Asmodia: They haven't told her how long it's been.  It feels like it's been days.  So - probably it's been fewer days.  They'll still probably raise her.  They'll still probably raise her.

She's not ahead of schedule on her scribing.  Being good at math isn't the same as being fast at writing.  She would obviously go feed the potion-tops to the petrified angels if she had time, to show what a good soul she is.

But Asmodia doesn't have time, so right now she's feeding the potion-top to a less useful apprentice, one very close to her own desk, but not the closest one in case that was some sort of trap for lazy girls.  She has no idea who this boy was in life, he looks young but could easily have been here for a hundred years for all she knows, his tongue is burned away and reburned by the line of potions he regularly drinks.  What happens to him if he doesn't drink the potions, Asmodia doesn't know.  He's chained to his desk and can't stop her, doesn't try to stop her, each time she pours one of the potion-tops into his mouth.  Maybe he thinks Asmodia is authorized to do whatever she wants to him, maybe he doesn't realize he could fight back, maybe he isn't in fact allowed to fight back at anything done to him, Asmodia doesn't know.

Asmodia wouldn't waste any time on pitying him even if there was any pity left in her nature.  There's very little doubt that copying spell diagrams for distribution in Cheliax is one of the best jobs in Hell, optimized mostly around maximum production for Cheliax and hence unable to distract the petitioners too much from relatively delicate work.  Asmodia's going to be retrained into a contract devil when she dies and that will be much much worse.  If she could get this boy's position for herself, when she dies, by throwing him into a lake of fire to burn there forever, there's no doubt she'd do that too.  Maybe that's how the boy got his position, by being extra good and doing horrible things to somebody like her.

She hates him.  He's so much better off than she'll be.  The passive way he accepts her torments feels like he's mocking her, like he's suppressing a smile knowing how much worse she'll get hers, in time.

Asmodia asks her contract devil if she's allowed to hurt that boy more for any kind of extra credit, if she has only a little extra time in her schedule but not enough to go feed petrified angels.  She doesn't want to waste potions by feeding him extra potion-tops.

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

lintamande: "For fun," her contract devil says, "or to get a better grade in being a scribe? Because the way to get a better grade in being a scribe is to get faster, and do better work, so you will not rise in my esteem by cutting off his ears with a bit of glass grabbed off the ground. But it's an acceptable kind of fun, if you were asking if you are allowed to have any fun."

Asmodia: She'll try having any fun, but mostly work on scribing faster and doing better work.

(Cutting off his ears feels more awful and poisonous than fun but it at least feels like she's inflicting her own pain onto somebody else and showing she's not literally at the lowest rung of Hell and maybe that counts for something with Somebody even if it doesn't move her contract devil any.)

They'll still probably raise her.  She doesn't want to exist.  They'll still probably raise her.  Nothing good will ever happen to her even after they do.  But it will be better than this.  Temporarily.  Then it will be worse.  They'll still probably raise her.  Maybe if she focuses really hard on copying spell diagrams she can stop constantly remembering she exists and that will be at least a little bit like not existing.  They'll still probably raise her.  She hates the universe and everything in the universe because everything in the universe hates her and never helps her no she can't think that when she goes back Security will hear her thinking that and worry she's going to become a Rovagug cultist and execute her and send her straight to Hell to be tortured for real and so she can't think that ever again.  Because they'll still probably raise her.

lintamande: Imps flit in now and then with messages for her contract devil; that's also got to be one of the best jobs in Hell, teleporting around with wax-sealed scrolls in tiny hands. It happens often enough not to be notable.

Until, reading one of the messages, her contract devil says in a tone that's somewhat less bored than usual, "set that book aside, mark your place, and come with me... oh, you'll need shoes. Mark your place, fetch a pair of boots out of the grey and silver closet, and come with me."

Asmodia: She obeys, new terror going through her.  She could have endured this, just this, until she went back, they'll still probably raise her, but now something different is going to happen and that will undoubtedly be worse.

