corpses! He pursues the killer for vengeance, she to devour him to grow stronger, and the two cooperate in their quest! (This involves a lot of bickering about who, exactly, she is allowed to murder.)

The two leads immediately fall in love with each other, with extensive romantic tension (ultimately consummated off-screen) while they hunt down and kill the various monsters and undead who are doing the killing; however, since she's Chaotic Evil and he's Lawful Good, the romance also involves attempts by each of them to seduce the other over to their alignment, she with the promise of joy and immortality, he with the promise of rest and security. Also there's a love triangle with a paladin who wields weapons that project spheres of metal and lead that can penetrate any armor and move faster than arrows but she's not all that interesting aside from that. Ultimately, they triumph, solve the extremely complicated mystery, outmaneuver the paladin, and defeat the villains; the heroine fails to recruit the hero over to her cause and declines to stop murdering people long enough to settle down permanently with the hero, but agrees to stay "for a while." The book end cover mentions five alternate versions of the novel with different romances and plots, in none of which, per the description, the heroine successfully lures the hero to evil, though there's a potentially interesting mention of one where they're both witches making lots of pacts with different demon lords for power.

A novel about two members of the same literary salon during a civil war, whose ideological loyalties place them on opposite sides, falling in love. It's an epistolary novel told primarily via the fiction, poetry, and letters the two lovers and other members of the salon write, although there are also occasional paintings. One of the lovers dies at the other's hand in battle in the second-to-last chapter, which is conveyed by the blood-like imagery in the subsequent art and poetry by the lover who killed them. Within the salon there is a sprawling implied polycule/love dodecahedron, which mostly isn't super relevant to the central tragedy or the background war politics but does come up frequently in the things they write to and for one another, and relationships within it frequently foil the relationship between the main couple. 

A novella about vampires which is in context a metaphor for domestic partner abuse. You are not supposed to root for the vampire at any point but she is charismatic and the blood drinking scenes are, in addition to being gut-wrenching in their depiction of the fed-on partner's inner conflict, sexy as hell.

This one, meanwhile, is 90% sex scene by volume and 80% subtexty characterization and political intriguing by mass. Most of the sex is probably notably kinky by non-malachitinous standards but to malachitinous eyes threatening one's partner with a knife, or tattooing them, is just straightforwardly a sex act. It's set in a guild coalition in 1600s Tisa and most of the plot is about the characters' relationships with one another-- there is another massive and sprawling polycule/love dodecahedron, this one much more relevant to everyone's journeys than the one in the epistolary-- but also their moral and interpersonal conflicts about one another's politicking. (There are a lot fewer Lawful characters than one would expect given the size of its cast but there isn't actually much of a Good/Evil skew?)

(The genders of characters were not literally selected at random when the books were translated into Taldane, but something approximately like that happened. In particular the translator of the intrigue/sex scene novel was sort of confused about whether one's gender and one's physical body are generally understood to have anything to do with each other.)

The complexity of this story is refreshing, at least if you're Abrogail Thrune.  In some ways, albeit not other ways, this is very much the sort of romance novel that she wanted to read, as an intelligent young girl.  As Infernal Majestrix, she reluctantly decided that she simply did not have enough +6 Intelligence headbands in her kingdom to crown the best of romance novel writers with one, which is what it would take to produce this.  The dense action and concise description is pleasing to her; most romance novels in other kingdoms are far more long-winded than this, to describe far less.  Even in Cheliax she has not managed by whip and fire alone to teach authors not to be such enormous windbags.

That the male protagonist from the Galt-analogue of Vratsa conquers a woman from the more Lawful Evil land of Pernik is wholly unacceptable, of course, but this seems easy to remedy.  Abrogail scrawls down a note to have the Imperial censors switch about the national identities of the protagonists; the moral justifications that accompany the protagonists' actions can easily be shuffled about without changing the actions themselves.  The censors should try changing about the sexes as well, if they can, but she will be understanding (if not forgiving) if they cannot make that flow properly.  Oh, and put back in all the sex scenes that some insipid earlier censor had removed.

Abrogail flips through the first book from the Global Alliance before shaking her head and setting it aside in disgust; these fools marinating in their own lack of ambition are beyond literary rescue.

The second book is far more promising: straightforward Asmodean porn, for the most part, with a new twist about people arranging for themselves the sort of body-reshaping experiments you usually see from the more unethical run of wizard.  In the novel's context of such procedures being ultimately approved by one's superiors, with whom one must plead to be allowed such reshapings, it has the proper moral that every aspect of your body as well as your soul belongs to the government that owns you.  This can be reprinted virtually verbatim.

Of Green:

A doorstopper novel about a Committed of Truth... this Lawful Good pablum cannot be tolerated.  Abrogail reflexively stamps it with the imprint meaning that the author is to die slowly and horribly and at the end be Maledicted, before realizing that she doesn't have any idea whether that works.  Well, it could work, given the strangeness of the whole affair, and it hardly hurts to try.

After flipping through the other novels from Green, Abrogail shrugs and stamps them all with the same imprint.  If it doesn't cost her own government torturer-time and a fourth-circle cleric spell slot to send these authors to Hell, she sees no reason why she shouldn't try to get them all.

Of the Aevylmarch:

The setting is fascinating, and you wouldn't need to change much of the action to have this Lawful Good protagonist be slowly seduced out of his Good, but not his Law, by this Chaotic Evil heroine, who could in turn be slowly seduced out of her Chaos.  Really, failing to set up this pleasingly symmetrical meeting at Lawful Evil, in which both main characters have something to learn over the course of the story, just seems like a literary oversight in the first place!  Her censors and editors will repair this almost-great novel, or else regret their inadequacy.

That the author is pleading to have nobody else publish a modified version of the work, referring to an unsigned contract they have no possible way of enforcing upon Cheliax, makes it only more inevitable that Abrogail issues the order she does.

Of Malachitin:

These books would lead impressionable young girls astray into Chaos.  Abrogail will keep them for her own reading.

Most of Tree is not producing much in the way of romance novels, or for that matter romance, but on a planet of a billion people there are bound to be a few outliers. Cheliax may be confused by the fact that the stories almost never bring up the sexes of the characters in question unless it actually comes up in a plot-relevant way.

The first book is a historical-fiction novel set in the city state of Tashi, with a tech level approximately concordant with the tech level a few centuries in Golarion's past, save that there is no mention of magic. (An appendix at the end of the novel discusses which parts of it are known to have happened vs. theoretically consistent with known information but with no way of knowing if they actually happened vs. possibly true but with multiple competing theories for what actually happened; the non-existence of magic is not even mentioned.) Tashi's government officially operates by a council of twelve selected by sortition, chosen every four months among practitioners of certain skilled traits, with the goal of making political assassinations non-viable, and is consequently slow and inefficient -- it seems that the city-state has no form of communication with other polities more efficient than physically bringing a letter to another city. One of the citizens of the city (which for some reason has no formal nobility, a fact which does not appear to be true of other polities referenced), a banker, has managed to "sponsor" a significant fraction of the city to encourage them to support cir policies if chosen to be part of the Council; ce has mostly managed to avoid being assassinated, which is presented as a live threat, by avoiding pursuing anything especially controversial and by having substantial influence over a neighboring polity, which might otherwise invade Tashi. The story is narrated from the perspective of the eldest child of an important civil servant within the city. Sir parent arranges a ?marriage? between sem and one of the banker's children, the theory being that se can spy on the family and figure out if the banker has anything planned that might destabilize the city. Se is initially theoretically prepared to work against the banker and cir child, and regularly reports back to sir parent, but over time se starts to feel closer to sir spouse, rather than solely viewing mem as a tool to be used to obtain politically relevant information. The two of them attempt to conceive a child, having an extremely awkward and miserable sex scene where both of them are clearly forcing themselves to be there, but eventually manage to do so. Simultaneously, the narrator discovers that the banker is considering pivoting to a push towards much greater control in the city; having come to care at least a little about sir spouse's family, se points out that this will likely lead to someone deciding to assassinate cem, at which point the banker reveals that ce is suffering from a progressive illness and will likely be dead within the next couple of years, and has decided that dying a little earlier is worth it if ce can use this to do more good for cir city. The narrator wrestles with what to do, but ultimately decides to pass this along to sir parent, expecting them to be reasonable about it. Sir parent is instead furious about the plans in question and vows to stop them from coming about, no matter what it takes. Se thinks se ought to warn sir spouse, but can't bring semself to do it. While attending a festival with sir spouse and child, as well as the banker and various other members of cir family, the group of them are targeted by an assassination attempt. One of the assassins seemingly expects the narrator to be on their side, and specifically to help them kill sir spouse, but se refuses, even at the risk of sir life. Se escapes with sir spouse and child, but the banker is mortally wounded. As ce lies dying in front of them, se confesses sir limited involvement, and the banker informs sem that although ce is definitely upset about the betrayal the most important thing is that the city be alright. Se discusses things with sir spouse, and they ultimately conclude that the policy the banker was pursuing before sir death was a good one, and that they will continue to use mir family's influence to support it even if it costs them their lives.

The second book is set in a world with technology far outstripping Golarion; there is still no magic, at least not that is referred to as such, but technologies that allow for instantaneous long-distance communication, for travel far faster than the fastest boats (though still slower than a Teleport spell), for fetuses to develop in a machine rather than a womb, and so on are treated as normal and commonplace. The protagonist, a sixteen-year-old, decides to stop taking something called "puberty blockers," a decision which the other characters and the narrative treat as predictably likely to cause vem suffering, but potentially worth it on net for some people. Ve discovers, to vir surprise, that ve actually experiences strong desire to have sex with specific people ve knows, and also in general; this seems to be viewed as moderately unusual within vir society. Ve tries to self-modify to not, fails, and spends a while angsting about how it sucks to have randomly wound up being an "allosexual." None of vir friends is similarly interested in vem, and ve grows increasingly miserable about both the fact that it feels like no one ve's close to understands what ve's going through, and the fact that ve would like to have sex but doesn't know anyone who particularly wants to have sex with vem. Eventually, while leaving a LARPing event, ve overhears another participant discussing the theory that the historical figure iir character was based on was, in reality, allosexual, in a way that makes it clear that ie is also allosexual. Ve approaches iem, and they realize that they actually have several interests in common, any of which could potentially form the nucleus for a grouphouse of people with similar interests. The two of them have sex (the focus of the sex scene is almost entirely on their internal experiences rather than anything that is happening physically), and the protagonist is overwhelmingly relieved that ve isn't just doomed to be perpetually miserable. The two of them get to know each other better over the course of additional LARPing events, trips to museums, and other such social activities, and are suggested to be having more sex, although most of it is offscreen. The story ends exactly a year after it began, with the protagonist and vir lover being approached by a younger student who has just discovered ye is allosexual and is looking for advice.

The third book appears to be set in the same setting as the second, or at least it could be, there's nothing to explicitly contradict it. The story centers around two young adults who live together (this is treated as an unusually low number of people to live together). The story alternates between chapters from each of their perspectives. One of the two adults is an allosexual working as a costume designer; the other has severe executive function issues and largely stays at home and interacts with some sort of ... game? Except instead of involving a board or cards or anything, it involves instantaneously communicating something with hundreds of other people? It isn't really explained what fe's doing so it might be pretty difficult to figure that out! Regardless, the costume designer seems to be heavily supporting fem in using fir society's ... guaranteed charity? But done a little differently from Golarion, like if Sarenrae's church gave people vouchers that could be exchanged for food from any merchant and compensated the merchants ... to acquire food and shelter and healthcare and so on. In exchange, fe regularly has sex with the costume designer. The costume designer seems to think that fe is happy with this arrangement, since fe's always said fe's fine with having sex with rem, but fe is actually miserable and dreads it every time. This comes to a head when fe has a nervous breakdown in the middle of sex; rather than being sympathetic or understanding, the costume designer is upset with fem, yells at fem for causing rem to have a incorrect beliefs about the world, and storms out of their apartment into the city, wearing nothing but pajamas, in the middle of winter, in a cold climate. Re proceeds to have a breakdown over the possibility that re might have accidentally harmed rir partner, and also over the fact that ... finding anyone else to have sex with is going to be moderately inconvenient because most people their age have already sorted into grouphouses? This part might be hard to understand without more context ... while also slowly suffering from symptoms of hypothermia and frostbite. The story ends with the implication that re froze to death in the snow before anyone noticed re was there, and that rir partner may or may not manage to actually survive on fir own.

The fourth and final book is set in a world that has what it refers to as 'magic,' albeit very different from anything Golarion would call magic, with a tech level lower than that of the first book. In this world, magic is performed in groups of three; two "mages" working in concert must sacrifice a living human in order to provide the necessary amount of energy, which can then be used to alter the size of various objects. The story opens with two mages in the capital city of a country working together to sacrifice willing elderly volunteers to grow an additional layer of walls to protect against an invading army, which believes the country is overusing this form of magic and should be forcibly prevented from doing so. The army is unwilling to actually lay siege to the city, and departs. The two mages, who were chosen separately as the two most talented mages in the country, are both highly impressed with each other's technical skill at magic, and decide to collaborate on research projects together. (Research is largely possible to do without requiring human sacrifice.) The government of the city realizes that a famine is likely, and approaches them to ask them to increase the city's grain supply by enlarging the grain. This, too, initially uses willing volunteers, some of them younger than the previous set, then criminals that have been condemned to death once the volunteers have run out.  Meanwhile, the two mages have become infatuated with each other, in what they both parse as friendship but to an outside eye from a society with the concept clearly also involves feelings of romantic attraction, though strangely they seem to be basically uninterested in having sex with each other. The two of them do some calculations, determine that it's likely the famine will continue the next year, and determine that it's not likely for there to be enough volunteers or condemned criminals to power their magic. They explicitly decide to conceive a child on the theory that killing an infant is less unethical than killing an adult, and their baby is born shortly before the next necessary use of magic happens. The government once again asks them to perform the ritual, which they do; somehow, they end up needing exactly enough people that their baby is the last sacrifice necessary. Despite explicitly stating they think it is less bad to kill an infant than an adult, the two of them are upset about this; the final section of the book is devoted to them researching improved agricultural techniques so that preventing a famine will not require literal human sacrifices. 

