Nethys: Nethys sure will really be in trouble if anyone finds out He did this part!

Nethys sees every part of Zon-Kuthon.  Nethys knows where every part of Zon-Kuthon is trying to hide.

Nethys provides those coordinates to Someone Else.

That's the sort of divine backstab that, if found out, would get every large or obvious remaining piece of Nethys assaulted by more gods than are currently assaulting Zon-Kuthon.

The only reason the gods are not currently that scared of Nethys is because it has not, up until now, seemed like Nethys is particularly likely to do that sort of thing - to tattle on gods' secrets to one another, to start wars between Them in which Nethys will pick sides and provide aid, weakening Them until all the gods that Nethys doesn't like, or maybe all the other gods period, have been killed.

It would not be in Nethys's seeming interests to start down that path, because you can't conceal that sort of thing forever.

But that logic is not unassailable, and other gods will be watching for early signs.

Nethys is doing this part anyways.

???: Snip.  Snip.  Snip.

She's mostly appearing to fight Zon-Kuthon along with the other gods, but it doesn't take much extra power to kill those little defenseless bits of Zon-Kuthon if you know exactly where to look for them.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds it hard to think around Keltham. 

Not in a stupid romantic way, she doesn't think, though she's aware it's the obvious interpretation. She thinks it's more that - all of her mind has to be pointed at him. She has to be paying attention to the surroundings, the conversation, the connected distant-implications, the opportunities for flirtation, she has to be directing most of her mind at the deception surrounding Keltham and also impress him with the quality of conversation she can generate with the part of her mind that's on him. 

As a result, the sober Carissa diagnosis of what she's like around Keltham is that she's fundamentally reactive. She follows trains of thought of his, she answers his questions. She teases him. She ventures a bit of promising theology, occasionally, if she's feeling bold. But she cannot construct an overarching plan. Which is fine, not that debilitating, it just means she needs one in advance, but tonight has been kind of eventful and the plan she had before they went to practice Keltham's cleric spells is a bit outdated. Kissing Keltham leaves more space to think than talking to him does, so she persists in it even once she would ordinarily declare that quite enough kissing.

She wants to convince him to fuck her. She's pretty sure that this is an important step in building intimacy. It involves him trusting her with something, and her demonstrating that trust warranted, and in her not-really-very-professional-judgment it's the best sex act for his kinks, it's about power without obliging him to do a lot of deliberate and constructed making it about power which he's still learning how to do. 

She wants to gently introduce, in a testing the waters kind of way, the ideas that 1) some girls are into out-there stuff, Carissa's about average and that means half of girls are kinkier than her, see where that line of thought takes him, 2) power is more interesting when it's not a game nobles play for fun, isn't it and 3) the thing that makes this right is that Keltham wants it and can get it.

The third one seems hard. She spent a fair share of her beauty appointment playing it in her head with imaginary Keltham. "You want it and can get it. That's what matters, that's why it's all right, it's all right for you to have things, assuming you can get them without breaking the Law."Imaginary Keltham: "Right, but the reason the Law doesn't prohibit this is that you also want it. Otherwise it would. If you try to propose a Law that says it doesn't matter what you want then all the people where the Law agrees it doesn't matter what they want would simply overthrow the Law and replace it with a Law who didn't say that, and even if they wouldn't, they could in principle, so the Law can't say that."

"You want it and can get it. Does it - does it feel like there's something important there? Something that dath ilan would - be missing, if they treated that as sort of a sideshow that gets to rise to relevance only if every other feature of the situation has lined up just right?"Imaginary Keltham: Well, it's relevant no matter what, it's just that sometimes the way in which it's relevant is that society should try to have fewer people like me in it, or that it needs to put more emphasis on people not doing things just because they want to. "You want it and can get it. That's - itself appealing about you. Maybe that's a very circuitous fetish but it feels very fundamental, to me. The trait that matters in the world is being able to get things you want, and the most romantic situation is being wanted. And that means there's inherently nothing sexier than someone who wants you and can get what he wants."

That one feels promising but like it achieves its promisingness by running askew and probably being heresy, again. She still thinks it's a line of argument worth attempting. Maybe you can get someone to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is sexy' and then from there to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is okay'.  She still tries to imagine objections imaginary Keltham might have, but Imaginary Keltham mostly says things like 'math you've never heard of proves that doesn't work', which is a sign she needs to take this problem to Actual Keltham.

Once she has a plan. Which she doesn't, yet, so. More kissing.

Keltham: Dath ilani learn fast, generalize fast, and get bored with a speed that would shock the more easily amused.  They overcomplicate sex because they have no choice.  They do their best to protect their kids from sexual spoilers so that young adults can have the joy of discovery, and amusing stories to tell for the rest of their lives, and also so that young adults don't exhaustively play out simple basic sex in their heads before having it, which, if they did, would lead them to learn-the-pattern-and-get-bored-by-it even faster.

Even Keltham of the +0.8sd, though, is able to spend a while just kissing Carissa without getting bored the first time he does that.  She is quite kissable.  Also snuggly.

Carissa Sevar: She likes Keltham. Her thoughts are probably lingering on this because of how she's presently kissing him but it's true, and no doubt there's been at least one agonized meeting over it though somehow no one has reprimanded her, maybe because they know that she really really really does not want to be a statue and even if all the other pillars of her motivational structure grew Keltham-rot inside them - and they haven't - she will still not betray them. She's heard it said - dismissively - that the characteristic female fantasy is that there is a powerful man who could hurt you, but he doesn't. Maybe that's all that it is. But right now, the way that it is is that she likes Keltham, and when he has her in his arms, all her plans maintain only the most tenuous of connections to her, bobbing up and down in the periphery of her mind like a sailor overboard on the high seas, visible for a long time despite being almost immediately beyond rescue. 

....and maybe she should troubleshoot that.

What are her objectives. First, to get Keltham to feel attached to her. Second, to comprehend him fully in order to build the Evil version of dath ilani thought. Third, stretch goal, seduce him to Evil. 

The third one seems tricky right now. That's okay. Carissa's going to be forgiving of herself about that. Other people, too, agree that it seems hard. Keltham is still grappling with ideas like that smarter people might take advantage of less smart ones; this part of the operation is in exploratory mode, right now, and that's all right. 

The second one...also seems tricky right now, though more necessary than ever. 

Whenever Carissa's around Keltham she gets confused about the nature of Evil. It's because the version she gave him just - fits better into a pathetic human mind? In hindsight it's obvious that trying to destroy the world might seem Good, that Rovagug cultists certainly would be, principled believers that the world should be devoured at their own expense. And the observable fact about the world that almost everyone ends up Evil makes more sense if Evil is about selfishness or lack of altruism than it does with the understanding that Evil is - well, Abrogail Thrune. Carissa is pretty sure this thought will end up in a transcript for Abrogail Thrune tomorrow so hi, Abrogail Thrune, please don't turn me into a statue, Abrogail Thrune, I am suffering in your service very diligently, Abrogail Thrune, but most people are not Abrogail Thrune. Most people are not even weak pale shadows of Abrogail Throne. Tyranny, slavery, pride, contracts - most people kind of just bumble along being weak and pathetic and Carissa is confused about 1) how any of them make Law and 2) how any of them make Evil. She's not worried about herself, personally. She's definitely making progress on Law and she thinks she's made some progress on being genuinely Evil the last two days. She's taking to authority nicely and has lit people on fire when they deserved it and offering to destroy Asmodia's soul in a dark sorcerous rite, if it's not heretical to contemplate, was kind of fun, though also Carissa wants everyone to go to Hell and not get destroyed in sorcerous rites. 

(Is that Good? If she wants it in a way that's not about what Asmodeus wants, that's about the sheer horror of their annihilation - it's at the very least the product of a broken mind misunderstanding doctrine. And yet.)

It hadn't occurred to Asmodia what they had to be trying to do here. But they are going to have to do it, or the mountains of spellsilver will go to everyone and Cheliax won't be uniquely advantaged - might be disadvantaged, even, if their current systems for promoting enough Law and Evil to get their children clear of Abaddon and into Hell stop working on a smarter generation of children - reformulate that to be less pathetic and broken, even if it means it fits less well into her present mind, she doesn't wish to err when she's trying to do strategic planning even if the errors are convenient otherwise, even if she suspects Asmodeus chose her partially for her heresies - Cheliax's current systems get souls to Asmodeus, who wants them; Asmodeus has extended this project resources on the assumption it can get him more souls, or more useful ones, and that's why it ought to do that. 

Asmodia is presumably being tortured right now and Carissa hopes she's not useless when she gets back. Maybe it'll be good for her motivation. 

The first goal, on the other hand, is going great. Maillol says the things she'd done shouldn't have worked, but they did, and Keltham likes her, and if she only had to accomplish the first goal she'd practically have accomplished it already and she could just keep him interested and roll around on a giant mountain of spellsilver. 

Maybe. 

Keltham hasn't really hurt Carissa. In a sense, no one has ever really hurt Carissa; she talks a good game but she was careful, in her old life, about which powerful adventurers who could kill her if they were so inclined she climbed up into a Rope Trick with; she mostly went for girls, because whatever Maillol says they are less inclined to hurt you on average though obviously Abrogail Thrune, hi Abrogail Thrune, is entitled to do exactly as she pleases with Carissa including turning her into a statue though Carissa really really hopes that she won't do that because Carissa wants to go to Hell and will make herself very useful to Abrogail Thrune there. If she gets there. Subordinate devils are worth having! Much more useful than statues!

