Keltham: "Right.  Afterlives.  There's no point staying on Golarion if you're not having any fun there."

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah. I mean, some of the afterlives suck, but Chelish people at least can be pretty sure of their draw, and if you're done here, not a lot of point hanging around."

Keltham: Keltham can feel it like an echo of Owl's Wisdom, his explicit awareness, his inability not to look in that direction, towards his perception that everything he's heard about the afterlife has been very vague; and the explicit thought now completed, that this is probably not some random innocent mistake it's okay to ignore while he plunges ahead into everything else that's more tractable.

He wishes he knew whether or not the truth about afterlives was being deliberately hidden from him by the people here, or hidden by gods from living nongods in this afterlife-feeding economy, or if this is some safer issue where it'd work fine to try harder to pin people down on details at the expense of some social capital.

He doesn't want to pin Carissa down on it, anyways.  It's not a fun pre-date topic.

"Sorry if I shouldn't ask, by the way, but I can't tell if your mention of meeting somebody more important than Contessa Lrilatha was a prompt to ask you about that if I was interested, or if it was deliberately vague to signal that I'm not supposed to ask."

Carissa Sevar: "Mostly just vague because the name wouldn't mean anything to you. I met the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, the head of the church of Asmodeus on Golarion. She was laying the Forbiddance."

Keltham: "Meta before I say anything work-related about that, what's the local defaults and your personal overrides for how much work you want to talk about on the dinner before a date?  Dath ilani default is that if you met somebody over work, work is assumed good to discuss while together unless somebody says otherwise; I haven't noticed a personal override over that myself."

Carissa Sevar: Dath ilan does so much reasoning out which things you do instead of just reading people and noticing if you're getting your desired result. "It seems like it'd be awfully hard not to talk about work, considering," she says. "I don't mind it."

Keltham: "Right, so, say anything to - Aspexia? Rugatonn? - about work?  I mean, if I'd been there I'd have asked her what we need to do to get intelligence headbands and a pair of detect-magic goggles, but there's presumably a reason she didn't deliberately give me a chance to do that, and I'll understand if you didn't want to expend your personal social capital on that."

Carissa Sevar: "I did ask for a headband, that was not what she was here to talk about. I don't think they are underrating how important you are, at least."

Keltham: To Keltham, that doesn't sound the least bit unlike what happens if a Legislator is passing through and didn't schedule time for your personal pet issue; that's what the whole hierarchy of Delegates, Electors, and Representatives are for.

"Yeah, not surprising.  Even the second part is more cheering than I was expecting.  Maybe not tonight, maybe more like early tomorrow, but I do want to talk to someone about - milestones, prices, what they're interested in seeing to create the promise that implies more investment as a correct course of action, what it takes to get resources like magic goggles and at least one intelligence headband and wisdom headband to pass around.  Or failing that, if there's enough other clerics here who can go in with me on second-circle cleric spells, for purposes of hitting everyone who wants it with an Owl's Wisdom at least once before they get their head stuffed full of dath ilani skills."

Carissa Sevar: "Seems like a good conversation to have." Carissa is almost certain the constraint on headbands is whether Keltham's going to destroy the world, not whether if he doesn't he'll create enough value, but probably whoever he goes to for the conversation will have figured out what to tell him. And she wants a headband very badly, so hopefully it'll even work out. 

Keltham: "Know my next step on who to ask about it?  Like, not necessarily who's in charge, if you don't know, just who I ask to find out where to go?  Other people have this weird ability to find security officers that I don't actually see myself anywhere."

Carissa Sevar: "I just step into hallways and call 'security' and let them show themselves."

Keltham: "...right then."

You would expect this to be a comedy trope on a TV show which otherwise lacked a mechanical explanation, not the way that things worked in real life.

Carissa Sevar: Is that a very un-dath-ilan way for things to work. Oh well. "I know that if we could actually go to dath ilan things would immediately start happening at a thousand times the already terrifying speed they're presently happening but I sort of wish I could wander around dath ilan not causing an international incident and just seeing what it's like."

Keltham: "Oh, good prioritizing of topics.  Anybody who wants that to be a romantic conversation should probably get that in with me during the first week or two, before I get especially nostalgic or sad about something I didn't realize I'd miss.  Yeah, it's about as fantastic as you'd expect from a billion people with high intelligence and enough money to spend on making stuff be diverse and pretty.  Enormous buildings that go up into the sky for two hundred layers of living space?  We've got those.  Endless forests with houses you'd never notice, where all the roads are far enough underground that you can't even hear a murmur from the high-velocity automatic carriages moving people around at a mile a minute to their workplace or their friends' houses?  Got that.  Wind pits a hundred meters on a side so people can fly around using small wings?  Got them.  Giant supershop that's fifty of these villas in radius, which ended up as the de facto selling point for everything in Civilization that's in common enough demand to need an exhibit and rare enough to not need many of them?  Got that.  Entire cities of actors that do nothing but play out unending elaborate fantasies that people can pay to wander into for a day or a year, complete with sex workers?  Got them.  It's basically what it seems to me you should expect from people with way more money and knowledge, and zero magic or gods.  Given the premise, I don't know what if any of that you'd find surprising."

Carissa Sevar: - longing sigh. "I don't know that I'm - surprised by any of those things exactly, they all sound like things people might want if they were very rich - I guess I'm confused about, if everyone's very rich, who does all the unpleasant work of digging the tunnels and hauling the garbage and being the sex workers..."