She puts on the boots from the grey and silver closet.  They don't hurt her.  Maybe they'll hurt her later.

lintamande: Her contract devil heads out briskly into the streets of Dis. The buildings are tall and sharp and vanish into the smoky haze above; the streets are carefully, evenly cobbled with tormented human faces. Here and there they cross a bridge of red-hot metal that smells of cooking meat from all the people walking barefoot across it; one, ahead of them, stumbles, and someone irritably kicks her over the edge of the bridge into the flowing lava below. 

Asmodia's boots are sufficient to protect her from the heat. 

The city, already dense, somehow grows denser around them, and the architecture more elaborate and more striking. They come at last to the palace gates, and her contract devil hands the scroll to the palace guards, and then turns back to Asmodia. "Tell Carissa Sevar," he says, "that you are, of course, for sale at the right price, and to look up Ahuvir Dulzomaud, who holds your soul. You're a whiny, tedious waste of space, and I hope you do manage to impress her enough to get yourself devoured forever because you can't handle existing."

And he walks away, vanishes almost immediately into the crowd and into the smoke.

Asmodia: Ahuvir Dulzomaud.  Ahuvir Dulzomaud.  Ahuvir Dulzomaud.

She repeats it to herself over and over as the palace guards lead her inside, because, whatever else happens, forgetting her owner's name or her owner's instructions does not sound at all like a good idea.  She is to tell Carissa Sevar that she is, of course, for sale at the right price, and to look up Ahuvir Dulzomaud.

What's going to happen to her, now?  The devil was very right, she can't handle existing.  There are people who do well in Hell and more people who do well in relatively light amounts of Hell and it unfortunately turns out that Asmodia is not either of those kinds of people.  She's defective, she gets that, somebody should switch her off.

They'll still probably raise her.

Iarwain: The palace guards are strangely gentle with her.  She is not struck, is not told to hurry.

She is told to pass through a particularly ornate set of black iron gates.

Beyond them is a lush green place as pretty as a garden and as wild as a wilderness, with flowers and bushes and trees growing either in no order or in a very careful order that mortal eyes cannot discern, prettier than anything a Chelish wizard student is liable to have ever seen during her mortal life in Golarion.

Asmodia: It takes her exhausted, literally-dead brain long seconds to grasp where she would probably have to be.

"The gardens of Erecura," Asmodia whispers.

Erecura: Correct.

The voice seems to come from everywhere, or maybe just the inside of Asmodia's own head, it's hard to tell the difference.

Asmodia: Erecura, Lawful Neutral goddess, former soothsayer of Pharasma who stole the secret to divinity from her goddess and was banished to Hell as a punishment.  Now apparently-beloved consort of the archdevil Dispater, who is Lord of Dis.  One of very few beings not Lawful Evil whom it is legal to worship at all in Cheliax - not worship as a primary deity, of course, but if you hold Asmodeus above Her you are also allowed to worship Her as well.

What happens to Asmodia now?

Asmodia doesn't ask; it's plaintive, whiny, pathetic, if they want her to know they'll tell her.

(Unless the rules are different in Erecura's Gardens, but no, no, that's too much to hope for, all hope does is hurt you.)

"What are my orders?" Asmodia says, her voice outwardly steady.  She can still muster that much strength.

Erecura: You have no orders.  You may have clothing if you wish, eat or drink if you wish that experience, explore my gardens, or find a quiet place to rest and wait to be raised.

You are also allowed to leave my garden and go exploring in Dis, but I would not particularly advise it.

Asmodia: "Why..."

Asmodia doesn't have any words left in her.  This can't be real.  It's a form of torture where they let you into the gardens for a few minutes and then pull you out again and put you back at the copying table, or somewhere much worse.

Erecura: It's a rather interesting question, isn't it?

But you're safe for now.  I would suggest taking this opportunity to sit down and weep.  It is safer to weep here than in Cheliax.

Asmodia: A god of Good who heard her call, before, but couldn't save her then?  But no, that makes no sense, how would They hold power here in Hell, unless everything she's ever been told about how the entire universe works is a lie.

Asmodia finds a place that looks soft to sit down, a little bed of unusually thick grass, obscured by enough trees and bushes that it might feel a little safer.  She sits there.  She doesn't seem to be crying yet?  Part of her mind suggests that she should be terrified of her failure to follow instructions.  Part is running with the theory that things are as they seem, and if they are, she can already predict she won't be punished.

