That would be interesting! Learning is one of the things Aire enjoys, although it doesn't rise to the level of one of the four highly valuable things. And while most of Aire's effects on her wearers come from her mutations and composite tattoo, all of the effects of which get applied to anyone wearing her, the individual factor that would be most relevant to Tanthe would probably be the Arousal Seal. Which is a bit more esoteric, and rather more particular to Living Clothing.

It really would solve quite a few of Tanthe's problems if they could find a way to allow a human to place a seal like that on themselves, one under their own control, wouldn't it? Or just find a fleshcrafter willing to make sub-sapient, very easily controlled Living Clothing with that feature that Tanthe could then wear, although that sounds both difficult and probably very expensive. And who knows what the Pink uses in place of money for things like that.

Those are some interesting theoretical possibilities to explore, yes! Although Tanthe is a little nervous about them, especially the idea of a subsapient Living Clothing; she's not sure she'd be comfortable wearing Living Clothes that could not understand the explanation of why it's really important not to do certain things to her. And having to feed orgasms to a subsapient entity also sounds awkward, and what if her controlling the clothes meant that she couldn't feed them properly because of the same effect that doesn't let her orgasm by herself? Then she'd be left with a poor creature made entirely for her convenience that she couldn't even sustain the life of, and that would be very sad.

You see, this is why it is much more convenient not to have ethics, Tanthe should try it sometime.

No, Aire doesn't actually mean that, Tanthe would stop being Tanthe if she didn't have ethics and that would be terrible. And also the rest of those concerns are entirely valid even in Aire's internal mental language which doesn't reference ethics at all. Or, well, mostly; she can't say she has the particular feeling that feeding orgasms to a subsapient entity would be awkward, she spent multiple decades surviving on that and never found the experience anything but occasionally boring. But Aire comes fully equipped with the ability to understand the rest of Tanthe's concerns.

She will indeed not be trying not having ethics. She would be so bad at it even if she did; the experiment would be over as soon as she read a few people's minds and remembered how she feels about them. They're all different and interesting and full of thoughts and feelings and they change and grow and learn and interact with the world and form social connections and relationships through which they can support and strengthen each other! How could she not find them so precious and important?

Anyway, yes, she admits that finding it weird to feed orgasms to a subsapient parasite is something of a personal quirk. It's probably substantially because she's still pretty hesitant on the subject of orgasms in general, and a little bit because she's pretty hesitant on the subject of interacting closely with subsapient minds in general—it always makes her feel a little off-balance to be trying to communicate with something that can technically be communicated with but only just—and she's not entirely sure about the rest.

Huh. She thinks she's just realized something. So, the difference between the way that Tanthe feels about people and the way that most people feel about people is sort of like the difference between Aire lack of anything like empathy for most people when compared to the sort of get an approximation of it she gets if she's in enough telepathic contact with someone. Only, instead of only having just having the thing Aire has, Tanthe has that and empathy, and so things compound. She knew that in words before now, but this is the first time she's felt like she can extrapolate out from where she is to where Tanthe is, to understand what it might feel like to generate that inside herself, instead of just seeing Tanthe doing it.

It would be so exhausting to feel about everyone a bit like how she feels about Tanthe and Christa. But actually, Tanthe doesn't seem exhausted by it, so perhaps she's wrong. And it's not quite the same, Aire's care for Tanthe and Christa is a noticeably different thing from the way that Tanthe care's about people in general. But she definitely recognizes that feeling of intense fascination. 

And on the subject of finding Tanthe fascinating, she hadn't actually been paying quite enough attention to notice that her hesitance around subsapient minds was a personal quirk of Tanthe's, and not something shared among many people with strong senses of ethics! It makes sense as following from a combination of that and her telepathy, and probably a bunch of other miscellaneous Tanthe traits she hasn't had the opportunity yet to observe.

Actually, that thought of Tanthe's about being hesitant on the subject of orgasms reminds her of something. Has Tanthe realized yet that all of those large bursts of pleasure she was getting while they were together were orgasms? Even the ones in, say, her throat, rather than in more traditional areas?

