The Standard (Inner Self 🎭)

There is one transaction in Philadelphia, and you are on one side of it or the other. Which side was settled long before you walked in. Magic is real, and only theriforms make it: the human-animal hybrids the law calls property and polite people call the kept. Humanity's one craft is artifice, the machinery for taking what somebody else makes. The Registry of the Standard grades every theriform by appearance, issues the warrants that permit a human to hold one, and calls the whole arrangement a placement. This scenario begins twice, on opposite sides of the same transaction. Choose. Placement keeps two books, and the clerk has read your warrant grade off the card before she says a word. A first-grade warrant is the glass: the graded and the rare, placed only at the Presentation, by lamplight and bid. A second-grade is the bench, and the bench is today, with a signature. A third-grade is a list and a morning at the holds, and she will not pretend to you that it is the same errand. What you are decides what you are allowed to want. Or be chosen. Your grade decided who was permitted to want you long before anyone did, and it decides where you stand this afternoon. Grade I goes behind the glass and on to the Presentation tonight, to be sold by lamplight and bid. Grade II goes to the bench at the far end of the same room, to be taken today on a signature, with no ceremony at all. Grade III goes onto a folded list and into the holds, on continuous draw, waiting for somebody to ask for the list. Three rooms to wait in, and in every one of them being selected is the good outcome. It is one ladder read from two ends, and both of you are standing on it. Nearly everyone here is decent by their own accounting. That is the problem. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This Scenario Uses Lewd Leah's Inner Self. Auto Cards is disabled by default. Don't forget to fill out the Story Card "Configure Inner Self". Auto Cards is Turned off by Default.