There are several scents there: ylang-ylang is the most dominant one, followed by jasmine. Then a bunch of other ones which Gifit hadn't developed the discernment skill to separate out [it is possible to cultivate it, as a subcategory of body control]. It will simply blend into Good Floral Scent.

Honestly that's kind of the default Zmavlipre lifestyle, and many people just Do Nothing for many years and only doing Something Substantial occasionally. [Zmavlipre generally don't have the same drive for ambition, recognition, or set-apart-ness that other sapient entities might have. The vast majority are content to simply sit there and enjoy pleasurable qualia.]

[Drones basically never do and never have the impulse to, but they'll lie to you if you order them. It's also popular to have drones do roleplay. LARP is generally very popular in Zmavlimu'e. Gifit went to one that was organized based on seasonal meets a while back. 

Domesticated animals are a thing, like chickens, sheep and cattle. There are no domesticated beasts of burden, because you can use drones for that. Sure, drones are weaker, but you could just use multiple, and, here's the important bit: drones can be toilet-trained.

There are no domesticated animal companions. Why would you want to let an animal inside your house, who will piss and shit and shed fur everywhere and not obey orders. Why not just buy a pretty drone and take care of it, and it can also be taught to entertain and do tricks and also suck your dick. 

Drones are sapient just like people, but they have different distributions on mental ability. Drones have better episodic memory, self-insight (interpreted broadly), and spatial intelligence. Their novelty-seeking impulse is greatly dampened, and boredom for them is greatly dampened as well. They're worse at verbal intelligence, pattern matching, and lateral thinking.

Despite this, drones aren't people and aren't treated like them. This is because drones don't have complex terminal desires – their terminal desires are few and stable, and basically cash out to 'serve and obey their Controller and make Them happy', which necessarily means that drones will always consent to what their Controllers ask from them. 

Gifit will interject here that usually drones use deferent pronouns to refer to their Masters, but that he aesthetically disliked this and preferred standard personal pronouns to be used by his drones for him. 

Drones are capable of feeling sensory qualia, but their capacity to have likes and dislikes about specific sensory qualia are greatly dampened, much like with boredom. A drone can tell you that something tastes sweet, but wouldn't be able to tell you whether it liked it or not. You could maybe wrench a preference out of it, but only after half an hour of prompting and comparisons with other stimuli, and explicitly telling it not to consider its model of its Controller. Asking the drone about its Master's desires is a very simple matter, though, and if the drone cooks for its Controller, it would be able to tell you with good accuracy whether He would like it.]

To confirm: It is not the case that Gifit's drones are for maximizing their/his inclusive genetic fitness such that they will be upset if he does not have reproduction-capable children anytime soon. Even if they were for maximizing inclusive genetic fitness he supposes they might not be too impatient, given immortality. It is not the case that drones find a lifestyle of hard labor they capture nearly none of the value from undesirable and are deceiving their Controllers about this. Also, setting aside preferences, do drones find their existences pleasant? Griffith leans somewhat towards preference utilitarianism when he's thinking about ethics, but hedonics do intuitively seem morally relevant to him.

[Nope! Evolutionarily that would make sense, but their eusociality developed before they had like, sapience, so it's operating on hard-wired instinct rather than cold calculation about kin relatedness structures. His drones will continue to serve him even if he says he's never going to have children.

Gifit will add that it's possible for drones to transition into Keepers and vice versa. Drones can transition into Keepers if they've been left Controllerless for months, and Keepers through a similarly long process of torture and humiliation, but that this change is both physiologically and psychologically traumatic, such that fewer than one in six drones will survive the process with both their body and mind intact. The latter process way way less likely to work, since they'll probably die of injury before then. The former process was adaptive because in the case where a hive lost its Controller, all of those drones would just have been wasted. With this process, probably at least one drone would succeed and become a Keeper, and become the new Keeper of the hive – successfully expressing the correct pheromones will suppress the transition in the rest.

Nowadays that never happens because people have wills which bequeath their drones to other people if they die – in the case someone dies without one (which is basically never) – it will escheat to the provincial government.

It is indeed not the case. Drones are okay with hard labor and would never deceive their Controllers. Unless, of course, if ordered.

Most drones would say it doesn't matter whether or not their existences are pleasant, only that their Controller's is. Or that their lives are pleasant if their Controller's is.