...anyway Keltham can bite her, and claw at her, but he hasn't for example even looked at the pokers in the fireplace, and he hasn't even asked for tips on the most efficient ways to hurt people without causing damage, and unless you count the cursed Bag of Holding as a sexual experience and plausibly Carissa should she hasn't, actually, been tortured in a sex way, and shouldn't have high confidence in how gracefully she'll handle it except within the bounds of how well she handles it in other contexts. It seems possible she'll like Keltham less once she's taught him how and why to really hurt her. It's possible that whatever switch will flip in her head and he'll be terrifying instead of intriguing, and then everything will just suck. 

Which would be good practice for Hell, if so. 

....Carissa thinks that somehow all this thinking is actually making her worse at her job and she should abandon it and go back to not thinking, which was working fine, kind of. 

Carissa Sevar: " - so," she says. "Are we supposed to have an in-depth conversation about how sex works now, or, given that your notes were destroyed, will we have to have sex in order to recreate the conditions under which you can recreate your notes."

Keltham: "I'd say 'stop trying to pressure me into sex' but I find that I in fact enjoy being asked, and maybe even enjoy getting to say no.  And I expect I can recall at least some of my questions, though probably not in the right order."

Carissa Sevar: " - noting a cultural difference that while if you don't want me to stop it's not a big deal we haven't had any interactions which to Chelish understandings involve pressure. And I can try to answer questions."

Keltham: "Civilization would have it something like - if a woman says no a couple of times, you're supposed to stop asking and not be visibly not-in-most-preferred-state about not having sex.  You don't lie, obviously, you just conceal the overt feedback.  She may guess, obviously, and if she asked you'd just tell her.  It's not about a deception, even a deception by concealment; the point is that you're not exerting a direct pressure on subverbal parts of herself by being visibly sad at them."

"It can be different for a woman pestering a man for sex, but only to the extent she has extremely reliable information - which basically means, information directly from him - that he's highly conformant to the masculine 'gendertrope' and that sub-'gendertrope' in particular.  I would have provided you with that information just now, when I told you that I was enjoying being asked and saying no."

(Keltham is just using Baseline 'gendertrope' as a loanword into Taldane, at this point, since the corresponding concept in Taldane simply doesn't exist.)

"Civilization is all very - structures to make sure that people end up having the power to protect themselves in their sexual relationships, and the realistic ability to decide for themselves without that taking a lot of mental work, and common knowledge that everyone has in fact been trained to protect themselves that way and passed some tests about it, all so that people can be given full responsibility to decide for themselves."

"So long as you're following those rules, in a world where you know everybody else follows those rules, it means you don't have to worry about them on their behalf, or try to protect them more than they protect themselves, or doubt them when they say yes."

"The typical dath ilani man - has a great horror of accidentally harming somebody, like that, and the rules are there so they can be less scared after somebody says yes to them."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. We....don't have any of those rules and I expect probably do have a higher rate of whatever problems you're trying to solve but if someone asked me for sex repeatedly and I disliked being asked because it was....mental work...to keep refusing, then I would say 'no, and stop asking', or something, and if I said no and then someone was visibly sad I would...not care...because I'm Evil."

Keltham: "There are kinds and kinds of Evil, then, and I am some but not others.  I may someday understand what it means to decide everything because you have given yourself to me to see what I make of you, I can feel a part of myself yearning for this thing I don't yet understand, but I have no interest in learning how to see you being visibly sad and not care."

Carissa Sevar: Not encouraging. (Though adorable.) But people can be wrong about themselves. "All right. Am I supposed to have that in mind when deciding whether to be visibly sad or am I supposed to just be visibly sad whenever I would around a Chelish person."

Keltham: "I think you should err an awful lot on the side of visibility, until I've been on this planet for longer than two days and can guess literally at all what the ass is ever going on without tons and tons of evidence.  I have been through mental training and it's not like it would be easy for you to pressure me into sex I didn't want and then successfully do mental damage to me that way, because, for example, I will in fact say no if you ask me to have sex while I'm still shaken up from my first nonsimulated violence.  Knowing this, you know that it is safe to be visibly sad around me, that you cannot easily hurt me like that; this is a dath ilani's dignity, and at deeper layers, their friendship."

Carissa Sevar: "I am not from dath ilan, and haven't had any specialized evaluation of my capacity to do things without hurting myself, but I am not often wrong about how I'll feel about things, and you're not going to hurt me by being visibly sad around me, or by doing something I've told you is all right, or by doing something I haven't told you is all right but haven't objected to, and I - feel upset, at the idea there's a world of men terrified of accidentally harming someone, when they should be entitled to enjoy themselves with people who aren't so easily harmed. - also seems absolutely brutal on women with fetishes for being forced but maybe that's how you bred all of those out."

Keltham: "I'm not saying you can't have high levels of your own world's dignity, just that it would be helpful to understand that dignity, I can tell it's very different.  And the men aren't going around being terrified because Civilization faced the problem head-on and solved it."

"Also, fetishes for being forced?"  The Taldane word 'force' can mean several different things, it's not obvious to Keltham how it translates here.

Carissa Sevar: "Like, it's no fun if a man asks them if it's all right, it's only fun if he just grabs them to have his way with them. It's got to be, like, the ...third? fourth? most common fetish."

Keltham: "Okay, see, that doesn't sound not-dath-ilan in the way other things do, lots of people enjoy being pursued and I can easily imagine how some would enjoy being pursued harder.  I mean, I doubt it's anything like that common, but it's not antinatural like finding somebody who gets sexually aroused by pain.  I'd put something like 30% probability that we do have that, at a layer of perversion above mine; and if we do, somewhere in Civilization, possibly a suburb of Erotown or Nandville, there are whole complexes full of women who've registered their preferences for men in sufficient detail that the highest bidders on them can just walk into their houses and haul them into the cuddleroom, with pairings near-guaranteed to find each other attractive even if nobody talks about it at all."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. All right, maybe those women do fine, although in our world that tendency tends to go along with liking pain, because it's not very realistic if he grabs you and is then very gentle and concerned with your pleasure, and it's better if it's realistic. - reportedly, this isn't actually a fetish of mine. I won't object if you jump me without notice sometime but that's because I like you and am a good sport rather than because the possibility of being jumped without notice is specifically thrilling."

Keltham: Inner query: if Carissa did like being jumped without being asked, would Keltham want to do that sometimes?

Inner response: loud yes.

Welp, time to venture another prediction on a model that, while it doesn't exactly fit everything, sure does apparently seem to fit some things.

"However," says Keltham, "at least one of the girls in the class, and furthermore, one of the girls who registered a high response about how surprising she'll be, does have that fetish."

Carissa Sevar: Shit, he does think they're manipulating it. Which isn't - fair, she doesn't see the Law he's using - 

"I haven't asked the other girls what they're into but given that it's one of the most common fetishes, probably? And if not we could, uh, put out an ad among wizard students somewhere slightly farther than Ostenso and find you someone, if you are intrigued."

Keltham: "Oh, I'm not saying she'll be surprising because she has that fetish, the surprising thing about her will be something that even someone from Golarion would find shocking, but she'll also have that fetish, which is very common here and isn't surprising at all if you're not me."

"I mean, assuming the basic premise here is true, which, it hopefully isn't... it would be a whole lot easier to nope the shit out of that hypothesis if not, you know, air-traveling-machine crash, surviving my own True Death and all that."

"I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't be talking about this in front of you at all.  If it's true there's definitely nothing you can do about it until I've figured more things out, unless that 'trope' is being specifically subverted.  It would be - a puzzle thrown at a dath ilani, not at someone from Golarion."  He's probably just alarming her more at this point, isn't he.  This in retrospect must be why the usual convention says that the NPCs in a meta-eroLARP-eroLARP can't hear you talk about the layer-0 eroLARP until you've made more progress with them.

Carissa Sevar: It seems important to get Keltham to explain this second layer of Law that he uses to infer that Pilar was chosen by Cayden Cailean without knowing about Pilar or Cayden Cailean. 

"Even if there's nothing I can do about it, if it's important to you and part of what you're using to make predictions about the world, then I want to understand it."

Keltham: Keltham considers explaining the concept of an ero-LARP, much more famous novels deconstructing those ero-LARPs, and ero-LARPs based on novels deconstructing ero-LARPs.

He considers trying to explain how quantum mechanics is known from experiment and how it in turn implies the many worlds, and what the nature of amplitudes led Civilization to realize about realityfluid, and how all those many worlds must be embedded into a still larger Reality in which the quantum multiverse itself is multiply instantiated.  And how, having survived an airplane crash, there is a single obvious wild thought about what must have happened to him, that ending in almost all places he continued on within a remaining and improbable one.  If he was a Keeper, probably, Keltham would already know it; for it seems like the sort of thing that must be deducible from first principles if it is true at all, and also, an obvious massive infohazard in ways that Keltham may not have begun to conceive.  He's not sure exactly why it will be massively infohazardous but it obviously will be.

And now the place where he finds himself, has people who aren't any plausible equilibrium of selection pressures, but happen to exactly fit the complementary shape of his own unsatisfied and unsatisfiable sexuality; and there's a research group full of girls roughly his age, with himself the sole male among them, and an explicit rationalization for why they all want his seed; and they all have economicmagic and 3-5 of them have fascinating backstories that even Golarion would find surprising; while Nidal invades Cheliax targeting him personally and the godtreaties break down, thereby forcing him to relocate to a new bedroom decorated in doompunk with chains attached to the bed.

