1.1 - mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus

Carissa Sevar: Hey. - no, no, he's right, she should mind that.

Ferrer Maillol: Elias Abarco has brought up additional points that Sevar didn't bring up, which complicates this already-painful decision. And Abarco didn't bring up the critical point about only telling Keltham the sad little facts that are true in other countries, not just in Cheliax, which means he wouldn't have done well leaving the whole decision to Abarco.

Ferrer Maillol would, if he were alone, massage his forehead.

The Asmodean style of tyranny is not about spreading around responsibility so nobody seems to be at fault for making bad decisions. Those are weak tyrannies. There must be a single decision-maker on point, as is both efficient and Asmodean. That designated person must be Abarco, Sevar, or Maillol himself, and any of those three people screwing up gets Maillol equally blamed for it, which leaves the pure and simple question of which of the three is least likely to fuck up. Maillol is pretty sure that's not himself, which brings it down to two.

In the end, what decides him is simply that Abarco called Keltham 'insane'. It's not a judgment conducive to making the kind of detailed predictions necessary for the actual moment-to-moment decisions.

"Asmodeus help you and me, Sevar, I'm making it your call. Your goal directives are as follows: prioritize the amount of time we get before this falls down and Keltham breaks with us. Secondary priority, if possible, try to make Keltham think that he should take you or some other loyal woman with him if he leaves us. Do not bother worrying about Keltham's opinion of Cheliax after the whole thing blows up. He won't be happy, ship sailed. Just make sure we get as much as we can from him before then."

"Abarco. Advise Sevar well on this and all related matters, and report to me if you think she's fucking it up. If this project fails early and it looks like it was even slightly your fault for sabotaging her, I will make damned sure you die before I do."

"Balaguerre. Sevar gets transcripts of Keltham's words, and his thoughts on remaining occasions where we make the call to risk reading his thoughts. Sevar gets consulted on Keltham analysis and policy if there's time. Sevar takes initiative on answering him if she's inside the room. Sevar gets reports on any other decisions that get made without her about what to tell him and why."

"And give Sevar her fucking intelligence headband if we have a spare on hand. If we don't, give her a Fox's Cunning so she has something to work with for a few minutes while trying to make the call on Keltham. Then message at the next regular report that I want an intelligence headband delivered soonest, and if it's not here inside twenty-four hours then I will go looking for it and nobody wants to be there when I come looking." Maillol wishes he could just grab an intelligence headband from any of these fucking wizards who'll make less important use of it, but that is escalating way beyond just setting somebody on fire for a few hours, or at least wizards act that way.

Carissa Sevar: This is an important responsibility and she should not look all smug about it. - or maybe she should, because that's exercising the vice of pride, which she is naturally inclined towards? She should look mildly smug about it.

lintamande: There is not a spare headband on site. There has been something of a run on Cheliax's spare headband supply what with the dozen emergencies so far today. It shouldn't be a problem to get one in six hours. A transcript of Keltham's words so far is available for her to review now.

Ferrer Maillol: "Get her a Ring of Sustenance as well," Maillol orders. It'll take a week before they can get any extra hours of work out of Sevar that way, and Asmodeus knows if this project will still exist or if the combined weight of divine interventions on it will have collapsed Golarion; but if the project does still exist, he expects Sevar will have quite the lovely backlog of tasks by then. "Stores if we have one, otherwise add it to the requisition."

lintamande: "We have those." He hands one over.

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham also wants a headband, and ones for his other girls, and ones with Owl's Wisdom as well. I don't think I'll be able to keep up with him if he's got a headband as good as mine, he's not smarter but he's got - more of a force-multiplier." They could give her intrinsic intelligence boosts with Wish and then the headband on top of that but she is pretty sure at some point if she keeps pushing for intelligence enhancement she's going to reach the edge of their deeply bizarre commitment to not lighting her on fire. "I think I could tell him that they've been commissioned and will arrive in a week or two and that we can have one to pass around in the meantime, if we can in fact have one to pass around in the meantime."

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol isn't even slightly fooled by her hidden agenda, but it's not a hidden agenda which is detrimental to him so it's not like he disapproves. "Sevar, I don't care what Keltham wants, I care how much we get out of him. You don't just tell me what he asked for, any more, you tell me what happens if I say yes. What's your estimated effect on him if we supply him with one lesser intelligence headband and one lesser Wisdom headband to pass around? And if you think that's a good idea or bad idea for other reasons, don't make me ask you for your opinion. You're in the command structure now. Grow up. Grow up very quickly."

Carissa Sevar: "I think supplying him with a headband probably means he sees through us faster but not supplying him with a headband looks increasingly suspicious or incompetent. I expect the lectures will be higher quality if he has enhancement, and more useful to the students if they do, until it falls apart which will probably be sooner. Though his god can give him Wisdom himself so we can't make plans that rely on his not having it, and the costs of him having more of it are probably small, a fourth-circle cleric could have an hour a day anyway if his god decides to indicate he ought to spend the day reflecting by giving him nothing but - actually, what do we know about what - it's Abadar, right - wants here -"

Ferrer Maillol: "We know almost nothing specifically. As a matter of general theology, Abadar probably approves of the project even more than Asmodeus does, and wants Keltham's knowledge to spread beyond Cheliax eventually but doesn't feel strongly about whether Cheliax pulls ahead of Osirion for a while. His not giving Keltham any particular visions seems suggestive of a bargain with our Lord, possibly, and if so Abadar won't try to wriggle around inside whatever bargain He's struck with Asmodeus until Asmodeus wriggles first, which our own Lord will probably do eventually. Some of the spells we already know Keltham got from his open prayer are suggestive of Abadar not approving of the deception we're running on him, which is also theologically to be expected."