Keltham: "Machines.  One person can dig a tunnel faster if they have a shovel.  Now imagine, it's like that, but there's a crew of a hundred people and eighty tunneling machines who show up and dig all the tunnels for the city you're going to build, over the course of a week.  Garbage gets tossed down a self-cleaning chute where it lands in containers that get carried away by vehicles that travel around automatically without any humans operating them."

"Sex workers aren't scalable that way because, like, Civilization has made a decision not to scale orgasm production?  But I don't know why you'd consider that an unpleasant job - anyone who sells sex is going to sell it at a price that makes them glad to trade it, right, and people who'd need huge prices to be happy aren't going to be the most competitive sex workers?  Wait this is going to be awful Golarion news and I should be trying to guess it before you say it but I find that I don't actually want to."

Carissa Sevar: "Do you want me to not say it, Cheliax isn't one of the countries where women don't have rights so you don't actually need to know."

Keltham: "So... somebody picks out the most attractive women, tells them they're sex workers whether they like it or not, and underpays them, because otherwise their country can't fill out those jobs because no woman wants them because of the marriage thing."

"...you know, I can tell that's still too sensible for Golarion but even having said that, I don't know how to make the answer be crazier."

Carissa Sevar: "If a girl has had sex while unmarried, in a country where women are supposed to marry as virgins, then no one will marry her, but it's illegal for her to have been educated or gotten a normal job, so she can be a sex worker - that does not translate quite directly to our word - or she can starve, and she will almost definitely get diseases from having sex with lots of strangers, and also eventually one of them will be bad news and strangle her, but I imagined dath ilan having enough Law to solve the latter problem and enough medicine to solve the former and it's still considered a lousy job with those aside, because propensity for it is barely getting selected for at all."

Keltham: More equilibria that seem weirdly more awful than anything Keltham knows about to explain why.

"Why would - you get diseases particularly from having sex with people you didn't know?  Is this a magic thing?"

Carissa Sevar: "...no? It's just - well, you get diseases from any kind of close contact with other people, right, and there are a bunch of diseases that you specifically get from sex, and people who haven't had sex won't have those diseases to pass along, and people who have sex with hundreds and hundreds of people will inevitably get the diseases eventually."

Keltham: "And here that's much more serious than - the kind of contagious illnesses that we still have in dath ilan, because we eliminated anything we didn't know how to easily treat, probably long enough ago that it happened before the screen.  Though - I'm a bit confused about the concept of a disease that's specifically transmitted by sex - you wouldn't think a disease would find its optimal strategy in only, like, infecting genitals or sexual fluids, and making sure it never got transmitted by sneezing - I wonder if there's something I'm missing about how the equilibrium point is different here.  Is it anything you still have to worry about in the face of fourth-circle cleric spells?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, Remove Disease is third and will totally handle it, but normal people can't afford that. I don't know enough about why diseases work different ways to guess the answer to your question but doctors do track, like, if you're doctoring someone with smallpox and haven't had it yourself you'll catch it, if you're doctoring someone with syphilis and haven't had it yourself you'll be completely fine, but their wife and mistress will come down with it eventually."

Keltham: "I'd guess that - a long, long time ago, in dath ilan - we figured out how to identify everyone with a disease like that, all at once, in one giant sweep through the population, and we isolated all of them until they got better or died, plus a while longer to be sure, and then the disease didn't exist anymore."

(The concept that you can have a contagious disease forever, without it either getting better enough not to be contagious, or getting worse until it kills you, has not particularly occurred to Keltham; why would the replication rate in the face of immune counterattack be exactly 1, rather than exploding or vanishing?)

Carissa Sevar: Nod. "I think Cheliax could do that but it'd just get reintroduced from other countries that aren't coordinated enough."

Keltham: "Yeah, we wouldn't even have tried until we thought we could pull it off across the whole planet at once, so it can't have been any earlier than that, in our history... I wish I knew whether dath ilan went through a phase like this, or if it's something that happens here entirely because of the gods or a leak in your heritage of intelligence or I don't know what.  If dath ilan used to look basically like this, minus the gods and magic, it sure would be nice to know exactly how we climbed out of it."

For the first time it occurs to Keltham to wonder if dath ilan used to have gods, and that's what the Great Screen is meant to protect, because if you know the info for gods, you might pray to them... it would take a huge effort to keep not just the phenomenon but the physics behind it out of all the textbooks, but that's the magnitude of effort dath ilan put in to the Great Screen.  And if that's not what's going on, then there remains the unexplained question of why Keltham does not know any standard speculations about hypothetical superagents, that lots and lots of people could have hypothesized, hypotheses which pose a lot of interesting then-whats once you start looking in that direction.

Carissa Sevar: "Anyway. It's interesting to know you can have plenty of sex workers if they're also allowed to do other stuff."

Keltham: "I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'.  Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"

(And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.  But Keltham is now suddenly very unsure he should talk any more about the Screening of History where gods might hear him.  If dath ilan's Keepers defeated the gods and eradicated their memory, sometime in the Forgotten, this may not be a good thing to talk about in modern Golarion.)

"Where does the equilibrium balance in Cheliax?" Keltham adds on.  "You didn't think that people who enjoy sex lots would be the natural sellers for sex, so what prevents that here?"