What happens if you perform an evidential update from that, and then predict the future?

He considers explaining this to somebody who is not going to know, at least until tomorrow, maybe not even for two whole more days, what an evidential update is.

"Carissa," he says, truly apologetically, "you have not, in fact, ever heard me try to explain any topic that Civilization would consider at all complicated; and this, is a little complicated.  I know which concept I'd explain first in the sequence of the explanation, and I was going to do that concept tomorrow, but that sequence goes on for a while."

Carissa Sevar: "Is it likely to cause some kind of catastrophe before you can get around to explaining it?"

Keltham: "When the research harem reconvenes, maybe I'll try an Augury about what happens if I politely ask everyone who registered themselves as very interesting to stand up and explain their backstories to me, each other, and the rest of the research group.  Given the entire premise - which I emphasize is still rather less likely than likely - that would be the most obvious way to defuse any potential catastrophes, if it did not itself cause a catastrophe -"

"- shit.  What happened to Broom?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": (Broom went invisible, stayed out of the way as best he could, and is now in a nicely appointed palace room of his own awaiting a check-in from Aspexia Rugatonn.

Broom wasn't exactly considered unimportant earlier, but now that an attack from Nidal, on the site of an Otolmens event, has started a war among the gods, he rates a few more minutes of her time, in case he knows literally anything whatsoever.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has been apprised of this but Carissa who isn't running this operation would not have been apprised of this. 

"...didn't see him in the pile of bodies. The - war among the gods - that's the kind of thing that maybe qualifies as a giant mess. The last one killed fifteen percent of the global population!"

Keltham: Not the same tragedy it would be in Civilization, he has to keep reminding himself of that until Golarion becomes cached.

Keltham pokes her in the ribs, harder than he would if Carissa wasn't a masochist.  "That's for talking about fifteen percent of the global population dying while we were lying in bed."

(Dath ilani do strive to learn from experience literally at all.)

Carissa Sevar: Deep elaborate bow, the most elaborate she can manage while in bed cuddling him. "I beg your forgiveness."

Keltham: "I - guess I do have to ask earlier rather than later, under the circumstances - if the planet-scathing side effects of a godwar are the sort of thing where - we should stay dressed in case we suddenly have to evacuate the palace."

Carissa Sevar: "Our chances of having to suddenly evacuate are probably much higher than usual but from a very low base."

Keltham: "Is the fifteen percent thing like - definite, now that the godwar's started - or could it maybe just be a small one this time."

Carissa Sevar: "We don't exactly have lots of examples. But last time most of the people who died died because - all around the world there were twelve days of really intense wind and rain, intense enough to wash out all the crops and uproot most of the trees, and so there was no harvest, and so they starved, and if this one is faster or - less rainy, I have no idea what makes godwars rainy - then maybe almost no one'll die. The lights aren't going to kill anyone."

Keltham: "This war has at least my god, Asmodeus, and Nethys all allied and trying to take out Zon-Kuthon, but given why Zon-Kuthon did it, there could be any number of other gods allied with him.  Well.  Probably not any Good ones.  But - how does that match up to whatever the last god-war was about?"

Carissa Sevar: "I think that's better than the last god-war, which was I think close to an even split - a god called Aroden had decided to make Golarion his divine realm, instead of having it in Axis, and rule it directly, and the gods were very closely divided on this plan, and He went ahead when He thought He had just enough support it wasn't worth it to his opponents to fight, and then - prophecy broke - there could never have been a godwar before prophecy broke, right, They'd see how'd it go and just settle accordingly -"

Keltham: "Unless you're about to wreck so much of what a god cares about that there's nothing left for them to negotiate, so they try to launch a preemptive strike team at you, and, when that fails, go down fighting."

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, that does seem to be the other circumstance under which you'd have a god-war. But it's hard to imagine He'll have many allies, it's not like many gods have much common ground with the god whose values are inverted. So maybe it'll be a quick one. The war between Cheliax and Nidal will probably last much longer, but is vanishingly unlikely to oblige us to evacuate."

Keltham: "Heh.  So, nothing Civilization would consider scalable weaponry, then.  Where scalable weaponry is weaponry that you can go on making more destructive if for some reason it needs to be even more destructive."

dath ilan: (Nobody plays realistic Alien Invasion Rehearsals.  They'd be too short and depressing.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels a quiet chill, even though this isn't new information, they knew dath ilan had vastly superior weaponry because it has vastly superior everything. "Nothing like that. There's a place in Garund where there's a wasteland for hundreds of miles because two ninth-circle wizards fought there, but it isn't actually dangerous to travel through, it's just that magic behaves weirdly and plants mostly don't grow. There's opening something like the Worldwound but Nidal and Cheliax are both Lawful and committed to not doing that, and anyway it's very very difficult and still doesn't just straightforwardly scale up.

- I would know, I think, if there were something that a reasonable number of people knew about or that had ever in history been used, because people at the Worldwound pay a lot of attention to our options however speculative for closing it. There could of course be secret things. 

....and one time some people crashed a moon into the planet, so, uh, there's that. I guess."

Keltham: "Small moon?  Or are we talking like a couple of billion years ago?"

Carissa Sevar: "Small moon. It was ten thousand years ago and it would've ended life on the planet if not for divine intervention of various stripes; it did annihilate both the civilization that dropped it and the one they were fighting with. There was no sun for many, many years, but with magic small populations can limp along without. We call it the Age of Darkness. ....there is a remaining moon and I wouldn't exactly put it past Nidal if they're losing everything but the Crown and Church will have thought of this."

Keltham: ...it's started to feel like somebody is recounting a colorful fascinating backstory for atmosphere, rather than something that actually happened, which potentially indicates that he's under enough internal stress to produce derealization; the whole point of history is that it actually happened.  Civilization may have hidden much of it, but for what remains, in the recent and far more distant past, the whole point is that it's not just another story.

"Yeah, that's around as much damage as Civilization could do to a planet and they might need a few months of lead time to scale it that far.  Well.  It's as much damage as they could do, using methods that people like me are allowed to know about, but..."  But why talk about that or think about it, if you're not a Keeper.  Except - there are no Keepers here, out of dath ilan, just Keltham, now.

"I think I should stop talking about this, Carissa, at least for the night.  I may not be able to simultaneously handle the aftermath of nonsimulated violence and also - thinking about what my being here may have set off."

Carissa Sevar: " - makes sense. I'm sorry. Did you have sex questions that are very narrow in scope and won't get into world history at all."

Keltham: "Well, at least ones I don't expect to interact much with world history.  But we should first do some manner of snuggly thing, no, not sex, to get my brain out of its current place."

Carissa Sevar: "Does testing out the chains count as sex."

Keltham: "Well, so long as you're not expecting too much, I suppose whatever happens to you will happen.  I am trying to hear and absorb what you're saying literally at all, and if I've managed to do that correctly literally at all, I do grasp that's the point of the chains."

lintamande: In a black stone room in a black stone skyscraper in the doompunk city of Dis, a contract devil is reading case law, as one does. 

Asmodia: Waking up from dying is not exactly like waking up from falling asleep.  Your memory isn't of a muzzy period that trails off and blurs into notness as you fall half asleep and then all asleep.  Dying is abrupt, at least if you do it the way Asmodia did - hearing a Security alert to cast resistances she doesn't have, no useful spells prepared at all, and then being swarmed by shadows moments after she'd reached her self-defense dagger.  It's very clear where your last life's memory ends.

Coming out of it is something like being drowning in the water and then clawing yourself onto shore and coughing out that water, and then, having just finished doing that.  Only without the whole part where you almost drowned, made it to shore, and coughed out that water, just the part where you'd finished.

Asmodia wakes up.

It doesn't take her very long at all to figure out why she's naked in a black stone room in front of a contract devil she met very recently.

Her internal screaming is very very very loud, but it's all internal, of course.

lintamande: " - well, that was fast," he says, turning to look at her, half annoyed and half amused. "Eventful day, hmmm? Stay there and shut up until I'm at a good stopping place." And he returns to his book.

Asmodia: Asmodia stays there and shuts up.

The more time he reads the better.

They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her.They'll probably raise her..........

lintamande: "Right!" he says brightly, when he's finished the page he's writing and reshelved the books on the enormous bookshelves paneling the wall behind him. "Well, they'll probably raise you, which makes trying to get any actual training done a waste of time, but they might take their time about it. What's your guess, for how long?"

Asmodia: The thought crosses Asmodia's mind to lie, but only very briefly.  If she was found out, it might be a very poor start to her stay in Hell.

"It - my priority depends on whether the shadows got Keltham too, or if they can raise him - there's a chance I'll be a high priority, I don't know what that chance is - do you know what's happening in Cheliax right now, in the place I died?"

lintamande: "You can lie, if you'd like, I don't mind," he says cheerfully. "If I minded I would simply make the punishment more fun until I was once again indifferent about whether you lie. You have to preserve your patience, if you do a lot of training new petitioners. I think we are getting the gossip ahead of everyone who isn't officially in line for it, what with you having come straight to me - good girl, by the way - but we'll know soon, from whether Dis has soldiers in the streets, whether there's a broader fight or a one-off bit of nonsense." Conspiratorially: "I think there might be a broader fight."