"A fact you may not know, Sevar - earlier thought-reading on Keltham showed him to be suspicious of externally supplied mind-affecting spells. It will be in your transcripts. Maybe we can play to that, find Keltham a book on the subject which mentions cursed forms of the item, or which claims that there's a higher-tier version of Fox's Cunning that you can use to make the recipient think they're smarter about particular subjects while actually not doing that. We've got a Wondrous Items enchanter working on a rush project to create tools so we can do edits to books more easily, and meanwhile we can get a forger-printer to stamp out individual alternate pages to splice in. Our wonderful new pet Nethys-worshipper does give us a way to send Keltham exactly the books we want him to have, and it explains why we're not just shipping him a dozen different ones."

"If that ploy fails, or if you think it's a bad idea to try, and Keltham does start wanting to wear his own headband - getting you a higher-tier intelligence headband is not something I can do in a day, Sevar. But your request and the reason for it has been noted."

"By tomorrow you'll also need to devise an explanation to Keltham for why you got your own private headband weeks ahead of the other women, if you want to wear it around him. If it's not a good enough explanation, you'll need to take it off around him. Do not give me any wizard shit about that." Maillol has very little sympathy for why wizards are under the impression that matters of intelligence headbands are an exception to the usual rules about shutting up and obeying orders, and Sevar is not high-circle enough for him to put up with it from her.

Carissa Sevar: "I have eight years on them and have gotten generous hazard pay that whole time for my service to Cheliax at the Worldwound. My salary from just the first two days was enough for the rest of the way to a headband, which I've been saving up for anyway; they're not going to be able to afford it for a while, because this is their first job ever and they're being very generously paid but not a headband every two days generously paid."

Ferrer Maillol: "Keeping in mind that a wrong answer to this question will get both of us killed, does Keltham believe that?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is unsure why he keeps reminding her of that!! She has never forgotten it even for half a second!! "If he has an objection it'll be a Kelthamish - it'll be that they ought to be really good candidates for a loan if they've got a guaranteed high salary for the next month, or something like that. But the loan process is probably complicated when the job is completely secret and also you can't honestly say you expect to have it in a month and also you can't go to the bank to do it, and also he expects us to be incompetent at things, if I say that loans on future income aren't really a thing he will just make his general face about Golarion. Look, I am not willing to die so I can wear an intelligence headband more, if I thought it would help for me to take it off around him I'd take it off around him, but it's around him that I keep being not quick enough and smart enough to manage things, I can't reason it out cleverly in advance and then just execute while slightly stupider because I don't get him well enough to predict his exact reactions yet. If when I put the headband on I actually suddenly can predict him in advance then I'll take it off around him but Abarco can't predict him in advance and he's got a plus 4 -"

Ferrer Maillol: He casts an orison that lashes her in the face, hard enough to do an exactly trivial amount of damage to a third-circle wizard. Hell wouldn't have instructed them to punish Sevar no less than she earned, if she was never going to earn any punishments. "Keep me informed of your judgments. Don't argue them at me. You're very obviously driven to get an intelligence headband and wear it, Sevar. There's justifications for that, good enough to get me to go along with it. It's also a very standard form of wizard bullshit, and the way that you will argue with your superiors about this one topic makes it clear that you are a very standard wizard in this regard."

"We're done here. Sevar, with me, Balaguerre, make sure someone's around who can cast Fox's Cunning on her when she requests it."

Carissa Sevar: If it's only wizards that think it's important to be smarter then maybe that's what's wrong with the church of Asmodeus in Golarion. Keepers would want to be smarter, she bets - they'd be careful about it but they'd want it -

She keeps this to herself.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol is heading back to his office. Once they're out of range of the security office - if not of security - he speaks again. "Word of warning, Sevar. Keltham is right that our usual schools teach people what to think, not how to think, and I should hardly need to say that the reason is that if they did their own thinking they'd fuck it up. Unless your vision succeeds far beyond what any reasonable person would expect, a Chelish academy based on Keltham-style teaching is going to have two kinds of people in it: Priests of Asmodeus, and citizens valuable enough that they qualify for our very limited soul-sale slots. If I'd realized that faster we could've brought in older women who'd already sold their souls, and not used up a hell of a lot of our project's slack on having a bunch of baby wizards do it, but what's done is done."

"I may be reading too much into Hell's instructions - we get told not to put too much weight on exact wordings that passed through three increasingly less intelligent devils on their way from Asmodeus to us - but it seems to me that Asmodeus gave you four instructions in order, and they may have been an order of priority. Serve Him well in this world, don't fall to heresy, figure out the differences between yourself and an axiomite, and become the kind of soul Asmodeus wishes mortals were and join His most treasured possessions. If all we learn from Keltham is tricks for smelting vast quantities of high-quality metal, it will not, in fact, make this project a failure in the eyes of Church and Queen, even if that falls short of your own ambitions for it."

Carissa Sevar: " - understood." But what if you could teach them a better what to think, one that held together against more of their own impulses - but he's right, that no one else can reasonably bet on that just off Carissa wanting it and Asmodeus thinking Carissa worth steering.

Ferrer Maillol: "You're not accustomed to being in the inner circle where you are expected to do your own thinking and put your life on the line for getting it right. Usually people get brought into it less abruptly than you, and it's possible I'm going to get called up on having trusted you more than you earned, contrary to Hell's instructions. My belief is that you earned it by understanding Keltham better than Abarco does, but you also haven't held that much responsibility before and my decision to dump it on you is going to look lethally questionable if you fuck it up. I cannot guarantee that I wasn't influenced by knowing, or thinking I knew, that you were a competent enough person to come to the momentary attention of a god. Asmodeus help us all if He was trying to tell us exactly not to do what I just did, by trusting you more than you'd earned. But we also got told to trust you no less than you'd earned, so."