"Safe for now?" Asmodia says.  "Am I allowed to ask - what you mean - for now?"

Erecura: You have 100 years in my gardens, and if your stay of torment is not renewed before then, you will then return to Hell and whatever is to be your fate.

That clock only runs while you are here in Hell; your time on Golarion does not count against that stay of torment.

Asmodia: "Why - I don't understand - is somebody - trying to make use of me, somehow?"

Erecura: Few souls are useful to no one.  But if there is any use of you that could repay the price that has been paid for this, it is a use beyond My sight.

Asmodia: The thought occurs to her that, if she's not that useful, then someone, somewhere, she doesn't even know it's possible, but maybe possibly it's because someone somewhere in all of everywhere must -

Asmodia: "Is it because - somebody cares what happens to me?"

Erecura: Perhaps.

Asmodia: "But -"  Asmodia struggles for words.  "But -"

But it can't be somebody who cares about everyone, the way Good might, because there are people in Hell, freshly arrived in Hell who might still be saved, who are much more the sort of person that a Good god would care about, and going through much worse than copying spell diagrams for the time before she gets raised (they'll still probably raise her), and if you had the power to give someone a stay of torment you would give it to them instead, unless -

"But it would have to be someone who cares about me personally and there isn't anyone like that!"

Erecura: There isn't?

Asmodia: "Nobody who has power!  Nobody who means anything!"

Asmodia: "Nobody who could command this, or pay for this, or bargain for this!  Nobody like that cares about me!  Even Carissa Sevar, whatever she is, doesn't actually care about me and wouldn't bother to save me like this, or if she did, she'd take credit for it so I knew, and she wouldn't, she'd think I was being weak and that a short stay in Hell would motivate me to work harder, for her, which it would, and she wouldn't pay me with 100 years in advance either, so I, I don't understand, I don't understand at all -"

Erecura: Not all puzzles are easy for mortals to solve, and some are difficult even for gods.

But if you'll pardon an old soothsayer Her crypticisms, allow Me to ask you this, Asmodia.

Were you expecting this to happen to you?

Asmodia: "No.  No I was not actually."

Erecura: Then consider that you may have been wrong about something.

Asmodia: "Wrong about what?"

Erecura: Ah.  That is the hazard of soothsaying, is it not.  It is far easier to guess that you must be wrong about something, than to guess what exactly it is that you are wrong about.

But one of the things you believe, perhaps more than one, must clearly be wrong.

Asmodia: Asmodia doesn't have any words left.  She sits on the thicker grass and stares down at her hands.  Nothing is hurting her.  She isn't being forced to do anything.

The thought occurs to her that this state of affairs is more pleasant than Cheliax, and Raise Dead requires her consent.

...that would be why the part about 100 years, maybe, it's - so she doesn't just stay here - but then why 100 years and not 1 week - she doesn't understand - but Asmodia guesses that she's supposed to go back and, do something, somehow, to earn the rest of her reprieve or at least her nonexistence or something - for who, who's her sponsor, how she's supposed to work for them if she doesn't know -

What was she wrong about?

Asmodia: Asmodia sits on the thicker grass and stares down at her hands.

What was she wrong about?

Well, either, she's not a useless waste of a person, in some way that Erecura Herself can't foresee, like She said, or, Erecura didn't say, that anything was beyond Her sight, She just asked other questions back, when Asmodia suggested, suggested that, somebody, somehow, somewhere, somewhere in all of everything everywhere, cared about her personally, and did this for her.

She does start crying, then.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa snuggles Keltham in silence until she thinks - she's not totally sure - he has fallen asleep. 

She's still not sure if it was in fact a good idea to push Keltham on the Second Law and on being more sadistic, she's not sure she'll know for a while if it was the right call or not. She understands the Second Law stuff better now (though she's still hoping she'll get it better still once she sees the transcripts) but she suspects it's not something she can use to do anything, making the universe look more like a sex story will also make Keltham wonder if Cheliax is doing that on purpose, besides how it involves lying and lying remains very dangerous. 