Carissa Sevar: "Well, there's still the diseases and there's still the risk of a dangerous guy, so it's still a job you probably only do if you don't have better options, though in Cheliax that wouldn't be because they're illegal so it'd probably be because you're really bad at working in some way or another. And if you are particularly attractive and desirable you probably try to angle that into being a powerful person's mistress rather than working at a brothel, even a high-end one."

And the gaps are filled by slavery, which she's not going to say. 

Keltham: "Oh, in dath ilan it's that sufficiently attractive people who are sufficiently good at sex, have formed - um.  A... temporal process with two sides... where each side is composed of people... who each have their own incentives... such that each side is in equilibrium with respect to the incentives given to them by the other side... and on the other side from the very desirable people, are people who are sufficiently cool and have done sufficiently awesome things.  You can't buy some very hot people with money, you've got to have done something that they think is worthy.  And the people who are obviously worthy, if they're willing to acknowledge you publicly as a fuckbuddy, they're validating to the world that you are that hot and that good at sex, and then you're somebody who gets to decide whether some lesser incredibly rich person is cool enough to meet your standards."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa tries to follow that and when that fails tries to nail down her confusion and when that fails says reluctantly, "maybe that's the same thing as taking a mistress but I suspect, instead, it's another vast confusing cultural divide."

Keltham: "Okay, suppose I asked you who was the hottest woman on the planet.  The first obvious answer would be whoever gets paid the highest prices for sex.  But suppose there's somebody even hotter than her, who doesn't accept direct payment for sex at all.  How could you tell she was even hotter?  How could she prove that to the world?  Well, let's say she thinks the big important thing is... research on rats, and suppose somebody incredibly rich goes and builds an entire small city devoted to rat research, and then she screws him.  Depending on how much money gets spent, especially if she's influencing multiple rich people to fund rat research, you could make the case that she's getting implicitly paid more than the most expensive direct sex worker on the planet, even if she's only a small fraction of the reason why anyone funded the rat research city."

Carissa Sevar: " - this is missing the point but in Golarion you'd check with a spell who had the most Splendour. Uh, I'm not sure that's how I think about sexual desirability working? I don't - think how hot someone is relates very directly to how much I expect to gain from having sex with them and therefore how motivated I am to do it. And I'm also not sure that's the main place where the confusion is."

Keltham: "Do people here not have... I don't know, the kind of pride in their own desirability and sexual skill where they want to prove that they're way better at it than most other people?  Because you can't just go around saying that, you've got to prove it somehow."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure that the more powerful you are, the less you need skill at sex. She's suddenly worried that she shouldn't say that either, though. "...yes but that correlates with not being very powerful or in-demand, and therefore with needing to establish that you're fun to have sex with if you want to get anyone to have sex with you at all?" she says tentatively after a bit of thought.

Keltham: Keltham is not sure what the communications obstacle could be here, exactly.  "I mean, it's a two-sided equilibrium containing the hottest people and the worthiest people who mutually judge each other as that, anchored by how hotness and worthiness are also somewhat visible to people outside their ingroups - I have a sense like I'm also missing the point.  If you're hot enough that powerful people are competing to sleep with you, you don't need to establish how hot you are anymore, the outside world has now seen it established."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm going to talk about some place other than Cheliax, first, because I keep getting distracted by trying to apply this conversation to our date" and by worrying about saying something that you'll be incredibly concerned and offended by. "So, Osirion. Osirion has a god-king, a pharaoh, they've had them since ancient times. The pharaoh of Osirion has hundreds of concubines. If he sees a hot girl in the street, I think he can just order her to become one of them. It's not particularly validating to be chosen by the pharaoh of Osirion, because it just means that you're either in the top couple hundred or that he was tired of the top couple hundred and wanted something new. I am absolutely not in the top percentile of hotness for women but if I went to Osirion I'd be a little worried about getting noticed, because I'm exotic, which is sometimes appealing in its own right.

Does all of that make sense, are we starting to make different predictions at some place after that -"

Keltham: "I mean you've convinced me that no woman would want to go to Osirion, and if she did, she wouldn't expect to gain positive sexual reputation from being selected by the pharaoh because the pharaoh isn't discriminating enough, but I'm now distracted by the question of why there is such a thing as a pharaoh of Osirion in the first place."

Carissa Sevar: "...as a question about history the answer is that his grandfather staged a nearly bloodless coup against the satrap of the Kelish Empire, with the churches of Abadar and Sarenrae both backing him, right after Aroden fell when the empire was very distracted, and won Osirion independence and kicked out all the Kelish nobles and ended serfdom and is wildly popular. I am not sure that's the question you were asking, though?" 

Keltham: "Suppose everybody in a dath ilani city woke up one day with the knowledge mysteriously inserted into their heads, that their city had a pharaoh who was entitled to order random women off the street into his - cuddling chambers? - whether they liked that or not.  Suppose that they had the false sense that things had always been like this for decades.  It wouldn't even take until whenever the pharaoh first ordered a woman, for her to go "Wait why am I obeying this order when I'd rather not obey it?"  Somebody would be thinking about city politics first thing when they woke up in the morning and they'd go "Wait why we do we have a pharaoh in the first place" and within an hour, not only would they not have a pharaoh, they'd have deduced the existence of the memory modification because their previous history would have made no sense, and then the problem would escalate to Exception Handling and half the Keepers on the planet would arrive to figure out what kind of alien invasion was going on.  Is the source of my confusion - at all clear here?"