"That's all to frame an important point, Sevar, which is that the theological discussions that Asmodean priests hold among themselves are different from the way you learned theology out in the cold. We do not sound like fucking Keltham, because we are not fucking outsiders. But if a new priest has an affinity for slavery, and a fifth-circle priest specializes in tyranny, the fifth-circle priest doesn't tell her to shut up and write down the standard answers he gives her about slavery."

"From the standpoint of tyranny, feeling gratitude for Asmodeus owning us is how we tell the common people to feel about it, because it's a simple fucking answer that won't get them in trouble. Occasionally, though, Asmodeus goes and makes a bed-slave His cleric, which shows that His true priorities do not always match those that we harried and overworked mortals try to set. We almost always decide to wait on perfecting souls into the exact shape Asmodeus prefers until they get safely to Hell. Asmodeus cares in ways we don't even try to care, because it's not productive when we try to do it. If that bed-slave feeling some exact form of gratitude for being a slave was a vital part of what our Lord wishes mortals were like, you may need to wait for a priest who understands slavery more deeply than I do, to tell you that, because instructing me in those details wasn't the Church's own priority for a Worldwound administrator."

"You have tyranny questions? I can answer those in endless detail, and you'd be stupid to argue until you understand Asmodeanism a lot better. But I will be checking some of the answers I gave you about slavery and pride, the next time I run into a superior of mine who has a moment. That's as much priority as I'd give to a fourth-circle priest asking me those questions, if the fourth-circle priest didn't tell me they were more urgent."

"Final warning. Don't get lost in all these fascinating questions you're supposed to think about for the first time. Asmodeus instructed you to serve Him well in this world first."

"Are we done, Sevar? I'll still be here if you have more questions another day, and you said Keltham was waiting on you." Maillol thinks and hopes this is exactly as much slack for interrupting him as he'd cut a fourth-circle cleric on urgent project business who was interrupting him for the first time.

Carissa Sevar: She does not exactly feel readier to answer Keltham. "We're done."

Ferrer Maillol: "Go with Hell's unusually personal blessing, Sevar." He taps her with the Guidance orison for the little bit that's worth.

Carissa Sevar: "Was someone going to get me a Fox's Cunning -"

And then someone does, by jabbing her in the shoulder. After this she's going to need to work on having a better working relationship with Abarco.

Fox's Cunning feels good, it feels right, and she's been told to correct for that, she's been told it's a flaw common to wizards, and she's not willing to trade her life for more of it so she's going to do what she was told and not reach for it more than she already has.

She closes her eyes and tries to drive out everything except the questions she has to answer tonight.

First, serve Asmodeus in this world. Get close to Keltham, close enough that when he gets sick of Cheliax he takes you with him. Hold things together for long enough to learn new things about metalworking, new things about everything else that makes dath ilan prosperous, but keep in mind that the thinking is not the priority for the Chelish government or the Church. They might be making a mistake, and Carissa might be poised to correct them, but they probably aren't making a mistake, and they won't believe her now.

- she has the option of telling Keltham that. Not tonight, but it's a thought to tuck away for later, it's not damning, that the Chelish government trusts the metalworking to lead somewhere useful more than the habits of mind.

- Keltham's sideways habits of inference are not, in fact, sideways, they're going to be a perfectly natural outgrowth of the things he's taught them in class, right now 'you don't know what he'll infer from a given bit of information' might be the best unenhanced Carissa can do but she needs that to stop being true as quickly as possible, replaced with the exact habits of inference herself, and it might not even be the best unenhanced Carissa can do; it's certainly not the best she can do now. In fact her mind is now rather spamming possibilities. Keltham thinks in - some theory of human psychology that extends from education to sex, it has gears even if she doesn't know them. He doesn't think sideways, he thinks in theories that make things be connected. He arrived in Golarion and noticed that it wasn't all women and went up to the theory about sex balances and where they came from and down again to know that mortals weren't made by gods. He noticed that people were wearing fixed cheerful expressions in class and went up to some theory about people and down again to how those kinds of people might be having sex. Carissa deeply wants to know this theory. Carissa manages to wrench her attention away from how much she wants to know this theory. Keltham wouldn't be stuck thinking about that if he didn't want to be, she's seen inside his mind.

Keltham thinks in equilibriums; he notices when a strategy seems possible to deviate profitably from without being punished. Keltham is from a societal context where competence at deception is not itself a valuable thing to signal, because deception is basically frowned upon in every context. Last one feels most immediately fruitful, though it's easier than it was a moment ago to hold the other ones apart and not subtly downgrade them in her mind because she's started following the third. Keltham didn't parse them as 'signaling competence at deception' because you signal things you want people to know about and even if you want to be deceptive you wouldn't want people to know you want to be deceptive. Whereas in Cheliax - wait, check, is this only true in Cheliax, because if not she'd better not say it -

- she should have a specific other country in mind when she tells Keltham how Cheliax works. Now that she thinks of it it seems very obvious. Keltham will be incredulous and disbelieving even about things she knows to be functional equilibriums, but that doesn't mean that every lie she can think of telling is equally credible as a functioning equilibrium. Societies are complicated and she can't invent 'Cheliax but LN', but she can tell Keltham how some place he wouldn't flee from works. Taldor is the obvious one. She doesn't know all that much about Taldor but she's met people from there, and it's culturally descended from Cheliax unlike Osirion or some place where she can't represent how the people there would explain themselves. The main thing everyone knows about Taldor is that it has a weak crown and too many dukes and counts who think too highly of themselves, and it's been wracked with civil war periodically for a long time, not falling only because the crown is old, and rich, and can hold Oppara where their power is invested no matter the madness that goes on beyond its walls. Quick check: has she claimed anything about Cheliax actively contradicted by that. She doesn't think so. Has anyone else -

