God, but she is cute. He waves back and approaches, eventually fetching up at a respectable girl-he-doesn't-know-well conversational distance. "It's good to, um, meet you. I know we've met but this does feel more substantial."

"I'd imagine it would! Come on, there's a nice shady spot over there under some trees. My best magic trick is much less spectacular in direct sunlight."

"Right, come into the shadows, the witch is a friend, grues have been extinct for three hundred years..."

He follows cheerfully.

"Grues are not and have never been real. The whole category of 'things that eat you when you're alone at night' has been wildly exaggerated in mundane media."

The shady spot isn't far. There's a couple of benches under the gently swaying leaves. Rosy steps between them to stand behind them both, her body angled to shield her clasped hands from anyone who might be passing by on the path.

"Come here and look at this," she says, closing her eyes to concentrate.

At first it's nothing much, a faint glow you could think you were imagining. Then light spills between her fingers, fiercer and fiercer until it glows right through her flesh like a high-powered flashlight. When it can get no brighter, then, she opens her hands.

A blazing jewel the size of a robin's egg shines with pure white light, an uninterrupted silhouette of brightness. Then a few silent cracks begin to mar its surface, and with them comes colour. Red here, yellow there—but before the red piece has finished cracking off, it's divided into ruby and crimson and mahogany and wine—and each shade fragments into a dozen more, over and over, leaving her cupped hands filled with a thousand brilliant shards of colour. The paler shades gleam brightest, but in the shadows under the trees, even the stately charcoal grey and the abyssal midnight blue manage to make enough light to be seen—if it is light that lets him see them.

Then, as she concentrates harder, the shards begin to lift. They swirl into the air in a riotous dance, with no notion of like following like, blues mingling with yellows, greens spiraling around purples.

"You can touch them if you like," she says in a hushed tone, only now opening her eyes to gaze in rapturous adoration at the spectacle she's created.

He stares, for a moment.

Then he reaches out and runs his fingers through the flow of shards.

They brush against him as little points of softly radiant warmth, and swirl in his wake wherever he moves his hand. Rosy is smiling, also with softly radiant warmth; making the lights seems to affect her really deeply, both in terms of the concentration it requires and the emotion it evokes.

"...it's beautiful," he says eventually. "And very, very magical. Consider me convinced."

She nods slightly, and closes her eyes again. All the points of light rush to absorb themselves into her face and hands, these being most of the exposed skin available; for a brief moment she's awash in a haphazard scatter of colour, and then the light fades and she takes a breath, pulling herself out of her quasi-meditative state.

"...is that why you don't have a single favorite color?" he wonders. Then he shakes his head. "Not really the top priority question, I guess."

"Kind of the other way around, actually! Any Blake can do what I just did, but I get more colours out of it than almost anyone, and that's probably because I love them all so much."

"Oh, that does make sense."

He bites his lip. "I - want to lay my cards on the table. I'm concerned, by the stalking, but I honestly don't really mind it. I'm much more concerned by your offering me your soul, and I really do mind that. It's not a fair thing to do to someone, when they could hurt themselves almost as badly as they could hurt you. I - I trust you had your reasons. I don't think I understand where you're coming from, not really, but I can understand... wanting things that could be bad because they could be good too. I think it's the same reason I came out here to meet you. I'm rambling a bit."

Deep breath. "Can we get to know each other? I'm not accepting your offer and I'm not turning it down. I'm just... putting it out of reach. I want to know who you are, before I even think about that."

"...I mean, by all means let's get to know each other, I'm hardly about to object to us getting to know each other, I'm just not sure exactly—when you say 'before I even think about that', do you mean you don't want me to talk about it, and if so does that also mean I can't argue with you about Drusus and Lita?"

"No, I mean - I'm going to keep it abstract. I don't want you to pressure me on it, but for one thing you already said you wouldn't, and for another thing it'd just drive me away. I'm just trying to get to know you without it feeling like life or death. You can help by being yourself... which I can't imagine is going to be a problem."

"I would say 'no power on this Earth can make me be anything else' but in fact there are some. It's just unusually difficult. Anyway so can I argue with you about Drusus and Lita, or would you rather pick a slightly less intense conversational topic?"

"No, by all means let's argue about Drusus and Lita. What do you see in them? I mean, I liked the book, but - not really on that level, I don't think..."

(His copy of Kajira of Gor is not dog-eared, per se, but the spine naturally falls open to certain pages that he's read more than others. Generally one-handed.)