Carissa Sevar: "You think everyone in dath ilan would just - decide not to follow orders, even though this would get them executed if anyone else in the system continued following orders, on the confident assumption that no person with a correctly configured mind would possibly decide to follow orders under those circumstances?"

Keltham: "Oh, so we're imagining that people also wake up with the memory that everybody's supposed to kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and the memory that they're supposed to kill anyone who doesn't kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and so on through recursion, and they wake up with the memory of everybody else having behaved like that previously.  Yeah, that's one of the famous theoretical bad equilibria that we get training in how to -"

Keltham: "Shit."

Carissa Sevar: " - confusion resolved now?"

Keltham: "Just Osirion, or entire planet outside Cheliax?  No, it's at least also Nidal."

Carissa Sevar: "Everywhere has people in charge who do things you wouldn't like and stay in charge because it's illegal to overthrow them and the laws are enforced. Exactly how bad the things they do are varies - the pharaoh of Osirion is actually not considered bad at all - and exactly how the laws against overthrowing the government are enforced varies but - probably even in Cheliax the government has done something dath ilan thinks would merit overthrowing it."

Keltham: But for that to be true in Cheliax - that makes no sense, in terms of dath ilani common wisdom about how evil aliens would enforce that equilibrium, they'd require non-dissidents to kill dissidents immediately before the timing info NOW! can spread at the speed of local speech  - maybe they're too dumb here to realize that?

"If you were supposed to have killed me a few seconds ago," Keltham says in a casual tone, not any kind of obvious whisper, "and are putting your own life in danger not to do that, this would be a great time to casually nod your head and then I'll censor a lot of my curriculum from here on out."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is, completely insanely, tempted to casually nod her head, even though that's not even at all - lots of countries do still have governments and don't enforce heresy laws and it's clearly one of those they're pretending at being -

"I think you are imagining that this equilibrium is extremely fragile and that admitting we're in it is also disallowed? But actually it's extremely sticky. Overthrowing governments is really really hard and usually the thing that results when you overthrow a government is much worse. The consequences of overthrowing the Chelish government would be bad ones. So you don't have to - pretend the government is perfect - you just have to have a critical mass of people who don't believe that overthrowing it would produce something better, especially not since the Chelish government is possible to improve in normal ways by, like, suggesting improvements."

Keltham: "I see," Keltham says.  "Because if you toss out the current equilibrium, it could disrupt a lot of stuff, especially in a place like Golarion where people who lose a year's income just starve, no safety margin for anything... and if the current equilibrium is also doing some good things..."

But it should be REALLY REALLY OBVIOUS that there's an alternative to Osirion which looks like Osirion WITHOUT THE PHARAOH RAPING PEOPLE and that you could just...

Well, the people here don't have any training in noticing better equilibria and figuring out how to move to them -

NO!  THAT'S JUST OBJECTIVELY OBVIOUS!

Keltham manages not to yell this out loud, and having now finished internally yelling insults at reality, continues looking externally thoughtful, grateful for his recent practice with Eagle's Splendour.

He is not going to say anything along those lines, however obvious, until he has picked up from books whether Cheliax has a pharaoh.  Or rather, what kind of pharaoh it has.

He is specifically not going to mention that, given a dath ilani training regimen, ten-year-olds are too smart to get stuck in traps like this; and would wait until the next solar eclipse or earthquake, at which point 10% of them would yell "NOW!", followed moments later by the other 90%, as is the classic strategy that children spontaneously and independently invent as soon as prompted by this scenario, so long as they have been previously taught about Schelling points.

Has he at any point mentioned out loud dath ilan's annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival?  He doesn't think so.

Carissa Sevar: " - because... okay, so, there are lots of people who benefit from the current system, right? The pharaoh has personal bodyguards who he personally raised from the dead after they died in his service. The pharaoh has people who he elevated to high-ranking positions. All of those people would be worse off if the government were overthrown, so for practical reasons they are going to oppose it. So in order to overthrow the government, you have to kill all those people, and also any people who are seeking out positions of importance in the government as a reward for their loyalty in putting down the rebellion, and also any people who have sworn oaths of loyalty to the current regime..."

Keltham: "I see.  In dath ilan we'd think that it's hard to get over half of the military power on your side by bribing it, in a pre-metallic equilibrium where almost all fighters have about the same military power.  And that once you start gaining more knowledge and get more powerful tech, it's your important duty to also use that knowledge to propagate certain kinds of stable equilibria to future generations and not others."

"But with wizards and clerics and whatever else you have here, if they're - extraordinary economics, you don't have the word, if they let individuals do big things without large support networks - you could get half-plus of the military power by appealing to fewer people.  Even while your society's knowledge was much too primitive to produce the kind of advanced weapons that would make these issues initially appear in nonmagical societies that have started figuring things out."

That does make it seem less like the whole thing is just an Intelligence 10 Phenomenon.

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, the pharaoh and a hundred high-level personal bodyguards could probably kill practically the entire rest of the country put together, commoners are pretty useless against high-level wizards and clerics. Certainly more than fifty percent of a country's military power is less than a thousand people."

Keltham: "Well, I think I'm starting to understand some of the ways that Golarion diverged from a human baseline because of the presence of magic.  Or I have the illusion of starting to understand at least one of those divergences.  It is not, by our standards, pretty, but it sure beats having no idea why nothing here is making any sense."