- she can delegate that, she has authority here -

"I need someone to check whether anyone has said anything to Keltham that would be inconsistent with Cheliax being approximately Taldor in political organization and culture until the Church backed the right side in the most recent civil war and Hell sent some people to try to shape the crown up."And now she's followed that train of thought far enough and needs to pull back and contemplate an entirely different one - she can see, from here, how she's been neglecting that before, going with her intuition until it is actually surprised or contradicted somewhere -

- Keltham has a general theory of human nature that is surprised by Golarion, not just by Cheliax, so he's missing something, and it'd be useful to figure out what, both because she might want to tell him and because it'll help with verisimilitude. He's missing - and her mind is spamming possibilities again, not that she's confident in any of them - that people signal negative qualities. That people prefer for other people to lose; that people have values actively incompatible with other people getting what they want, that people are bad enough at thinking that trying to make them think about something is dangerous - many of these are too specifically Chelish -This would be much simpler if she could make Keltham tell her all the theories he uses to understand people. Maybe she can sell her superior - or just the one superior, now - on the theory that if they ask Keltham to explain those parts, Keltham will be easier to fool.- set that aside too, flagged as maybe possibly coming from the part of her that is tempted to trade off lifespan against intelligence headbands.Keltham has learned more from them than they've learned from him. He is surprised by Golarion, he is missing something, he underadjusts or overadjusts or adjusts along completely wrong dimensions but he's notably much less wrong than he was a day ago, already. They will not be able to hide things in the vast fog of his confusion for very long, because he is narrowing it. They should tell him less, if they possibly can. They should say it's not the priority that gets their project more support and headbands delivered earlier. They should say they don't know. They should find legitimately very important questions they can ask Keltham instead of spending lots of time explaining things to him. She should find something simple to say to him about sex, that's true everywhere in Golarion, and only later, if ever, ask him to explain theories.

It's not a pleasant thought, not the answer that she wanted inside at all, and Carissa might not have managed to think it before she saw inside Keltham's head.Fox's Cunning wears off and leaves her - tired. And in a bad mood. And now she - still doesn't feel any closer to figuring out what to say to Keltham - but she remembers the direction she'd found when she was smarter, and she knows perfectly well how being smarter works, that it's a glimpse of a person you want to grow up to be, even if you have to be dragged kicking and screaming, because it's not always pleasant for the tiny stupid things that humans are to grow into bigger smarter things..."Is he still on the roof." "Yes," Elias says irritably.She hurries.

Keltham: It got a little cold and lonely up on the roof without Carissa to lean against.

Keltham solved this problem by going down, wandering around randomly for a bit, not seeing any security anywhere he looked, calling out for "Security?" in a not especially loud voice, seeing somebody step around a corner a third of a minute later, and, you know, you would think that if this whole place had elaborate tunnels in the walls for security to hide, and that was being kept secret and not told to him, they would be hiding this fact by having some visible security officers but fine. Anyways, Keltham then asked if there was such a thing as magic to keep him warm, since the roof had no obvious switchable infrared-lamp-heaters, and the problem got solved.

After that, the roof was about as good a place to think as his bedroom, with an increased probability of later Carissa materialization.

Keltham is currently wondering if maybe Golarion just sort of... collectively lacks the form of Law-aspiring thought where, if you have a problem, you try to think of a way you could rearrange reality such that you wouldn't have the problem anymore.

It would explain everything he's seen, in one sense. But explains too many things he hasn't seen, in another. Somebody invented stairs as a solution to the problem of climbing to the roof, thereby falsifying the general form of the theory. Maybe that was before they invented wizard-based contraception and bred intelligence out of themselves, though? Or maybe devils told them how to make stairs.

(He's aware it's not a very plausible theory. But sometimes when you don't get something, it can be productive to play with impossible theories, or even frustrated yelling at reality, in case that knocks something loose; so long as you don't just keep on doing that.)

Carissa Sevar: "Hey you. - oh, it's warm up here."

Keltham: Oh, good. "It was getting too cold for me all by myself without you, so I reacted to this unsatisfactory state of reality by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alterative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, which led to me asking a security officer if there was any magic for staying warm."

(By a similar line of reasoning, Keltham was considering sex with Ione if Carissa never returned and he felt sufficiently disappointed about that.)

Carissa Sevar: What is that supposed to mean???"Well, I reacted to the unsatisfactory state of reality where I had no idea how to communicate to you about sex by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alternative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, and getting advice from someone smarter, and the conversation ended up mostly being about other things but I do have an explanation about the sex thing. Does dath ilan have social deception games?"

Keltham: "We sure do have games with social deception, and parts of society where it's understood to be fun if we let things play out in a - competitive, deceptive way - but we try to keep it out of science and commerce and management and politics, or any other context where getting it right matters more than getting it fun. Both kinds of sexual negotiation exist, but in dath ilan it'd always be very clear which kind of sexual negotiation you were in at any given time."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. In Golarion people mostly do the games-with-social-deception kind of sex, and I wasn't actually planning to because my incentives are very strongly tilted against accidentally confusing or alarming or upsetting you, but we don't strictly delineate them and I wasn't assuming you weren't planning to, and I was slightly worried the entire concept is one Good people don't invent. I am glad that they do, they'd be missing out on a lot of fun."

Keltham: "I do not, in fact, understand the thought process whereby this was a sufficiently worrying thought that you needed to consult your best local equivalent of a Keeper, but it's okay that I don't understand that - I don't expect to understand everything for a fair while - and you don't need to explain it in any more detail, if you'd rather do other things with our time. I express clear acceptance and affordance for you to suddenly need to go check with Keepers while talking to the alien, whether it was yourself you were trying to protect by doing that, or me."

"I don't know whether my own statement there makes any psychological sense to you, as something that a person would naturally say in my position, but it's a sincere speech-act for whatever that's worth."