Asmodia: He can read her mind, then.  "I was reading a math book in my bedroom when I heard a Security alert telling me to resist negative energy, which I can't do, and then shadows attacked me and I died pretty quickly.  I don't know - why that place was swarmed with shadows, except, obviously, that they would have been after -"

"Sir, are you authorized to know about Keltham and his project?  I do not have any grasp of that but if you are reading my mind you know I am being sincere when I say that I don't know whether Hell has cleared yourself to know about it."  If he can see her mind then he knows that she is being very sincere, very humble, and only trying to serve Asmodeus's purposes and interests, when she thinks about how she is trying not to think about thoughts that may be classified information.

lintamande: "You know," he says, "it's such a shame, how you want to be eaten by daemons. I think you'd make a quite satisfactory contract devil yourself once you'd had training. A real waste. Which means, of course, it'll be more expensive, for you to get what you want, since you're trying to buy something quite valuable away from those who lay claim to it. Did you ever consider being totally worthless? Of course, then, I suppose you'd have nothing with which to buy even your very worthless place keeping the floors shiny." He gestures, and, yes, there's a face there, moving very subtly in the glossy black tile, distorted like it's far away and underwater. Screaming, obviously. 

"I am authorized to know the business of anyone I own; if that means I just got a promotion, so be it, and if someone thinks I am not suited to the promotion and tries to kill me, so be that too. It would be a great sickness in the heart of Hell, were it ever correct for you to withhold something from me. If I feared this hypothetical promotion, I might choose to sell you off right away without asking, but that would be my choice, not yours. Do you understand?"

Asmodia: "Yes.  The shadows were obviously after Keltham who, if he knows anything like what he thinks he knows, and I think he does, is potentially the greatest weapon and asset that Cheliax has.  Keltham knows - Law, math standing behind things, underneath the world, underneath thoughts, ideas that could obviously be used to create weapons if somebody wanted but he somehow doesn't think like that."

Asmodia wonders why there might be a broader fight, what sort of broader fight, but doesn't have the temerity to ask - well, she thought it, so he knows it, but she hadn't meant to do that to ask.

lintamande: "Fascinating," he says. "Write down everything you've learned since you heard of Keltham, while it's fresh. The quill on the left draws your blood; you may do a draft in ink, first, if you'd like, which would be the quill on the right. The potions on the third shelf help clarify the memory; they'll burn your tongue out, so if you have anything to say you may as well say it now."

Asmodia: That's pretty tame for Hell, she can't stop herself from thinking, if that was all there was to Hell, it wouldn't be that bad.  It's a really stupid thought and she already knows that he has an unending depth of torments vastly worse she does not need to be told or shown that part.

"If there's anything I should prioritize in case I get Raised almost immediately, sir.  Whether you mean me to write down math and ideas I learned from Keltham or also - all the strange things happening around him, like Ione getting book powers from Nethys and Pilar getting oracled by Cayden Cailean and the Queen suddenly deciding that Carissa Sevar is worth sleeping with, and all of that sort of stuff."

Why the writing works better in her blood if it's possible to draft in ink, she does not need or want that answered it isn't meant as a defiance her brain just wonders that sort of thing and she knows it isn't needful for her to know it.  Why she wouldn't just be told to take the third-shelf potion right away.

lintamande: The devil has been only half attending to her, flitting around getting more books off the shelves, but at that he stops. 

"Carissa Sevar," he says. "Tell me more."

Asmodia: (Who the FUCK is Sevar actually.  EVERYTHING SHE JUST SAID and the FIRST THING he wants to hear about is SEVAR?)

Keltham: Keltham has discovered the very strange pleasure of snuggling somebody who can't snuggle back.  You wouldn't think this would make any sense, and yet, there's a strange... you know, he's not even going to analyze, he's just going to wrap his limbs around Sevar while she can't wrap back, and enjoy that for some reason.

Eventually his brain pings him with an impending boredom warning, because he is still, unfortunately, a dath ilani, and this activity is not one of vast complexity.  He can either escalate it, down a path where he's not quite sure what is or isn't sex, or he can restart the conversation from pre-forbidden-topic.  Keltham opts for the latter.

"Ready to be talked with while you can't escape?" Keltham says.

Carissa Sevar: "Mmhmm."

Keltham: "So I've got - smaller questions, subquestions.  Like how, when you told me that you'd made yourself prettier, I felt this weird sense of - both ownership of your appearance, or something, and a worry that you thought you weren't already attractive for me, like my brain thinks I'm now the center of your decision process -"

"I think it's all part of a larger question, that I think is a common thread running through my notes that got lost, but maybe you want to start with a smaller question first."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, no, I think there's probably a larger thing there. So, some people just like hitting people in the bedroom, and that's fine, but it seemed likely once you mentioned you were growing romantic feelings - that you actually want an overall romantic relationship dynamic that's built the same way, where you have power and ownership and make decisions, where my sexuality is for you, and is yours to shape and enjoy and make demands of. And so I would predict you'd want - lots of things in that sphere."

Keltham: Keltham takes a deep breath.

"So, you've now ever been partially exposed to snippets from the basics of the basics of childhood training for dath ilani, you don't have zero idea of how we see reality.  We're used to knowing things legibly.  Including places where Golarion might have the idea that it's important for people to obscure things, because you've built a weird not-quite-Lawful thing which requires illegibility to work."

"Like - bargaining, the way you first described how somebody would do that for my shirt.  You can imagine a non-dath-ilani with a shirt thinking 'oh no, I must conceal that the true value of my shirt to me is just a million gold pieces, if they think it's really five million I can get a higher price, if they know it's one million they can just give me an ultimatum to take one million one hundred thousand take it or leave it.  A dath ilani wouldn't be scared of things becoming legible, because they have more Lawful approaches that don't disadvantage them in the presence of that legibility; they know the right thing to do is refuse unfair but mutually beneficial trades with very high probability.  The real value they put on their shirt isn't a secret for them the way it's a secret for somebody bargaining the usual way for Golarion."

"I mean, if they were playing by Golarion's rules, they might still try to make the other person think it was five million if that was the game.  If it wasn't anything serious like negotiations with Cheliax, I could see myself playing the bargaining game the illegible way if that saved me time explaining things, I'd try to have fun with it even, though I doubt I'd be very good at it on the first try.  But I'd have a legible game to fall back on if the illegible game blows up or isn't going my way."

"If you're used to that being the way things are, trying to play an illegible game with no known legible Law underlying it feels like walking on wet ice... you don't have a lot of ice.  Feels unstable, like you're about to put your foot down wrong and fall over, any second.  As kids they train us to keep going anyways and parse the universe as we run through it, but that doesn't make illegibility feel safe."

"There's places even so where Civilization would - give somebody a hug and tell them it was okay to not be totally legible right away.  A mother who just gave birth to a child doesn't need to immediately put a value in unskilled-labor-hours on her baby's life, how much she'd pay to avert a 0.1% chance of various bad things happening, any of that.  Anybody who burst in and started quizzing her about that would be ejected from the maternity hospital and probably from most of the cities in Civilization."

"But when Civilization gives someone a hug and tells them it's okay not to make up numbers today, what that relies on, very crucially, is the expectation that the numbers the mom isn't making up and doesn't know to herself are roughly correct numbers in the sense of leading to roughly the same decisions as better numbers would.  The reason we give a hug of it's-okay-not-to-be-legible-today to the mom who just gave birth is that, if she did make up numbers about the value of her baby's life to her, they'd be more like four million labor-hours than four labor hours.  She's not going to frantically drop her baby in order to save a water-glass from falling and breaking.  If you expected her to get decisions like that wrong you'd tell her to make up legible numbers immediately and run them past somebody else."

"Someone tells me that she's given herself to me, to do with as I want, and if I'd grown up in Golarion we'd probably both be fine from there.  But in reality, I'm pretty sure there would be some things I could do that were really not what you had in mind, like, like taking that sharp thing... +3 vicious nasty bigsword, and killing you with it, and then after you're brought back I just kill you again and tell Cheliax not to bring you back that time.  That is probably really not what you had in mind, and just to be very clear, it is not what I had in mind either.  And you can't spell out things like that for me, my model predicts you replying, because then it's you telling me what I can't do, and contrary to the nature of this thing the way it needs to be.  In this case there's no problem, right, because it so happens that I don't want to do that to you, my brain is generating the correct answer despite it being illegal to tell me an underlying Law.  But that also means I'm playing an illegible game that has no known legible game behind it, and I feel like I'm walking around on wet ice every time I try to think about moving forward with it, because I did not grow up in Golarion, and I am not confident that the numbers I'm not making up are roughly correct ones."

"Done."

Carissa Sevar: Actually if that specific thing happens she'll be so fucking promoted in Hell, but there's no way to - oh, wait, yes there is. 

"I contemplated whether you might do that and decided if you did I would have an incredibly lucrative storytelling gig in Hell telling people about the fascinating very brief experience of trying to explain sadism to an alien from another world.

- uh, I realize that was just an example."

Keltham: "...this feels like some strange reflection of a dath ilani's dignity where you can't possibly offend them in various ways without making a deliberate and adversarial effort about it.  Except it's about you being - invincible, not something that can be truly hurt by anything - something like that."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds herself noticing that she shouldn't lie about how her sexuality works because she has no idea what the Second Law of inferring peoples' sexualities does. She assumed Keltham noticed she was faking earlier through training she could learn to subvert but if he's using the Second Law, then the only way out is truth, not necessarily her truth but real truth, the only thing that will have the right truth-properties on the Shadow Plane Of - what did he call them - tropes.

"....part of Chelish dignity is definitely that you only offer deals if you genuinely mean them, that you're not relying on any - altruism or mercy of the other person that was not specified up front. In practice, if you like the sort of things I like, that - kind of means you have to be awfully invincible? Or - mostly I slept with people at the Worldwound where the treaty proscribed them killing or permanently disabling or kidnapping me, and that was enough. 