Okay, she's pretty sure that these "Tree" people are very likely literal trees or some other very nonhumanoid species, and that these books were 'translated' out of something considerably more alien than just a foreign language.

The books are too alien to have anything recognizable as romantic merit or demerit, but Abrogail supposes, if she must consider them for publication in Cheliax, the answer is no; people running around being worried about whether they're hurting each other are not good for young girls to read about all day.  Even the third book, in which the protagonists' pathetic feelings result in equally unhappy and pathetic lives followed by pathetic deaths, doesn't redeem the extent to which a reader would be immersed in constant Lawful Good misery and the extent to which this would be unhealthy.  If Chelish girls were otherwise in danger of becoming paladins when they grow up, this 'romance novel' might talk the more sensible ones out of ever trying to be nice to each other or have consensual sex; but it is more important to produce romance novels which can help girls with more innate promise than that grow into proper cruel ambitious adults.

Now can she hand off these books to any of the wizards who will be incredibly fascinated by the hints about how to operate the universe?  The agricultural techniques in the fourth book... mostly don't seem like they'd work without a lot of additional capabilities taken for granted, that Cheliax doesn't have, but the remaining techniques seem potentially quite important?

An attentive reader will notice that Carolingian "men" are risk-tolerant people who like to argue and can't back down from a dare and treat everything as a competition and settle disputes with mild physical scuffling, and Carolingian "women" are "risk-averse people who are aware of the concept of diplomacy and conceal their emotions and manage households and do behind-the-scenes maneuvering," with no particular reference to physical characteristics. People who don't sufficiently fit either description are referred to as "genderfails", which does in fact appear to be associated with actually failing some sort of test. Carolingia seems to think that genderfails are at least mildly despicable, but very, very sexy.

Also, everyone in these novels is fucking a lot. Most of the books include bonus, plot-optional sex scenes in the back -- in addition to the sex scenes in the main text, which contain plot or at least some kind of important character development -- with footnotes in the main text indicating the points where bonus sex scenes are available.

The first novel is set in a universe where men have emotion-based magic and women have ritual-based magic and hermaphrodite genderfails can combine the power of both and therefore rule with an iron fist, IN SPACE. The leader of a resistance cell arouses the suspicions of her feudal lord, who is charmed by her talent for subterfuge and indulges her by letting her think she's succeeding at fomenting revolution, while secretly stymieing all her efforts. The rebel loathes and fears the lord, but can't help recognizing how skillfully they wield power, and unwillingly grows to admire and desire them. The two are having sex almost from the beginning of the novel -- the lord can and does use the rebel sexually at will, and the rebel is attempting to sexually manipulate the lord -- and there are several lovingly described torture scenes when the rebel does something the lord can't quite overlook. By the end, they've settled into a strange but affectionate relationship, where the rebel eagerly betrays her comrades to the lord in return for scraps of affection, and the lord lovingly rapes and tortures her as a reward.

The second novel follows a young woman who's setting up a household with her new husband, and her new husband's brother, and her new husband's brother's wife, and her new husband's brother's wife's cousin, and her new husband's brother's wife's cousin's dog, and also a wandering troubadour who joins them halfway through the book and appears to be planning to stay indefinitely. She's very fond of her silly impulsive histrionic husband, but he's a soldier and only occasionally comes home on leave; the actual romance plot is with the husband's brother's wife. The two women initially clash over how they want to run the household, expressing this through the subtext of long ostensibly-friendly conversations about home decoration and chore schedules. Over the course of the book, they gradually work out some of their issues and begin to find their differences a powerful resource rather than an obstacle, and the subtext slowly shifts towards sexual tension. They don't actually have sex onscreen -- the climax of the book involves a successful dinner party -- and it's never clear what exactly their mostly-absent husbands know, but in the epilogue the household has six children of varying ages, and the husband's brother's wife has the only working penis in the house.

The third novel is the story of two men on opposite sides of a glorious and noble and thoroughly unrealistic sword-and-shield war over disputed territory. One is young and clumsy and ambitious; the other is older and weary but devoted and noble. They sing to each other from neighboring fortifications in between skirmishes, and risk their lives reaching rendezvous points to leave love notes, and trade longing glances in the thick of battle. The occasions where they can actually meet face-to-face are scarce and precious and full of desperate fucking in muddy foxholes. At one point they clash on the battlefield, and the younger man wounds the older, and afterwards carries him back to camp and personally nurses him back to health before releasing him in a prisoner exchange. At another, the older man puts on clothing the younger stole from the commanding officer he has a crush on, and they roleplay some very sexy illegal orders. The book ends when the two countries make peace, and the men swear eternal brotherhood before returning to their homelands.

The antfolk still aren’t quite sure what this “romance” thing is, precisely, but these seem pretty close at least! If these aren’t to alien tastes, please send back feedback to receive more tailored media!

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.
 

A slightly complicated political novel, classified as “short,” with only 70,000 words and three subplots. In this one, one of the hives is secretly preparing to wage war on both hives and framing it on the other, and is thwarted when one of the ambassadors has a crisis of faith, which is detailed in full. She defects, tells the others about the evil plans, and gets lots of cuddles with her new friends.

The Grapeverse has a selection of romances and romance-like stories available! In general, the Grapeverse produces stories with well-polished prose whose characters come alive on the page; these five are no exception.

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First up: an epic poem about an ancient king, presented in the original with extensive annotations. Full translations are going to be legitimately tricky; it's long, it's gorgeous, and the poetic form is pretty strict and doesn't adapt well to the rhythms of other languages, but the writer keeps doing this thing where the rhyme scheme and meter highlight underlying thematic connections between different lines—anyway. The plot begins with an introductory section where the king is going around doing atrocities in a very badass ancient-legendary-figure sort of way, right up until a random peasant girl lights him on fire with her magic powers and he immediately falls madly in love and drops everything to beg her to marry him, then spends the next two-thirds of the poem gradually lightening up on the atrocities front, partly because he has now realized that peasants are people and partly because his wife keeps arguing with him and occasionally threatening to light him on fire again, which he always responds to with a confused mix of fear, adoration, and occasionally anger. The queen's power to set fire to her husband is depicted very obviously and straightforwardly, discussed in the text and the dialogue; the king's reciprocal power to have his wife executed is left completely to subtext and implication, only barely hinted at by means such as using epithets for her that emphasize her fearlessness whenever he gets angry. Accompanying notes explain that the poem is an allegory for real historical events, with the queen standing in for the entire Phoenix archetype, which did appear during that approximate historical era and did have those approximate powers and did have approximately that effect on ancient kings' tendency to oppress people although the exact mechanism was obviously very different.

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Next: a widely acclaimed example of the "porn about masochists with access to magical healing" genre, in which a [sadist who lives by themself in a castle they designed and built using magic] (this is a two-word phrase in the author's native language) gets an unexpected visitor and falls in love with them despite being sort of shaky on this whole 'human interaction' concept. Neither of them has much of a clue how to pursue a healthy relationship, but they are both highly motivated to figure it out, and they make it to the end of the book having successfully reinvented most of the basics from scratch and settling into a life together full of art and luxury and wholesome, loving, extremely gory sex. The climactic scene involves the introverted-sadist-architect breaking into tears about how much they love their partner and needing to be wrapped in blankets and snuggled until they calm down. The two of them are the only characters in the entire book, unless you count the introverted-sadist-architect's house as a third character, which you very well might given how much screentime it gets. The back of the book has a collection of author-approved fanart of the castle, added so the aliens can get a sense of the architectural styles involved that words alone would have trouble conveying.

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Thirdly: another, less well-known example of the same genre. This one follows the story of a palace scribe in an empire ruled by a selfish, sadistic, Chaotic Evil disaster of a man; she catches his attention by coincidence one day and tries to run for the hills that very evening because she expects if she meets him again she might die. He captures her, enslaves her, and does lots of graphically described awful things to her, which she enjoys much more than she expected to. He falls in love with her, charmed by her resilience, her determination, her practicality, her wicked sense of humour, her extreme masochism, and an ineffable charisma that radiates from the page; she falls in love with him right back, captivated by his power, his beauty, his sadism, his force of personality, and his surprising perceptiveness. The central tension of the story is the emperor doing more and more awful things to the scribe in an effort to push her to her limits, and the scribe cheerfully cooperating in this endeavour and then not turning out to have any. They have what by any sane standard would be a deeply unhealthy relationship, but they're both having fun. If you've read the epic poem about the Phoenix Queen, you can kind of see echoes of that dynamic in this one, except that here the scribe has no pyrokinetic abilities to threaten her imperial lover with, so the balance of power is entirely in his favour.

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Fourth, a book called Shattering Cascade, a phrase which in the original language is balanced with perfect, deliberate ambiguity between two meanings: either a cascade of shattering, like a collapsing building that keeps dragging more of itself down with the rest, or a cascade which is shattering, like a waterfall breaking apart into a million pieces.

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And lastly, the VERY DETERMINED author of a certain work of interactive fiction has figured out how to create a copy of it that will work by magic, via an interdimensional collaboration whose details are too complex for this margin to contain. It's a book that writes itself depending on the reader's choices; you interact with it by touching certain words, which appear in sparkling ink to highlight them as interactive. Some of them will change things in place, while others advance the story by proceeding to the next section. Sections can be erased and replayed by means of sparkling-inked undo arrows. There's a foreword that explains the exact mechanics.

The player's character appears wandering in a starlit desert with no memory of where they came from or how they got here. After finding and exploring a nearby ruin, you eventually stumble upon a talking statue of a beautiful winged person, and although the statue is very shy at first, eventually you can coax enough information out of them to realize that they're some sort of powerful magical being who has been horribly abused by people using them for personal gain. You, too, can horribly abuse them and use them for personal gain; or you can use them for personal gain in less gratuitously awful ways that they still pretty clearly find traumatizing; or you can try to befriend them; or you can try to befriend them but in a sex way; or you can ignore them and try to figure out a way to escape the mysterious magical ruins by yourself. The descriptions of the statue's reactions to trauma are uncompromisingly realistic; the descriptions of the statue's reactions to genuine friendship and love are heartbreakingly sweet. Playing one route does not lock you out of others except implicitly via effects on the statue's mental state and opinion of you; you can change your behaviour toward the statue at any time, and an enormous amount of effort has gone into ensuring that however you treat the statue, they react realistically according to the current path of the story and their own personality. The story has multiple possible endings, depending on your relationship with the statue and on whether you choose to escape the mysterious ruin or not, plus the implicit non-ending of simply never deciding to take an ending option; it is only possible to remove the statue from the ruins by force or with maximum trust levels, and if you do it by force the statue crumbles to dust as soon as they cross the outer wall.

A young but talented female chemist (someone who does alchemist things but in a wizard way) is interested in her brilliant and mysterious colleague, but when she asks him out he swears her to secrecy and confesses to being a vampire, ageless but capable of surviving only by drinking human blood. He is unwilling to let himself get close to her while she is mortal, but refuses to turn her into a vampire for fear that the thirst will drive her to murder, as it once did to him, and because there aren't enough blood banks to support a large population of vampires stealing from them in secret. She accepts his self-imposed isolation, but declares a quest to create a synthetic blood substitute. She spends ten years researching in secret from everyone except the vampire (ten years in which they do experiments together and move from colleagues to friends to best friends as the vampire admits it's better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all). The project eventually succeeds. They kiss, he turns her into a vampire, they reveal their existence to the world and start making everyone immortal and have an extremely fancy wedding with elaborate descriptions of outfits and décor.

Someone has gone through and hastily replaced what was clearly a lot of detailed chemistry descriptions with ridiculous technobabble that doesn't cohere into any kind of usable scientific information. The "fact-checked by chemistry professor Cort Andri-Mara of Whiteharbor University" blurb in the front matter has also been crossed out and a big "CENSORED" graphic printed on top of it.

From Homerealm, a space-cyberpunk novel trilogy about the industrial espionage between two large space-based corporations. It is quickly established in the first scene that all of humanity has uploaded, and enjoy spectacular luxury in a post-livingonplanets future. Some implausible technobabble is introduced to justify the mathematically-unbreakable self-sovereignty of every upload, and the main consequence of that these novels are exploring: how you replace torture in a world where everyone is immortal, indestructible, and doesn't feel pain.

(The narrative seems to go out of its way to belabor that physical pain or harm is now impossible to impose, but also that it is only pain, among sensory experiences, that one is protected from this way: one might get the impression that the author was in love with the concept of masochism but also feels strongly that pain is a very unsexy thing.)

An ensemble cast of two teams of spy-hackers then proceed to try to keep their company ahead of the other in the race toward inventing new technologies and securing new resources, mostly through means involving breaking in to key individuals' virualities to trace their emulator and then kidnapping them to sex dungeons where the author takes advantage of the simulated environment to describe fantastically elaborate, implausibly artistic, and physically impossible forms of bondage, which serve as a backdrop to exquisitely pornographic interrogations that mix skilled orgasm-control and other dominant techniques with mind-games to break the wills of the "victims" and get the information they're looking for... and in one case get a new submissive-pet-relationship. In none of these scenes do the depicted people appear to have much if any reaction to being forced into a sexual situation; it is clearly shown that the sexual "torture" is, if not fun, then exciting, for everyone involved, as a background fact that no one questions.

The climax of the first book is the defection of one spy-hacker from one company to another, which was a purposeful scheme that results in the two spy-hacker teams finding out about each other's existence. The climax of the middle book is the aforementioned new-submissive-relationship in which an important character, in fact the same character who, it is now revealed, falsely defected, falls for her interrogator for real this time... after resisting longer than anyone else and nearly succeeding in subverting her new dom as well, but in the end deciding to give up the information willingly for the sake of the new relationship, which is depicted as entirely genuine. The climax of the last book is a sort of BDSM battle-royale in which the two spy-hacker teams go head to head, each capture half of the other team, and go all out to break each other. The book ends with the two teams in uneasy truce, comparing all of their information and realizing that they can sell the critical McGuffin-secret to both companies and buy their own (virtual) universe with the proceeds. (The subtextual assumption being that of course even high-action hacker-spies would want to retire and spend the rest of eternity worldbuilding.)

