"Can you tell me what that conception is?"

"No." She still has to derive it herself.

"We'll come back to that, then. What kinds of things can be kinks? Do they all have to involve sacrifice?"

"No, anything can be a kink. It's just something that some people find arousing that most people don't."

"I see..." 

Kumi gets out her notepad. 

"Teach me, please."

Ishaza nods, and begins.

Ishaza still has to talk sideways around some things, but with hours of interaction Kumi can feel out the boundaries of what she's allowed to talk about and what she isn't.

She can still stress basic, common-sense things, like the importance of good communication. 

Kumi's independently invented sadism and masochism, so Ishaza's able to give her her words for those two things once she develops the ideas more. Bondage and discipline are harder to derive; Kumi seems to think they're all one thing, which in a sense they are. Kumi settles for calling them both "Restriction", and they move on from there using that as a stand-in. It's not actually important to rederive exactly BDSM. 

Consent is hard to express as a unique concept separate from basic common-sense knowledge, especially when she can't mark it as important by giving it its own word or specifically discussing agreeing to things beforehand. It's like watching Kumi trying to discover the concept of human rights from a bunch of court rulings. It's not trivial, even with Ishaza nudging her in roughly the right direction.

In a real sense, Ishaza is playing a very old subgame here. There's a whole set of rules about what summoned representatives can and can't say about technology to prevent every iteration of the game being played from immediately devolving into the most advanced world in all pharasma's creation. Gozreh would mutiny - that's giving the game to Abadar - but Abadar and the other gods nonetheless want to be able to inspire inventions. However, no god wants every god to be able to send a dozen innovations that build their strategy. What an individual deity's representative can do is thus subject to a game of implication and insinuation from ostensibly general advice. The more the mortals have to work for it, the more can be transmitted... but it's a laborious process, and slow.

Eventually Kumi has to go sleep. Ishaza doesn't need to, so instead she talks to Shelyn's church. 

Meanwhile... 

Shelyn, do you have a spare moment?

Yes, I do. What can I help you with?

We need to talk about the situation with mortal babies. Why are there so many of them and why do most of them die? I've been informed from the contract of creation that the GM hates it when that happens. So why does it keep happening? 

Zon-Kuthon has the Loss domain and draws a huge amount of power from infant mortality. He's also one of the primary contributors to sealing Rovagug. If he stops powering the Star Towers then it's war with the Rough Beast all over again, and maybe this time we lose. So any attempt to prevent babies from dying gets vetoed by him.

So the whole table is being held hostage by one problem player?

No, Gozreh also supports it because it's "more natural" and because he doesn't want a boom in the human population. 

Shouldn't Pharasma have just kicked both of them? She's the GM?

Not with Rovagug there as a potential issue.

I see. He's that powerful, huh?

Pretty much.

Okay, that might explain why so many babies die, but why hasn't reliable birth control been introduced? Why isn't reversible sterilization a cleric orison?

That's a thornier issue. Lamashtu is the main player against, because her "mother of monsters" domain extends to all unwanted children, but not so strongly so that a coalition couldn't compensate her, maybe with a forced fertility orison... it's just that that is equivalent to anteing the fertility of every mortal as a chip in the game.

That maybe wins us Osirion, but it means Asmodeus gets to only give children to loyal supporters of his regime, and Lamashtu and Zon-Kuthon get to force people to bear more babies they don't want. It doesn't even fix the child mortality problem.

It's much more of a questionable investment than fixing child mortality.

Does Lamashtu have the power to release Rovagug too?

According to the play contract, yes.

But she isn't directly involved in the Dead Vault?

She is not.

Isn't Pharasma the one who enforces the game contract?