...if you introduce technology into a Punish-Non-Punishers society with magic, the situation is no longer stable, it has a possibility of transitioning to the kind of pharaoh-free Civilization that Keltham is familiar with, if very large supply networks (and only those) can build weapons powerful enough to kill high-level wizards and clerics.  But, yeah, Keltham is going to have to think about how to do that with a minimum of fuss, and maybe not say a whole lot while he's thinking.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can, in fact, follow the way Keltham might be reasoning, and she's pretty sure that she screwed up, even though claiming that every single country except Cheliax was like this would have been ridiculous and even though she's actually pretty sure that Keltham isn't going to change the calculus of whether it's a good idea to overthrow the government. 

"Anyway, sometimes it does go wrong and someone's power base isn't secure enough. Like in Tian Xia, the Lung Wa empire which had endured for centuries collapsed after Aroden's death because there was a massive associated natural disaster and a famine, and the empire collapsed, and everything is much worse now. I've met Tian adventurers and they tell stories about - ghost cities where everyone just left or died because trade routes were disrupted and food stopped coming, an entire country that made a pact with a kraken to be its slaves, other areas where the civil war still hasn't ended even though there are very few people left to kill each other. I am sure that the Emperor of Imperial Lung Wa did some things you'd abhorr but - it'd be monstrous, to overthrow him, to throw cities and civilizations and twenty million lives into the chasm of Chaos just to stop a couple dozen people from getting raped -"

(She's doing such a bad job at being more Evil, she's going to have to set some time aside tomorrow to work on that.)

Keltham: "I try not to be the stupid kind of Chaotic.  Even Chaos is made almost entirely of Law, remember.  If you're doing it correctly.  In fact, I'm beginning to think that the top 0.1% most Chaotic dath ilani on my planet, placed on a scale with one unit of distance between what you consider 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic', would be located one hundred and forty-four units further to the Lawful side of what you call Lawful."

Carissa Sevar: "That seems probably right. I just - it sounds like you're thinking about goverments as things that mostly maintain their power by making it too hard for people to correctly overthrow them, when my impression is that actually most people correctly don't want to overthrow them, and I can name six countries where I think that's not true so I don't think I'm just incapable of recognizing it when I see it, and it's not how I see Cheliax. Or Osirion, for that matter. Though I do think stealing all their women would be incredibly satisfying and we should do it."

Keltham: Stable governments make the expected benefit of overthrowing them look smaller than the expected friction costs of coordinating and changing the regime, yes.  Friction costs are not fixed independently of tech level.

"Where do gods fit into this?  There's a Lawful Neutral god that sponsors Osirion, the same god that took over the planetary banking system.  I imagine that god - doesn't care whether people benefit themselves, or benefit others, it's just completely indifferent to the effect of laws on citizen welfare, all it cares about is that there be laws - confirm or more likely deny my guess?"

Carissa Sevar: She STILL hasn't been told whether to tell him he's Abadar's, "Abadar's not one of the more human gods but I think 'doesn't care whether people benefit themselves or benefit others' sounds right, and, uh, not exactly indifferent to whether laws affect human welfare and more ...deeply concerned with laws along a specific dimension which is not human welfare, but definitely isn't just 'laws exist' - I bet it matters that they're possible to consistently enforce and that they're consistently obeyed? And I bet there are other things that matter which I just don't happen to know."

Keltham: The info he needs is to what extent gods, both including and excluding Asmodeus, are liable to get pissed if Keltham tries to make their afterlife-feeder be less of a shithole.  Keltham is aware he can't immediately ask about this, though it also occurs to him that Carissa may be similarly speculating about Keltham's intentions, and not saying what she speculates he's thinking.

Gosh, Keltham hopes they weren't supposed to be coordinating some kind of immensely meaningful implied side conversation, while they were talking about this, because if so, Keltham has absolutely no idea what they both sidespoke, and that would be embarrassing.  Well, not really his fault because of the enormous cultural gap and hypothetical Carissa should have known better, but still.

"Wanna go back to talking sex work in dath ilan?" Keltham offers.

Carissa Sevar: "Sure. Do women pay for it? They don't, in Golarion; it's not hard to find someone who'll have sex with you for free."

Keltham: "Some women do?  I should also mention that there's a difference between, like... slipping some normal man or woman a private note saying that you realize you've failed at flirting with them but you still want them enough that you'd pay thirty unskilled-labor-hours to fuck them anyways, versus paying much higher prices to extremely attractive people who are extremely good at sex.  The second thing is more of a case of - something you do when you're older, richer, can afford it on a regular basis if you don't want to go back to less expert sex, and aren't concerned about it messing up your regular relationships.  I've resorted to bribery six times and been bribed twice, but the total money flow ratio is more like, twenty to one, not three to one."

Carissa Sevar: " - that with normal non-professionals is not a thing in Cheliax and I suppose it could be, I don't actually know why it isn't. I guess since no one does it, offering would be extremely weird and therefore a negative signal about the traits of the person who offered?" It'd read as a bizarre threat, is what it'd read as. "I'd be cautious about doing that here, not that I expect you'll need to."

Keltham: "Thanks for the warning.  Anything else I shouldn't offer people money to do?"

Carissa Sevar: "Huh, good question. I'm not immediately thinking of anything else." 

Carissa Sevar:  "Normally I would say you shouldn't offer people money to overthrow the government, that actually is illegal, but what with it being you I think it's probably better if your controlling constraint isn't - believing yourself to have necessarily incomplete information about the merits of overthrowing governments."