The whole thing might have gone better without the Queen involving herself but - Carissa's not actually sure. It's not as if there are a lot of agenda-free eighth circle casters who understand the project well enough to get through a conversation with Keltham at all. And the Queen's agenda right now seems to involve convincing Keltham that Carissa is very valuable, which does feel nice. Even though it's probably false. And even though Carissa's pretty sure that anyone else would've assigned a milder punishment for what was admittedly a very insubordinate thought but she's been having her thought transcripts read by the Queen and by high-ranking Church officials for several days now while trying to run a sensitive operation and she actually thinks most people would have had, like, two insubordinate thoughts. Or even three. 

Keltham: Keltham awakens, feeling groggy but noticeably better.

Carissa Sevar: Here is his Carissa, very snuggly. 

Outside, the rain has started to lessen, a little.

Keltham: He can hear it.

He opens his eyes.  Does his Carissa look to be awake herself?

Carissa Sevar: Yep. Holding very still, so she doesn't wake him, but looking relaxed and comfortable and not at all like she's been internally contemplating how to demonstrate convincingly to Keltham that Cheliax isn't mind-controlling him but could if they wanted to and whether the Queen has asked to be notified when Carissa goes in for her punishment.

Keltham: "So I'm still sort of groggy, and yet, now that it sounds from the rain outside like there isn't going to be an enormous global disaster, I sure do feel weirdly better for what are no doubt totally unrelated and coincidental reasons."

Carissa Sevar: "In dath ilan are people not supposed to have feelings about enormous global disasters?"

Keltham: "They're definitely supposed to, but I'm an unusually Evil dath ilani so I shouldn't have any feelings like that, clearly."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you know, I like you Evil but I think Evil people have a preference against enormous global disasters, they're not very profitable and the last one also led to a bunch of civil wars and so on."

Keltham: "Probably not supposed to cry as much about them, though."

"- I'm joking, I understand that you can classify as Evil and still cry."

Carissa Sevar: "It's not very Chelish, to cry about them, but your being here in Cheliax is, if you hadn't noticed, premised on the suspicion that we are doing Evil wrong and need to learn to do it better, and maybe it will turn out that doing Evil right involves more crying than is strictly conventional. Anyway, it's only me who saw, and I won't report you to your wide-eyed researchers who you want to impress."

Keltham: "I - there's so much I need to understand about Golarion - and it seems like all I can do, is ask one question after another, and there's probably some order I could ask them to make them more efficient, but I don't know what it is, so all I can do is keep bothering you like this, for which I'm sorry -"

"Would my researchers be particularly unimpressed if they were just told the fact that I cried, even if they didn't remember seeing it?  Cheliax norms call for people to look cheerful while the world is ending, and not to have been heard to have cried when it didn't?  I - won't ask why, if the answer is yes, just - yes or no."

Carissa Sevar: "Uh, if you weren't an alien, yes slightly, since you are an alien, no."

Keltham: "Right then."  He doesn't ask why, as promised.  Later he'll understand, no doubt.  "It's - I wouldn't want to have a breakdown in public, in dath ilan, either, but it's not their way to hide the fact that it occurred in private.  What people see - reaches them in a way they can't control, they can't stop themselves from also feeling distressed if they see you crying, they can't fully control how it changes their opinion of you either.  But you can be abstract about it if you're told afterwards that it happened, so that makes it okay to tell people about things it wouldn't be okay to show them.  It's not about hiding the truth."

"I think I should still live like that.  So go ahead and tell my researchers what happened."

Carissa Sevar: " - if you say so." Squeeze. "I have thought about whether there's a better order to introduce you to everything about Golarion than you asking questions and I haven't really been able to think of one either, so go ahead and ask lots of questions, I guess."

Keltham: How do you feel about being rented?

Keltham doesn't ask; for one thing he still needs to query his own sexual-romantic self about it first, and it's not currently active enough for that.

"I don't know if you're the sort of person who ever likes to talk about herself at all - but it occurs to me that - now that our relationship has moved past safe first-date activities like you giving yourself completely to me to do anything I want potentially including killing you - we should maybe do some more serious and heavy stuff, like me asking you about your life history."