With Abrogail now alerted to the possibility that these books were only 'translated' into a setting where the characters have the usual humanoid number of arms and legs, she doesn't fail to note that this story is probably also about aliens.  The second and third Carolingian books have nothing of interest and are not even of Lawfulness let alone Evil.  Abrogail stamps them with her most expensive means of annoyance, where you hunt down the author if they try to flee, Maledict them, and pay Hell extra to have them sent down to a lower layer; why not, if she doesn't actually have to pay for it.

The first book... appears to be deliberately written to subvert Asmodeans; the overt story is one of a very proper romance between ambitious master and ambitious reluctant slave, on the surface of things, with authority finally triumphant.  But this protagonist and deuteragonist care way too much about each other and not just in an obsessive, possessive, controlling way.  This book does not show a healthy Asmodean relationship regardless of how much torture and rape goes on inside it.  This book is Problematic.  This book comes from an alternate universe where it's fine for Asmodeans to really care about each other.  This book is disturbing.  Who writes this?

Abrogail reaches out for her worst stamp, slightly regretting that she's never put in the effort to make a new stamp for how much to hurt authors if you have an unlimited budget you don't actually have to pay for, and is disgruntled when the book suddenly vanishes from her grasp.

...somebody appears to have left a weird book underneath the pillow of her dorm bed in Ostenso wizard academy.

Sure, Pilar will read that.

And now that Abrogail has figured it out, the 'translators' are no longer trying to make all the books overtly be about humans!  Instead they're about insects!  Very Lawful Good insects.  Abrogail is not really clear on what she's even supposed to be reviewing here.  She reaches for her slightly-short-of-max punishment stamp - she will reserve maximum punishment, in the future, for deliberate attempts to subvert Asmodeans - and then hesitates.  They did say to send feedback to receive more tailored media, and possibly that is an offer in good faith or at least interesting faith.

Abrogail writes up her feedback!  These ants are very Lawful, which is good, but they care about each other, which is Good and therefore bad.  The goal of romance novels is to train young women in appropriate thinking about matters like seduction, cruelty, how to use the pathetic emotions of others against them, to turn unhealthy love to healthy possessiveness, obsessiveness, pride, and to, like any Imperium-approved fiction, train also the ways of ambition, obedience, intelligence, acceptance of suffering.

Abrogail likes the density of action, the complexity, the concision, these would all be good hooks for young ladies and get them to exercise their intelligence.  The books are just entirely not on theme!  They want 'Lawful Evil', 'Asmodean' books - maybe whatever translates these things can include an extended note enabling the Antfolk to understand that?  Abrogail has grasped by now the notable absence of alignments, gods, and afterlives from most of these books.

Plastic Heart, A soft sci-fi where almost everyone uses various 'augments' - biological or robotic modifications of their bodies, or even cloned or fully robotic bodies. Everyone is effectively immortal barring the most terrible accidents or thorough and deliberate murder. Nonsentient robots do almost all the work, allowing people to live without working at all if they wish. People are more open sexually than in the past, the book explains as if to justify itself. The book follows an augment technician who only has a few basic augments herself. She gets her business off being one of the best, more than for stellar customer service. She often refuses 'boring' jobs and usually only works on customers with interesting problems. The mods themselves range from brain implants that prevent the bearer from lying or deceiving at all, custom eyes that display high-definition hypnotic patterns, RADAR and jamming equipment stored in a low-profile forearm hollow, all sorts of physical enhancement from muscle to reflexes to armor, and lots and lots of different configurations of extra limbs. Tails, animal ears, private parts, and tentacles are the most popular. There's a lot of sex - one scene at least with most 'clients' and every interestingly exotic augment, usually justified as 'testing' and often discovering lingering issues that need to be fixed, like the new skin feeling weird or tentacle control spasming out. One repeat customer keeps adding and removing more and more exotic mods, changing genders at whim, and eagerly explaining the experiences that are only possible when you have extra senses and extra limbs. As the two fuck after each augment session they follow a cute sexfriends-to-romanticpartners path with the augment tech blushing and nervous for the first time in her life.

The notion of using maliciously modified brain implants to get oneself a slave seems to have simply not occurred to the author.

There's a surprising amount of alien technical detail in there. Probably not enough to build a 'RADAR' outright but enough to deduce that it involves using light to detect far away things. An appendix talks about how most of this isn't possible yet but it's not IMpossible either.

Grapeverse appears on its surface to be about humans, or rather sorcerers, even to close inspection, but...

Why is the sorceress who lights people on fire when they disobey her, who's manipulative enough to keep a pathetic man in an inspiringly romantic state of mind, trying to corrupt the evil King to goodness??  This story makes no sense!!  This is like somebody took a real romance novel and took the roles and powers and behaviors and scrambled them up randomly!!!  Is somebody trying to taunt Abrogail?  This could have been such a good story!

Abrogail stamps the book for maximum punishment, and then sends it off to the censors with a note that she wants somebody to unscramble these pieces and put them back in a proper Asmodean order.  It's possible you could cause this story to make sense just by having the protagonist successfully corrupting the King to greater instead of lesser Evil, and with her finally taking the throne at the end of her successful manipulation plan.

Another horrifically Problematic book sending all the wrong messages about how people should torture their partners during sex!  At least the subversion attempt here is hardly hidden at all.  Abrogail reaches for her max-punishment stamp and is less surprised, though still surprised, when the book vanishes as she reaches for it - probably to wherever the last one went.

RRRrrrrrgh this book is so close to being a genuine masterpiece!  Censors, see if you can rewrite this to have the scribe be biding her time, not be attached in quite this way to the Emperor, and have her take over the Empire in the end and convert it to proper Lawful Evil while keeping the former Emperor as a pet.

Author:  Goes to a high-quality prison where they will be let out and richly rewarded if they learn to write good books within ten years, and will otherwise meet a very sad end after that decade.

Abrogail is so torn about this book!!  It has so many good lessons!  It has so many bad lessons!  It's so well-written!  It reads like somebody took a great book and scrambled all the themes so that they wouldn't make sense any more or have any central message!

Abrogail marks it as acceptable to read for clerics of Asmodeus only.  Author goes to prison to see if they can learn to write better books.

Abrogail plays with this for a while, seeing how far she can lead on the statue with hope and apparent love before betraying it at the exact optimal moment to produce maximal psychological damage.  A short while later, it turns out that somehow Abrogail has misplaced several hours and -

She's keeping this one.

She will share it with a few very high-performing minions of hers as a rare and marvelous reward.  It doesn't appear to be duplicable anyhow.

Author receives:  The temporary rank of para-Baronet, with accompanying stipend of wealth and luxury, which will vanish if they cannot produce another, better work than this one within three years.

More Lawful Good pablum.  Author dies.

Have some young, flexibly-minded, disposable apprentice alchemist check whether any of this alternate alchemical system is useful here.  Para-baronetcy if they can swing it, horrible death if they can't.

(There is a response note from the Grapeverse letting her know that everyone is rather confused about the format of her feedback, but as an incidental result of their confusion, the authors of the scribe book and the statue story have met and are considering a collaboration, which news they tentatively expect she will appreciate?)

(They can see it and -)

Oh, definitely!  What Abrogail really likes, though, is stories about worlds with relatively unsophisticated technology and magic being uplifted to more sophisticated technology and magic - her favorite romance ever is about somebody getting tortured into doing that!  Any stories like that in Grapeverse?

You could reasonably read this as a horror novel about the desperate attempts of sadists to be sadists in a world where real torture is impossible and they are trying to be creative about that but it is fundamentally impossible to break people.  But it can't even work as a horror novel, because everybody is relentlessly cheerful about being trapped in a world like that.

The aliens in this book are ultimately impossible to relate to.  Abrogail would send the author to Hell, but they might enjoy it, and then some devils might end very unhappy and one can imagine them eventually tracking down Abrogail somehow... also it seems like her orders are not, in fact, usually getting carried out on the other end.

Definitely not printable in Cheliax, maybe see if one of the other planes will buy this alien book for something of value.

Abrogail's feedback to the author will gush a lot about the 'new technologies' they're trying to investigate, in between extended lies about how much she liked the pornography and character development, and express sadness that the innovative technologies weren't more relatable to her own world's technology level.

Abrogail.

Now what.

Don't try to be overly clever here or the books will stop arriving.

Why would that even -

It's obvious if you understand decision theory, Abrogail.

Abrogail will send back her entirely honest feedback about how this story is almost absolutely boring except for the alien technical detail.  Is Aspexia going to object to her sending back entirely honest literary feedback?

I'm watching you, Abrogail.

Well, the technically detailed stuff mostly isn't romance novels. After conferring with some others how's this horror book about a charismatic cult leader who uses gaslighting and blackmail and conditioning to build himself a harem, take control of a major company, buy an island, and effectively become a tiny King until it starts falling down when people get too suspicious? There's a lot of attention paid to the details of psychology and how to keep intricate lies believable and consistent. But the psychology is weird and the lies are actually not especially skilled, these people seem kind of deeply suspicious and good at picking them apart so the lies are arranged at a different angle than Cheliax would use to lie, lots of arranging background facts and faking books and records. She can probably just skip the part where the island is invaded and he gets caught and executed and everyone gets therapy, since that's her taste in books.

Ev has a lot of novels containing occasional mentions of romance!  But novels centered on romance are scarcer... though in a planet of several billion, there're enough outliers.

* A novel where a woman in love with a king (mostly for his wisdom?), and she begs him to let her join his court.  Noticing her talents, he sends her on various missions - some of which seem Abadarian in how they help trade; others of which are exhorting people about a rather-Iomedaeian religion - which she does very well while sadly deciding her love is futile.  Finally, as they're both going on a diplomatic mission together, a peasant happens to mention her obvious romantic feelings in the king's hearing.  He's shocked but not averse since he's grown to admire her; she's shocked that it could be returned; the book ends with their wedding.

(Readers might notice that there's no mention in the novel of sex or magic or gods aside from this Iomedae-lookalike, we only get vague ideas of each character's appearance, and this kingdom appears to have no army nor bandits.)

* A novel where a man who's ended up in an alternate timeline (where he was never born) finds the alternate-timeline version of his wife, tells her the story, and proposes they affirm or reaffirm marriage.  The novel focuses on their debate about the ethics of vows taken by alternate-universe versions of yourself, her growing feelings toward him, and his gradual realization that she's changed from his original-universe wife but he loves her anyway.  Eventually, having tentatively concluded the marriage vows from the other timeline aren't in force between them, they decide to get married.  In a subplot, he attempts to reproduce and publish some of his original timeline's historical research, hampered by the fact that he doesn't remember it that well.

(Both characters explicitly agree in the ethical debate that sex shouldn't happen unless they're clearly married, and it doesn't.  Also, governments are barely mentioned, and we have only vague ideas of each character's appearance aside from their hair.)

…The Antfolk are a bit concerned about the Evil Empire thing, but as long as they’re getting Cheliax literature in return, they don’t care that much. (They would probably care that much if they knew about Hell, but thankfully for Abigail, they don’t!). Are these better?

Unfortunately, seduction doesn’t translate very well, since Antfolk are a hive species and don’t do sex! Cruelty is also not very popular. The other stuff they can totally work with, though! They can’t actually think of a single piece of literature that doesn’t include pride, actually - they’re a very proud people, normally!

Another dense-action filled series, but this one involves rescuing the other from slavery because of a much more possessive “this one is mine they can’t have it I don’t share they’re mine” sort of thing. Instead of sneaking in for the rescue, the rescuer, named Jalturi brutally kills everyone in her path, and loots most of their wealth in reparation. The former slave, Telmu, kill all of the grubs and eggs in reparation for being forced to work in the nursery, and she makes lots of badass comments while doing so. The narrative doesn’t seem to even think that people would consider this very evil.

A young worker, Telrun, looking to prove herself, infiltrates an enemy hive, telling them a backstory that heavily implies that her “former hive” was killed by her actual hive. Using the sympathy and goodwill this gives her, she gains enough trust to become an apprentice alchemist, and thereby gain access to the notes. She sends the information to her actual hive using telepathy. This continues for a while, until the spymaster tells her to stab the senior alchemist on the next herb gathering explanation and run. Telrun objects, asking why, and the spymaster explains that she can tell that people are getting suspicious, even if Telrun is less skilled in the arts of spy craft and can’t, and that the senior alchemist previously created a nasty weapon that roughly translates to liquid-burning-living-hive-destroyer. She stabs her with a tool somewhere in between and spear and a dagger, and runs back to her hive, where she is praised and celebrated for her excellent work.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the best way to handle criminals (execution, forced-work, exile, and loss-of-rights seem to be the main options), while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony. 

Oh, yes, this new novel is definitely much better!  Keeping the part about the island being invaded is fine; it just has to be set up in a way where the King's downfall clearly results from the protagonist's many careless mistakes, rather than being some inevitable quality of the world.  The therapy sections at the end can be deleted without trouble - or just rewritten in a more Asmodean way, which makes it clearer that the people getting this involuntary "therapy" have simply changed from one owner to another; and that the question is not whether the little people of the world will be owned, but whether it is you doing the owning or somebody else's government.

If there's any way to pay for the creation of new books interdimensionally, Abrogail would happily pay 1000gp to fund production of a romance novel with a proper Asmodean plotline (now that they have some idea of what that is) but with the sort of technical details that don't usually go into romance novels!

This novel opens with a mad scientist having captured a family of noble adventures. She proceeds to 

One by one the adventurers break, leaving the mad scientist disappointed in how easy this is. 

Deciding she is bored with how breakable everyone is, she clones herself. Her clone, an exact duplicate of her in mind and body, immediately manages to escape her. The two engage in a protracted duel of wits, struggling to kill each other inside their lair. The battle is close and the clone very nearly wins, but ultimately the original uses a spinal implant she put in the clone after the copying process but before she woke the clone up, complaining that this feels like cheating.

A substantial section of the book is then devoted to the original torturing her clone and attempting to break her, while the clone tries various desperate plots to escape. 