Carissa Sevar: " - and now we're back on serious topics, sorry. What sorts of things do you do in a whole city of sex workers - do you pretend to be the pharaoh of Osirion -"

Keltham: "You mean, and then the women overthrow him and take sexual revenge on him?  Or played straight rather than subverted - I mean, I'm sure somebody has played Perverted Alien Dictator of Civilization and probably a hundred thousand variations on it - I don't know, myself, very much of what goes on in there.  There's a standard wisdom of, play the simple sex games first, wait to get bored naturally before you start making sex more complicated, don't rush ahead to the weirdest sex Civilization has developed."

"It's considered - the kind of info-hazard that isn't going to drive you insane, but can make you miss out on a lot of fun, by making you bored before you would've been bored?  Like telling somebody how a book ends when they just started reading it?  We have whole Civilizational structures around avoiding that class of lesser infohazards, spoilers they're called.  With, for example, simple codes you only memorize after you pass a competence check for a threshold level of sexual experience, so newspapers can print sentences that only sufficiently perverted people would be able to read without making a deliberate effort."

Carissa Sevar: "- huh. I guess that's fair enough. Does this mean that you should not be doing kinkiness challenges, because Golarion doesn't have such a norm and adventurers tend to tell stories about what they've gotten up to."

Keltham: "Eh.  New planet.  I'll get used to what's normal here.  Maybe don't spring it on me all at once and leave some for next time."

"Actually, I'm not quite sure what kind of perversion kinky is, I can tell it's, like, sexual diversity but the word doesn't directly translate.  Surprising me is fine, to be clear."

Carissa Sevar: "I mean, it's sort of a general word for everything that's not, you know, one man and one woman with no implements and no magic."

Keltham: "That covers an awful lot of space by itself, I would've said, but maybe I'm naive about how much more people get up to in their forties once they can afford nicer things and more participants."

Carissa Sevar: "I mean, I think people who tend to like tying people up also tend to like whipping them also tend to like dripping candle wax on them also tend to like having two of 'em you can get to do things with each other and also tend to like using control spells on them, so it forms a sort of - natural category?" Shrug. "Maybe the category is just general the thing you are calling 'perversion'."

Keltham: "Okay, haven't done any of that and if it ever got mentioned in the newspapers it was encrypted."

Wait WHAT.

Carissa Sevar: "It'd have to go awfully wrong to get mentioned in the newspapers."

Keltham: "Under other circumstances I'd say 'surprise me' but - what exactly is whipping?  What's a candle?  I can't quite make things out through this translation spell, but whipping sounds like pain and candles sound like fire.  I feel obliged to check that these activities won't require that we pay to resurrect each other afterwards."

Carissa Sevar: "Whipping is painful but, like, in a sexy way, not in a deadly way. Candles are a tiny bit of fire, people who don't have magic use them for lighting, and their wax melts at a low temperature so they're also painful but a sexy amount not an injurious amount. We're - not even talking about things you'd need healing for, though people do in fact get into things you'd need healing for."

Keltham: "Okay, and the concept is that you and I hire a member of some non-human species that... doesn't mind having it done to them?"

Carissa Sevar: "It's going to be so fascinating to settle some bets among your research group.

 Uh. Humans, are often into being hurt, in the context of sex, because pain is an intense experience and with the right surrounding context can be fun."

Keltham: "...okay I checked in with my inner self and if there's some later stage of my life where I would want to be tied up and hurt in a sexual context, I haven't at all gone down the path that leads there.  In fact my self seems to be - sort of weirdly violently against that happening to me, to a degree greater than I'd expect from small amounts of pain?  I've paid pain costs in nonsexual contexts, but this was just like a very loud inner NOPE.  I hope that's not too disappointing."

Carissa Sevar: "Men are more often the other way around, if anything, and it's the other way around we've got a betting pool on. Whether you like inflicting pain on interested parties in a sexual context. I have no idea how 'you were not aware that was a thing' cashes out, for that."

Keltham: "I... don't see why men or women would want to be hurt, in terms of the human mind design and the reproductive pressures producing it that I'm familiar with... pain is the damage signal, it's the sum of what we avoid so that we won't die and fail to have children... are you someone who enjoys pain inflicted on you in a sexual context?"

Carissa Sevar: " - point of theology, Cheliax conceives of pain as significantly more than just a - damage signal, not that being sexually into pain is limited to Cheliax or people who share our theology, or is even significantly more common here, I suspect it's innate. I have enjoyed pain in the context of sex, though the atmosphere matters a lot, you'd, ah, have to be good at it."

Keltham: "Okay, let me check in with what my brain thinks of pulling your hair in a sexual context if you enjoyed that in a sexual way and YEP somebody just won their bets on me alright."

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, good."

Keltham: "Huh."

"I'm reasonably sure that dath ilan never wanted me to notice that about myself."

Carissa Sevar: "...huh.

I guess dath ilan's really Good but that seems like one of the context where Good's just obnoxious."

Keltham: "Stuff in dath ilan doesn't happen without a reason.  It's not Golarion.  Let me think about this."

Keltham: Point one:  If the desire to inflict pain in a sexual context is sufficiently a human universal and sufficiently common that somebody on this plane of existence can spot the signs in Keltham before he knows them himself, the Keepers know about this already.  The probability of this need not be evaluated; it's a flat fact.

Keltham: Point two:  Not only has Keltham not been told about this, Keltham has never been exposed to any sexual education or priming which would cause him to think, if he did notice this fact about himself, that it was a good idea to pursue that thought further.  People don't want to be hurt; that is sort of what hurting is.