I don't think the core thing that is important to me is being invincible. I think the core thing that is important to me is - not being foolish, and if I assumed there was some safety where there wasn't, then that was foolish, especially across a species gap, so I had to assume there might be none, and it's very satisfying, to be able to assume that.... and another part of it is that something very important to me is being safe. I think part of why I like being hit is that - one way of being safe, right, is to never have bad things happen to you, but another is to never have bad things be bad for you, to transmute them all through arousal and the admiration of others and sheer determination into something that you're good at, and prized for. I feel safer when someone is hitting me than I ever feel otherwise, because I know I can handle something I didn't previously know I could. You could drive a sword through me, no one would stop you, but I'm safe even if you do, so I'm not scared....I don't know if I'm making sense." She's not lying, though.

Keltham: "I'll try trusting you about it, then," he says, in almost a whisper, feeling rather scared himself.  Until you tell me to stop.  He doesn't say it aloud; it's supposed to be illegible.

Abrogail Thrune II: HOW is Sevar DOING that.  Abrogail has repeatedly glanced over at the transcript, reading every few steps as the quill writes them; and Abrogail can't understand anything about how Sevar figured out how to say exactly what she said.  Maybe it'll come clear once she gets the full transcript with Sevar's thoughts, but Abrogail somehow doubts it -

Aspexia Rugatonn: "We are in the middle of a war," hisses Aspexia Rugatonn.  "Asmodeus is in the middle of a war.  Pay attention."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I am.  The war is predictable."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can't think of anything to say that'd possibly improve on that outcome, so she just lets all her delight show on her face. 

Keltham: "I'm about ready to sleep.  Want me to let you out of -"

"See, if I wasn't this exhausted, I'd have noticed faster that I'm not supposed to ask you that.  But if I've got to decide - then I need additional information, right, that's why my brain doesn't want to decide right away - are there likely to be any Carissa-needs-a-toilet-first consequences if I decide to try falling asleep snuggling you like this?  If a more experienced thing-I-am would know to tell you to give me other information first, tell me those questions."

Carissa Sevar: "I think someone more experienced would say it as, 'I'm going to go to sleep snuggling you like this, but I'll entertain arguments I should let you out for a little while first'. I should in fact probably check out the fancy palace baths."

Keltham: Keltham has an alternate thought.  Is it a real impulse, something he actually wants out of his true self?  Or his brain autocompleting the thing that a person-like-him-would-do based on its early primitive pattern prediction?

...probably a real impulse, Keltham isn't sure, but if he's not sure, that's reason enough.

"Should you now.  Well, I'll snuggle you for a bit longer, since I feel like doing that, and then possibly I'll let you out.  But no promises."

Carissa Sevar: Tiny happy Carissa sound.

lintamande: The top priority on the Raise Deads is getting everyone who is themselves a fifth-circle-or-higher cleric of Asmodeus raised by morning so they can join in on the Raise Deads themselves. There are not usually quite this many dead clerics of Asmodeus but they're getting through it, burning diamonds at a pace everyone knows that even the richest treasury in all Golarion can't keep up for very long (but longer than Nidal, probably).  They have some other people nearby casting Restoration on the newly-raised clerics to fix the problem where they come back weaker.  It's a nice little assembly line operation. 

Someone from Palace Security is on hand for Maillol's resurrection. They have a briefing for him. It's a pretty long briefing considering he's been dead for almost five hours now.

Ferrer Maillol: It's not the first time Ferrer Maillol has been raised.  He doesn't remember anything of Hell; he's a priest of Asmodeus, not a sold soul who bypasses sorting, and while his god could perhaps trouble Himself to take Maillol directly, Asmodeus, of course, has never shown that much solicitude.  Maillol is someone who'll predictably be raised even with prophecy broken; he has never seen the Boneyard even briefly.

His last memories say that somebody hit him with a Suffocation spell, a caster powerful enough that Maillol went unconscious almost immediately, and unconscious is not a good place to be in the middle of a Nidal assault even if the spell doesn't just kill you.  Maillol didn't particularly expect to survive, to be clear, and burned all his negative channelings almost immediately; he wasn't expecting combat that day and hadn't requested spells accordingly.

Maillol lives and pulls himself together, fast enough you might not notice it, and requests a situation update.

lintamande: "Our Lord is at war with Zon-Kuthon," the briefing begins, "and Cheliax is at war with Nidal. Keltham is alive. Sevar is alive and has project command, though she delegated most project decisions to you anticipating your immediate return. Otolmens' oracle is alive. Keltham, Sevar, and Otolmens' oracle have been relocated to the palace on Her Majesty's orders; Sevar is presently chained up in Keltham's bed, having had a conversation with him in which she told him that what he desires is a romantic relationship in which she belongs to him, he worried she did not mean he could murder her, she insisted she did mean that, and he decided to trust her and try doing whatever he wants, which seems to be cuddling. Project casualties are in your briefing notes, they're in line for resurrection; we're seeing high casualties on the border, so those resurrections may be slow at their present prioritization.

Pilar, the oracle of Cayden Cailean, somehow accompanied Keltham to his spell testing and out of the villa for the summons, and then took a sword for him; she's higher priority for resurrection because we're both worried we might lose her - she's in Elysium - and because we need to ask her what the fuck happened. Asmodia is also dead, confirmed in Hell, lower priority; Ione is not conscious and may not, given the vision was likely from Nethys, recover consciousness. The villa has just been determined clear of hostiles and traps and not yet evaluated for Kuthite magic items for divination or espionage. Keltham is suspicious about the destruction of his notes, which happened when the Kuthites swarmed the villa, and about the fact that the invasion was obviously timed to his stepping outside the villa and yet the invaders didn't seem to immediately know where he was. We have no explanation for this. He's requested we ensure there are no secret Kuthites on staff; we're pretty damn sure, obviously, but if there's anyone who could plausibly have evaded recent evaluation, haul them in. He's also suspicious that Security didn't teleport him out; we determined that staff member used his Teleports earlier in the day fetching requisitions from a supply depot in Corentyn, and that despite this he was selected to accompany Keltham out of the villa because he passed muster to Detect Anxieties and Detect Desires when most didn't, but if anything about that seems odd to you, we can raise his priority for resurrection as well, or if he refuses it contact his owner in Hell."

Ferrer Maillol: 'Our Lord is at war with Zon-Kuthon' would be harder to understand as a statement with import clearly distinct from 'Cheliax is at war with Nidal', if there were not a window inside the room Maillol now occupies, from which you can see a bit of the darkest-of-night sky, flickering, in a way that (if history is true) it hasn't done in the hundred years since Aroden died and the Worldwound opened.

Maillol wants to believe that this is literally the worst that a project disaster can possibly, possibly get.

He is afraid that it is not.

"Have we considered the possibility that this project is, in fact, cursed directly by Pharasma Herself with all of Her malice, and should be shut down entirely before we find out what happens to it tomorrow," says Maillol.

...he doesn't actually.  But he thinks it very loudly.

What he says instead is, "I need explicit confirmation that Aspexia Rugatonn knows that Carissa Sevar is sharing a building with the Queen."

Iarwain: In the depths of the center of the Palace in Egorian, there is a chamber that sees unfortunately frequent use.  The queen sits on a stepped dais high enough that her own head will not be below that of the crouching form of Gorthoklek the pit fiend, which, even with Gorthoklek crouching, requires quite the high dais.  Across from Gorthoklek also stands Contessa Lrilatha in full and deadly panoply.

Before the dais stands one other.

The most important purpose of this chamber is to, when it becomes necessary, hold an intervention.

"You," Abrogail Thrune declares coldy, imperiously, a voice like a twisting dagger, "are a greater disappointment to me than perhaps any other being or happening in my life."

"The feeling is mutual," says one of the three entities in Cheliax who would dare say such a thing.

"I can remember as though it were yesterday, my excitement when I learned that Asmodeus had sent me my own personal erinyes to tempt me and corrupt me.  What poisonous words does she now whisper in my ears?  Restrain my cruelty.  Restrain my lust.  I must control my desires and not let my desires control me.  I have been assigned my own personal black-winged monk of Irori."

"Irori is Lawful Neutral," observes the same entity who spoke before, Contessa Lrilatha.  "Asmodeus is Lawful Evil.  Need I spell out in greater detail what the two have in common?  Imagine my own disappointment when, hoping I had been assigned an eager pupil to corrupt further, I found myself instead tasked to restrain an incipient drow queen."

"Drow queen.  What a tempting thought.  They, one hears, are allowed to have fun."

Aspexia Rugatonn speaks then, weary, dry, from where she stands before the dais, facing down the Queen with the other two sensible beings in Cheliax.  "You are allowed to have fun.  You are allowed to have other fun.  Find different fun."

"I don't want different fun.  I want to turn Sevar into a statue.  I really, really want to turn Sevar into a statue."

"I really, really want to dissolve you in acid but you don't hear me being a whinecomplainbitch* about it."  (This word of Infernal now appears as a loanword in the Chelish dialect of Taldane.)

"I want to petrify her slowly, so that she can feel it happening, and scream with all of her heart and all of her soul while it's happening, and release all of that terror, and tension, and everything inside her, and I want to kiss her gently while she's turning to stone and screaming.  She's just so scared, and I so rarely meet anyone who's that scared... well, anyone interesting to me who's that scared of me personally doing something that it would interest me to do to them."