Well it's hard to say whether she realized it, her whole capacity for conscious thought was kind of dodgy for a while there, but it certainly isn't a surprise to hear at this point. It's very odd, though, she's never heard of anyone being able to orgasm that way. Then again, it's clear that her family's notes on her ancestors were not fully comprehensive; she glances down at the palm of her left hand, where she can see clear as day a slightly charred-looking black blotch, whose origin and nature are a complete mystery to her because she only noticed it after she escaped the pit.

(The black blotch is not visible to an external observer, but Tanthe does not know this.)

Oh. That's concerning. 

Aire can't actually see that with her eyes, she just knows its there from seeing it through Tanthe's. 

Does it feel like anything? Expand or contract or change? 

Aire manages to hold herself back from thinking a bunch more questions. Tanthe hasn't had long to investigate it, she probably doesn't know the answers to most of them yet.

It feels sort of background-unpleasant in a way not dissimilar to being slightly achey or slightly chilly or both, but mostly doesn't impinge on her consciousness unless she focuses on it specifically like she's doing now. It doesn't seem to have expanded or contracted or otherwise changed in the time she's had it. She poked it a few times and it was like so—

She pokes it, demonstratively. It feels slightly stiff, and slightly sore, in a way that feels consonant with the slightly-achey-slightly-chilly background discomfort.

The fact that Aire can't see it through her own eyes, only through Tanthe's, is weird but does handily explain how it could be a part of her curse that didn't get recorded in the notes. On the other hand, maybe it's some kind of weird interaction between her curse and something else. It definitely seems curse-related, what with appearing right after her curse was triggered.

The time it appeared certainly is suggestive.

As far as weird interactins go, it could come from the other part of her line, and be triggered by something telepathy-related, like radiating experiences that are above a certain intensity, maybe? That does feel less parsimonious, though, hypothesizing a curse that's lain dormant on one side of her family for generations. But she does feel like it points to the approximate class of other things that could be involved; Tanthe does have two different sources of oddness, and she feels one of the most likely reasons for her to have something pop up when nobody on either side of her family has had it do so is an interaction between those two sources.

Actually, does Tanthe know how common people with seven wombs are in the Coiner line? She recalls Tanthe mentioning a relatively recent person with five, but perhaps Coiners with seven wombs all share that mark, and that state is simply rare enough that it never got recorded.

She remembers that the number of Coiners who lay copper by default (and therefore have five or more wombs) was quoted to her as about one or two in a hundred; the number of Coiners recorded in the secret books who were known to have seven wombs is four, out of, well, she's not sure exactly, but maybe she can come up with estimated population numbers if she thinks about it...

Tanthe is now thoroughly distracted chasing down her own memories of offhand remarks, family trees, and all other conceivable sources of genealogical data. After a few minutes, she thinks she has an estimate: it seems, from what she can gather, that a little more than four out of five Coiner women are the normal kind with only one womb who lay only gold, and a little more than four out of five of those who remain lay silver, and although her data is too scarce to provide a confirmation, it seems reasonable to conclude that probably a little more than four out of five of those who lay copper have five wombs and the rest have seven. The math also checks out with respect to the number of Coiners who lay copper being about two in a hundred.

Anyway, back on topic, yes, her best theory right now is that only the seven-layer Coiners get the mark, and as there have only been four of them recorded so far - with Tanthe as the fifth - it's very easy to imagine that none of the earlier ones managed to tell anyone about a mark on their hand after they triggered their curse.

Tanthe is very Tanthe, and as she goes down mental rabbit holes, Aire finds herself suffused with warm affection for her. And also rather impressed, that analysis was quick, and probably more important for the "feeling impressed" bit, quicker than Aire could have done it. There's something pleasant about watching Tanthe's mind at work, seeing it all happen in enough detail that Aire feels Tanthe's thoughts have carried Aire along with them, and let her experience what it would be like to be cleverer.