The clone is slowly broken, falling in love with her captor. The love is genuine and the captor lets her guard down, mildly disappointed in her own success. Taking advantage of this to escape, the clone, having planned this all along, creates another clone of herself. The two are able to cooperate to defeat the original, managing to form an alliance built on mutual love. They tell the original that she too will come to love them, in time. 

In the epilogue an expanding swarm of clones is overrunning civilization, torturing innocents and each other for fun and sport. It's left ambiguous as to how sad of an ending this is as, as at least the clones love and care for each other.

The first novel from the Earthtenders is…something. Certainly not Asmodean. The two main characters, a soot-stained welder and a slender and delicate textile artist, have no discernible gender, bond with each other within the first quarter of the book, and spend the rest gradually developing a relationship, melding aesthetically to each other as they barely withstand the minor injuries of the outside world. The textile artist spends an entire scene weeping on a grassy, flowered hill, being comforted by their partner, after stumbling on the corpse of a beautiful hummingbird in the woods, reminded of the fragility of such innocent and beautiful things. The welder, somewhat hardier, still tears themselves apart over their inability to rise to the peak of their craft, destroying half their own workshop once in despair, curling up in their partner’s arms. By the end of the book these two strange hothouse-flower people have bonded into something slightly more equipped to weather their lives — unlike some of the minor characters, who all seem to be very much like them.

In the second novel, set in about the same world as the first as far as the average resident goes, the viewpoint character, a doctor struggling with the responsibility of his profession and with an old addiction, meets a mysterious, beautiful sculptor at a series of dinner parties. The sculptor is, outwardly, as cripplingly empathetic as the rest of their kind — but the more time they spend together, the more the doctor notices that their behavior is precisely calculated for an effect, to silence or punish someone they dislike or to gain the trust of an observer, all at the expense of the group at large. The doctor becomes fascinated. The sculptor reveals to him, the first time they’re alone together, that they burned away their natural concern for other people in much the same way their species does for chairs and stuffed animals and disease-bearing insects. What follows is an extended flirtation of slowly escalating secondhand cruelty. The sculptor stops making the effort to leave the social circle tied together, and begins dissolving friendships, setting up accidents, ruining livelihoods — the doctor watches, crippled by guilt but sexually fascinated and yearning for the ability to deaden the pain he feels whenever his mistakes cost lives. The climax of the book is a murder, the sculptor guiding the doctor’s hands, and then a terrifyingly gory scene of eroticized anguish as the doctor watches the sculptor use the raw materials he’s given them. It is heavily implied that the next death of a patient at the doctor’s hands is not an accident. The last page of the book is a sketch of several delicate mobiles of bone.

It's disheartening to think that so much of the universe where a concept akin enough to 'romance' exists at all, to turn up any scrap of literature involving it, has so many people who know barely anything of sexuality, and nothing of cruelty or power or anything that makes sex more interesting than slapping flesh and a fleeting moment of pleasure.  Worlds full of the sort of boring creatures Shelyn would make, if Shelyn had the capacity and desire to make mortals without free will.

Abrogail will simply set this aside without any comment that might inspire the authors to write back again; Abrogail does not know how many 'romance novels' like this Cheliax may receive, before Otolmens shuts it all down, and she wishes to focus on more promising universes with more hints of useful knowledge in their books.

The maggieverse has heard hints from elsewhere about what Abrogail likes and would like to present the following: 

A novel with "psychological horror" warnings on it but nonetheless genre-tagged for romance, about a girl who grows up in a monarchist, feudal-adjacent dystopia where personal relationships are overshadowed by personal gain and everyone has to keep an eye out for backstabbing at all times; while carefully balancing her legal obligations to her parents and teachers with the extra-obligatory factors that will prevent them from discarding her before she's gotten everything she needs out of them, the young noble girl at the center of the story yearns for genuine affection and care such as she had once received from a nanny who was executed for crimes it had been convenient to her parents to frame her for when she was very young. At a social event, she is briefly distracted from checking various refreshments for poisons or mind-altering drugs by a handsome young nobleman with a charming smile, who over the course of the next in-universe weeks takes an interest in her without making clear any ulterior motives and slowly seducing her into trusting him. After she has fallen thoroughly into his clutches, he proceeds to betray her in the most viciously pragmatic way possible, stripping her of several opportunities she had spent years cultivating at the behest and payment of her rivals. A brief window into his perspective shows that he thinks of her as pathetic and almost hopelessly naive, but that there's a chance she'll take the event as the reality check it is and shape up into someone it would be dangerous to overlook and with a quite central grudge against him, so he's preparing to order some token security measures against her when, mid-sentence, his perspective cuts off. 

A reframe back to the protagonist's viewpoint shows her as having picked up the pieces of her shattered psyche quite effectively, if not perhaps in what a normal person would call the usual fashion, and having decided that the extent to which she could blame him for doing exactly the same thing anyone else would have done to her given the chance is vastly overshadowed by how skilled he was at making her feel good and happy and adored when he was trying to do that. So she has decided to kidnap him and psychologically break him into doing what she wants again, using resources that she had continued hiding from him even while she trusted him out of sheer habit. The torture scenes, both physical and mental, are lovingly described, and the boy pretends to break several times before it actually happens, only to be caught out by clever tests the protagonist devises. 

For the rest of the book, the protagonist's rise through the ranks of the kingdom is steady, even though she starts out lower than she would have if she had never fallen for the boy's original betrayal, and although her rivals initially deride her for spending so many resources on acquiring her pet, it turns out that having a consistent source of extremely basic emotional needs strengthens her considerably psychologically, giving her the edge she needs to triumph over several crucial rivals. At the end of the book she has acquired a position of direct service to the king, who is so impressed by her effectiveness in bending her pet's will to her own that he puts her in charge of breaking critically important dissidents.

Mm, they're not bad as novels, but something about the depiction of ambition and cruelty here feels more Taldor than Cheliax; you get the impression that the author thinks that the object of cruelty is power, rather than the object of power being cruelty.  Also Abrogail is concerned about impressionable young girls growing up to want to be ants.  Possibly they should, as an experiment, reprint these books and sell them in Taldor.

Abrogail doesn't write back again; she wants to focus on worlds that are sending her useful technical details, and these ants have probably gotten about as romantic as they can get.

Finally an alien plane she can trade with! Possibly! She'll send back three Chelish romance novels of her own favorite taste, and there can be more if the Fayliens have more stories! Especially if they go into even more technical detail! Cheliax will pay them to produce stories like that, if they don't have them already!

The author issues an amended version of the harem king book where the king's downfall was largely due to hubris leading to careless mistakes, and some extra nerding out about the magic?? centralized-record-system-thing that the protagonist is skilled at manipulating despite precautions built into it explicitly designed to prevent this, mostly by quietly controlling an important node of it that redirects people to the right records, but decline to change anything about the therapy. They can't take payment but the author was happy enough to take the excuse to gush a bit.

Abrogail finds herself deeply appreciative of the haunting fragility of these innocent, pathetic beings.  They are Lawful Good, but not in a way depicted as admirable, only in the way of making them more attractive victims.  Abrogail could break dozens of them, gently, with the softest touches driving them to break themselves, before becoming bored; and would treasure ever after whatever expressions of art they produced along the way.

Now this is just beautiful.  This is by far the most beautiful book that any of these worlds have sent her.  This is not a romance novel for young girls, this is a beautiful creation for everyone in Cheliax to read who is smart enough to comprehend it.

If she, herself, had to be sent to any of these worlds, Abrogail would choose this one without the tiniest hesitation, from among all of those shown so far.

Abrogail will send back a copy of the romance novel that she had the greatest hand in creating herself, when she first ascended the throne, along with a copy of the most precious grimoire of Hell that Abrogail has in her own possession.  It's not clear that she can pay anything meaningless; maybe she can pay something meaningful.

...it's the sort of romance novel that Abrogail always thought she wanted to read, and Abrogail would have been much more excited about reading it before coming across the Earthtender masterpieces.  This is most well-crafted and Abrogail will be printing it throughout Cheliax and seeing if she can slip it into Taldor to corrupt their own sensibilities - it's very well-placed for that - but now it has the hollow sense of being given only exactly what you asked for, when you didn't understand what you really wanted.

Somebody, she guesses, put this directly after the Earthtender book exactly so that Abrogail would realize that all the romance novels she used to enjoy, even brought to the pinnacle of the art form she herself tried to create, would only be hollow things compared to what the wider universe could offer her?  And then she never gets an Earthtender book again, and has to read the two she has over and over again, or if they do send her other books they're not as good?  It's finely honed cruelty if so.  Especially the part where Abrogail herself wouldn't give back the Earthtender book for anything; even knowing that not with the Crown of Infernal Majesty could she boost any Chelish writer to produce its equal, and may never again see its like.

@Planet Rockeye:

It's not really the kind of technical detail she was hoping for but... thanks on the editing help, she supposes.  Her own censors can do the same sort of work, but Planet Rockeye is doing it better.

She's still in rather a melancholy mood, now.

Firstplanet has also heard the rumors about Abrogail's tastes! Something like sixth- or seventh-hand, admittedly, but they still hope this novella will be more of a hit.

On a planet whose human inhabitants have barely become more interesting than other species of ape, a black obelisk appears. It ensnares the mind of any human who comes near and sets them a task. The tasks vary in complexity and duration, but the results of success and failure are always the same: for failure, stabbing pain and an explanation of how to do better, for success, ineffable pleasure and delicious food and a harder task. The humans strive to please their alien god, accomplishing successively greater feats of dexterity and intelligence and clearly becoming a nascent civilization. Of the three viewpoint characters, one fails too often and loses the obelisk's attention entirely; the other two excel with fire and stone tools and twisting string and drawing primitive maps. The descriptions of their devotion to the obelisk and the experience of communing with it are blatantly and unashamedly horny, but none of the sexiness involves body parts in any way. Eventually one of the protagonists invents the first alphabet, and is rewarded with a vision of their descendants walking on the planet's moon, where a second obelisk awaits them. The novella ends shortly thereafter with the two successful protagonists being told to produce offspring with each other.

This recently written fanfiction tells the slice of life story of Abrogail as a barista at a coffee-shop-but-for-tea. The author seems to have based her character on the reviews Abrogail has written - the fictional Abrogail is depicted as a romantic who enjoys nerding out about science. She gives many of her customers love life advice, often encouraging them to be ambitious and pursue their desires, even when those desires scare them. There are occasional tangents of long excited discussions about science between Abrogail and various customers - covering such topics as the functioning of the research center at the south pole during the winter, whether particle physics is relevant to philosophy, and exactly how a human would die if you threw them into a blackhole. 
 
Every few chapters she seems to fall in love with a different customer, often torturing and fucking them. She quickly grows bored with each crush - a fact that is depicted as tragic. 

The entire fanfiction takes place in the coffee-shop-but-for-tea, including the sex scenes which are treated as entirely normal things to occur in public.

She knows some clerics of Asmodeus who will get off on this, but it's not suitable for enlightening the general populace, particularly.

She's looking for romance novels at a somewhat more magi-technologically advanced level than this, please?  For people who're still searching for a cheap way to manufacture alkali for use in paper-making, for example.

More books arrive! Paperbacks. Whoever printed and bound them puts little value on the aesthetics of outer appearances; the covers are off-white like the pages inside them.

The first book is an aggressively mundane (though comically written) tale about subsistence farmers in a fantasy setting with technology on par with Golarion's. The male and female leads keep their heads down through political turmoil and dragon-slayings; the drama in the story mainly comes from the psychological distress inflicted on their entire extended family from having to hurry to get the planting done in time. One gets the impression in reading it that the setting is based on a well-known legend typically told from a different vantage point, but knowing the exact details there isn't really necessary to enjoy it (if you're the sort of person who enjoys the sort of thing).

The second book centers on a LG teenage boy who vanishes from their industrialized society (mentioned in tantalizing passing) and finds themself falling out of the sky in a much more primitive one--by far less technologically advanced than Golarion--as a burly man with 20s in all their physical stats. Injured from the fall, he's nursed to health by a society of CE raiders tell him that he's their prophesied hero who'll elevate them beyond their humble means. At first horrified by their slavery and brutality, the book goes into great detail about how being lovebombed and worshiped corrupts him to Evil. (And into detail about how a messiah-figure obsessed with discipline and drill turns disorganized and factional raiders into a more Lawful fighting force, all without invoking the terminology of Alignment at all). He takes on a harem to share his phenomenal stats with future generations, and unites various clans and conquers small polities over twenty years while preparing in earnest for world conquest. He . . . helps them industrialize somewhat beyond the point of Golarion! The book goes into detail on the science of gunpowder, steam engines, and telegraphs! After years of war, his armies clash against a great walled city that'd been set up as a threat since the start of the book. They're led by a genius inventor and strategist themself, a woman who he becomes obsessed with. After finally breaching the city and enslaving the populace, he takes her for his harem--determined to make her his.

The book then abruptly shifts perspectives, starting again where the main character falls from the sky, but this time as a young girl and in a different place. She wins the respect of the walled city with her technical and philosophical knowledge, and becomes beloved by them--showing them a more egalitarian way. When the raiders become an increasingly salient threat, and diplomacy fails, she helps them prepare to defend the city, but it isn't enough. She considers resolving to kill herself if she's captured, but can't bring herself to do so, instead resolving to try her best to do what good she can while looking for a path to escape and survive. But when she's taken as a slave, she realizes that her captor is an alternate version of herself. The rest of the book shifts perspectives frequently as the male lead struggles with resurgent guilt and despair--brought to earth, his power fantasy interrupted--and details how he attacks the female lead in anger. Meanwhile the female lead tries to lead him towards the light, all the time trying to keep the flames of hope alive in her own heart and doing what she can to help the other harem girls. Eventually, though, they both give into despair and live a miserable codependent life on each other; ruling the world empire joylessly without the resolve to steer events in any particular way until it ossifies and tears itself apart.

Abandoning family and other obligations, they turn to subsistence farming and slowly they find some small measure of peace.

...

Abrogail has literally no idea how to react to this.

She'll... have the name changed by somebody disposable and then ship it off to the wizards, she guesses.

She'll write back to the Fayliens that she enjoyed the technical parts but all the purported sex and romance here is just way way way too - Abrogail doesn't even have words - too consensual.

