"Sure. ...Were you planning on factoring in that most humans would find lives of celibacy objectionable?"

"He can have whoever he wants."

"He just deteriorates every time he touches someone new."

"Yes, I know. It is a consideration in favor of having sex with the fifteen-year-old I purchased from a foreign planet. The consideration against is the entire rest of the sentence."

"I don't think the foreign planet part is hurting you here."

" - it means he can have less accurate expectations? This is less of a problem because he knows me near-perfectly and so I don't have to figure out how to credibly signal that my peers would prevent me from abusing him or whatever - but still, teenagers kidnapped from foreign planets by Elf princes will probably assume they have pretty much zero social power -"

"Fair enough. In my native culture the age of consent was 16 or 18 depending on where one was if that's a useful data point."

"The only lines that make a ton of sense to me objectively are 'old enough to be the person who is best at deciding what he wants' and 'old enough there's no power imbalance'. And he's the first thing and will probably never be the second thing."

"I dunno, he seems to have leveraged his magic power pretty effectively."

" - yeah. I don't think I'd have handled being in his position as gracefully."

"If he knows you so well does he have an idea about what you're going to do?"

"He thinks I will get over my discomfort around the situation."

"Would that be a disaster?"

"I expect we could make each other quite happy. Everyone on that planet will continue to think - but I guess it's silly to make decisions off that -"

"A little. If you're going to worry about that maybe worry about his immediate family, don't worry about the cultural zeitgeist."

"Thank you. I think that's - all I wanted to ask about."

"Good skill."

He goes back up to Cir's room, and knocks.

Cir opens the door. "Did you forget something?"

"No, I went and talked with Timothy and Cam."

"...you were gone for five seconds."

"Milliways does that. If I'm ever gone for a week or something you should come downstairs, it's probably not that I've abandoned you and it's probably that it's been three minutes. Anyway, I talked with them. They both think you're - perfectly capable of knowing what you want and it's not very fair of me to treat you otherwise."

Smile.

"So I apologize for that."

"It's okay, you were just trying to be good to me."