Gifit will say that caring about your drones' welfare to an extent greater than that of 'keep them healthy so they're productive' is kind of unseemly and that a significant number of people would say you should go to a therapist to get that corrected.]

A drone arrives and says that there's a message from Sir Damin. Damin wants to confirm whether Gifit is still available, because he plans to visit. [Damin is one of Gifit's friends, and visits about a dozen times a year.]

"Tell Damin the following: I am still available, but have experienced some drastic nonnegative mental changes. Thus, your expectations about my behavior may be incorrect, so if you have a very specific idea of how visiting me will go, you may be disappointed."

Why is it 'unseemly' to care about drone welfare, anyway? What are the effects of acting in an unseemly manner, and what else is unseemly?

The drone says, "Yes, Controller," but stays there. It will remain until Griffith says it's dismissed. He hasn't propagated the order to the rest of the drones.

[It's unseemly because it's like caring about what a spoon feels, or what a cow feels. Spoons and cows aren't people. 

Acting in an unseemly manner will probably make people dislike associating with and interacting with you. 

Many things, but it's kind of...instinctual? One of the native moral atoms of Zmavlipre is beauty vs ugliness – 'unseemliness' taps into that. If it feels ugly, then it's unseemly. People do have different views on what is unseemly and not, but usually people converge on certain things most people would think of as ugly.]

"Once you have done this, tell my other drones that they are not to require explicit verbal dismissal if they are capable of using their judgement to determine when I am ready for them to leave. Now go."

Griffith paces around the garden area. Does this place just not have the concept of wanting experiences in general to be pleasant and preferable being expressable as a semi-coherent philosophy as opposed to a personal quirk? Is it not intuitive why someone would care about keepers and drones and cows and wild animals but not about spoons or rocks? The drones are at least not an obvious disaster. Possibly the animal agriculture is not an obvious disaster either: There are non-animal-welfare costs to many forms of farming that are detrimental to animal welfare, and people here are immortal and don't care about cheap meat for the worker caste. This may mean they don't do concentrated feedlots or such, because of disease risk. What is the state of animal agriculture here, anyway?

"Yes, Master," it says again, bowing, then leaves.

[Nope! They have game theory, and aesthetic theory, but not...ethics? They also don't seem to have the concept of moral obligation? They have the concept of doing something because it's beautiful, efficient, powerful, coherent, or truthful, and likewise opposing something because it's the opposite of those values (ugly, wasteful, weak, dissonant, or false), but don't really have the concept of like...doing something because it's 'Evil'. (They also don't have the concept of Evil.) Or generally 'bad' which doesn't touch upon any of those moral atoms. 

Animal agriculture is actually quite good! Animals are permitted lots of space to roam around in, are kept clean, and tend to have enrichment, since, unlike Earth, labor is extremely cheap! You can have drones watch over your animals. Also, people care aesthetically about where their food comes from and would disprefer meat they found out came from animals which were kept overcrowded and in filth – it triggers disgust around bad smells and disease, even at that remove. People generally care about metaphysical qualities of things here more than Earth.

Ranchers also prefer that their animals not be kept in filth and overcrowding or simply ugly and bare environments because it's generally unpleasant to have said ugly things in your property, so even if Zmavlipre were able to ignore the metaphysics, it would still most likely be the case.

People do care about their drones getting some meat to prevent deficiencies but it doesn't have to be tasty meat. Zmavlipre buy offcuts and offal in bulk to feed drones with, with the Keeper getting the good parts – indeed it's common for butchers to have whole cows ready, and only slaughter them once an order comes in, since the Keeper would buy the whole cow after processing, save for things like the skin, which would be sold to a tanner. (Unless the Zmavlipre runs a leather business, hah.)]

A while into Griffith's pacing, the same drone returns.

"Sir Damin said that 'he would love to talk about these changes' and 'is now more interested in coming.' Sir Damin says he plans on coming tomorrow afternoon, staying the night, and leaving the next day." [This is common practice when visiting faraway friends and is something Damin has done many times before at Gifit's place.]

Is it appropriate to send Damin some reply of the form "acknowledged, I plan to see you when you arrive"? If so, Griffith will have a drone do that.

It's annoying that Earth had enough pressing problems and disinterest in actually working hard towards one's ethical values that the state of knowledge around animal welfare is really, really bad. It's also annoying that he was almost entirely too busy or otherwise occupied to engage with the literature. Improving things here, if there are viable improvements which he's not sure there will be, is going to take a while no matter what.

