Of course!  It wasn't at the top of his stack anyways!

Great! Then Opalyn will take the surveys now, and Aqqord can send the proposal via messenger up to the castle when it's ready!

And as a reminder, there is no need for him to announce it by voice directly into Opalyn's bedroom!

Here's the room with the survey reports, containing everyone's recorded claims about what they want in a mate, everyone's self-reports on what they have to offer a mate, and everyone in town's reports on what all of their ex-partners were actually like and actually seemed to want!  Opalyn can peruse them at her leisure!

...or she could say a little about what she wants and then Aqqord could produce a neat stack of the top twenty candidates, yo.

Onnnn the one hand Opalyn could in theory pick through these a few at a time late at night, tossing most of them in a pile to her left. She's done that for years and it feels pretty familiar.

Onnnn the other hand... ugh maybe she should accept some help. If there are twenty in the pile maybe they won't all be Aqqord?

"Can you promise not to put your own top pick plus nineteen duds in that pile? They'll be twenty good ones?"

Aqqord would never dream of falsifying any aspect of any of his plans, as this would cause them to be less than completely optimal!

Okay. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Fortune favors the bold. And other similar truisms.

This is going to blow up in her face isn't it.

Even so.

Opalyn anxiously shares the following criteria.

1. Male. (She doesn't explain her complicated feelings about pansexuality, it'll just be easier this way.)
2. Between the ages of 25 and 50
3. ACTUALLY AVAILABLE, seriously, for real, why would she want someone who would drop their current partner?
4. Smart
5. Has ideas
6. At least occasionally successfully implements those ideas

Oh no this does actually kind of sound like Aqqord, if he's single, what can Opalyn say that will rule out Aqqord himself in a way that also further narrows the search criteria helpfully? How about IS SANE? But she doesn't trust Aqqord to know how to filter for that. How about: can take others' perspective well... but Aqqord won't know what that means either. What would perspective taking look like to him?

7. Seems to make a lot of compromises
8. People like him

And then if it's not too much to ask,

9. Funny
10. Great in the sack

Well obviously if you want a man, and you prefer a loyal highly sentimental man who won't drop his current partner for someone 125% better, you'll have to take him away from some other woman currently in possession of him!  Attractive men aren't going to be just lying around with nobody having claimed them!

And wouldn't making compromises indicate that your starting positions were not already perfect?  Either that, or indicate weakness and being willing to move away from perfection.

Sometimes, attractive men are just lying around with nobody having claimed them! This is because people measure attractiveness in different ways! One woman's trash is another woman's treasure! Also, sometimes you catch people at just the moment when they happen to be available! Please filter the search to AVAILABLE MEN ONLY, thank you!

And yes do the compromise thing too. Opalyn does not have ten years to explain to Aqqord what she's going for there.

...there isn't really a standard entry in his coding system for "willingness to compromise" because he hadn't thought of this as something that enough people had to variable degrees, and varied in how much they wanted, to form part of an idealized relationship pattern to compute.  There's an entry for "weak-mindedness" for the sort of person who likes a minion who's easily bossed around?  And separately sexual submissiveness, which some people don't realize is not the same thing at all?

Yeahhhh so this is kind of why Opalyn expected to have to go through the surveys herself. Can Aqqord maybe just have a bunch of street urchins load the surveys into wagons and take them up to the castle.

Eventually, of course, he'll be happy to do that!

Meanwhile he intends load up the sorter for "male", "underlying biological age 25-50", "recently single in a way that doesn't reflect too poorly on him and/or has an open polyamory slot", "tested well on intelligence tests", "has somewhat succeeded at life", "overall high ratings from past partners", "rated as funny by past partners", and "rated as sexually skillful by past partners".

How does Opalyn feel about cybernetic replacement limbs, dependent relatives or kids from past marriages, troubled histories from before the man came to Little Damar, ratings for openness to intimacy, and Opalyn's acceptable relative positions inside of a man's harem?

Okay, having at least some filtering on the clearer criteria does sound helpful, thank you!

Opalyn fears, though, that the criteria that Aqqord doesn't understand, the ones Opalyn hopes are good proxies for skills such as perspective taking, may be quite rare in Europa, or might correlate inversely with the other qualities that she wants. There seems to be a high incidence of megalomania here. She's going to have to build a working model of why, at some point, and how she might disrupt that equilibrium.