Even hunched over, with its wings folded, the black figure is taller than a man standing on another man's shoulders.  "I expect that our Lord would be most extremely displeased," rumbles Gorthoklek.

"I would, of course, unpetrify her immediately afterwards; and swear then never to do that to her in truth, unless she had betrayed the House of Thrune knowingly, deliberately, and unambiguously."

Gorthoklek and Contessa Lrilatha both pass their Bluff checks against the queen; Aspexia Rugatonn, who is not specialized in Splendour in quite the same way, does not.  The brief break in the room's atmosphere is therefore, however finely, noticeable.

"What," says Abrogail.  "Did you actually believe that I would actually bury her?  Really?  Really?  After having known me this long, you still think I would do that?"

"Yes," say three of the four most powerful beings in Cheliax in unison.

"Perhaps I would if Asmodeus had not singled her out and if she were not performing vital work for Cheliax.  But, that being so, do you truly believe I would affront Asmodeus's purpose and interests so, when I could have most of the fun I wanted without the cost to Hell?  You should know, given the consequences to me, and how those have not yet been invoked, that I have never once betrayed Asmodeus in the depths of my own heart."

"The trouble is what the depths of your own heart seem to define as a betrayal of Asmodeus," rumbles Gorthoklek.  "The depths of your own heart seem astonishingly permissive about it."

"Oh?  How misfortunate.  The devil negotiating my pact on behalf of Asmodeus should have defined that term more carefully."

Mortal humans being what they are, one would have expected this clause of the contract to come into force within days of the pact being signed and possibly the first minute.  No matter how lax or unspoken the definition, no matter how the mortal drove themselves half-mad trying to avoid that, it should have triggered anyways.  The resulting penalty clauses do not nullify the compact, but produce a less stringent interpretation of Hell's side and a more stringent interpretation of Abrogail Thrune's.

Given that it hasn't triggered, the devil who negotiated that compact is not having a good century.  It isn't that Asmodeus hasn't benefited from the pact, or that Asmodeus isn't receiving enough of a share of the gains, or even that He is displeased with the results, it's the principle of the thing.

Abrogail Thrune has never once spoken aloud what it meant to her when she signed her compact, to not betray Asmodeus in the depths of her own heart, lest anyone use that knowledge against her.  It is simply this: she gets to have her fun, and Asmodeus gets to have His.

"You know as well as I do that it would be good for her," says Abrogail Thrune. "It would be so, so good for her."

"We are not here to do what is good for Sevar," says Aspexia Rugatonn.  "We were explicitly instructed not to be proactive about her correction."

"You were.  I was not.  Asmodeus cannot have failed to predict that she would catch my interest."

"He most certainly can have failed to predict it.  He can have failed to predict that Hell's exact wording would leave you a loophole, and a rather arguable loophole at that.  Our Lord has other things on His mind and cannot devote all of His attention to Cheliax.  Complications like these, which require more of His attention, are already injuries and expenses to Him.  And now, of all times, He is gravely distracted, and may not see what is happening here at all."

For all her Splendour bonuses, Abrogail can't compete with Aspexia for sternness, but neither is she that easily swayed from her desires.  "You may recall that when I was negotiating with your Lord's agent to take this throne in the first place, there is a specific clause I added to the effect that His high priests would not tell me to never have any fun.  Keep to your Lord's bargain, Aspexia."

"Operative word never," Aspexia says sharply.  "I've accepted you turning good Asmodeans into statues and burying them, because most souls are of little importance to our Lord, because there could be a discipline problem otherwise among those who truly look forward to Hell.  You may continue to have that fun in the future.  This soul is of importance to our Lord and to your country of Cheliax and to our Lord's longer purposes in Golarion.  Otolmens has appointed an oracle.  The gods are at war.  You need to stop introducing complications."

"Unfortunately, as I do now admit, I did not realize, on first meeting Sevar, the effect my threat would have on her; and that, I do worry, may be a complication.  The transcripts of her thoughts show that, despite my attempted reassurance, she continues to be distracted by thoughts of me doing terrifying things to her.  So now I have to actually do them to her.  Slowly.  It's the only way to undo my own past folly."

"Hardly the only way," observes the most actually intelligent entity in the room, in a low grumbling growl, though this level of Intelligence is not required to see the obvious. "You could swear to Sevar the same oath, without first pretending to turn her into a statue."

"But then I would never get to slowly petrify her!"

"Why have our existences become this?" wonders Contessa Lrilatha on a more private channel.  "How did we offend our Lord?  Will we ever be allowed to return to Hell?"

Gorthoklek replies with a brief proverb in Infernal.  It carries with it the sense of 'Hell is other people', of 'This is Hell nor are we out of it', of 'Hell is not a place but a philosophy', but the literal Infernal is simply 'Hell is the destruction of hope.'

Pilar : Time doesn't always pass in the same rate, in Chaotic planes.  Especially if the local Power in charge wills otherwise.  Cayden Cailean is otherwise occupied, fighting Zon-Kuthon; but has still His local co-conspirators, and His plans laid in advance.

Pilar Pineda has been in Elysium longer than Hell thinks.  Not nearly long enough to get the full tour, but enough to be shown around a little, appropriately attired and appropriately treated, to see massive crystal-waterfalls in which glasslike material flows slowly down from what look like leagues and leagues up, to sleep briefly but refreshingly in a warm cavern lit by glowing edible moss, to meet interesting people and be mistreated by them in interesting ways.

Long enough to be told what Elysium believes about what Hell really is, how Hell really works, and have it sworn to her in the name of Good and Chaos that they're telling the truth to the best of their own knowledge.  They're not Lawful, yes, but it doesn't mean they're all liars, all the time.  There are beings with spell-like abilities here to rival great wizards, and one shows Pilar a glimpse of Hell as it really is.

To be clear, Pilar hasn't been here that long; this tour is being done in something of a rush.

Keltham: Keltham wakes, to light just beginning to filter in through the bedroom window.  He is not used to sleeping through any more light than that, and, what with all the distractions, didn't even close the curtains before falling asleep cuddling a chained-up Carissa.

Oh.

He can sleep on the same surface, and even in the same poorly designed bed, as someone else.  Well.  He can do that with Carissa; he doesn't particularly like the thought of doing it with anyone else that he currently knows.

It's raining outside, moderately windy.  It's not possible to see, underneath the clouds, if the sky is doing anything weird.

Keltham starts to get the - key, how is that a key, he didn't want to interrupt sexytimes to ask Carissa this, last night, but you can literally just look at it and see how it must fit into the lock.  Why couldn't you just look at the shape and remember it, and then make another key like that, if you'd trained yourself a bit on fast memorization?  Golarion really doesn't make much sense... well, maybe only sexy keys for bed chains are like this, because the person is chained up and it doesn't matter if they can remember the key's shape.

He's carefully unlocking the keys before it occurs to him to wonder whether he actually wants to Carissa let out; after a few moments, he concludes that he doesn't want to do more - well, maybe he would, if he thought of things to do - but if he wasn't pushing himself into things -

Keltham realizes he's being dumb; he knows how to think better than this, in familiar domains, knows that the Way there is not to question your ordinary wants so much except on rare special occasions of deliberate meta.  He felt like letting Carissa out of the chains, so he's going to do that and not trip over questioning the impulse.  If he made the wrong decision somehow by acting on that impulse, he'll find out and his brain will update its impulses.  Besides, if he wants Carissa back in the chains, he can always put her back in them later.

(A strange wash of warmth at that final thought, unfamiliar, but becoming quickly less so.)

Carissa Sevar: She's a sounder sleeper, but wakes up at him attempting this; flinches, at first, and tugs at the chains, before she realizes -

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, hey. Good morning."

Keltham: He's pretty sure that what she just said was 'good morning', so the Taldane words are starting to settle in a little.

"Greet the day!" Keltham replies cheerfully in Baseline, before his brain helpfully thinks of the rainy weather outside and that it might betoken an impending genre shift to Postapocalyptic; and while Keltham does inwardly tell his brain to screw off, this is not a perfect inner telling.

Chain removal continues.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, do they no longer have a language in common, ugh. She will call a servant about that once she's unchained, if he doesn't seem to have other plans.

Keltham: Keltham will perform the gestures for Comprehend Languages where Carissa can see them; he hasn't prayed for spells yet, so he might as well use this one.  He can understand her now if not speak to her.

Keltham doesn't think until afterwards that maybe energy is more expensive to his god than usual right now... well, he'll see if he gets any spells period, then.

Chains be gone.

Carissa Sevar: "If you don't want to wait for me to prepare Share Language we can ask the staff here for it," Carissa says once he's cast Comprehend Languages. "You have a call bell, right next to the door."

Keltham: Sure, he'll try Taldane with yet another different set of hard-to-detect connotations being rapidly overridden by actual familiarity.  He goes to tap the call bell.

lintamande: A uniformed person shows up in about fifteen seconds "How can I help you, sir?"

Keltham: "Eat chair Share Language Taldane?" Keltham says in attempted Taldane.

(It's pretty easy to figure out that 'eat chair' was supposed to be 'cast magic'.)

lintamande: Yeah, all right. Tap. 

Keltham: "Thank you," Keltham says in Taldane, and tries running through some words in his mind.  It's harder to read the faint connotations than it was yesterday; Share Language doesn't want to override knowledge that you already have.  Keltham has to focus hard on the internal probes and use some dath ilani techniques for hunting down subtle connotations that words and concepts have to you.