Some of Griffith's peers have said that the avertable badness on Earth was in some ways analogous to the avertable badness of a building fire with people stuck in the building. This does not, actually, appear to be the case here, at least by Griffith's intuitive metrics and the knowledge base he currently has. It's nice.

He'll head back inside and look for a writing desk. And start mentally drafting changes to Gifit's house, if he's going to be here a while. Perhaps he would prefer more indoor plants.

Yes, it would be appropriate. The drone who bore the message will send that.

Gifit's bedroom has a writing desk. [Griffith will also know that it's rather uncommon to write things directly. Usually, you have drones take dictation for you in shorthand, which they will then write in longhand or, more popularly nowadays, type with a typewriter.]

What changes does he want to make? [Gifit's main house is relatively small, as main houses go, especially since he decided to have the drones live separately. This is not always the case, especially when they own fewer drones: you save on heating costs this way, and it's less friction to check on them. Heating is not that necessary because winter doesn't go below freezing, but there are cold snaps where it does, which occur infrequently. Also, it's generally considered good to be in close proximity with your drones – not just because of instinct, but because you want your drones to be exposed to your pheromones. It's considered a good idea to sleep with your peripheral drones every once in a while, in both senses of the phrase.]

Griffith is going to start writing miscellaneous things he has memorized down in English, with space for phonetic annotation if he feels like doing so (or having someone else do it) later. Some songs, including one about being out in the rain. A bunch of poems, including "On Seeing a Photograph by Matthew Brady" and a lot of grooks. (He likes memorization more than average, but mostly does it recreationally.) Also some examples of math notation, which isn't really English but is maybe relevant. (Does he want his drones to learn the Latin alphabet? Unclear and not urgent.)

He's not really sure what changes he wants made to the house. He's a fan of colorful geometric mosaics and sunlight and houseplants, but it's not like the status quo is bad. Also, having sex with drones sounds awkward and tedious and vaguely wrong-for-him, but is maybe better than it sounds.

…huh. It's been a while. He should probably eat. Do food preferences go with the body or the mind? What does Gifit normally like eating?

Imperial math notation is kind of better because it's been designed from the ground up, but he can totally write down Earth language and Earth math notation if he wants to.

[Colorful geometric mosaics can be had for cheap, since Kosfor City has Art Nouveau aesthetics and so he'll be able to find many local sellers and builders to renovate his house, and probably for cheaper than if he decided he wanted a different aesthetic. Gifit's memories of having drones with sex range from pleasant to very pleasant. Gifit is kind of vanilla when it comes to that – other people want elaborate scenes. Gifit also had a low sex drive compared to the median Zmavlipre, which kind of brings him around the level of 'forty year old man' rather than 'twenty year old man'.

The house lets some sunlight in but it's not optimized for that. Sadly you would need to radically reconfigure it if you want to have maximal sunlight penetration – there are certain builders and styles which specialize in this. It's not an uncommon preference in Zmavlimu'e.

Kind of both? People get specific cravings for food if their body says they want a specific nutrient – paying attention to this is a subset of body control – but also people just inherently like certain foods. Gifit is close to the median in Zmavlipre tastes: he likes sweet and salty, dislikes sour and acid, likes dairy products, likes alkaline foods, dislikes dry foods.

It's currently early spring now, and still somewhat chilly, so Gifit would probably eat some sort of warm soupy/brothy type dish, followed by a similarly warm dessert. 

It's typical for people to have their drones prepare meals at set times, and for them to set menus beforehand, often at the start of the day, but Gifit kind of has an irregular desire-to-eat schedule, so he doesn't have his drones cook unless he says so.]

He'll request a somewhat ramen-like dish on the basis that Gifit liked it, Gifit was eating food that wasn't terrible nutritionally, the ingredients should likely be in stock, and it sounds good to him.

Warm desserts are typical? What sort of warm dessert, is this more a reheated pie slice or a freshly made molten chocolate cake or what? Drones presumably don't eat desserts so there's not much economy of scale except temporally or if a household is entertaining.

Do they have the microwave oven? The microwave oven works with, uh, something like radar but he doesn't really know how radar works, inch-or-so length light waves, right, something about them being good at heating water? He should maybe try to provide technological input at some point. Anyway, reheating food existed before the microwave oven, he's pretty sure, so even without the microwave oven the standard thing might be to reheat something.