Carissa Sevar: "I think I understood around the edges of it. If I'd properly had that thought in so many words I would've just said it but instead I just noticed the confusion and all of the attempts I generated to communicate it started a hundred steps back in very confusing territory, which I am going to blame on all this talking to an alien miscalibrating me about how impossible to expect communication to be. And now I think I do want to do other things with our time, if you want to."

Keltham: "Sounds good to me. Retrieve an item from the conversational recursion layers all the way back to dath ilani sex technology questions, or pick up somewhere else?"

Carissa Sevar: "Sex technology! Is there sex technology for turning into a dragon so you can have sex as a dragon."

Keltham: He leans back against her, like when they were on this part of the conversational stack before, restoring the state of the earlier function call.

"Probably not, and I'm considering how close somebody has gotten, but first I need to know what a 'dragon' might be."

Carissa Sevar: "They are reptilian, magic - what we call sorcerers, they don't have to shape the magic deliberately, they can do it from intuition - and don't die of old age, they just keep growing larger. Ancient ones are a thousand feet long, and wouldn't be able to fly at all if they weren't very very magic by that point. ....usually people Polymorphing into dragons to have sex go for smaller ones, because Polymorphing things much larger and more magical than your native form requires very powerful spells. They breathe fire, or spit acid, or various other nasty things depending on planar affinities."

Keltham: "Yeah, we can't actually do that. Closest anybody would've come materially would be building a giant mechanical thing that could have sex with you or that you could control to fuck somebody. And though it's sort of a cheating answer, well, cheating is technique, so: I expect that the closest people have come to that experience is that there's probably some set of drugs you can get in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods which will let you, I don't know, put on a costume or stare at a moving picture, and experience that you are a dragon with some amount of hallucinatory sensory remapping. But if I have to resort to saying that's how we'd do it, then you win in terms of the technology question."

Carissa Sevar: "To be fair I can't personally do that either! As a mere third circle wizard I can turn into any woman you've ever met or heard of but only for six minutes and they have to be humanoid."

Keltham: "Okay, I hopefully won't have to suddenly go meta too often, but for purposes of rapidly learning how romance works around here, that was totally a probe to find out what kind of women I find physically attractive, right? Where the fact that you can and will call any bluffs by transforming into that person forces me to be honest. And on my side, I can choose between flattering you by listing women who look more like you, or teasing you by listing, say, Lrilatha? Because that would - not that this is a problem or anything - that would definitely be Complicated Romance rather than Straightforward Romance in dath ilan."

Carissa Sevar: "- huh. That's - Straightforward Romance around here, Complicated Romance involves hiring specialized seduction devils to test peoples' monogamy commitments who've made them or something. Anyway I don't have much riding on being your type because every girl you're going to find here's got light brown skin and dark brown eyes and hair. ...saying Lrilatha would be a Complicated Romance response because the possibility is real that she'd hear about it, I think maybe my mental delineation is whether we have introduced non-romance stakes..." She's kind of bad at...not telling Keltham things....this is a bad thing to be bad at!!!

Keltham: "Oh ho, are there other varieties of girl to be found elsewhere in Golarion? Perhaps I should ask for pictures before I decide."

Carissa Sevar: " - are there not, in dath ilan? Peoples native to different countries look different, they have dark skin near the equator and people far up north are very pale with very light hair and people in Tian Xia look - Tian, I don't know how to describe it exactly but it's very distinctive, their face shapes are different and their hair is finer and thinner and black even though they are pale."

Keltham: "We - don't have that, no, because anyone can go anywhere with a quarter day's cost of labor. Even if we started out with less travel, way back when - after a few generations of everybody mating with everybody all over the planet, I guess all the heritages just blended together. People probably cared at all about preserving variety of appearance, back when that variety was dying out, it's just, there's so many other things to select on, when you try to decide who you're going to have kids with... and it's so much not a place where it'd be Governance's place to solve the collective problem by telling people they needed to start doing assortative mating on appearance instead. Forbidden costs, not much of a reward. Even in dath ilan we can't get all the public goods at once."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. Well, that makes two things Golarion has going for it on the sex front, a reasonable match of sadism and masochism and distinctive races. I have heard Chelish men assert that northern girls are the prettiest but they were at the Worldwound and might've been just trying to win points with the locals."

Keltham: - Couldn't Carissa just observe whether they said the same thing around only other Chelish people?- Not being able to clearly tell on the meta-level whether or not it is currently a time for social deception games to be going on seems super inconvenient and like somebody could get hurt!!

Keltham sets it aside; he does not need to solve all puzzles simultaneously, more evidence will arrive in time, and if jumping at every confusion prevents him from ever getting laid then this would constitute a symptom of meta-level dysfunction. Like, it's one thing to do that when confusions happen once an hour, but another to do it when they happen once per minute.

Instead Keltham says, "Now I really want to ask what you think is the best thing Golarion has going for it sexually, but, spoilers."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I don't know if it's a spoiler if we can't do it. There's a seventh circle spell called Waves of Ecstasy which incapacitates everyone around with overwhelming pleasure and I don't think that's the best thing Golarion has to offer but if it were it seems like it wouldn't really be a spoiler for our evening, myself not being seventh circle. Yet."

Keltham: "That sure does sound like the absolutely classic example of something you'd only see in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods. Wait, wizard spells are like that because they've mostly got to be useful in combat, right? Is there a class of combats someone can best fight with Waves of Ecstasy? Because that sounds like..." Taldane doesn't have the word for trope. "A particular literary theme."

Carissa Sevar: "I think it's a modification of a very similar spell that incapacitates everyone around less pleasantly? But no, there are no monsters I've ever heard of whose secret weakness is sexual pleasure."

Keltham: "And Golarion doesn't have the thing where, if there were monsters like that, you wouldn't find out until you passed a sexual experience test. So if you haven't heard about them, they probably don't exist. Check?"