Aire thinks Tanthe's best theory is a good theory! Without telepathy, it would be very easy not to notice the mark in how it effects the behavior of a seven-wombed Coiner with all their gates opened, given Aire's experience with Tanthe they probably weren't very inclined to talk. And even with telepathy, Aire didn't notice it in Tanthe.

In fairness, it's entirely possible that Tanthe did not once catch a glimpse of the palm of her own hand in the entire time she and Aire were together after triggering her curse, or, if she did, that she didn't consciously process what it looked like. They were kind of busy at the time.

Do not think about what exactly you were busy doing, Aire, control yourself or Tanthe might decide it's not safe for her to be around you and that would be terrible.

Aire casts about for something she can ask about that will get her mind off of how absurdly delicious Tanthe is, and manages to recall Tanthe's earlier offer to explain more about the precise nature of the badness of deception in relationships. It sure sounded like she had a more fleshed-out understanding there than "if they knew you were deceiving them, they would be sad, and that would be bad, so you should not do that" and Aire is interested in hearing what exactly that is. No, actually, she knows it might look like she's just looking for a way to distract herself and that would be nice but also she just genuinely is very interested.

Oh! Yes, very reasonable.

Okay so, one reason why deception is bad in intimate relationships is the obvious surface-level reason of "if they knew you were deceiving them, they would be sad", and that can be a sufficient reason if you care intrinsically about that, but it's just a starting point. There's plenty more to be said on the subject.

Deception creates distance, for one thing. One of the purposes of an intimate relationship is intimacy, closeness, sharing yourself with another person and being shared with in return. It can feel awkward or uncomfortable to try to be close to someone while keeping a secret from them that they would be sad to learn you had kept. It can be unpleasant to try to be close to someone who bases part of their opinion of you on false beliefs, when they tell you what they think of you and you know they only think that because you lied to them. When you're with them, you have to spend thought and energy on tracking your secret and making sure you don't accidentally reveal it; you can't be fully and casually open with them, can't speak carelessly in front of them. People often pick up on that kind of distance and, even if they don't have any idea why, notice that their friend or partner is acting oddly towards them.

Deception also makes relationships fragile. If you're keeping a secret from someone, you have to continually put work in to maintain that secret, and it might take only a few slips of the tongue before your deception is irrevocably demolished; also, other people who know your secret might reveal it, either accidentally because they didn't know it was a secret, accidentally because they weren't as careful as you, or even on purpose, whether because they want to damage your relationship with that person or because they want that person to know the truth or for some other reason. In fact, even someone who doesn't know your secret can inadvertently reveal it by revealing evidence for it that they themselves did not realize had those implications! Things often don't go well from there, however it came to that point. By contrast, if you're keeping something from someone and then you decide to tell them yourself because you want to stop lying to them, especially if you're doing it out of consideration for them or for your relationship, they'll probably feel more favourably towards you than if they found out by accident. They'll tend to be less upset and more open to reconciliation.

And deception damages trust. The more you lie to people who think they can trust you, the less it is the case, in practical terms, that you are trustworthy. That's obviously bad in an ethical sense, but it's also bad in a practical one? Trust is a tool for coordination; it lets people cooperate with one another toward shared goals without spending effort and time and energy searching for potential betrayal. When you give the false appearance of being trustworthy, you're contributing to a state of affairs where that tool is less useful, where people benefit less from using it, especially around you in particular, because you will abuse it to betray them. It's some of the same problem as Tanthe was complaining about with destroying people at the heart of the resistance against the Red Queen specifically, though much less immediate, more diffuse and abstract: there's an important project happening, one that can benefit you as well as the people working directly on it, and you're sabotaging it for your own short-term gain. (For the personal benefits of being able to rely on genuine trust, Aire need look no further than the reasons she herself has been trying to be actually-trustworthy toward Tanthe. Which Tanthe really appreciates! It's good to know that that's a thing Aire can do, and good to know that she's putting in the effort to do it!) Under this framework, manipulating people into trusting you so that you can use that trust for purposes they would disagree with is generally bad, but it's especially bad to do in the context of an intimate relationship, where people normally have the most reason to trust each other and are relying on that trust the most.

