....fuck. "I, um, maybe?" he stammers. No matter how enthusiastic (and pretty) she is, talking about the porn he likes is a bad idea. Even if he wants to. Even if she's encouraging him to. It's just sometimes hard to think of exactly why. 

"And you're so intriguingly flustered about it! Do go on."

Fuck. "Well, I mean, it's related to your earlier question, I guess. Just, like, much like movies, sometimes you want to read things where the ethics of things are discussed, and characters have emotional conflicts about what they're doing and justifying it to themselves and the relationships and stuff. But sometimes" often in his case "you just want to read things where someone just breaks someone, and you get to watch them break, and see, um, what happens after." He blushes a lot as he stammers through all this.

"Do you now."

"Y-y-yeah, I think, I mean, if you know what I mean, you know, right? That sort of thing."

"Well, I think I know what you mean. But you could always explain in more detail, just to make sure."

Aaaaaaahhhh. "I mean, you know, you read the stuff I do, right?" She really might not. "Like, someone taking a girl, and her struggling and failing, or just, not even having a chance to struggle. Or something like that? And then she's just, completely broken and will do, um, whatever he wants, say whatever he wants to say, think and act in ways that he tells her to, and is, completely, his?" He's being turned on just thinking about this and would really rather that not be happening right now. (It's also making it harder to walk his bike.)

"The stuff I read and the stuff you read are not exactly the same but there is definitely some thematic overlap." She smiles at him, or perhaps a better word would be 'smirks'. "Maybe you could give me some recommendations."

"W-w, well what do you read, then?" He asks, side stepping (probably only for the moment, she's clearly not one to let things go) the idea of giving her recommendations for the porn he reads. (She might read it and hate it and him! Or worse, like it!)

"Mostly a lot of fanfiction. People will write the most fascinating things about familiar and much-beloved characters having terrible things happen to them. One of my recent favourites had a younger woman and an older man with complicated allegiances in a covert magical war so that, for contrived circumstantial reasons, he had to save her from the depredations of his comrades by claiming her for himself, using an irreversible magical bonding ritual that he excused as an interrogation method, so that they ended up having to conceal their relationship from her side while pretending to his side that he was just using her for her body and her intel, and meanwhile he's torn between remorse at what he had to do to her and the undeniable attraction of the magical bond, and she falls in love with him because he's trying so hard to be kind and respectful in the midst of an objectively horrifying situation, and then they spend the next hundred chapters having enormous amounts of very emotionally complicated mind control sex."

Huh. "I haven't really read any fanfiction," he says. "Is it really all that good?" It certainly sounds interesting, from what she's describing, (though not really what he's looking for when he's in a, um, mood, though possibly good for other times,) but it's fanfiction, so...

"I mean, like any form of media, you do have to sort the gems from the duds. But there are such gems if you know where to find them."

"That makes sense, I suppose. And this one is one of the better ones?" 

"Mhm! Also it's finished, which a lot of fanfic isn't and some never will be." She sighs theatrically. "One of my favourite writers has a work in progress that hasn't been updated in months about a girl who visits a haunted house only to find that it's run by a very real demon who likes to seduce people for their very real souls."

"I'm not sure how I'd be able to deal with an unfinished book like that, just stopping in the middle," he says. "Also, that's fictional, right, it's not something I'd need to worry about at all?"

"The story is fictional. Demons are real but I haven't heard of one running a haunted house as a soul trap. You'd need some awfully specific circumstances for that to work, at least as far as I know—I'm no expert on demons."

"Alright, good." Not that the idea isn't, um, appealing, but he doesn't want to accidentally lose his soul. "Is there anything like that I should be wary of? Like, things that magic people know to be on their guard against but most humans don't?" 

"Um, hmm... I'm not sure, I don't want to terrify you by giving you the full rundown of all the safety advice I grew up on as the heir of a major family, but there are probably some things that even someone relatively ordinary would benefit from knowing. In general it is a bad idea to make deals you don't understand the terms of, or agree to things you might not be able to fulfill. The power of names has been diluted a lot since the old days but full names still carry some magical weight, if you have a middle name it's a bad idea to go handing it out carelessly and if you don't it's a good idea to keep that to yourself. If someone seems sketchy and wants something from you, it's a bad idea to agree to it—a lot of sketchy things work much better on an at least arguably willing subject. There aren't any full-blooded vampires in town that I know of, but you might still want to cultivate a habit of only inviting people into your house if you're sure you want them there. All of this is stuff that's really unlikely to come up for someone like you, to be clear. It's even pretty unlikely to come up for me, it's just for someone in my position it's better to be aware of it all."

That sounds pretty scary on the face of it, but in theory these are mostly things he probably should be doing anyways. (Besides the name thing, but the name thing should be easy enough.) "So wait, vampires are real?" he asks, once he's processed some of what she's said. "I suppose that's not that surprising if fae are real, but... what other magical creatures are there? Are there like werewolfs and zombies and, I don't know, mermaids and stuff?"

"Werewolves yes, mermaids yes, zombies are a sort of complicated subject I don't know much about but I don't think they come in traditional zombie plague if that's what you're asking..."

"I was mostly just naming magical creatures that everyone knows about from fiction. Though I guess zombies are more sci-fi these days? Regardless it's probably a good thing zombies don't come in the infectious kinds. What else is there, besides those? Is it just... everything? Goblins and elves and trolls and unicorns and stuff?" 

"Unicorns are nearly extinct these days. I think the last recorded sighting was in the 80s. Goblins and elves and trolls, though, yep. Well—there's a lot of things you could call 'elves', and several of them are real. Same with goblins, but less so. Trolls I've only heard of one kind. And in general, yes, there's just a lot."

John frowns slightly when he hears that the unicorns are practically extinct, if not fully. "Well, okay then," he says, at the end. "That's... a lot then," echoing her. "How do they manage to keep things secret, then, with so very much going on? Your letter said something about veil laws?"

"The Veil Laws are... their own entire story... but the short version is that some very powerful people on all sides of some very old conflicts are invested, for various reasons, in making sure that people who don't already know about magic never find out. The penalties can be pretty harsh, if somebody slips up badly enough to threaten the status quo. There are a handful of exceptions but one of the big ones is for romantic partners, because a lot of the old magical families like mine have to marry mundanes to avoid bloodwarp—um, that's when your kids come out with totally different innate magic from either of their parents because different magical heritages mix in weird ways."

"I'm glad there's an exception, then," he says. "And it won't be a problem if we um, break up or decide not to date or anything?" She hasn't essentially forced him into a relationship with her, right? That doesn't seem like the sort of thing she'd do, but he still is concerned now.