At some point he should test whether he still likes pickles in this body, but not right now.

They have dishes very similar to ramen or alkaline pasta dishes in broth here! The drones will go do that. It will come out very similar to Japanese ramen, except the broth is clear and lighter rather than opaque. [Usually it's richer and opaque, but Gifit preferred the lighter version.] There will be garlic, pepper, other spices he can't immediately identify, and thinly sliced beef. [Pork is a thing, but it's not as popular as on Earth.]

Not exactly? [There are desserts at a warm range of temperatures – hot, tepid, and cold. Imperial orthodox culinary theory says to serve food that is of the opposite temperature as the ambient one. It's cold now, so hot foods ought to be served. Tepid (room temperature) foods can be served at any time.

Examining Gifit's memories will reveal that he likes, and often orders these hot desserts: brown sugar rice pudding, which might have other grains like corn added in, potentially with cinnamon or saffron; the same, but with red beans and less milk; coconut cream soup with starchy vegetables and fruits, like taro, banana, tapioca spheres, and jackfruit, flavored with pandan; rock sugar soup with glutinous rice balls, potentially with fillings of toasted sesame seeds. (Griffith might recognize these as very similar to payasam, hongdou tang, bubur cha cha / sampelot, and tang yuan, if he's had or seen those before.)

He doesn't really like baked desserts, but there is an oven. Zmavlipre kind of prefer wet or moist dishes to dry ones, in general.

People care a lot about their food, both in the taste and in the presentation. Probably because you have drones to cook for you, but Gifit's memories say that many Zmavlipre also love cooking and do it themselves – though of course when it's time to clean and wash dishes, the drones do that.]

[They know that certain types of electromagnetic radiation can heat materials, so they have the theoretical basis for it, but no one has put in the effort to engineer one. 

The drones will not reheat things. It won't be fresh anymore afterwards – the drones eat any leftovers. By reheating food you are figuratively taking the food out of the drones' mouths the drones also cook their own food – one person's leftovers is not enough to feed several dozen remna.

The desserts will kind of take a while to cook – with the rice ball dish the drones have already prepared and frozen the rice balls so it's faster; normally you don't do that but Gifit doesn't tell the drones what to cook in advance – but the ramen will be quick and the dessert comes afterward, so it works out.

They do have the concept of the refrigerator, but it's kind of inefficient and bad? And it consumes kind of a lot of electricity by their standards. They're working on better ones. For now, what they do is import ice from the southern provinces, which are colder, as well as the Antarctic, and then store the ice in cellars to be used year-round. They only use that ice for chilling – they don't use it directly in cooking, it's dirty. This is a subtropical climate, so it usually doesn't get cold enough for water bodies to freeze and ice harvested from them.]

The soup isn't bad, though it could stand to have more vegetables and maybe an egg.

Since when does corn go in rice pudding – no, corn pudding-like stuff is good too, the combination isn't obviously insane. Red bean paste is good. Are whole red beans good? Probably, but maybe not what he wants today. He'll order the coconut cream soup, since there weren't enough vegetables in the noodle soup.

He feels a bit like he's mistakenly slipped into a cognitive frame where he's treating Gifit's estate like a restaurant with a menu. He could demand the red beans be made into a paste. The only block is that he doesn't actually know how red bean paste is made. Well, it's extremely nonurgent.

He has imported ice because he's in an alternate Analogous-To-Gilded Age. Weird. Probably this place doesn't have CFC problems yet – those are chlorofluorocarbons, right? The space of refrigerants with all three of those elements is the concerning thing? Maybe he can preempt that cluster of problems.

The usual soup has that, but [Gifit didn't like those in there, so they weren't put in.]

The red bean soup usually has half of the red beans be mashed, and the others left whole, so that you both have a thick soup but also Textural Heterogeneity. The coconut cream soup can be had. [Gifit loves dessert] so there will be kind of a lot of soup? Actually, all the portions have been kind of a lot – it would be enough to feed like, two humans. It's just right in this body, though. The dessert might be too much, but only in the sense that it's too-'rich'-such-that-you-tire-of-it-and-need-an-opposing-flavor*. In the case that happens, the drones will offer dried salted sardines. [This is a common opposing-flavor-food for creamy sweet dishes, since it's light and salty.]