Carissa Sevar: "Some places in Golarion might have something like that but Cheliax does not withhold any information about the weaknesses of monsters from its soldiers deployed at the Worldwound, so yes."

Keltham: "...right. Sometimes I forget that you're a seasoned emergency response official on a level where - I don't even know who in Civilization would be comparable to you. Even best-on-continent championship medical responders probably don't stack up to literally actually fighting alien invaders every day."

Carissa Sevar: "There are championship medical responders? How do you evaluate them against each other, presumably they haven't all addressed the same emergencies!"

Keltham: "Standardized trials, of course! With prediction markets about performance under real future possibilities, in case somebody is only-testing-well in a way that the markets can notice."

"Oh, you were probing about people I find attractive, so. I can't show her to you until I learn an illusion spell, and maybe something that boosts my memory, but in terms of people I would've screwed if I could've made it to where I could screw almost anyone compatible-and-available... ah, background. There's this one woman who was, on scores alone, the second-best endurance medical responder for a region containing a quarter of the planetary population. She wasn't the person you'd call in for one person having a brief medical emergency, she was the person whose performance degraded the least if she had to work for sixteen hours straight. Except at her level, never mind sixteen hours, she could go for like thirty."

"Now consider all of the Alien Invasion Rehearsal people, and the sections of Governance who think about weird scenarios where, for some reason, you can't send in ten medical techs, you have to send one medical tech who works ten times as long. Everybody wanted her in their weird emergency response plans. The number one endurance medical responder for her region wasn't into working with Governance on weird scenarios nearly as much, or the number one people for other regions, they just wanted to spend all their time responding to medical emergencies, go figure. So she was like spending half her time on actual patients, and half of her time maintaining all of her certifications for being hypothetically called in on every imaginable kind of weird medical emergency by every branch of Exception Handling. Lots of people watching the transmitted moving pictures of her doing that, treating simulated aliens that famous authors dreamed up, things like that. She was rank 5 famous, only one in a hundred thousand people had more identity recognition than her. If you were really lucky you might personally see her simultaneously treating four pretend wounded bodies during an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival." Or during an Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival, which was when Keltham had actually been pretend-nearly-killed by the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military and gotten his game life saved by her in person. "And also she was pretty. Merrin, was her name."

He'd almost said 'Miran', but remembered the difference between her game alias and her real name barely in time, which is a little embarrassing for somebody who was once your teenage crush.

Carissa Sevar: Because it is entirely hypothetical, the idea of a crisis where one person might need to work for thirty hours straight. Carissa, being a wizard, hasn't done it, herself and she can certainly appreciate the exceptional talent inherent in not having your performance degrade over the course of thirty hours, but clerics, at the Worldwound, work hours like that during every rush, at least once every month.

To be the right trade for Asmodeus Keltham does not have to solve everything, or even half a percent of everything.

If he teaches us metalworking, that would be enough.

" - neat," she says, and giggles. "How do ...Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals go."

Keltham: "Well, just because we don't have endless hordes rushing at us from the Chaotic Evil afterlife doesn't mean we'd like to all pathetically roll over and die if someday we did get invaded, though usually we'd suppose them to be invading with machines or cleverness. So we try to prepare ourselves, rehearse for it, just in case. Some of the best writers and the best just-in-case military people - and maybe some Keepers, I don't know - all get together, and plan out how they would invade us if they were aliens with particular capabilities. Then during the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival they get to tell us, this city got wiped out, or everybody in this region just got mind-controlled, or whatever, and then everybody in the region who got mind-controlled will pick up whatever pretend weapons they get issued and rush over to pretend to try to kill the rest of us. And, I mean, that also increases resilience if someplace gets hit by a catastrophic earthquake, because people have rehearsed who to coordinate with and which houses to check and how to look for bodies before their brains rot, that sort of thing. But running it as an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival instead is more fun."

Carissa Sevar: "Sex technology: sexy alien invasion rehearsal festivals, yes or no."

Keltham: "Has absolutely happened on a citywide scale, but only in a city where everybody opted into that and all the underage kids got sent away for that day."

Carissa Sevar: "Are kids not allowed to participate in sexy alien invasion rehearsal - I guess they probably wouldn't have passed their competence tests -"

Keltham: "Well everything is a spoiler at that age."

Carissa Sevar: "Are you supposed to figure it all out yourself?? I feel that this would lead to some hilarious misconceptions! Like the jokes about peasants who go to a priest thinking they're infertile and it turns out they just hadn't known you're supposed to put it in."

Keltham: "You try for a period to see where you end up on your own and then you learn about the standard optimal way of doing it. As opposed to, I don't know, starting out by knowing all about how it goes? That sounds a lot less exciting."

Carissa Sevar: Girls would get pregnant. If they didn't know how to avoid that.

Carissa has been specifically directed to stop entertaining opinions about things like that. It's bad for her eternal soul. And to stop telling Keltham things for no reason. It's bad for her longevity. "Maybe another thing we're doing all wrong for foolish reasons," she says. "I guess you could ask the girls if there's anyone who has no idea what she's doing."

Keltham: "That sounds a biiit more dangerous in a world where there's serious diseases transmitted by sex and no cheap contraception, though I guess a wizard could afford to solve both of those... but you don't seem like you'd be able to afford clever infrastructure for keeping secrets like that, from only exactly the people who can afford to stay ignorant? So I'm mostly guessing you're joking?"

Carissa Sevar: Aaaaaargh he's already good enough at inference it's hard to gloss over things - "Yeah, I would be surprised if you found any takers in Cheliax. There are some countries that protect their daughters from sex by not letting them near men instead of by telling them about it, so I guess you could try to meet those, once we steal all the women from all the countries that don't let them do things."

Keltham: That's the most horrible take on spoiler protection that Keltham has ever heard.

"I suppose they may as well get some benefit out of it, yes. But it wouldn't be me having sex with them? I already know where to put it, unless the people older than me have been hiding the real target area."