@The Refuge's first book is not worth mentioning; the second book...

...

...

Aspexia, how do we handle this?  We can't just keep the book a secret and not reprint it, while using the knowledge within it, if we want more books like it - correct?  But if we print it widely enough to be read, we gain no advantage thereby.

Use the knowledge within the book, kept at first secret; and then, having conquered the world thereby, translate it and print it for all to read - we shall so commit ourselves.  Unless some still more valuable and more Asmodean book is received in the interim, to obsolete this book's technical contribution.

Makes sense!

And review it, Abrogail.

Her verdict is obvious:  It's 200% of a good book, in the sense that the first half of the book would constitute a good book.

Here's some porn about a woman with the inexplicable ability to transform other people's bodies, who really likes a very specific type (women who are entirely human save having large fluffy fox/dog/wolf/cat-ears and fluffy tails and playful demeanors, and can be trained into being masochists) who uses this power to solve many of her interpersonal problems and make people her overly sensitive pain-and-pleasure-drunk foxgirl slaves. Eventually a man with magic-reflecting magic that she would have known about had she bothered to check turns the tables on her and she experiences her own descent into the pleasant haze of obedience. Its appendices include speculative foxgirl biology and some nerding out about nutritional science and a detailed rant about runaway sexual selection in evolution.

On the stack to print in a few more years or decades after Cheliax finishes conquering the world!  It's a pity they can't reprint it sooner; this would make a tasty bit of meaninglessly fluffy candy for a young girl.  Actually, how about if they strip out the appendices and print it now, in limited circulation, with appendices and worldwide circulation to come after Hell conquers all?

Try for a little more detail here, Abrogail.

...allll right then:  This is a book for young girls, not a book for young women, because the protagonist solves her problems with sorcery and not with cruelty, ambition, cleverness, wisdom.  Which is the protagonist's downfall in the end, as is proper; but it also makes the book, as Abrogail stated, meaningless fluff.

The Refuge book senders would like more details on what she liked and disliked about the second book, so they can scour bookstores for ones that she might like! Also does she mind if they "post" her comments on the "web" forum, to solicit people's recommendations?

Yep, that's pretty fair! It's not very deep, it's not meant to be. It's porn. She's glad Abrogail likes it though, more people should see the beauty of foxgirls.

@The Refuge:

It's the difference between reading about future devils and reading about future paving stones - whether people's flaws are in the end corrected by the suffering they endure, or if it simply destroys them.  The first book-half is about a man aspiring to greatness and conquest, whom healthy Chelish girls might justly desire as a superior to seduce and exploit.  The second book-half is a story of people who could have been great, but whose flaws - their need for love, their need to love, their dissatisfaction with a life that contains only power - in the end prevent them from achieving that greatness.  It's realistic, don't get her wrong, but it's not fun to read.  

Abrogail has turned any number of people into probable future paving stones, to be clear, and enjoyed the process.  But she wouldn't continue to enjoy reading their stories from the victim's perspective after they'd broken.  People who shatter completely stop being interesting to her.  She sometimes keeps them around in the dungeon for a few years, worked on by other employees of hers, so she can come back and enjoy how broken they still are.  But that's - how can Abrogail put this?  That's a passing moment of pleasure in her story.  Not their story.  They don't have stories anymore once Abrogail is through with them.  It's not about their horror and anguish and suffering, past that point, it's about herself being so powerful and rich that she can afford to have that done to people on a whim.  That she can make herself be the center of somebody else's universe, make it so their universe contains nothing else but her own Will and the endless horror it inflicts on them, and then that Will just ignores them from then on except to occasionally look in and enjoy the meaninglessness of a meaninglessly suffering empty thing.

The second book-half is a novel of literary self-destruction, as the novel's characters become less and less deserving of having a story.

A copy of the Asmodean Disciplines has found its way to the sonataverse, where it acquired a small but enthusiastic fandom. With a combination of spotty reading comprehension and no actual clerics, the fandom has invented or reinvented as many as several heresies.

It's somewhat unclear whether this untitled book is fiction or nonfiction; it might be a collection of loosely-connected short stories, or possibly a collection of case studies, or possibly some of each.

¹ [No content warnings are present in-universe.]

. . . it suddenly occurs to us to ask, uh, who it is we're sending books to and why?

@Sonataverse:  Great masterpieces these stories are not... is what she'd like to say, but most adorable fluffy Asmodean porn is, frankly, a lot worse-written than this.  This book should be widely printed in Chelish erotica stores and displace the more poorly-written erotica there.  Sure, an explicit theme of fear-based obedience rather than simple obedience might be nice, but -

Aspexia likes simple obedience.  There's nothing wrong with simple obedience.

...of course you would think that.

Yes, of course she would.  These stories are fine the way they are, and should be printed unaltered.

. . . it suddenly occurs to us to ask, uh, who it is we're sending books to and why?

@The Refuge:

Abrogail Thrune is a rich woman who pays other people to write romance novels for her - she's been doing that since she was sixteen and inherited the family fortune - and yes, she supposes she has some personal habits that Lawful Good fuddy-duddies might find unpleasant.

She's passing on all the technological innovations in the books directly to the government of her home country of Cheliax, though, which has plans to use the knowledge to increase the wealth of everyone in Cheliax, and, in time, her planet as a whole will be wealthier too.  There's plans to print The Refuge's previous books throughout her planet, distributing the knowledge there worldwide, as soon as things can be set up so that this doesn't prolong any current or immediate-future wars.

Wow, that implies such fascinating things about how your world's society structured itself.

The forum we posted in recommended this romance about researchers with a highly infectious novel virus quarantining together trying to find a cure before it kills them and they're vitrified, as a romance novel that has good medical science in it. We tried sending a textbook, but it didn't work.

She'll pass on this otherwise empty and meaningless romance novel to her government!  Their efforts at finding books like these will have a great impact on Golarion!

Homerealm has heard rumors of rumors about Abrogail's actual tastes, but at this point no one sees any reason not to take her glowing review of the cyberpunk sexual-interrogation novel at anything but face value. As such, the next book sent is:

A short novel about the invention of a neural implant that is supposed to convey an infinite tolerance for pain. Those given the implant can still feel everything, but it has no emotional valence anymore; pain is just a number map in their mind. The book goes into an attempt at accurate neurology about this. Only, it turns out that the way this works is by splintering the subject's mind. One shard remains in control, unaware, while the other watches through their eyes and experiences all the suffering that the first one doesn't.

The protagonist of the book undergoes this procedure and shortly after starts having (what the text tells you are) incredibly vivid dreams in which she meets her other shard, and torturers her sexually, something she wasn't previously into but experiences really intensely in the dreams as their brain rebalances. (The author of this book has clearly never heard of 'plurality' but manages to halfway invent the concept anyway.) The protagonist's two shards continue to meet in dreams, and then learn to communicate while awake, but they rapidly diverge in personality as the suffering-shard helplessly suffers.

Eventually, further neural scans prove that the two personalities are genuine and that the same thing would happen to anyone with the implant. She cancels her project and removes the neural implant and the two of them share her body, and her suffering, equally after that, but they've already diverged enough that they don't remerge, but they have developed strong feelings for each other as individuals and start trying to invent uploading so they can each have their own body. While they're still stuck sharing, they exploit their newfound masochism to fund their uploading research with kinky sex work (which gets one short on-screen sex scene to illustrate but is mostly just mentioned in passing like the obvious thing for a high-status researcher to do with sudden masochism). The book ends with a tongue-in-cheek note that a sequel will be written once uploading is actually invented.

(It took a bit for Piecemeal to get a return message with Abrogail's review, but apparently three days later someone blew up the weird spacetime relay it used. This was probably the author's fault, as he is the kind of person to loudly overreact to someone messing with his story in a way that inverted his politics, and also charismatic enough that various people have a tendency to go all 'rid me of this troublesome priest' about him expressing his anger. If there were any backup gizmos, whoever has them is being Very Quiet about it.)

That's very sweet, Homerealm!  Though these two personalities could stand to be fighting for dominance a lot more instead of just cooperating - that's a part of sex that Abrogail finds exciting and she knows, based on the previous book, that Homerealm has it too.  Is the role of conflict in driving plotlines, and sexual-romantic plotlines especially, something that Homerealm hasn't invented yet?  Abrogail can write a bit about it if so.  Roughly, if you're imagining some plot development or piece of hypothetical magic that could make things less stressful for your viewpoint characters, why, you just shouldn't have that exist - it's not that complicated!

The technology/magitech is still quite hard for her to relate to, though.  Can Homerealm go more primitive - to the level of a civilization that has just figured out how to make firepowder but not really about why these recipes work, say, and is just finding out?  Reading about technology her own civilization can't have yet isn't fun for Abrogail!

Homerealm does indeed have lots of books with non-cooperative sex in them! Why didn't she say so.

Here is a long-form serialized story featuring a socially awkward teenage boy who wakes up alone on an empty infinite plain, with the power to rearrange physical matter however he likes. He builds himself a skyscraper to test his powers. If falls down. Cut to the next day with him living in an entirely different skyscraper, experimenting to figure out how to generate food. As a last resort he can make copies of his own body, but he is far from hungry enough yet to eat copies of his own body, so he slowly walks through cellular biology and what he remembers of crop linages to create an extremely basic plant, which he then iterates on until he has dozens of completely original species of grain and fruit and vegetables. Once he grows one of something, he can use his magic to copy it indefinitely. Once he has food, the narrative goes into detail about the way he uses his powers to recreate things like basic plumbing and electric lights, including detailed descriptions of a steam-powered generator, interrupted by lightly exhibitionism-flavored masturbation scenes that give a bittersweet feeling to the solitude.

'Cause the thing is? He's horny and lonely. So he decides to try to create other people.

The book perspective shifts to the blank-slate physically-teenage girl that emerges from the amniotic sack fruit growing on the people-tree. While the protagonist boy's behavior toward the blank-slate girl would by Chellish standards read as way too nice, it is not portrayed as Good. He grooms her with the sole goal of making her dependent on him, even worship him.

Back in the boy's perspective, we see in his thoughts all the things he could teach her but decides not to. Instead, he makes another. And another. Soon he has an entire community of sex slaves that he keeps in line with magic-assisted pleasure and extremely rudimentary gaslighting, which is easy for him given how naïve they all are. He falls deeper and deeper into playing with them like toys, though when he goes so far as to make one of them cry, it shocks him out of his spiral, and awakens his empathy.

He decides to try to teach his first and most experienced girl to use his matter-rearranging powers, not knowing if that is even possible. It is. The girl starts using her powers, and is joyful. He teaches her other things too, everything she'd need to keep their community thriving. He worries, about giving up control like that, about creating equals instead of slaves. But years pass, and an entire civilization of matter-shapers grows out of his initial community, with some of his original gaslighting enshrined as cultural norms despite his discomfort with that.

He falls into depression once it's clear that the civilization he's spawned doesn't need him anymore, but his first girl finds him, talks with him, realizes what's wrong, and uses her powers to enslave him for his own good. She keeps him in a haze of pleasure and praise and happy submission, happy and proud to have become someone capable of caring for her creator.

It is unclear how this happened so quickly, because by sheer wordcount this book-game is longer than any five or ten reasonably sized books combined, but the collaboration between those two grapeverse authors has borne fruit!

This is another book-game with the same mechanics as the one about the statue, but a distinctly different tone. The central character, instead of a sad traumatized statue, is a slightly altered version of the scribe from the other book. Her personality is the same, but her context has changed: she's an ethereally beautiful magical being, humanoid with delicate crystalline wings, and you the player have discovered her trapped in a magical silver cage that burns her to touch. It's possible to just plain free her, in which case she wishes you good fortune, tells you she owes you a favour, and flies away, ending the story; or it's possible to do some things to her while she's in the cage, which can provide some amusement for both of you but is ultimately a fairly limited form of interaction; but, if you pay close attention to subtle clues in her dialogue and body language across different playthroughs and hints provided by the narration, you can figure out how to use the tools in this magical workshop to bind her to your service before you open the cage. (Implicitly, the previous owner of the workshop was working on trying to do just that when they disappeared; even more subtly implicitly, she may have had something to do with their disappearance.)

There follows a fascinating range of options for interacting with the magical winged girl. You can exploit her for magical power, which she grumbles about but can't really stop you from doing; you can torture her or have sex with her; you can ask her about herself and her time in the cage, which questions she will flippantly deflect. If you treat her impersonally, she starts out flirting charmingly with you but eventually gets bored and withdraws; if you engage with her banter, she gets much more animated. Depending on how exactly you treat her, you can see all kinds of subtle variations on her base personality. She seems to pick up on hints of your personality through your actions, and will react differently depending on whether the personality you display is attractive to her. (Her criteria for attractiveness are fairly elusive, but Abrogail will probably have the most luck at meeting them when she is playing the game as herself, without putting on any kind of non-Abrogail persona. Getting her to respect you is a major aspect of winning her favour, but she doesn't exactly lay out a rubric for how to do that, and it mostly seems to come down to demonstrating that you are worthy of her respect.)

If you exhibit an interest in pushing her to her limits, and she isn't into you, she'll laugh and dare you to try; if she is into you, she'll laugh happily, and dare you to try hoping you'll succeed. Hours upon hours of content are available down this road. When she's into you, she helps, giving you feedback on how she feels about things, suggesting clever ideas for what you might do to her next. You can use information gained with her cooperation against her in timelines where she likes you less, but how much she likes you is still the major deciding factor in how interesting of a reaction you can get out of her; she just feels less when she's not on board with the proceedings. At first she's not very receptive to aftercare, but with sufficient patience and attention you can get her there, if she likes you enough; and succeeding at that unlocks a whole vista of new interactions, new depth to her feedback on what you're putting her through, and especially new things she will let herself feel that she wouldn't, perhaps couldn't have, before. The exact path you take here matters a lot to the results; depending on what you do to her and when and how, you can shape her in all kinds of interesting directions and explore all kinds of interesting psychological territory, though she remains irrepressibly resilient no matter how much you put her through. Getting her to scream is a minor accomplishment; getting her to cry is a major one. If she likes you, she'll congratulate you on both.