[Red bean paste is made by boiling the beans, and then mashing them.]

[Sadly, Gifit is neither a chemist nor an engineer, so his memories won't be of much help. His memories indicate that Damin has a chemist and industrialist friend, Xaber, who he's close with.]

* Two syllable word in Standard Imperial. They have a lot of taste and smell qualia words.

Well, he clearly ought to try the sardines. There are not prewritten guidelines for waking up in the body of an alien aristocrat but if he were writing them, “try weird things the alien likes if they don’t seem objectionable” would definitely go on the list.

The issue isn’t Gifit’s memories, it’s Griffith’s. Which are full of keywords that point to Wikipedia articles he doesn’t have access to. He probably wants an introduction to Xaber (and how formal are introductions here, anyway?) if he can convince Damin he’s an alien in Gifit’s body. Since people don’t just believe statements here.

After dessert, he has a drone take a lot of notes for him on his memories, while they’re fresh.

The sardines are sharply salty and crunchy, which is a pleasant contrast to the creamy soft sweetness of the soup. The drones don't offer many sardines, since it's meant to be there purely to dispel the too-rich sensation, and not to be a course or dish in and of itself – [although there are true dishes which incorporate it.]

[Introductions are informal! You basically just ask the mutual friend to introduce you, which is considered a minor to moderate favor, since they're staking their reputation on it. You are asking the mutual friend to vouch for your good-faith and your worthiness-to-interact-with. However, Gifit's memories indicate that Damin will probably agree to introduce him even if he doesn't explain, because Damin likes to make introductions. He kind of fancies himself a matchmaker – both romantically and platonically.]

The drone will take dictation for Griffith, but Griffith will have to say them all in Imperial, because the drone doesn't know English. Afterward, the drone will ask whether Griffith wants the shorthand to be written out in longhand, or typed, and how many copies to produce.

He sort of figured introductions between slow-paced aristocrats would be more complicated than this, but this works.

His memory dump is going in Imperial, yes. The drone can handle some phonetic transliteration, and at a few points he'll write some symbols himself. Given this, he'd like a longhand rewrite because presumably the typewriter does not have Latin letters. He wants whatever Gifit remembers as being a normal number of copies for an important diary-entry-ish thing, he's not accustomed to having a personal paper archive.

The drone will write it down in longhand, and will copy the symbols with exacting accuracy, including the size at which Griffith writes the symbols.

[The normal number of copies for a diary entry is just one, which would be locked in a safe which has his valuables, like firearms, gold, jewelry, and important or secret documents. It's in his bedroom, actually! The code is 112999.]

Alright, sure, one copy for now.

He'll continue enjoying the lifestyle of a rich immortal with good senses (meals, bathing, probably a personal concert if that's a thing, fancy bed), put food on a schedule so he doesn't forget it, and generally pass time enjoyably until Damin shows up.

There is a large-by-Griffith but small-by-Gifit-standards bathtub. [Zmavlipre love bathtime and big bathtubs. This bathtub which could fit more than one person in it is considered 'average' – and it's not just because Zmavlire'a are bigger than humans on average.]

A few of Gifit's drones are trained in singing, and they can sing for him.

Day 2

Damin will arrive with six drones on a carriage, which is giving a rococo aesthetic, except with yellow and blue as the main colors rather than yellow and white. Two drones are pulling the carriage – with their replacements in the back when they get tired – with two attending to him directly.

He's going to go up to the gate, whereupon one of Griffith's drones will let them pass through, since it has been told to expect them.

Damin will ride all the way up to near the front of the house, where he will park the carriage and wait for either Griffith himself or one of his drones to attend to him. 

He's wearing a similarly blue and yellow patterned garment seemingly made of a few long pieces of cloth draped and wrapped around the body, like a sari. His drones are wearing similar wraps, but only on their torsos – they're wearing regular pants.

Griffith will personally greet Damin, and is wearing something nice from Gifit's wardrobe. He'll do whatever generic greetings are appropriate and then offer to summarize the drastic psychological changes he's experienced unless Damin wants to say something else first.

The generic greetings will be had, and since Damin was going to ask the usual smalltalk questions anyway, he will agree to hear about Gifit's 'drastic psychological changes'. He's a therapist, so he's very interested!

"We should probably go inside before you tell me that your entire personality has been inverted or something."