ANYWAY. To answer Aqqord's questions:

- Cybernetic replacement limbs: neutral
- Dependent relatives or kids from past marriages: neutral unless they want her to immediately take an active role in supporting / nurturing those others, in which case negative in proportion to how big the role is
- Troubled histories from before the man came to Little Damar: neutral but definitely provide more data on what kind of trouble
- Ratings for openness to intimacy: more open is better, less open is worse
- Acceptable relative positions inside of a man's harem: anything is fine but specify, and if the role is small it better not also come with the expectation of exclusivity

Does Opalyn have any particular tastes in previous trouble?  Like mercenary service or men who've otherwise seen war, and have some trauma about it that a good woman could help to heal?

Some men in Little Damar aren't explicitly polyamorous, and wouldn't voluntarily let themselves be seduced away from their current wife.  But when strapped into the Romantic Preference Extractor, it showed that if those men were forcibly taken away by a new woman, they'd find that very romantic and would be very flattered and turned on despite their overt protests and tries to escape.  Does this count as "available" in Opalyn's book?

War trauma: not positive, but acceptable. All else being equal Opalyn would prefer not to get the kind of guy who gets confused and strangles her in his sleep?

Does it count if they're flattered by forcible reassignment: No. No, it does not.

Hmph.  Well, to each their own tastes, Aqqord supposes.

He'll just head off to the Matching Machine.  Does Opalyn want to stick around to watch for 5 minutes, or head on out and wait for papers to be sent back to her later?

Wow that is something. If it's literally only five minutes Opalyn might as well stay and watch? She can think of it as research into how Sparky things work.

By the way, is Aqqord a Spark himself? Is it typical for there to be multiple Sparks in the same... political division? City? Whatever this is? Like, how is it that Aqqord is working in Little Damar, which is Doctor Disaster territory?

He is a very weak Spark, as Sparks rate things.  Hardly a Spark at all, by the standards of Sparks.  He needs help to build any artifact that does anything except plan.  The Matching Machine is his own work, made with premanufactured parts; for the Romantic Preference Extractor he needed help.

A few minutes later, Aqqord hands Opalyn a stack of top-5, top-10, and top-50 romantic prospects!  Each file is quite detailed, thick enough to be maybe a 5-minute read apiece, and includes data not just from people and their ex-partners but also in some cases surveillance reports or intelligence interrogations.

It may contain some men who are 18 or 55 or would need to be seduced away from their current partners, if they're otherwise really excellent matches, because the Matching Machine does not actually have an infinite-weight setting for any desideratum.

That's fine, actually, because that's how most preferences work in real life too! The age cutoffs were somewhat arbitrary. Opalyn remains resolute in the "available men only" criterion but if someone is amazing she could just remember they exist and otherwise do nothing about it because sometimes circumstances change!

Opalyn is grateful for the help and says so and makes polite noises until she remembers that courtesy works entirely differently here and she can probably just go now. She takes the files with her. Are they so heavy she needs an urchin and a wagon after all?

Nah, couple of kilograms of paper.  Noticeably heavy, but not, you know, urchin heavy.

Though there's plenty of urchins and other potential minions in Little Damar who could be press-ganged into her service, to be clear!

Opalyn can definitely handle a few kilograms! Off she goes then.

Has Twoodle just been standing around this whole time? Opalyn feels a little bit bad about not releasing him sooner. What did he make of the whole Aqqord interaction?

He continued to not have more than one facial expression, at least while on duty and when not instructed to express any opinions.

(Having opinions about your boss's sex life -- causally interacting with it in any way, really -- is not a trivial decision to make in Europa.  Sparks and Important People get up to some stuff, you know?)

Opalyn releases Twoodle back to his regularly scheduled life! Presumably she can look for him at the guard station if she wants to talk to him again? He's been an excellent tour guide and remains the most sane person she's met so far in Little Damar, but that's not really grounds to completely derail his entire existence, especially if he's not enthusiastic about that.

If Opalyn is extraordinarily lucky maybe the stack of paper she is presently holding contains the file of an additional sane person!

She thanks Twoodle and waves goodbye to him and walks back in the general direction of the castle. It's easier to go back than it was to navigate outward early in the morning, given that the castle is rather imposing and obvious when she looks around.

Well if Twoodle isn't steering you away from it, you are liable to walk through this here district.  Unlike some other places or cultures, the local version of the profession offers cheerful early hours for those needing a morning pick-me-up and not given to coffee.