There are thousands of different ways to accidentally give her the means to free herself. Down most of these paths, the first you hear of it is that your pretty winged girl is gone, leaving little clue as to how she escaped; down a very, very small fraction of them, if you have given her particular reason to dislike you, the narrative reports that you go to sleep one evening and never wake up. However, if she's having enough fun with you, she'll pass up the opportunity without ever mentioning it, and the narration will give very little hint that anything interesting even happened; in could-be-free-if-she-wanted mode, she has very subtly different reactions to a lot of things, but mostly gives no sign that anything has changed unless you tick her off enough that she leaves without warning. And it is fairly difficult to tick her off that much if she already likes you enough to be staying.

You can also, of course, let her go on purpose anytime you like; her reaction to this will vary, from fleeing immediately to a wistful farewell scene to, if she likes you especially much, a wistful farewell scene in which she asks you to torture her one last time. It's possible (though tricky) to finagle recapturing her during the wistful farewell scenes, which she thinks is very sexy of you even though she's a little mad about it. Subsequent goodbyes in that same timeline will tend to be shorter unless you really make an impression on her in the interim.

Although it's possible to treat her kindly from the start, it's not really possible to win her trust that way; she keeps snarkily pointing out that if you wanted to be nice to her, you could always let her go. You can get to a state of something resembling friendship along this route, and even sleep with her in a moderately consensual fashion if that's your thing, but she won't stop reminding you that she's your unwilling slave until you either let her go or start treating her like one.

It's a very open-ended game, but the foreword hints that there may be a victory condition, and it is this: getting her to the point where she likes you so much that you can openly offer her her freedom, even go so far as to free her outright with no tricks, and she'll scoff and say she'd get bored without you. That unlocks an epilogue scene which summarizes your relationship so far, shows you narration of her thoughts for the first time detailing what she thinks of you, and then lets you get right back to what you were doing... except that now you have permanently unlocked the ability to read her mind, which sticks around even if you go back and replay the whole thing from the beginning.

The mind-reading honestly doesn't add that much new information in most places, since she speaks her mind quite freely especially when she's fond of you, but it adds depth and richness to the portrayal of her experiences throughout the story. And if you hadn't already figured out certain aspects of her magic or coaxed her into telling you about them, reading her mind lets you square away most of the remaining mysteries—including the mystery of the former owner of the workshop you found her in, whom she very much did murder from inside her cage because he was an idiot. You also get all kinds of charming little details about her thought processes; for example, if you contrive on a replay to get her into a situation where you offer her her freedom while she is secretly capable of taking it anytime she wants, she explicitly reasons that she shouldn't choose any differently than she would if she didn't have an escape plan, because it's possible that something about the way she responds might alert you to its existence and you might figure out what it is and thwart it. In general she is an incredibly suspicious and cynical person, but in a cheerful, strangely optimistic way; she expects people to treat her badly whenever they can get away with it, but trusts herself to endure arbitrary hardship and still come up laughing, and takes enough pride in that resilience to genuinely enjoy having it tested.

Consistently across all timelines and scenes, the winged girl's characterization is detailed, coherent, well-thought-out, responsive to circumstances and history, and... well, if you grant the premise that a personality like this could exist, this is certainly an unfailingly realistic depiction of one. This is the pinnacle of one of the Grapeverse's most cherished arts: writing imaginary people behaving exactly like that specific imaginary person would behave, all the time, in response to whatever nonsense the narrative (or, in this case, the player) may throw at them. And the personality being depicted is really something. It is within the realm of possibility that a lesser soul than Abrogail, faced with this book, would waste away in front of it, helplessly seduced by its fictional occupant.

@Homerealm:  The depicted level of gaslighting and brainwashing in this book is a bit on easy mode - the women whom Abrogail is trying to select reading material for, and herself, usually don't have targets this stupid enjoy a back-and-forth of conflict between an equal and her near-equal who has to be conquered with wits, with ambition... does Homerealm possibly not have something called pain?  It's very important to the way Abrogail herself looks at sex - her first sexual experience was a very painful one, and that shaped her, and Abrogail would never have had that go any other way.

The science parts are great, though, and Abrogail would treasure this book for that alone.  (It advances Cheliax's timeline on conquering the rest of Golarion by, Abrogail estimates, another year.)

Here in return is a Chelish romance novel (hastily censored to remove some of the more blatant things that might alarm a less Evil world) about a female slave successfully brainwashing her own owner, given no more initial vulnerability than her owner's tolerance of her providing him with a little less pleasure, a little more pleasure, according to her own whims!  She provides him with subtle feedback and maneuvers him into showing her a slight taste towards physical masochism, which she heartily indulges and reinforces with more eager sex, and works that up to his showing a taste for play-submission, with play sessions that extend for longer and longer.  At the end of the story, he tries to tell her that playtime is over, and she orders his own former servants to beat him severely for his impudence; one servant objects and is slain by the others, whom she has offered slightly nicer treatment than their last owner did.

This is what it looks like when the protagonist faces a position of serious challenge!

From the samples of Asmodean fiction which have made it to Planet-That-We-Live-Upon, Cheliax looks like a well-adjusted society that has managed to wrap their heads around the concept that fiction isn't real, and exposing people to stories with bad people or bad things in it will not cause total civilizational collapse. A surprising rarity in the domain of interdimensional fiction reviewers. On the other hand, it seems like this world can only be sent "romance novels"; Oh, well. Listeners can send romance novels. Probably.

A longer work depicting the internal politics of the cloistered harem of a Despot; The viewpoint starts out following a new inductee to the harem, who catches the Despot's eye and... plays board games with her? They sit down for long philosophy discussions together? Sex eventually happens, but it's not until the concubine is halfway through redesigning the city's aqueducts to support its growing population. (The concubine is not ready for sex yet, but knew this was a risk she was signing up for when she joined the harem) A few chapters later, the viewpoint starts to shift to depict the lives of the other concubines as well; many have romantic and sexual relationships among each other in addition to their rivalries and their relationships with the Despot. It does become clear over time that the Despot is not just turned on by civil engineering, though she is definitely turned on by civil engineering. Two thirds of the way through the Despot dies and is replaced by her son; Half of the viewpoint characters (the male half) are executed offscreen, and a third of the remainder are removed from the harem for being related to the new Despot. (They are implied to live comfortable lives elsewhere in the palace but are no longer the focus of the story.) The new Despot proceeds to not have sex with any of his concubines for ten whole chapters of poetry, engineering, politics, and math. At one point he has his soldiers undress a concubine and tie her to his bed, but then all he does is pace the bedroom while using her as a sounding board for whether or not he can afford to build a new bridge next summer, then untie her and send her back to her own chambers. He does eventually start hurting and fucking them, but it takes a while.

A story in which a mad genius has finally gotten fed up and vowed to push out the moon's orbit to realign "months" and "year-parts". The protagonist is an unrealistically-competent-crime-investigator who winds up responsible for auditing the mad genius' calculations to confirm that this won't kill everybody, and also has to prevent multiple assassination plots by concerned states and individuals. Many of the technical audits are depicted in detail, though an author's note explains that many of the technologies involved are either speculative or entirely fictional. This should be obvious to anyone who likes this genre of fiction, but apparently that doesn't hold across interdimensional cultural gaps. Over the course of the novel, the two develop both a friendship and a rivalry; There is no sex involved at any point, but the protagonist's complicated mix of admiration, anger, fear, and protectiveness towards his nemesis/ward/prey/friend is clearly setting up for a romantic arc in the sequel; There's a somewhat condescending author's note to this effect, though it is explicitly directed at the force preventing non-romances from being transmitted rather than at any potential readers. In the end, the mad genius flees the country after being told that her plan will not be allowed because it will kill lots of people and upset the international order; The protagonist tracks her down to a remote desert and tries to arrest her, but she declares that no law will stop her from fulfilling her vow and escapes into space to try to enact her plan from Forlorn Sister, outside of any state's jurisdiction.

Another harem novel, this one flagged as somewhat-unrealistic pornography (Though it's not like the sex scenes in the last one weren't explicit.) Like the one before, this is told entirely from the perspective of various concubines. Unlike the one before, some of these concubines seem to be slaves rather than volunteers. Every so often, one will try to kill the Despot during sex, or escape to freedom, or poison the Despot's food, or kill themselves; These attempts always fail and those attempting are raped and killed, or tortured to death, or both, except for the suicide attempt who just gets raped. It's a lot shorter, and the Despot starts having sex with his concubines right out the bat, but despite this it seems to have the same or possibly even more civil engineering, proportionally.

The tessaverse has also heard some of Abrogail's feedback, although not perfectly; whether the message was distorted in the passing or this is just their closest matches is hard to say.

A [fantastical-costumehero-altconstruction-premodernverse] (This is roughly a mix of Magical Girl and Urban Fantasy genres, but it usually isn't set in the Tessaverse itself) derivative novel with the worldbuilding premise that magical power is not native to humans, but can be obtained by magicals via carefully devised contracts with an ambiguously independent collective from another planet with a name that roughly translates as "the observers." The footnotes suggest this is explored in the parent setting in greater detail, but this one only concerns itself with providing a surface level explanation of how a poorly specified contract can result in you not getting what you wanted out of it and wasting your payment, or a well designed one allowing you to obtain abilities that would ordinarily be far more expensive. The story is in the third person perspective and follows two protagonists.

The protagonist, Momo, is a kind and friendly woman who obtained a sufficiently well specified object repair power that she can also use it as an anomalously broad and capable healing power. Her arcs follow her trying to balance her contracted responsibilities with her work to help people and her own personal life. Primarily, the last the form of dealing with her increasing distance from her prior acquaintances, as well as a newly expanded magical social circle, which includes an alluring but guarded magical of ambiguous gender she finds herself drawn to despite the negative rumors.  At the beginning, this ability is presented as unambiguously positive in impact, and includes an examination of the idea of what it means to be good and what their obligations towards society are by the Momo and her best friend, who has their own, less versatile contracted powers. As time passes, however, Momo is forced to deal with steadily more problems, starting with becoming the target of anger from people she didn't save. From there, things escalate, with her and her group coming under physical and social attack by entrenched interests, people looking to monopolize her power, and people hostile to those she has already helped. With the result of careful planning, quick thinking, and a healthy heaping of luck, she is able to survive and maintain her freedom, but the task grows steadily harder.

The deuteragonist's perspective picks up at their meeting with the protagonist, who they seem to recognize on sight. The viewpoint character for these segments is an extremely capable and [graceful-efficient] magical named Jix as they work to pursue their own agenda, which appears to be quietly dominating the local underground and magical scenes. They deal with roadblocks by whatever means necessary, including a great deal of intimidation and violence, but is careful never to leave anything that can be traced to them. Along the way they demonstrate keen foresight and competence in dealing with various plots, ambushes, and manipulations before striking at those who attack them. Outside of their work, they work their way into the friend group of the protagonist. They are openly polite and friendly, if not especially approachable, but in private seems dismissive about any of them besides the protagonist herself. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that more and more of their actions are targeted at people and groups Momo associates with, which leaves the impression that they too wants to take the protagonist for their own.

Things come to a head when one of the strongest local power blocks manages to ambush the protagonist, badly injuring her best friend in the process, only for Jix to spring a second ambush and take them down herself. Rather than capture her in turn, however, Jix instead swear themselves to the protagonist's cause, and reveals that their own power is the ability to turn back time. The first time through, they had been saved by the Momo in their darkest moment, but when she was defeated and killed, they altered the wording of the same restoration contract the protagonist had made so they could reset the entire universe. From there, the two perspectives track closely together as their relationship evolves, with Momo learning to enjoy exercising power over Jix inside and outside of the bedroom. The book makes use of magic healing to justify otherwise-inadvisable sex acts, which it’s made clear Jix would ordinarily dislike but adores because of the person doing it. Alongside the steamy scenes, the plot escalates, with the deuteragonist going to further and further extremes to take out things they feel are a danger to the protagonist, up to and including several cases of murder. This comes to a head when the protagonist catches them during the act and confronts them, which results in an impassioned scene where the deuteragonist pleads with the protagonist to let them succeed in keeping her safe, just once. This resolves with the protagonist agreeing to be more selfish, but ordering Jix to not act out without her permission, and proceeds to a punishment scene that makes it clear (if the rest of the book didn't) that this is this particular author's kink. The story wraps up after a short timeskip with the Jix heading out on a mission of dubious providence, but in clothing that is obviously (to a tessaverse resident) sub fetishwear.

The second novel is erotica set in a [human-aliensocial] fantasy world where civilization is largely unrecognizable because nobody can trust each other or really cooperate. The level of technology possessed is more advanced than is really plausible given that, but is still noticeably behind Golarion on that score; this is not brought up directly in story, but someone familiar with Tessaverse literature would recognize some bits that signpost this happened for aesthetic reasons.

In the third novel, a student named Violet is isekaid to the Tessaverse’s past, where she finds herself hundreds of years ago in the city that would later form the nucleus of the Tessaverse. Upon realizing this, she makes a name for herself in the field of mathematics. The story goes into great detail on the subject from first principles, but the Tessa largely seems to focus on creating a coherent basis for mathematics rather than redevelop specific new techniques; the impression given is that the author believes this is obviously the most important part of math. One of these achievements, the cubic and quartic formulas, catches the attention of a famous polymath in a neighboring country named Elle. In proper history, this woman had revolutionized a dozen branches of mathematics and science but had always despaired of the fact that nobody could keep up with her, and ended up with most of her work unpublished for decades after she died young from disease. Violet already has something of a crush on Elle, but experiences severe imposter syndrome due to feeling like she was being given credit she didn’t deserve; her publications had been based on the work of others, including Elle herself. From there, the story covers the protagonist’s struggle between being seduced by Elle and her attempts to grapple with the false impression she has created, which is made all the worse as her love interest steps up her own efforts in an attempt to keep up.