'Lawful' is obsessing over your city's regulations and fretting over whether you're conforming enough to all of them, 'Chaos' is insanity, 'Good' is something put firmly underneath a sense of superiority that's alien to dath ilan, 'Evil' is being mean to people and not in a sexually sadistic way either.

Keltham makes a note not to trust this particular person with anything if he can avoid it.  Actually, he should check -

'Asmodeus' doesn't return anything, nor 'Zon-Kuthon'.  Somehow the spell knows that these are individual things rather than general concepts, no matter how much a dath ilani would say that no such qualitative difference exists, and isn't transferring them over as Shared Language.

Keltham supposes that would have been an overly easy way of identifying traitors, at least those at or above second-circle wizardry... no, that's trope-based thinking, and it is very far from certain that mode of thinking binds to reality here at all; so he needs to at least firmly label every use of it in an inference step, and then compute everything the other way too.  If this technique is not forbidden to work by tropes, Keltham should be creative about making this method work, or just literally continue at all to think about how to make it work.

'Pain'?  Keltham can't get a read on it, he has a Baseline concept that the Taldane word maps onto almost exactly; Keltham already knows what this word means.  This sort of outcome is presumably the reason why Golarion folks don't think of this as a standard probe to use on each other.

Dath ilani however do not have a single commonly-used concept that corresponds exactly to the connotations and meanings of the Taldane word 'torture'*, and Keltham can get something of a read on that; 'torture' sounds awfulscary rather than desirable.

Okay, probably not a Kuthite traitor then, to the extent this method works at all.

(*)  The Baseline compound phrase that refers-by-convention to 'deliberately inflicting extreme amounts of pain' carries primarily the connotation of overly large negative payoffs in decision matrices and edgelord thought experiments devised by teenage males, not the idea that you can obtain information or obedience that way.

(From the perspective of anybody watching, Keltham just said 'Thank you', closed the door, and then shut his eyes and stood motionless for about a minute.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is ....concerned!!! But she has nothing productive to do with the concern and isn't exactly going to interrupt him. She brushes her hair and pulls her spellbook out of extradimensional space, instead. 

Keltham: Keltham finishes thinking and turns around in time to catch this.

"Wait, have you had a hammerspace* this whole time?"

(*) Lit. 'Don't-bother-tracking-facts-about carrying' in Baseline, translated to a Taldane term for a pocket dimension.

Carissa Sevar: "It's a first circle spell to hide your spellbook in another plane. It only works on spellbooks. I separately have been loaned a Bag of Holding, which is more of a standard instance of that thing, if you want to poke it."

Keltham: "Literally only spellbooks, and how is that a thing the spell can tell, and what counts as a spellbook, and can you write a spell over the outside of a luggage and pack the whole thing away, are some of the questions that leap instantaneously to mind, but they are not urgent ones.  I sure will want a Bag of Holding once I have anything to hold in it."

"Do you need, or for that matter want, a separate room so you can prepare spells?  And I also need, if it's possible, a space where I can sometimes be where other people won't be there without knocking, if this ends up our shared bedroom."

Carissa Sevar: “Only spellbooks because this is a hyperspecialized version of a more general third-circle spell which a research team at the Worldwound shaved down to first by making it incredibly specific. It has to be the spellbook you prepared the first circle spell out of, it has to be magically unique or you might get someone else’s spellbook with the exact same spells written in it, the weight limit is what a Mage Hand can lift, and non magical notes or writing don’t tend to come back when you summon it back. You can use the third circle version if you don’t like those downsides. 

I think this is meant to be your bedroom, and you can request me a separate one if you want space that’s not shared, even if you’re generally going to want me in yours.”

Keltham: "Hope we can at some point get to a situation with three rooms instead of two, but given the Security situation I can live with it temporarily.  Do you need to formally report in to Security about last night before spending a lot more time with me, do you prefer to prepare spells before you do anything else in a day, do you desire breakfast above and before all other things..."

Carissa Sevar: “My priority is you, Keltham. But I guess you’ve got spells to pray for and so I’ll probably by default report to Security and prepare mine while you’re doing that.”

Keltham: "Ione's list of spells got burned, so I figured, especially given what happened yesterday, I'd ask my god to pick whatever, in which case praying won't take long... if I get a busy signal and have to figure out my own spells for a new request, it might take longer, I suppose."

Carissa Sevar: “…right, I have no idea if the godwar affects prayer. We could ask whether the Asmodean clerics here are getting spells normally but that’d only tell us so much because Asmodeus is a much bigger and more powerful god.”

Keltham: "I'll just try it now."  Keltham, who has some alien mental training involving task-switching and calm-states via biofeedback and also lacks preconceptions about how fast sacred rites should take, shifts his thoughts into a more meditative and contemplative mode.  The Taldane word 'prayer' means more to him than it did yesterday, there's a novel concept inside Keltham for its connotations to translate onto.

Keltham remembers what he saw in Early Judgement, and thinks about his desire to engage in mutually beneficial interaction with the God of Coordination, the god who runs the afterlife of golden gondolas that are sold and not given away, because money symbolizes mutual benefit that spreads out beyond two people bartering directly, and that is what binds people helping each other into a Civilization even of many life forms.  Whatever spells his god thinks he should have today to serve that goal and make skyscrapers in Golarion, those are the spells Keltham wants.

Abadar: Abadar is (a) busy (b) very confused about how His attempts to help the strange squirrel via spell choice have been playing out so far and (c) feeling somewhat more relaxed about His initial attempt to open trade with the squirrel in a way nonharmful to the squirrel's own interests, now that the consequences will include the downfall of Zon-Kuthon.  If the squirrel is Good, which it might possibly be to some degree, it'll probably feel sad about how this whole business ended up helping Cheliax; but having also helped cause the downfall of Zon-Kuthon should make up for a lot, relative to what a Good squirrel's interests probably are.  And if the squirrel isn't Good at all, the squirrel is even less likely in those branches to regret having ever tried to trade with Abadar.

But, most importantly, Abadar is busy.  Call again later.

Keltham: "No reply at all.  I'll try picking out my own spells and praying again, but that'll take some time to think.  We should - request a room for you, so you can prepare spells there, I guess?  I'm not sure how my brain will respond to you being quietly in the room preparing spells and I don't want to unnecessarily fight my brain about anything right now."

Carissa Sevar: "Very reasonable. I will go report to Security and can convey that request on my way?"

Keltham: "Make it so, Carissa."

Carissa Sevar: She curtseys, and off she goes. 

Iarwain: Dawn has come, and Asmodean priests receive their spells.  One soul stands near the top of the new priority list.  If they don't act soon, they might not get her back, if it's not already too late.

Pilar : Pilar Pineda wakes in the dawn light of Elysium, still immersed in the pool of glowing slimes where she was resting that night. It seems that she is no longer chained, no longer bears those marks that tell Elysians how to mistreat her.  She is as naked, now, as when she first appeared here; though the pool slimes would be protecting her modesty if Asmodean wizard students were allowed to retain any.

Standing before her is the bizarre, brightly colored, un-reality-resembling form of Cayden Cailean's - herald?  Delegate?  It's not clear what she is in many senses, just that she (or is it She?) obeys, or, as the locals would have it, 'works with', Cayden Cailean.

Pilar knows, even before She speaks, what She will say.

"They'll call you very soon," says She to Pilar.  "Are you still sure you want to go back?"

"Yes I am sure," Pilar says firmly.  "And, if it's in any way possible, I don't want to come here next time.  Even if I can't get Maledicted in time, don't take me here again, just let me get my proper trial from Pharasma.  I belong in Hell.  And yes, I know that when I'm in Hell, I'll many times wish I was here.  But I'm actually Lawful Evil, and this was a lovely place to visit, but it's not where I belong."

The strange being nods Her head.  "Okay."

Pilar was expecting more of an argument.  "Okay?" she repeats.

"An it harm none other, do as ye will!  It may not be the whole of the Law, but it sure is a great big part of Chaotic Good!  We're not going to keep you here if you say you'd rather be somewhere else."

From far away, Pilar hears the call.  Yes, she answers, with her mind, with her soul, and a majority if not the absolute entirety of her heart.  Yes, I want to go back.  To serve Asmodeus in Golarion, and then in Hell.

And she feels herself start to fade.

She's fading really very slowly, for some reason, and seems to basically be still here.

"Time is running super fast for us right now, relative to Golarion," says the strange being.  "I am willing that it be so.  Raise Dead takes a minute to cast, and it turns out, there's a few more things you need to hear before you go!"

"Is this where you spring some sort of Chaotic Good trap on me?" Pilar says suspiciously.

"No.  It's where I tell you that Cayden Cailean won't be able to take you, if you die for real.  He was only able to get away with this because you were going to go back and Cayden Cailean knew that.  You're right, Lawful Evil to Chaotic Good is something of a stretch.  We could arrange a visit, but we can't offer you citizenship, not really."

Pilar now has additional questions.  "Wait - if I could never stay here in the first place, why did you keep asking me if I really wanted to go back to Golarion and go on to Hell - why send me on this whole tour to convince me to say no to the Raise Dead -"

The strange being laughs Her strange high-pitched cheerful laugh.  "Well, because it was important that you knew for yourself, you see!  There's not many people who can go to Hell with a whole heart, or who really and truly want to belong to Asmodeus when Asmodeus cares so little about them.  Many, many, many fewer people than have convinced themselves that they're okay with it."  The strange being looks sad, now.  "Not many people in Cheliax would make the decision you just did, if they had really been to Elysium, and if they really thought they could stay.  If Asmodeus's followers had any sense they'd throw you a huge party about it, when you got back to Golarion, but they won't do that either.  Most of them won't want to admit, if they even let themselves know it, that they would never do what you did."

