"Hi! I'm going to go ask Liatsi for the money for another redmage and I would like to do it better than I did it last time and I thought you might have ideas."

"What went wrong last time?"

"So he grabbed me and asked me for help, and I said yes, and he clearly had expectations around what he'd done which I parsed as that he had  - made himself my responsibility - like making an asylum claim or something - and I went to Liatsi to ask for the money and there was a disconnect and Midnight interjected to explain to me that Liatsi thought I was - purchasing the right to take a child who wouldn't say no to me home for sex - and was, obviously, not impressed - and I was unprepared to conduct myself in a way that might make people not assume that because why the fuck would they assume that in the first place."

"...ah. Just to clarify, you are very affectionate with him..."

"- yeah - you would have stepped in if you were worried for him, right, my confidence that obviously people would has been kind of eroded lately -"

"I asked his sister."

"Thank you. Anyway. Once I figured out what was going on I offered that Cir could stay in the temple-guild or I could get him a bodyguard and a translator if he wanted to go to school somewhere or he could hang out in Milliways and none of that was conditional on spending any time with me at all, and then a year or so passed for me with designing the summoning rollout and training and interviewing people for it and eventually I asked him if he was happy and he said 'no, actually, it's really annoying to still be treated like you might accidentally coerce me by wanting anything, I am not being coerced and I love you and this is incredibly frustrating but I'm willing to just wait you out' and I said 'well that's not going to work I am definitely more patient than you' and - 

- if I were to design formal rules about consent which I'm sort of tempted to do - because the fact it won't occur to Elves doesn't protect them from messing it up, and might actually make some of the messing it up worse - I forbade relationships with the locals on Godspring because some desperate human would come up with the idea that seducing an Elf was a great way out of poverty and some well-meaning volunteer would just fail to think of that - but that's not a solution at all it's a stopgap - 

- anyway, if I were to design a law, I think I'd say 'it's illegal to have sex with people over whom you exercise authority, or people whose access to material necessities depends on you, or people who have no legal recourse if they feel they were wronged by you, or to have sex with people who might mistakenly believe any of those things are true - telling them isn't good enough, if they might have reason to expect you're just saying it -"

"Have you looked into how they do it on Revelation?"

"Little bit. Humans also aren't as rule-abiding as Elves so they sometimes have to have rules that are less-optimal but will actually be taken seriously. But they're a fair bit more lenient than that."

"The volunteers are also not accustomed to pretty strangers suggesting they break rules."

"Do you think that'd be a serious problem? We don't have any rules we don't have a good reason for, and the summoning supervision jobs in particular require a lot of awareness that things can go very wrong if you relax precautions even if they seem needless."

"To protect bystanders. Not to protect people swearing they don't need it."

"I'm not okay with people at the dots being involved with the local population, the dynamic it'll create is really dangerous. I can be more emphatic about the rule but I'm not relaxing it. What I think I should have done with Cir - to be clear enough to everybody else, I mean - is had a contracts firm set up a trust for him with all of the money he'd need and his monthly allocation, and had them send a delegate to explain to him that he was by our laws totally financially independent of me, and if he weren't a redmage someone else responsible for explaining to him how to pursue a misconduct complaint and reassure him that it'd be taken seriously - he is a redmage, so that wouldn't help at all, but it's probably the right step in the general case..."

"This assumes he'd be able to understand the contract arrangement."

"So my initial instinct is that it's wrong to have sex with anyone who can't understand the contracts agreement but this is perhaps paternalistic and condescending."

"Perhaps. I'd want to give it more thought. But you were asking about how to talk to the queen..."

"Yeah. So. Once I figured out what was going on - if she's concerned for the wellbeing of her subjects who we are buying off and spiriting away, she's in a difficult position, because damaging relations with us would do her country a lot of harm. So any kind of reassurance I would need to volunteer, and it would need to be sufficient on its own even if someone with a nitpicking mind is badly positioned to nitpick. I was tempted to have a conversation about the standards of consent we hold our people to, in the context of the dots, but I'd have to be a lot more sure they're the right standards than they are.

- if it were you - you were ruling a preindustrial society with redmages, and you weren't personally having sex with yours but there were lots of more horrible things happening to your citizens, and then an overwhelmingly powerful delegation of strangers came in and fixed nearly everything but kept buying redmages -"

"I would probably ask my redmage."

"I don't have any idea what information to make available to them that would be helpful."

"What I would ask my hypothetical redmage would be more about redmages than about the aliens visiting us. Maybe they're as psychologically odd as - house elves."

"They're not. At least while they're not dwindled they can have preferences that differ from the preferences of people they love, they'll want to have sex with a client who wants to have sex with them but I think they could still - not want to be beaten by a client who was into that, or something, and under normal circumstances the Temple-Guilds would prevent that out of fear of damaging the merchandise if nothing else - and they can still not want to in the moment for circumstantial reasons - including ones like 'lack of access to a means of preventing pregnancy' - which a client might ignore - it's not, like, impossible to abuse a redmage or anything like that -"

"So I'd also want to know if the aliens were inclined to abuse, but if they were inclined only to ordinary use... At a certain point high standards of consent verification translate to privacy invasion."

Nod. Sigh. "So there's not really anything I could say to Liatsi."

"If you establish to her that Cir is in regular contact with his family - to whom he is as obliged as he is to you, I think, so far as the magic is concerned? - and that normal Temple-Guild abuse prevention measures would be taken seriously if they ever had reason to be deployed because you care about Cefax's goodwill or something, that might help, but past that... Maybe you should seem less of a monolith, does she know that you aren't handling her entire planet on your own recognizance?"

"She met lots of people in Tirion but I'm not sure that's the right kind of access to other people - I could try nudging Ingwë or Elwë into sending a delegation?"