Alongside the romance comes a series of mathematical developments, each shown and proven in the pages of the work. Despite her guilt, Violet increases their own work rate in an attempt to put off disappointing Elle, which culminates in her releasing a proof for the fundemental theorem of Calculus just ahead of Elle’s own work. At this, Elle asks Violet out, at which point she spills the beans, confessing her secret. Rather than reject her, however, Elle remarks that this just means that the protagonist knows even more things that she doesn’t, and declares her intention of getting them out of her before silencing her with a kiss. A short sex scene follows soon after, but it’s clearly a lot more vanilla than the previous works and is not the focus of the book. Checking the documentation will reveal that they were delighted to hear that Abrogail was interested in mathematical uplift, which is a popular Tessaverse genre that they haven’t seen much of in any of the other worlds they’re receiving fiction from. Supposedly this is one of the most popular examples of the [mathematical-romance] genre in the Tessaverse, but they apologize if it wasn’t technical enough for her taste because they know some people have high standards on that score (The book is, by the by, over half mathematics, history of mathematics, and philosophy of mathematics by volume). That this might be a miscommunication does not appear evident in their commentary.

...

...

Abrogail played this game for, yes, a while, before it became too frustrating that Abrogail couldn't meet the book's occupant in real life.

So once some other things she's doing are wrapped up, which may take a decade or so, Abrogail shall use a few spells in her local universe, such as Scribe's Binding and Miracle, to transform the winged protagonist of this book into an actual mortal being, and see about them seducing each other for real!  If the book's authors have ever wanted to create true life, they will have!

This isn't just Abrogail delaying a reward for herself towards future victory; she probably can't get a Miracle on this scale until she's sufficiently pleased her boss.  Any books about technology of an appropriate level will hasten the day when this fairy-being becomes real.  And, if the Grapeverse can hasten that day, Abrogail will endeavor - though she's not sure if she can do this, she will if she can - to send back, through this connection, an appropriately seductive and seducible being transformed into an interactive romance novel.

Abrogail isn't quite sure what to do with these books.  They've got valuable civil engineering, on the one hand, and a great lack of interesting romance, on the other.  Abrogail is not oblivious to the point that whatever bizarre game she's playing with... the Outer Gods, presumably... the fact that They're sending her only romances implies that she will not be allowed to obtain only material about civil engineering.

Abrogail will simply give her honest feedback on the books, then, in hopes that she is in some sense thereby rewarding whatever has sent her these civil engineering notes:

The first book, as a romance novel, has the fundamental problem that the protagonist is not really conquering or seducing the man in any way, and none of the things she wants from life seem at all entangled with her hypothetical progress on seducing this man.  This is a slice-of-life harem story with sex scenes.  Nobody has any romantic feelings at any visible point, whether of the Good or Evil variety.  She doesn't know if future material of this kind will make it across, but perhaps this selection of Chelish romance novels will help enlighten the Listeners on the difference between a romance novel and a book with sex scenes in it.

The second book is not really to Abrogail's own taste in romance novels - it's sort of weirdly Lawful Neutral as rivalries go, something about it doesn't feel very passionate and it may not be a coincidence that they don't get around to fucking.  But she does concede that it is a romance novel.

The third book may be a sexier harem-slice-of-life novel than the first, but that is, again, what it is.  It's not a romance novel.  It doesn't even have any romance in it, in fact.  The Despot who has painful sex with the harem inmates might as well be a weather phenomenon that rains orgasms and whippings.

All right what is all this NONSENSE.

Otolmens is VERY BUSY but will probably be closing it down SHORTLY.

Any GODS who are messing with it should FINISH UP THEIR MESSES and not start ANY NEW MESSES.

The Grapeverse authors of the collaboration write back to say that they are greatly interested in hearing about her playthroughs, which paths she tried, and what she thought of them, and they wish her well in creating a living replica of the winged girl; they are highly confident, in keeping with the winged girl's characterization, that she would be actively delighted to be created almost no matter what circumstances awaited her.

They are also intrigued by the idea of a seductive being transformed into an interactive romance novel, but they would not like to receive one unless the transformation was consensual, and that seems hard to verify under these circumstances, so sadly they'll have to pass; and furthermore, they cannot send her any books about technology of an appropriate level, due to a recently signed international treaty forbidding anyone on Grapeverse from sending uplift materials to Cheliax. If she wants tips on seducing the winged girl once she's made one of her very own, though, they will be happy to respond to questions if the connection is still open at that time!

The Earthtenders relay effusive thanks for the two response works in a small pamphlet with pressed flowers and sweet-smelling herbs tucked between the pages — they say they will send more very soon.

(Also included within the pages is a slim metallic disk of unknown provenance.)

They've noticed some fluctuations in the Mysterious Transmitter so they're going to just hurry things along in case it stops working.

They send out the hastily-composed "Emergency Interdimensional Second Edition" of the first harem novel. The politics and sex and romances (Yes, there were romances, though obviously alien cultures have different romance tropes) are left as untouched as possible, but the least romance-relevant civic engineering and poetry and board games have been replaced with somewhat anachronistic explanations of the germ theory of disease, a plan to cultivate pennicilin, the design of a hydroelectric generator, a steam engine, semiconductors, democracy, blast furnaces, a basic mechanical thinking-machine, synthetic fertilizer, and other useful inventions that are hopefully both comprehensible and useful at Cheliax' inferred technology level. Maybe this will help them speedrun the horrible parts of industrialization and get to the part where everything is great apart from the risk of destroying themselves. Good luck, people of Cheliax! Hopefully this one goes through, they're not sure it will since it's not like the things they replaced were irrelevant to characterization or the romance arcs.

It's very well-written BDSM material.  It is not however Evil BDSM.  It is Good BDSM.  These people care about each other very much, don't prey on anyone who doesn't try to prey on them first, and the fact that they're fighting alone against a hostile world and occasionally assassinating people, does not make them Evil, it makes them Chaotic.  This is the sort of material that - there is no kind way to put this - Cayden Cailean worshippers think BDSM romance novels are supposed to be about.

Eh.  It's not going to make the list of the 10 most interesting sexual encounters in Abrogail's real life let alone her fiction, but Abrogail can ship it.  This book's author understood that the characters need to start out in a position of disadvantage and use their wits, they didn't leave out all the elements that make sex interesting such as sadism, noncon, torture, etc.  Reading this romance novel would be better than spending the same amount of time in a quiet room with nothing to read; this is, in fact, something you can say about relatively few romance novels.

...the sad thing is, this is probably going to be a Chelish bestseller once approved simply because there are so few writers who manage to be okay at the basics of a romance novel.

She'll again be frank in her review, and hope that incentivizes whatever Outer God to send more incredibly valuable books like these:  This is a well-plotted... whatever kind of plot this is... and Abrogail's wizard compatriots, if not Abrogail herself, will absolutely appreciate the mathematical uplift.  Appreciate it lots and lots and lots.

But the actual plot of this romance novel, if you could call it that, is about Boring People with a Boring Romance having Boring Sex One Time.  Abrogail doesn't know what else to say here; this book's author was obviously just not trying to write a romantic plotline that somebody like Abrogail would enjoy.

This novel opens upon a girl living on a sidewalk. Her descriptions of the world are abstract, ghostly, and clinical — enough so to make it unclear if she understands what the objects around her are. She thinks of herself as a particle settled in the guts of a monolithine purgatory, looking on its mechanisms with awe and fear while recognizing herself as a being that cannot engage with them.

Each pain of homelessness is depicted with intimate detail: the elements yawning to swallow, the personlessness and objectification, the nestled-up fear of someone walking towards you, the soundless scream of boredom.

Rather than knowing a language, she possesses a unique translation magic. The author seems to take satisfaction in exploring the tics and limits of the ability as they arise. She does not speak, but her stream of consciousness is lucid and charming.

The novel makes an abrupt tone-shift thirty thousand words in. Walking on the beach at midnight, she is abruptly caught in the fringes of a selkie's love-inducing song. Her own magic renders her uniquely vulnerable to it, unspooling every tight-packed subliminal and thread of persuasion all at once.

It is a momentous and world-shattering event, the girl's psyche rewriting itself from the first line to the last over the course of a minute. The format abandons prose in favor of desperate adulent poetry, itself rapidly decaying before crescendoing in transition to graphic novel. (The visual world doesn't appear true to its textual descriptions. Ordinary life is vivid and dense, individual blades of grass are carved in spindly ink, each closet and window painstakingly shaded.)

The selkie departs before so much as noticing her victim, but the vagrant discovers that she is also a noblewoman who lives in a manor. She seeks an audience, pleads to be the sea monster's servant, and receives gracious acceptance. Thereon they enjoy slices of life together: quiet nighttime walks, buying the vagrant glasses and knitting her clothes, kidnapping and brainwashing new slaves, dispassionate sex, and abusing unique magic for political capital.

The girl finds herself ensconced in deep happiness. The city has lost its cruel majesty: it has been reduced to her meagre backlight. Her muscles grow toned, her face sharpens, and her gait becomes a marshal's clip.

Much of the remaining plot is fixed on the details of doing chores in the dark. The vagrant talks to everything inanimate. She greets the air, compliments the pleasantries of kitchensmoke, seeks the perspective of a splinter on a broom, and develops her routine to step on each floor tile equally. She spends time improving her housekeeping skills. She learns to mend wood and glass and marble and porcelain. For laundry and dishes, she learns the local magic (purity through water) - a schoolchild's skill that she eluded. She is tireless and diligent, with a singularity of conviction in her work to make angels blush. Any and all events she treats as a life or death scenario.

In parallel to the slice of life plot, the world itself is decaying — aesthetic and genre conceit bleed in like spilled watercolors. Roses frame the panels where the monster smiles prettily and then drift down around her. Feathers rain from the sky when the girl is happy: she notices and examines them, but seems physically unable to consider looking up for a source. When she and the selkie are alone, the girl is small enough to fit in a palm and interacts with the world as though that size. When there is a timeskip, she has no memory of anything that happened during it.

While scrubbing a floor, the girl's glasses fall off her face and she appears to notice the readership, which prompts a total collapse of psyche. She is only comforted by two full hours of high intensity lovesongs. Afterwards she behaves like it never happened, but it is unclear whether she has raised a facade or if the event was excised from her memory so the story might continue.

Soon after it becomes clear that her magic is not translation, but the ability to see the world for what it truly is. The world was never decaying: her power to perceive the bones of meaning was simply growing in strength. She does not spend much time trying to come to terms with this or what it might imply: her thoughts are so quick and uniform in looping back to her true and bright love that solving a metaphysical puzzle edges on impossible.

After nervously skirting around the readership, she seems to decide they are another of her objects. She will turn to speak with them on occasion, or close her eyes for a time as though to listen. Irregularly she will ask a favor: usually for them to "please stay a sliver's sliver while I attend this next room?" She is obeyed in this, and during one of these moments of privacy, she tells her master about what she has seen. In a moment of rising drama, the selkie proposes a trade summit with their observers, who respond to the request—

The readership apologetically sanctions the sea monster, but asks if she would like to meet them for lunch to discuss how to be a more tradeable-with agent. She would.

In preparation for lunch, the readers design an avatar which is then instantiated in the world. The author goes to distant lengths (described in a footnote) to make its depicted behavior true to their character. They arrive upon the appointed hour to break bread. They say they are the sum of their people rather than the wisest, but have some suggestions like "less rape!!" and "if you work to reduce your power over others, those above you will do the same" and "be cheap to predict."

It seems to go really well — the selkie hires the readership as a slave and they thereafter become a participant in the novel's slices of life. (The readership takes the form of an androgyne voyeur of a maid, who can be seen in many panels demurely escorting the protagonist from fifteen paces back. For the girl's part, she continues to treat them as inanimate.)

The last pages follow the protagonist folding warm linens, bent over and keenly focused on matching corners with atomic precision. The panels depict her mind in tandem with her body, utterly washed in worship of her master. The sunlight appears as through stained glass and the air shimmers as if with heat. The readership sits next to her, rolling the pad of their thumb over a conflux of floor tile lines as they stare intently at their friend.

—it actually appears to be an in-progress serial rather than a novel, last published two days ago.

Here's a big doorstopper of a story that doesn't introduce romance for the first bit, but sufficiently counts. It's set in a world where, when you die, you find yourself raised at one of eight cathedrals three days later. Occasionally new people arrive in the world, and occasionally some don't come back, and occasionally people reference other people not in this world, but nobody seems especially concerned about this. There are no children or old people, only adventurers of a variety of races, constantly respawning in the prime of their lives, some greater and many lesser. The gods don't seem to have alignments, exactly, though some are more evil and some are more lawful. One is vaguely Iomidaean and another slightly Asmodeousish but not closely in either case. 

The cycle of conquest, of push and counter-push, is a cycle - the weapons in use advance in sophistication and might until they start ruining the world around them, turning verdant fields into blasted hellscapes emitting invisible poison. Eventually one of the gods' factions grows stronger than the rest and effectively claims victory, but by old agreement this victory is simply tallied up for some eventual reckoning, and everything is reset. Once more the adventurers start as a half-naked mob in eight wooden shack cities and spread out into the world to cut down trees and dig up stones and build smithies and workshops and raid each other in extremely brutal personal assaults, organized if not equipped from the get-go. They make leather armor and iron weapons and build blast furnaces, and clash with steel armor and crossbows and limited strategic magic. They set up more and more sophisticated supply chains, wagons ferrying chalk and sand and salt to glassmakers, acid foundries proving a major target for strikes by the enemy as destroying one can cripple the whole economy, and fight with cannon and musket and bayonet and spell-charged bombs, all of which need to be hauled to the front. They build incredibly intricate war golems that walk on their own and are profoundly expensive bulwarks of battle, though terribly vulnerable if misused or unsupported. The warmachines and industrial logistics and strange magic have the Planet-characteristic level of nerdy detail focus on them, when relevant. They start working incredibly complex and delicate procedures in huge industrial complexes to refine magically active crystals into an extremely energetic form, to build superweapons, and launch them at each other at key moments with intel and secrecy becoming far more critical than ever before. The cycle tends to take about twenty years. (Close examination and some possibly-expensive experiments will eventually show all these industrial processes to be - wrong and useless in subtle ways. Unfortunately.)

And then someone wins, and it's all reset again.