On reflection, the Elysians never once did tell her explicitly that she could stay, just kept on asking her if she was sure she wanted to go back.  "What in the name of Asmodeus... um.  What is Cayden Cailean planning?  Why do that?"  She doesn't expect them to just actually tell her, but, Chaotic Good outsider, she should at least try.

"You don't think it's just the sort of thing that Chaotic Good people do?"

"No," says Pilar.  "This is way, waaay, waaaay too much effort for just getting one Asmodean to know for certain that she's an Asmodean, when, in fact, she already knew that."  (Elysium has affected her speech patterns, Pilar notes, she'd better watch that when she gets back.)

"Did she really know it, though?  There'd be an awful lot of Asmodeans who said they were certain they were Asmodeans, who'd never let themselves think that wasn't true.  But if they were in Elysium and had the chance to stay, they'd say yes in a heartbeat.  Could you know you weren't one of those, if you hadn't really tried it?"

"Yes, I could, actually," Pilar says.  "But more importantly, that is not the whole point of this operation.  What is?"

The strange being slyly winks one of the inhumanly huge, luminous white-black-blue-white eyes in Her head.  "Well, that would be telling.  But, guess what - the part where Cayden Cailean turned you into His oracle is going to help Asmodeus, in the end!"

"Really."

"Really!  You're truly loyal to Asmodeus, Pilar.  I'm not going to say we'd never use somebody like you against her own god, but it's still the sort of thing that Good prefers not to do.  According to Asmodeus's own values, He'll be better off in the world where Pilar Pineda became an oracle of Cayden Cailean than in the world where you didn't.  Obviously that's not the real point from Cayden Cailean's perspective, but it still happens to be true."

Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil don't have a whole lot of common interests, but they do have some.  "...Is this about keeping Rovagug sealed, or the Worldwound, or something?"

"One of those three for sure!"

Pilar can feel herself to have almost entirely faded, now.  Golarion is calling her, it's not her home, but it's on her way.

"And maybe it's not the real point either," says the un-reality-looking bright-pink sort-of-horse, "but with so many people in Hell, who don't want to be there, it would be sad if one of the very few people who did want to be there, couldn't go.  Asmodeus isn't a friend to anyone, but that doesn't mean He doesn't need anyone to be a friend to Him.  After all, sometimes -"

Pilar hears the last words with her soul's mind more than her soul's ears.

"- friendship can be the greatest magic of all!"

Iarwain: "Though," the Element of Laughter murmurs to herself, a little sadder, by the now-empty pool, "this isn't one of those times."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has no idea who in the palace she's supposed to report to and is mildly worried that if she just wanders around she'll either run into the Queen (hi your Imperial Majestrix you can do whatever you'd like) or run into someone that some random god can oracle or otherwise work through. ...if she's not more or less immediately stopped by Security she'll try for a temple.

Iarwain: Security will direct her quickly enough to Maillol, who's in a temporary guest office at the annex temple.

Ferrer Maillol: "Sevar."  He's had any sleep, now, and is going to need to have it for an entire damned week until his Ring of Sustenance kicks in again.

Carissa Sevar: Well, that's one of her questions answered, which was whether he was back and Project-related decisionmaking appropriately located so that she can stop doing it. The other things she wants to know are whether Pilar's back or whether she should start setting up excuses for that/evaluating a Pilar-replacement, whether anyone has any guesses on the mysterious Second Law that allowed Keltham to predict Pilar would enjoy being forced and have an interesting backstory, "and, in the spirit of continuing to be proactive about this, whether the Church has any correction for me."

Ferrer Maillol: "I'm probably just stupid from the Raise Dead, but I seem to be unable to find any flaws to pick in your performance over the last half-day.  Perhaps I'll have found some tomorrow."

Pilar's back, carrying a story that got her instantly kicked to the almost-but-not-quite-absolute-top-priority line to talk to Aspexia Rugatonn, which is, unfortunately, a pretty long line while the gods are at war.

Sevar is unfortunately the expert on whatever the Abyss this Second Law business is about.  Maillol can barely understand any of the game Sevar is playing against Keltham's mastery of the Law he's already lectured on.  If it wasn't for Sevar's thought transcripts, nobody else reading the surface conversation would've realized that there was a great mystery here in the first place.

Still, even with everyone incredibly busy, there's probably somebody here in the palace who can beat Keltham's Will save on Detect Thoughts with enough reliability to make it worth the risk.  Though they should probably ready a story about Nidal infiltrators in case that person fucks up.

Anyways, Maillol can't think of anything besides sending in somebody to ask Keltham why he thinks one girl is a hidden Kuthite cleric, and hoping that makes him think about the Second Law.  Maybe have somebody go in who's old and impressive-looking and wearing a big visible intelligence headband so that Keltham is more likely to try to explain to them than to Sevar.  All they need is for one of Cheliax's three eighth-circle wizards to have the time available for a Detect Thoughts.  During a war with Nidal.  Well, there's also always Aspexia Rugatonn, it's not like she'd be busy.  Or Gorthoklek, as the general of Cheliax's armies this must be like a vacation for him.

Carissa Sevar: "I assume I can't be of any help to the war effort that's worth distracting me from Keltham but if I can, he'd accept that as a reason for me to be doing other things." Carissa would have some kind of feelings about how she had the best spellcraft of anyone at the Worldwound including the wizards with two circles on her and can only serve Cheliax by getting chained up in bed except that would be pathetic. 

Ferrer Maillol: "It may be useful to have him think something like that exists when it doesn't, to give you an excuse to be places, but you're the one in charge of lies."

"I am still making an effort to understand Keltham myself in case you're not available, so, Sevar, correct me if I am mistaken.  My guess is that you'll say that Keltham doesn't think quite the same way we do about how he's obviously more important than anything you can do for the war effort, but that it's still a lie he might notice as out-of-place even if it's not instantly obvious to him the same way.  Confirm or correct me."

Carissa Sevar: "He would - try to extrapolate the equilibrium where third circle wizards on a secret directly divinely commanded project are needed for the war effort and something wouldn't add up, I don't know what, but if we're not in fact doing it then there's a reason we're not which bottoms out in reality, maybe in pieces of it he can see."

Ferrer Maillol: ...right.  Maillol really hopes that going around saying "extrapolate the equilibrium where" instead of just "figure out how things work if" is meaningful and important and not, when you start saying it, a sign of increasing Kelthamization.

"Give me your current best guess about when Cheliax will gain more than it loses from resuming extraction of information from Keltham, given that your thought transcripts suggest genuine and not simply posed concern about his ability to recover from the shock.  We could find a spare room within the Palace's Forbiddance for lessons, but not if we're eating our seed grain by doing that.  The actual call will remain yours after further observation of Keltham."

Carissa Sevar: "He thinks he'll be better by tomorrow or the next day, I predict he's right though he seems quite not okay right now and if he's still like this tomorrow I'll push it off."

Ferrer Maillol: "Understood."

"There's been a suggestion to have a third party tell Keltham useful things about your sexuality, preferably true ones, that he might be hesitant to believe from you directly.  Such as that you are attracted to him in part because of the actual power he holds over you, in the sense that you know Cheliax would let him do anything to you if he made that a condition of cooperating with us, and that if he never exercises any power over you, you may lose some interest.  Supposedly we know how you work because people with lots of experience with submissives can guess that by looking closely at you and how you behave around Keltham, as some people in our 'Governance' are of course doing in the background.  That Cheliax would let him do anything he wanted would be true in every sane country in the world and Taldor specifically and therefore, goes the argument, passes your condition on how we tell him Cheliax works."

Carissa Sevar: "I do think it'll be important progress for him to understand that we're not pretending and that I don't even wish we were. I am not sure who he'd trust to hear it from - maybe Ione, if she recovers, maybe Pilar - I do predict that most possible ways of saying to him 'you know, you can actually not-for-pretend do whatever you want' result in a freakout like the one he had over the idea that you get executed for trying to overthrow the government, but there might be something -

- if I were trying to broach it to him, which has the disadvantage that I'm not going to say I'll get bored if he doesn't keep up, what I'd say is that I disliked it in the sex shop how it seemed like it was set up for mostly people who wanted to - pretend - and that if I wanted that I'd have said to him 'act like you can do whatever you'd like to me, until I tell you to stop', or something, and I didn't, and that a consequence of what I said instead, as far as Cheliax is concerned, is that he is, actually, entitled to do whatever he'd like, and if he wanted to chain me up again and I was being difficult about it he could call in Security and no one'd blink at that, and even though I expect he's nowhere near the point where he'd enjoy my being defiant I like knowing it's real.

But that of course - even in Taldor it wouldn't matter at all what I had to say about it and we do have to introduce that at some point, as I understand it?"

Ferrer Maillol: "I believe the central concept is that we lie that 'Governance' would be unhappy and then go along with it, but tell the truth that the actual power this gives him is important to your sexuality.  'Governance' is not telling him this to encourage him, of course, but because it's an important fact for somebody like him to know about somebody like you.  He should not suggest that you have any power to restrain him from doing whatever he wants, because in fact you don't have that power and that fact is very important to you."

Carissa Sevar: " - yes. Okay, I think that's a good idea, I'm not sure who can pull it off, I'm authorizing the lie that Governance would be unhappy though even in Taldor I'm not, actually, convinced they would."