She could probably come up with more reasons if she tried, but those are the big ones, in her opinion.

Hearing all of this is doing very odd things to Aire's mind. She knew, not all of this, but large parts of it at some point, didn't she? Not even before her memories were removed, but early on during her time in the cave. Well, she already noticed her sense of what was meant by the word "safe" had drifted and become far more specific over decades alone, it makes sense she'd have lost more, during that time. Oh, she didn't really care about a lot of that, she thinks. And other parts don't feel familiar at all. The memories coming back up are fuzzy, but they're clear enough she thinks she can be sure of that much. And she does feel that even in the areas she did grasp she had a different mental focus, and things were more about, hmm, avoiding certain negative consequences of deception, rather than reasons one shouldn't utilize deception in the first place. And of course there is that substantial portion of what Tanthe is saying that does seem entirely new, like its filling in gaps in what her old understanding would have been.

Looking back, there's an odd sort of gradient where her more recent memories are the type of crystal clear that means they'll last forever, and the earliest have that odd fuzz over them. Two competing effects, maybe one imposed by her maker and another innate to her? She doesn't really know.

What else did she lose, during her time alone?

Anyway, moving on from moping-adjacent thoughts, she agrees that what Tanthe is saying makes quite a bit of sense, but she does feel that it's perhaps focused on people with a sense of ethics or at least people interacting with others that have similar values. That doesn't mean it isn't true, just that it seems likely that an Aire not motivated by actually caring about Christa and Tanthe would absorb all of that information, adapt precisely how she did deceived people and perhaps do so more sparingly, but decline to stop using it as a first-line tool.

This version of Aire finds herself feeling a new and unfamiliar yearning when Tanthe describes the purposes of an intimate relationship. Intimacy, closeness, sharing yourself with another person and being shared with in return? She couldn't really get that, not properly, while the version of Aire in the minds of those she wanted to be close to was so far from the real thing, could she?

Yes, exactly! Most people have a social need that looks something like that definition of intimacy, even though different people (and different kinds of people) can relate very differently to that need. If the thing you are trying to have is an intimate relationship like a close friendship or romance, then deceiving the person you're trying to build that relationship with is counterproductive to that aim. (A version of Aire who didn't care about anyone might not want that kind of intimate relationship... but Tanthe thinks that's a little sad? She has a feeling that this Aire is able to be happier, has more sources of good things in her life, than a hypothetical version who had never met anyone she felt moved to care about.)

Aire thinks Tanthe is right that a version of Aire who didn't care about anyone wouldn't feel any sort of desire for that sort of relationship. She finds the idea desirable now, but only specifically with the individuals she cares about.

Aire thinks she agrees with Tanthe about this version of Aire having a higher ceiling of happiness, and in general thinks she's better off for caring. Or, well, she agrees that this version of Aire is better off for caring about who she cares about, she is still of the opinion that caring about people is a double-edged sword. If someone implacably opposed to everything else Aire cared about or someone who was imminently going to die ended up on her short list of things that actually matter, the version of Aire who had to deal with that would be worse off than the Aire who didn't meet anyone worth caring about. But, all in all, Aire is pleased that she has an entire new source of good things in her life. It's just that she's rather aware of the new vulnerabilities that come along with caring, due to the newness of it all.

Hmmmmm. Tanthe thinks that she personally is still better off for being able to care about people, even though sometimes people die or are opposed to your goals. But maybe that's partly because her immediate reaction to the concept of someone implacably opposed to everything she stands for is 'that doesn't sound real'? Short of, like, Literally The Red Queen, she feels pretty good about her ability to find common ground with people! (And even then—she's not going to actually try talking sense into the Red Queen, because that is an insane doomed plan that could not possibly work, but if she were somehow trapped in a room with the Red Queen and inexplicably not mind-controlled yet, she'd give it a shot! Just to see what happened! This is perhaps the same underlying tendency that is leading her to try befriending Aire.)