"...I mean, did you not swoon adoringly—okay I will grant that you probably didn't swoon adoringly, but some equivalent—when they came out of what's-his-name's establishment so powerfully in need of each other that Drusus almost defiled the woman he thought was his queen right then and there? Like, not to say that I don't have opinions on the way the text handles gender, I have lots of opinions on the way the text handles gender, but if we take Tiffany-Sheila-Lita to be an unreliable narrator, and assume that every time she says something about the ineffable nature of womanhood she's actually talking about her kinks, then textually she's just right that she needed to get her head out of her behind and stop defining her worth by her ability to exert power and start pursuing and being pursued by the thing she actually wanted, which was total domination by men in general and Drusus Rencius specifically. And it's not even like it ended badly for her—I mean obviously it textually ended great for her because they spend the whole epilogue having fantastic sex, and we're supposed to take that as a clear happily-ever-after cue, but even from a pretty cynical perspective I think it's clear that the two of them are legitimately good for each other and legitimately in love with each other and, at long last, legitimately treating each other well to the extent they know how, and also the narration was pretty vague about the bit at the end but I have chosen to headcanon that she got to peg him even though I know that's not what the author meant because I think it's a charming encapsulation of what I think the author did mean which is that even though he has total power over her as his slave he doesn't need that to define every aspect of their lives and they can express genuine love for each other in ways their society might not necessarily look kindly on because what matters is the two of them and what works for them, regardless of what you, I, or the people of Gor would think."

She pauses, breathes, reviews the number of words that just came out of her mouth, and makes a sheepish zipping motion as though to indicate that she is done now and he can speak.

Okay, that was a lot.

He did not swoon adoringly at the part where Drusus nearly lost his self-control and held himself back by the barest thread, but he did have to wank about it, which is kind of similar. He sees what she's saying about Tiffany not defining herself by her ability to exert power, even if he's got quibbles with it. He's following along with her point about the epilogue, up until she mentions pegging and he chokes on nothing, vivid images of Rosy in a strapon suddenly flooding his brain and sending his blood in various inconvenient directions.

Normal function resumes by the time she starts talking about how just because Drusus has power over Tiffany it doesn't mean it has to define their entire lives. Which is a very respectable point, even if he's still not sure how it'd hold up in the real world. Also, his ears are still bright red and he's hard again even though he got off fifteen minutes ago.

"I, um. Interesting points. I'm."

He shudders out a breath.

"Maybe we can talk about Matilda instead? Sorry, I - don't have an intelligent response - I can think of one in a bit, maybe -"

She reverses her sheepish zipping motion. "No that's fair. It was a lot. By all means let's talk about Matilda."

He takes another couple of steadying breaths.

"The thing I always liked about Matilda," he says eventually, "when I was little, was that - she had to win. She didn't have another option and she didn't pretend to. Charlie Bucket was happy just to have a magical time, James didn't really do much of anything to get his magic peach, that girl from the Magic Finger... wasn't even really involved with her plot... but Matilda needed to get out, and she did what she had to, and she got out. I liked the boy from The Witches too, even more actually, because he had the same kind of - determination. He was hurt and trapped, and he got himself out, and he took up the good fight because he didn't want other kids hurt."

Pause.

"That sounded a bit grim, I guess. I was kind of an intense kid."

"No, I think that makes perfect sense! I really admire characters who have something to fight for and are out there fighting for it." (She will not tie this back to Tiffany. Peter does not seem ready to hear about Tiffany any further today.)

"Yeah. Something that's real, so real even a kid can tell it matters. It kind of held over into what I like now, too, but - narrower? Gor aside, that's a big part of what I get out of War and Peace, that... everybody's trying to find something they'd die for, or live for. And they try these things on for size, like glory and patriotism, and none of them fit well enough to cover up the hole inside... it has to be love, in the end, not love of one person but love of every person, that makes you keep going, fix the world no matter what it takes."

"Hmm," she says thoughtfully. "I guess I wouldn't know, I've never been much of a 'find something to fill the void' sort of person." She is being so, so good and not making any jokes about love filling anyone's holes and there is no one around to praise her for this. Tragic. "But I think I might see what you're saying. Love is a worthy cause in a way most other things aren't, because it's... about people? I'm not sure I'm saying this right."

"Mm. Love, agape, love of everyone, isn't - fragile the way other things are. If your purpose is just loving one person, they could die, and you'd be adrift. If you love your country, it could collapse, go rotten from the inside, stop really being your country anymore. But if you love mankind... there's always a core, there, to keep you going."