Having a strong sexual desire to inflict pain, according to everything that dath ilan has taught Keltham about the world, would mean that any attempt to satisfy this desire would involve an unusually mentally resilient sex worker being paid a lot of money to put up with a sexual experience that she didn't like.  If he got addicted, if his whole sexuality turned into that, the rest of his romantic life would suck really hard and probably never be truly satisfying again.  That would have been the obvious prediction, going on the obvious-intuitive reasoning Keltham would have done from everything Civilization ever taught him.

The thought that the world was full of other people who were the complements of that desire, who wanted to be sexily hurt, would just straightforwardly have never occurred to Keltham at all, if he'd spotted that desire in himself.

Keltham: That makes the answer obvious, doesn't it.

All he needs to do is guess, first, that Civilization prefers not to lie, and second, that natural selection in dath ilan worked the way it obviously-intuitively should.  By default, organisms don't like pain, and pain is what they don't like.

"Dath ilan has people who want to inflict pain sexually.  It doesn't have the people who want to be sexily hurt.  I'm not sure why they exist in Golarion, but whatever that reason was, it didn't operate in dath ilan.  That's why I was never supposed to notice."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. You know, that - actually sort of follows - one explanation I've seen for enjoying pain being more common in women is that it improves the odds of surviving rape and sexual slavery, and then the - thing you talked about in class, about who has more children -"

Carissa is having the somewhat upsetting realization that maybe it would be bad for dath ilani people if they went to Hell? if they've just completely eradicated the mechanism by which their brains translate pain into something more complex than just suffering?

Keltham: "I could wish these congratulations came under nicer circumstances, but congratulations anyways, you're learning to operate the theory validly."

Carissa Sevar: "I mean, I already knew about the bad stuff, I just didn't know we were getting anything good out of it. And - I think we are. Getting something good out of it, that is, something I'd definitely arrange for heredity-optimization to keep having - wow, I bet in Nidal it's everyone -"

Keltham: "I hope you're right about everyone in Nidal enjoying it, but even I'm starting to notice that sounds a little optimistic for Golarion."

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, Nidal is horrible and I bet everyone there is miserable, but I also bet that they have near-universal sex-related pain-enjoyment - sex-related pain-enjoyment doesn't give you context-free enjoyment of all pain, I did not enjoy getting punished for bad grades, and I've had sex with a girl who was into hurting me more than I could handle and that wasn't fun either."

Keltham: Blue and orange, Keltham thinks, as he notices it explicitly this time, how there's an alien reality here that doesn't make sense and his brain is trying to force it.  But he doesn't know the thread to pull to unravel this whole knot, all he can do is wibble the fringes of it.

"If you don't have money flows to make up for relationships that would be imbalanced like that - is there some class of things okay to trade, that aren't money, that you were getting out of that relationship instead?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, people trade - favors, protection, in that specific case a spell I really really wanted. It's not that people don't have sex for - reasons located outside the sex, they do that all the time, it's just culturally rather unheard of, to name a specific amount of money as a bid, and it's also traditional for it to be a bit ambiguous how much you are doing for what reasons."

Keltham: He's going to wait until later, in case it's somehow wrong and wronger if done in public, to ask Carissa how much hair-pulling he can trade for how much explanation of how the ass the flirting norms here actually work.

"Yeah, dath ilan has all kinds of dating ambiguity and mindgames, like you'd imagine from people with high intelligence and a lot more spare time, but the concept of never naming specific amounts of money - it's so not dath ilan, I can't easily convey it.  Anything worth anything is worth money.  Not just money in general, a specific amount of money.  It's 'the unit of caring' in our parlance."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, I am not surprised that dath ilan prefers forthrightness on the value-transfer elements of sex and flirting even if they like ambiguity elsewhere. I can see how you'd get used to it, even. But I think if you do it here you'll just confuse people terribly."

Keltham: "Is it literally just money or do I have to be careful not to offer anybody anything such that it would have a well-defined resale value..."

Carissa Sevar: "That is definitely sometimes done - spells have a resale value - but there are nuances and I might recommend running it by someone else first."

Keltham: "Is such conversation also bad on the metalevel?  If I asked everyone who'd be the best person to ask about which sexual offers are and aren't offensive, is that question itself even more offensive?"

Keltham has noticed that Golarion can sometimes be effectively predicted by asking himself how he would design a social protocol as badly as possible.

Carissa Sevar: "This conversation is fine. That question is fine. I promise we are not entirely made of impossibilities."

Keltham: Well, congratulations to Golarion on passing the bar that he set literally as low as he could imagine on short notice, but it's sure an improvement on undershooting it, so he'll take what he can get.

"I think I'm pretty much done with my dinner, myself.  You?"

Carissa Sevar: "I'm done. Up to the rooftops? Or have you rediscovered your sex drive in the course of this conversation?"

Keltham: Good question.  Keltham turns his attention inward, not quite able to stop himself from thinking how much clearer that perception was under Owl's Wisdom, how much easier and fuller the seeing of Keltham by Keltham.

"It sure is more there than it was when I walked in, maybe half from time passing and half from discovering high-payoff sexual options I never imagined possible.  Still, I think I want to start off the evening a little slower, and spending at least some time on the rooftop sounds good."