A follower of one of the eviller gods has long had a back-and-forth with a particular foe on another god's side, going out of his way to interfere with them when it doesn't especially disturb his god's strength and fantasizing about doing so, about grinding their smug face into the dirt, when practicality and loyalty to the cause interfere. The pair of them clash wits, sometimes winning and sometimes losing. It gets to the point where both characters' allies remark on how obsessed they seem, and the superiors of the more-evil one order them to try and get useful strategic information out of their rival. The eviller one pursues this goal with gusto, making innocent comments to provoke revealing responses, making casual bets of information risked against information, with applying appropriate levels of double-checking and skepticism to what they learn. They're thrilled and happy with the constant pushing, seeing defeat in the face of the foe, and seeming string of victories for a while, until a brilliant stroke of counterintelligence by the less-evil rival ruins a large part of the more-evil god's army in a nasty ambush. 

It's a wakeup call, and only makes the man want to outwit and conquer his foe more. He goes with a subtler and longer strategy after that, remaining friendly and cheerful. Over time they convince their foe that the most fun moments of their repeating lives are when the two clash wits and earn delicious victory through their own ruthlessness and cleverness. In dialogues on the battlefield and occasional ambiguously-might-be-rape sex scenes after victories and defeats they continuously try to out-wit each other, and eventually the follower of the less-evil god switches gods to be closer to their other rival. They bounce off each other in constant contests of dominance after that, the talented upstart without reputation and contacts versus the loyal long-term servant. It's a delicious thrill, and when the former rival makes a play to take control of the established one's unit, someone the rival thought was a friend and ally betrays them, and they end up chained to the ground in the evil one's bedroom. It's a shame he can't be too cruel, the eviller one thinks, because then he wouldn't come back the next time he dies in battle, and he'd be much less useful that way. He has to restrain his torment to just enough not to drive the rival away from the plane for good, just enough to give them a glimmer of hope to prove themselves again or become the superior eventually.

The doorstopper of a novel ends on the note that, unknown to the eviller god's followers, the rival's former superior officer receives a coded message that is implied to contain vital intelligence. She comments, "That idiotic masochist's playing the long game, huh."

The Grapeverse authors of the collaboration write back to say that they are greatly interested in hearing about her playthroughs, which paths she tried, and what she thought of them, and they wish her well in creating a living replica of the winged girl; they are highly confident, in keeping with the winged girl's characterization, that she would be actively delighted to be created almost no matter what circumstances awaited her.

They are also intrigued by the idea of a seductive being transformed into an interactive romance novel, but they would not like to receive one unless the transformation was consensual, and that seems hard to verify under these circumstances, so sadly they'll have to pass; and furthermore, they cannot send her any books about technology of an appropriate level, due to a recently signed international treaty forbidding anyone on Grapeverse from sending uplift materials to Cheliax. If she wants tips on seducing the winged girl once she's made one of her very own, though, they will be happy to respond to questions if the connection is still open at that time!

@Grapeverse:

Abrogail does not in fact require their permission to reciprocate the fine gift of interactive-winged-girl she's been given!  And Abrogail is not an Abadaran who always wants to leave people better off by trading with her!

There's been some indication that this connection might be ending soon, so here, have the results of a Scribe's Binding that's been used on a captive succubus.  Hopefully they can use this highly magical soul-book for raw materials for more of their art form, and if not, the succubus can just stay a book forever!  Do note that if they try to untransform her back in a naive way, without editing her book first, she'll almost certainly kill them!

This novel opens upon a girl living on a sidewalk. Her descriptions of the world are abstract, ghostly, and clinical — enough so to make it unclear if she understands what the objects around her are. She thinks of herself as a particle settled in the guts of a monolithine purgatory, looking on its mechanisms with awe and fear while recognizing herself as a being that cannot engage with them...

...

...

Okay, yes, thank you, Abrogail can recognize the dreadful madness of the Dark Tapestry before she gets far enough into the book that it eats her mind and brain and soul and body in approximately that order.

Uh huh.  Sure.

Abrogail was seriously right about to put the book down before Gorthoklek burst in here so impolitely!

Uh huh.

Mm... another technically competent BDSM romance novel that would have interested Abrogail more before the Earthtenders expanded her sense of the possible.  Printable enough in Cheliax... once they've milked these industrial processes for all they're worth.  It's not clear if they'll operate in Golarion, but just the concept of the process lines seems like quite an important one - there's an implied methodology of how processes like these must have been invented, that this is what industry aims for, which seems conceptually valuable all on its own.

She does appreciate the ambiguity of who's winning; Abrogail has always thought that a romance novel is boring if you can easily tell who's winning the romance.

This story is set in a world that starts around or maybe a little behind Cheliax's technology level, in a city filled with canals, artisan guilds, and a valiant attempt at republican government. It is made of segments <3k words, and most under two thousand, strung together with more implication than connection. The plot depicted within the scenes is an extensively if not excruciatingly detailed account of technological and scientific development, as the main characters discover the principles of phlogiston and apply them to metallurgy, followed by several equivalent breakthroughs of which the last is luminiferous aether, including entire stretches that simply address the reader directly to explain the underlying details for why the principles the characters have discovered exist and produce the practical and experimental results they do; extensive political developments are sketched out and discussed, taking place more in the gaps than on page. It is a romance in that the six main characters are married and become closer over the course of the narrative; one of them has developed psychosis as a result of psychoactive drugs taken to tolerate having sex, which is treated as difficult mainly for that one, and a fate that could strike any ordinary person.

An accompanying note apologises for the lack of cultural contextualisation, which has inexplicably been failing to send - both the usual discussion appendix it is published with on their world, and attempts at explaining humans to aliens - and hopes that despite inevitable misunderstandings this unusually-physics-detailed story will nonetheless be overall-positive to receive. (Parts of the note itself have failed to send, including any kind of name for the sender(s).)

@Soonverse:

While it's clear that the physical principles of this world are not the same principles that underlie Golarion, the process of discovery is exceptionally inspiring and valuable.  Cheliax deeply appreciates their service.

The romantic aspects are trash.  No woman dreams of this life.

Here's a dozen of Cheliax's finest romance novels, if they're curious about how to do that correctly.  This may also help make it clear what sort of valuable service they've helped perform for Golarion!

A world of Lawful Good men and women, as delicate and fragile in their own ways as the characters of the Earthtender stories, desperate to protect themselves from any hints of woe that could devastate the little and emotionally fragile happiness they possess.  They live in a world clearly advanced beyond Abrogail Thrune's own, as with many of the other outside-books, but their inner thoughts in relating to that world are strange, organized, reflective... there's hints that their entire world is run by rulers much darker than their little Lawful Good selves, though the characters themselves never suspect it and think of themselves as self-ruled and independent; they walk within a world far more regimented than Cheliax, and believe themselves to be in Galt.

Into this world enters a character remarkably like Abrogail Thrune, though she's not called that; an Outsider who, even deprived of most of her more advanced magics, realizes at once through her fierce and clever and wise intelligence, that the slaves around herself must have owners - and that she must now play a very calculating, incredibly cautious and paranoid game, if she wants to seduce and corrupt her way through these beautiful fragile things without alerting any of their true masters -

Yeah, not happening.  Yoink.

Abrogail was enjoying that!

And if the portal spits out something like this without the subtle textual attempts aimed at mind-controlling Abrogail Thrune into a Lawful Good version of herself, armed with new dangerous reasoning powers carefully constructed so that she will only comprehend them if she first converts to Lawful Good, Gorthoklek will let Abrogail read that one.

Oh.

Well, you probably get that sort of thing in the mail if you leave your mailbox open, hm.

Hence Gorthoklek monitoring it all since the start, yes -

Aw, shit.

"Oh, that's not good.  I don't suppose you have any idea where that book went?"

...what's this doing underneath her pillow?

"Don't fucking look at me, I didn't put it there."

A book wherein a princess, resolved to marry the most powerful man in a land, funds a tournament death match in her fantasy kingdom which is filmed by flying golems. Once entered into the game, one cannot leave the arena except in a coffin. The plot revolves around her suitors--all dashing, eloquent, and emotional men with a variety of different magical powers and mundane skills--hunting each other, fighting each other, and soliloquizing at each other in dramatic rainstorms or on windswept peaks (it's a large arena). There are shifting alliances, always at risk of ending with a knife in the dark (though of course the assassinated will wake up to give a few parting paragraphs of text). Several changes in philosophy are spurred. They learn from each other and take each other on as apprentices. There is romance. Eventually, one group of men put their various talents and knowledge together to defy the game, spurn the princess, and escape into the broader world--the last bit of the book is a bit of a "where are they now" that covers the secret societies they've formed, cities they've built, apprentices they've taken on, and scholastic traditions they've founded--while the others play out the rest of the game, the survivor getting the hand of the princess but losing what they realize too late would have truly made them happy.

(Chosen as being a classic exploration of different philosophical and ethical views that treats them all evenhandedly but has kindness and cooperation winning out, since The Refuge has to at least try.)

The connection is visibly closing now; Abrogail is only able to flip through the book briefly, before sending back a note to the effect that perhaps the new Golarion will someday appreciate the soulless intellectual commentary of this book once the planet has been conquered by Cheliax.

They've noticed some fluctuations in the Mysterious Transmitter so they're going to just hurry things along in case it stops working.

They send out the hastily-composed "Emergency Interdimensional Second Edition" of the first harem novel. The politics and sex and romances (Yes, there were romances, though obviously alien cultures have different romance tropes) are left as untouched as possible, but the least romance-relevant civic engineering and poetry and board games have been replaced with somewhat anachronistic explanations of the germ theory of disease, a plan to cultivate pennicilin, the design of a hydroelectric generator, a steam engine, semiconductors, democracy, blast furnaces, a basic mechanical thinking-machine, synthetic fertilizer, and other useful inventions that are hopefully both comprehensible and useful at Cheliax' inferred technology level. Maybe this will help them speedrun the horrible parts of industrialization and get to the part where everything is great apart from the risk of destroying themselves. Good luck, people of Cheliax! Hopefully this one goes through, they're not sure it will since it's not like the things they replaced were irrelevant to characterization or the romance arcs.

To the Listeners, Abrogail sends back a copy of all the Chelish romance novels that could be obtained, with a note that the average and common setting of the stories set in Cheliax should be more or less accurate.  Abrogail greatly appreciates their assistance in helping Hell to conquer Golarion, which, thanks to this last novel especially, Abrogail anticipates wrapping up within as little as a decade.

The Earthtenders relay effusive thanks for the two response works in a small pamphlet with pressed flowers and sweet-smelling herbs tucked between the pages — they say they will send more very soon.

(Also included within the pages is a slim metallic disk of unknown provenance.)

It seems, indeed, that the Outer God (or whatever) maintaining this connection does have a sense of humor, then.  (Cruel humor?  Is there any other kind?)  Abrogail does not know if the slim metallic disk is meant to be to her a solvable puzzle, but she can recognize a puzzle when she sees one; and is not particularly planning to give up on solving this one even in Hell.

Abrogail sends back a copy of all her personal notes that she's made on all of the romance novels she helped construct as a newly ascended teenage Infernal Majestrix, from the beginning of her time as active editor to the end, and all the works that were produced thereby.

Abrogail doesn't actually have Scribe's Binding used on herself to send herself over the connection; she is not that enamored with the Earthtenders, to take that much of a risk, and it would betray her contract with Asmodeus besides.  If she can conquer all Golarion and perhaps other planets, if she pleases Asmodeus that much, her reign may perhaps be extended long enough for her to breed delicate Lawful Good flowers in reality.

The very last book through the portal is---a graphic novel, possibly? though set someplace so alien that you cannot tell what world it could possibly be from---it is not clear, even, whether this is a world that has erased its past, or where people are extremely good at coordination, because there is nothing here that would reflect the past or the possibility of coordination---whatever world set out to write this book set out to write a story of beings so alien to themselves that almost nothing could be inferred, from these characters, about their authors---though it is rather seductive for all that---though it's not clear what about it is romantic, it is---

Gorthoklek reaches over to seize the thing almost the moment that it appears through the portal, but it wavers and vanishes after a single tantalizing glimpse of its pages.

Oh that FUCKING TEARS IT.

This portal is DOWN and it is NOT GOING BACK UP AGAIN.

...WAIT.

Oh NO.

Otolmens is looking over this situation, now that she has STABILIZED SEVERAL WORLDS in IMMEDIATE DANGER OF ENDING, and -

- have the mortals seriously been READING BOOKS that came through a PORTAL TO OUTSIDE PHARASMA'S CREATION.  Did they REALLY.

Somehow, despite all Otolmens's experience with mortals, she is still managing to be surprised.

Peranza wakes up with the muzziness of a Sleep spell and swallows a scream, because when you have, obviously, been kidnapped, and when your body reports a moment later that your arms and legs are tied, that is not an especially good time to scream.  Until it is clear whether that behavior is wanted and demanded of you.

She struggles and manages to sit up, on the rough fur cloak on which she was thrown.  By the time she does, it's already clear, from the rocking motions beneath her, that are not just dizziness after all, that she's on a boat.

"Oh, hi there, lazy-ass, glad to see you're finally joining us.  Do you know anything about why we all got kidnapped?  Who, what, anything?"

"I - no -"

"Reading it as truth."

"Peranza, I got a book the same as Asmodia did, different book though.  Followed by another book shortly after."

"From which the obvious deduction is that everyone who got a mysterious book - or, from you being here too, Peranza, who read any of a mysterious book - have been kidnapped."

"I expect that when Sala wakes up, she'll tell us the same."

Peranza is still a bit dizzy, and also frightened, she knows very well that she's not in Asmodia's league, let alone Pilar Pineda's.  She's not even second-circle, well, most students aren't, but Asmodia and Pilar are - and Ione Sala, who, twisting her head around, Peranza can see curled up in a corner unconscious, definitely also is, even if she's not as overtly scary as the others -

Peranza realizes, then, that whatever is happening around her, she does not actually belong in this group, and is probably going to die horribly quite soon.

"Think Ione's coming around, now - no, Peranza, don't yell at her.  If Ione comes out of this more mentally confused that's not going to help anything.  Wait for her to sit up."

"Sala.  Pleased to see you've decided to wake up, finally."

"Do you have any idea what we're doing here and also, while we're on the possibly related topic, why are you wearing that."

"I've got absolutely no idea," Ione lies.