Carissa Sevar: And spoiler-protected people are supposed to only play with each other? She's not going to ask. " - I think it's sweet how you get angry about the women in the countries that don't let them do things. I get angry about that but most people don't and I think I started feeling specifically fond of you as an individual instead of as the vehicle for the most important thing that I can reasonably do when you first heard about it and decided we should steal them."

Keltham: "You're angrier than average, huh? Guessing that's not so much because it was your choice of diverse cause area, and more because there's so many even worse things to worry about in Golarion if you pick based on calculation instead of emotional pull."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes. Other people are being entirely reasonable and I can't defend my fondness for the idea against fixing some other equally bad or worse thing but the one that happens to make me angry is that one."

Keltham: "It is a reasonable thing to be angry about. I - will not mind if all of you take it a little slower on telling me even more things to be even angrier about, if there isn't any reason I need to know right away. Rapidly learning about lots of things to be angry about does not sound optimal for my mental state. I'm not a Keeper."

(Yet, says a tiny voice inside him, which Keltham decides after a due pause is probably due to internal pessimization over things for internal voices to say, rather than due to internal prediction from knowledge he hasn't acknowledged to himself.)

Carissa Sevar: "And that's also the advice I got from someone who sort of was." In a manner of speaking. Well, not at all actually, she thought of it herself, but it's a good excuse to stop telling him things, which she should. "That - I should be aiming at telling you about decision-relevant bad things rather than about ensuring that in the smallest possible time interval you know all of the awful things in a world full of them, except we don't totally understand your decision procedures so I shouldn't try to have that much ownership of it on my own, but that - it seemed likely to him we might err on the side of trying to press right on through every awful atrocity that Chelish parents protect their children from knowing of - and I know more of them than a usual adult, even, because of the Worldwound.

We can - take it a bit slower. You're bearing up very well under it, but - uh, conventional wisdom in Cheliax which you might think is very foolish is that the more important someone's business the more important they have lots of nice things."

Keltham: "Well, sure, that's why we coordinate to pay people who produce public goods for us, and why it's considered a good thing that people who produce not-so-public goods become wealthy too. You want to incentivize people to do important things, and you also want them to be less distracted by unimportant things. If I didn't have something in my model producing that conclusion already, I'd have been confused why your society was giving me what is, by your standards, very expensive living conditions."

"Just to be clear, I want to know it all eventually, I am not that much of a not Keeper, especially in a world that's much more dangerous. But if nothing else, there's got to be more sensible ways of prioritizing what I need to learn first, than prioritizing it by how much it shocks me."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, of course. But I notice that now, tonight, we keep getting distracted away from nice things with horrible ones, despite agreeing that you need nice things very much, and I propose that that means we're doing something wrong."

Keltham: "You make a compelling case. All right, let's see if we can go the entire rest of the night without talking about anything horrifying. Well, except that at some point before dawn tomorrow, I have to test my remaining cleric spells, and any appropriate warning signs on those should in fact be clearly laid out to me. But when it comes to everything else, if for some reason I need not to do something in the cuddleroom, and the reasons are horrifying, you can totally not tell me why, just, not to do it. And even if the reasons aren't horrifying, you still shouldn't tell me, to maintain plausible-deniability." Oh, Taldane has a single syllable word for that, that's helpful.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Don't turn into a girl with red hair and creepy fangs. That's all I've got but I'll let you know more if I think of them."

Keltham: She totally did that on purpose. "Right then. Don't turn out to be asexual." See how you like hearing about what is very clearly going to be a very interesting story that isn't going to be explained right now.

Carissa Sevar: What does that even mean. It does not quite parse as 'celibate' and is obviously the opposite of 'sexual' but she doesn't know how to have sex in an un-sexual fashion if she wanted to! "I'll do my best while not knowing what that is."

Keltham: "Some people don't have any sexual desires, or they don't find it in themselves except under very rare conditions, and obviously if you're the first sort and wish you weren't, you're never quite certain you're not secretly the second kind... wait, that's a sad thing, shouldn't have said it."

Carissa Sevar: "If we were having advanced sex instead of beginner sex I would propose that we hit people when they say sad things. Maybe for beginner sex we could tickle people when they say bad things? With a feather - are there tickle technologies -"

Keltham: "Oh, wow, there are people who gain arousal points from being tickled? Because I am pretty sure I wouldn't, though I suppose we could very briefly try."

Keltham decides not to say, because it would be another sad thing, that unless there's a secret population of dath ilani who do gain arousal from being tickled, a torture machine is not something you would be allowed to sell even in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods. Well, maybe if you put intrinsic surveillance technology into it and only let people use it on themselves so they could practice being way too mentally disciplined. Or maybe the Keepers have some incredibly unpleasant technology hidden for extremely unlikely emergencies.

Carissa Sevar: "Point to Carissa in the sex games wars - yes, there are people who gain arousal points from being tickled, and even more who gain arousal points for futile-ly struggling to avoid being tickled!!"

Keltham: Keltham visualizes this. Boops the same internal part that was booped by hair-pulling, check. "I wonder if I would be the first dath ilani to ever build a tickling machine. It would automatically be the best tickling machine ever, unless people here have built even better ones."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you know, we do our best with our deficient tech level but I bet richer people can build more terrifying tickling machines."

Keltham: "Hmmm! I suppose to be properly terrifying it should chase you down, snatch you up, and maybe hold you there while the tickle devices approach closer and closer. Which is going to take magic if I want to build it here without waiting an additional one hundred years to climb the technology ladder first. Is that cheating? I ask because I like to know whether what I'm doing is cheating, not because I'm going to do it any differently depending on your answer."

Carissa Sevar: "It seems to me like it might be complicated, building a tickling machine while trying to prevent the escape of your ticklee. You could call in security but that would be cheating."