Aire thinks Tanthe is probably at least partially right about herself, although she thinks she's run into enough people where "try to find common ground" wouldn't work that she thinks that some of that attitude is coming from Peachport's idyllic nature. Arcadia was different enough that she thinks Tanthe would find a bit less success with that attitude there than she did at home. As an example, the individual who interrogated Christa would, Aire thinks, be rather difficult for Tanthe to get along with if Tanthe was, say, declining to inform him of Aire's location so he could send the Inquisitors to kill her.  She can't imagine Tanthe persuading him without leaning on deception during the early stages; she thinks if Tanthe didn't, he would hear "skinsuit" and then everything after would just be taken as more proof that Tanthe was an evil slut to be threatened or punished into submission.

On the other hand, Tanthe is Tanthe. And she did happen to be right about Aire, when Aire herself wouldn't have predicted that to be be the case if you'd asked her when she was back in her cave. Perhaps she should decline to put weight down on her skepticism until the first time Tanthe is actually wrong. And perhaps she's simply thinking on too short a timespan; when Aire imagines Tanthe interacting with him for months, or even weeks, she finds herself much less reluctant to imagine her successfully persuading him that Aire should not be murdered simply for what she is.

Yes, finding common ground with people can take time. And deceiving someone because they'll murder your friends if you don't is a completely reasonable thing to do!

As for Peachport's idyllic nature... Maybe people from Peachport are just special somehow. But maybe most people, if they try, if they have help, if they're embedded in a community where it makes sense to shape your life that way, can find common ground with each other without any kind of special idyllic nature?

Aire thinks that probably the people of Peachport aren't special, and the source of Peachport's idyllic nature is that it's the kind of community that Tanthe is imagining, with people like Tanthe providing the help, and a culture that encourages people to try, and that's plausibly enough. And she does get the sense that something like that would be self-sustaining. If it's just actually true that most people you interact with will be the kind of person who will reach back to find common ground with you if you try to find it with them, and everyone else around you resolves their conflicts that way, and someone who's willing to help lives two doors down the street, it would be pretty easy to just go along with that.

Yes, that sounds about right. Maybe, after the Red Queen situation is handled, Tanthe should try traveling more widely and see if she can find somewhere else to set up that kind of self-sustaining improvement. She's not sure how well it will work, though; she suspects part of the reason she has such an easy time of it in Peachport specifically is that she grew up there.

Yeah, that's a bit of a problem. It does seem like the Pink is mostly the kind of place where people tend to feel like they have common ground with each other, Red Queen notwithstanding, which is perhaps suggestive of some things. It might have something to do with the lack of the risk of starvation or homelessness? At any rate Aire's seen substantially less enduring conflict between Lovers than she did between people in general back in Arcadia. Although with some more thinking it occurs to Aire that that might have a lot to do with just how selected-to-be-a-certain-way the kind of people who decide to travel to the Pink are. But that's also suggestive of what it might look like to find a place where she can do that kind of thing.

Oh, yes, that's an interesting angle to consider. Maybe people are friendlier when they're happier? Or when they're better off and there's more to go around so they don't have such a strong need to guard what they have and press each other for more? They should investigate and find out! ...later. When they're not in the middle of a crisis.

Tanthe is so cute how is Aire supposed to cope with this?

Yes, they should probably not go on a fact-finding mission during the war for the fate of the world. But yes, later, absolutely. It's not particularly what she would spend her time doing if left to her own devices, if she'd never met Tanthe, but seeing the curiosity reflected in Tanthe's mind lends the question a glow of interestingness it wouldn't have to her on its own. And spending her time with Tanthe is what she'd spend her time doing if left to her own devices now that Aire has met her.

(They're beginning to run up on the possibility of an on awake and alert Christa, Tanthe should be able to feel a bleary recognition of an extra person being present in Christa's mind, if she's paying attention.)