"If you want help with the house let me know."

"Oh, that'd be lovely, actually, save us all the time digging up stone! Once we have designs we'll come and find you."

Nod.

He takes hold of both of his parents' hands so he can swing between them as they head off outside.

Miranda makes vague grumbling noises.

"It's not like people we know are any better. And that's without a way to change it."

"It hadn't even particularly occurred to me before and it took - four? Five? Sentences for Cam to explain it - I don't think it was just that he's my alt either - and having mind control for it is not unambiguously better -"

"I wasn't thinking of it as mind control."

"No?"

"Maybe it depends how it works? But one-off changing a thing within the range of normal human variation to something else within that range seems very different from controlling someone's mind."

"If there were a spell that did that Occlumency would block it."

"That doesn't seem like it necessarily tracks ethicalness."

"I think it tracks mind-control-ness."

"Mind-affectingness, maybe. I don't know, if you're going to have a norm it seems a whole lot crueller not to have any way to conform to it, and I'm not very comfortable saying that if such a way of conforming is denied to people, then they'll be forced to fight the norm, which is good because the norm ought to be gotten rid of, and the reason it ought to be gotten rid of is the suffering of the people with no way to conform to it."

"It ought to be got rid of because it was stupid to begin with. Nobody would be very hurt if we had a norm that we all had to wear green but it would be stupid."

"Sure, but unless you're going to go crusade for homosexual marriage in Arda it seems like a bad idea to object to this particular habit of their stupid evil gods."

"Well, Cam wasn't going to do it."

"Let it go, Miranda."

"Okay but only if you tell me what you would've said."

"Would've drawn some comparison with how horrifying Elves find locking people up, probably, I didn't develop it to the point of having a quippy phrasing."

Miranda hugs him and leaves.

Sigh. Hug. "It's that bad?"

"What is, my inability to tell someone I literally murdered that they are in the moral wrong?"

"No, I mean, the orientation-switching thing. It really does sound better than not having it."

"It was a whole thing when I was a human, I might be biased even apart from the predisposition to object to mind control."