Keltham: "Oh, the idea is that you build the tickling machine in advance, and don't tell them about that, so it can be a sudden cuddleroom surprise. But I can see how a thought that Chaotic wouldn't occur to such a very Lawful woman from such a very Lawful country."

Carissa Sevar: "Luring women into your cuddleroom under false pretenses to surprise them with tickle-machines? I wouldn't have believed you capable of it!! And I am delighted to be wrong!"

Keltham: "All romantic relationships in Golarion are competitive deceptive ones, right? I don't even have to put up a warning sign saying it might happen. It's just assumed."

Carissa Sevar: "Indeed. You still aren't even cheating. The cuddlerooms all have implicit signs: beware, may contain tickle machines, and dangerous boys, and possibly the sexy kind of dragon."

Keltham: "This explains a lot about why people here never go into the cuddlerooms and just have sex in their bedrooms instead."

Carissa Sevar: "We built great elaborate cuddlerooms, but then we got carried away and filled them up with goblins and mimics and treasure chests and traps and spike pits, and they were too dangerous for all but the bravest adventurers, and we retreated defeated to have sex in our beds."

Keltham: "Probability 1 that this has totally happened multiple times in dath ilan with somebody putting way too much overengineered sextech in their thousand-labor-hour cuddleroom."

Carissa Sevar: "If everyone has sex in their cuddleroom, is it kinky to have sex in your bed? Like having sex on your dining room table, except comfier than that?"

Keltham: "Seems slightly mildly naughty, yes. Though you'd want a very advanced self-cleaning bedroom. Or more likely, a spare bedroom you could use instead, until you, or somebody you hired at a high price, cleaned out all the lubricants and other fluids."

"Well, I guess you could just have quick uncomplicated sex on the bed that didn't call for much of anything to be externally lubricated? But that seems to defeat the point of the kinkiness, which is, I assume, to wreck the bedroom as much as possible in the course of having complicated sex in it."

Carissa Sevar: "Now, room wrecking sex, we don't actually have much of that, probably because of how we are terribly poor. Most decent beds can stand up to having someone chained to them for hours of exciting adventures. As long as no one turns into a dragon."

Keltham: "There's a proverb that goes: If you've never broken a... cuddling device you don't have a name for... you're not having vigorous enough sex. Of course then they started making ones that would not break under any realistic circumstances and the proverb became obsolete, but it stayed in the language."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, with magic healing I feel we should be able to one-up you, but I admit I am not sure how. If you've never broken a...spine you're not having vigorous enough sex? If you've never broken an immovable rod you're not having vigorous enough sex? If you've never broken an extradimensional sex dungeon you're not having vigorous enough sex? But I have never broken any of those things so I guess perhaps everyone I've slept with was very bored."

Keltham: "Oh, it's part of a whole family of adages about being too risk-averse in cases where errors are recoverable. If you've never lost money on an investment, you're betting too conservatively. If you've never failed a test, you're taking lessons that are too easy. So for sex in Golarion as practiced by someone who can afford healing spells, it would say that if you've never broken an ankle during sex, you're not trying sufficiently precarious sex positions."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is having trouble imagining what kind of sex practiced by avowed non-sadists might nonetheless break ankles but she decides not to ask. Perhaps she will learn firsthand, later, if she stops derailing the conversation.

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I have never broken an ankle having sex either. I don't think I've broken anything more exciting than a uniform button."

Keltham: "Well, let's not aim to correct that immediately. It seems like an activity that could legitimately be reserved for the third date or later. I don't think it counts if you do it on purpose, anyways; we just have to keep escalating until something interesting happens."

Carissa Sevar: "You're the expert." Maybe escalating until sex is positively dangerous is how they all handle their suppressed sadism.

Keltham: "I had, in fact, been under the impression that between the two of us, you were the expert. But comparisons over expertise are better settled in domain contest than in argument."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, on Golarion, people who like to hurt people just do that, and so there's less suppressed sexual tension pushing them towards bafflingly risky and furniture-destroying sex acts. So in that one specific dimension, you have us beat. ...but for everything else, a domain contest does seem called for. You're not dressed for it."

Keltham: Two seconds and three zippers later, Keltham is displaying the dath ilani male version of plunging cleavage. "Our clothing technology enables rapid adaptation to many purposes. Point to us."

Carissa Sevar: Wow Golarion clothing -

- well, probably someone has clothing that does that. Probably inheriting Countesses of Cheliax have clothing that do that and Carissa should have asked about it as a higher priority than asking to be prettier. Carissa owns three outfits, her dress uniform and her undress uniform and her sleeping clothes, and they do not do that.

Also what was that mechanism it looked mechanical -

Carissa Sevar: "I will have you know," she says, slightly sternly, "that I am with a heroic effort of will refraining from derailing this flirtatious conversation to ask how your clothing fasteners work. But in the morning nothing will deter me."

Keltham: "They work very well, thank you. Your move, Carissa Sevar."

(Keltham is expending his own virtuous effort to avoid thinking about zipper patent licensing.)

Carissa Sevar: "Well, now you're dressed for the occasion and I'm dressed for entirely the wrong occasion. I would be perfectly dressed to defend you from demons but regrettably security is doing that. Also one sometimes breaks an ankle, doing that, and I hear that breaking ankles is a third date sort of thing. Maybe I could defend you from a particularly aggressive nocturnal songbird? Or a bat."

Keltham: Keltham zips down an additional distanceunit of cleavage, just because his technological superiority lets him do that so easily. "I admit, I've never ticked 'had a girl defend me from a bat' on a sexual experience assessment, but you may be overestimating my prior corruption levels if you think you have to go that far for your next move."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm going to steal those clothes and wear them to class tomorrow, this is your fair warning." And having said that she doesn't want to give him time to dwell on it, so she kisses him.