Carissa Sevar: Are people in dath ilan just that candid and self-aware all the time. How do they live. "Rooftop it is. Assuming we can find it. Do you want to ask security right away or go exploring ourselves." Normally the second would be a stunningly dangerous thing to do but security isn't going to let Keltham get exploded by a stray internal defensive measure.

Keltham: "Let's explore!  Though I'm trusting you that misguided exploration is either knowably not fatal, or that they'd resurrect us without too much fuss."

Carissa Sevar: Oh okay she'd been worried that 'this sort of thing is dangerous' is something that'd have him all shocked and appalled about what societies outside dath ilan are like but apparently it's allowed - "I expect this place has defenses that might in fact be fatal if triggered but that they have been very thoroughly disabled, Chelish security's not stupid and they don't want you to die. And if you did they'd resurrect you but I'm not relying too much on that because I'll be in lots of trouble if I get you killed, even though it'll take all of ten minutes to fix."

Keltham: Keltham rises from the table.  "Shall we?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah! You know, I figured I would live my whole life without getting to poke around a Duke's villa, I am very excited."

Keltham: "Your lead, then."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would attempt to trot up the massive entryhall staircase in a sexy way except she's not actually sure she knows how to do that, it's a skillset that definitely exists and that she has witnessed on display but not one she's had occasion to practice, and trying and failing to do it is pathetic. The natural default mode for exploring is more - cautious, giggly, childlike, and that is appealing in its own way - maybe to Keltham too - but not sexy, and she's going to be kind of dissatisfied if -

- one thing at a time. The massive entryhall staircase opens out onto a luxurious mezzanine and then there are two wings with rooms, presumably parlors and bedrooms and guest rooms and so on, and no obvious staircase up, though she knows that this place has some towers. "Do you have a sense of where the towers were, relative to where we are."

Keltham: Keltham tries to visualize the villa as seen from the courtyards they sometimes pass through.  "I don't think I actually remember, but I think there's a tower visible from a courtyard I think is that way, and then we'd know."  He gestures in a direction.

He's considering offering to hold hands, but maybe Cheliax considers handholding an unreasonably advanced form of erotic perversion practiced by only the most sexually degenerate individuals, only if he keeps asking about that sort of thing at every step, that'll take all night, but also holding hands seems not optimal for exploring and potentially sort of awkward for maneuvering, and do they even do that here, and...

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, all right, let's try in that direction."

Keltham: Off they go, then!

(He still hasn't asked about holding hands.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can't read his mind. Though she is aware that paradigmatic flirting in most places involves physical contact so they can - brush against each other, maybe, in tight spaces, which she can probably find if she tries hard and believes in herself - oh, here's a servant's hallway, meant for halflings and very cozy -

I WOULD APPRECIATE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE TOWER AND WILL PAY YOU SOMETHING REASONABLE FOR THEM she thinks loudly at security.

lintamande: Elias Abarco hates this particular girl by now but that's all the more reason to take a deal like that! "Door on your left," he whispers when she's far enough ahead Keltham won't hear it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn't even expect to regret this! Asmodeus personally is interested in her trajectory!! 

The door on her left opens in her hand, though she wouldn't have expected it to, and it's a grand bedroom, with a four-poster bed with sweeping velvet drapes and a fireplace and a sitting room and a dog bed fancier than anything Carissa's ever slept on. And it has a staircase up, a neat little spiral staircase with carpeted steps. 

Keltham: Bit weird and sparse for a bedroom, but everything here is like that.  "Stairs!  Is that as tower-promising as it looks to an outsider from another dimension?"

Carissa Sevar: "In this dimension, too, stairs often lead up to towers."

It would be - wise to try to arrange incidental physical contact here? But she doesn't think of handholding because that's not really a thing.

Keltham: Keltham has been thinking thoughts along not entirely dissimilar lines, and tries to match his steps to Carissa such that, if she was okay with that, they could try both going up these stairs in quite close proximity.  If she seems to be falling behind or pulling ahead, he won't fight that, of course.

Carissa Sevar: No, no, they can go up the stairs together, brushing shoulders a slightly unnecessary amount. 

There's something profoundly strange here and she doesn't know what it is. Maybe it's just the role reversal, that usually people are trying to seduce her. Maybe it's just that he's very young, and she hasn't dated teenagers since she was one, mostly at the Worldwound the interesting people have a decade on her because that's what makes them interesting, all the magic they know....maybe an adult dath ilani would be running rings around all of them, and that's why Asmodeus picked a teenager -

And then they're out at the top of the tower. Cheliax is not industrially advanced enough to have light pollution. The sky is very bright and very clear. 

Keltham: Dath ilan is too good at coordination to have either lots of aerosols in the atmosphere or lots of high-scattering non-red lights on at night all the time, and Keltham has ever been a tourist in clear cold high places where the stars are brighter yet.  It's not a new sight to him, except of course in the sense that -

"The patterns of the suns are different," Keltham murmurs.  He didn't get around to checking last night, with all the various rushes.  "I was wondering if this was a branched time of my own planet, in my own -" Taldane doesn't have a word that means galaxy - "larger structure of suns.  Didn't seem likely, but - anyway, it's definitely not."  Dath ilan doesn't have the notion of 'constellations' in quite the same way, but he doesn't see any of the patterns that a dath ilani would use to identify the Northern Star or Southern Center or the direction of a meteor shower.

Carissa Sevar: "I think you're from farther away than any of those stars. A very good wizard can teleport to those, and not to dath ilan."