Carissa Sevar: - giggle. "Yes, all right, I guess that's the sort of thing people get around to on a second date." And she's got it all Taldor-ized and everything.

Keltham: "So what's your life history?  In six words or less."

Carissa Sevar: ...is that a joke? "...worldwound...wizard....weapons specialist...met Keltham."

Keltham: "Selfish dath ilani died, met Carissa."

"Now the long version."

Carissa Sevar: She really does like him. 

"I was born in Corentyn. It's a city on the same coast as Ostenso, but pretty far, five hundred miles or so, right where the Inner Sea opens up into the ocean. My father is a merchant; he works out what cargo will be sent in his ships to other cities, and what they'll trade for there, and he sells foreign goods to merchants in Corentyn and sells Chelish goods far away. I have a half-brother who's going to take over the business from him someday. That's how it's normally done; there's a lot of accumulated expertise no one's written down, so you teach your children. Teach your sons, until pretty recently. My mother is a wizard and when she met my father was doing odd wizard work, a step up from laundry - daily cooling spells for people who don't like the summer heat, Comprehend Languages to translate for merchants, that kind of thing. 

When I was young there was a civil war, and that's when the Queen signed her compact with Hell and formed modern Cheliax, though I don't remember much about it, except that the ships were impressed for moving soldiers around and my father was very annoyed about it, and parts of the city where we didn't live got destroyed. My mother kept me home and tried to teach me magic. After the war the church opened up a school for wizards in Corentyn and my mother got a job as a teacher there and I tested in, and did very well, and when I graduated was encouraged to enlist in the Chelish army and go fight at the Worldwound, because it'd be best for my growth as a wizard and paid very generously and was also necessary to prevent the destruction of the world, which even Evil people care about typically. So I enlisted, and I've served six years now, with a year off in between three-year terms. I planned to stay until I hit fourth circle, because I want to be fourth-circle, and I knew in my heart I might actually stay until I hit fifth, because then you can Teleport, and then I was going to open a magic shop in Corentyn and have kids and be rich."

Keltham: So Carissa already knows herself well enough to know she'll want children.  Well, she's had longer to figure it out than Keltham.  Then again, some people younger than Keltham already seem to know...

...why is he thinking that he doesn't know if he wants children?  He was going to become a billionaire and have lots of children.

It's pretty obvious on reflection that it's because these children will be real.

"I was born in Default, the city you're born in when you're not born anywhere particularly interesting, because your parents don't have any particular reason to be anywhere else and so they might as well live where everybody else lives; it's the largest dath ilani city in the world, and the center of Governance is there but not in the center.  I got the usual education, but with fewer persistent friendships over time with other children, because my parents moved around a lot.  Conventional wisdom is that more persistent friendships are better, in childhood, but my parents basically waved it off because they thought I'd be pretty much all right even if they didn't optimize every single aspect of my childhood as hard as possible.  I agree with them about that, but one still gets the impression that all of their friends were horrified.  In that dath ilani way where you're privately horrified but conceal the overt signs because, first of all, you don't think that exerting more social pressure will help, and second, they can guess perfectly well that you're horrified.  We had a small house-module, maybe something like a tenth or twentieth the size of the villa that got burned down."

"I'm not sure at exactly what point it became clear to them that I was a little different than the other children, but it must have definitely been apparent at the point where I got - one of the elaborate tests that children get, in dath ilan, which aren't just there to measure us, but also to provide the results for the prediction markets that say what will happen in Civilization's future - anyways, I apparently ran across a lightly injured adult who needed me to get help, and I helped him, but I wanted to be paid for helping.  I think that was when my parents decided that they'd made a mistake by assortatively mating with each other to select on the quality of reserving a little more of their life for themselves, and moving a lot if they wanted to do that, even if it meant their child's life was less than perfectly optimal; I was more selfish than either of them, which doesn't always happen, in a heritage-mating setup like that one, but happens sometimes.  And dath ilan - when you're different, if it's something they can live with at all, they'll do what they can to make life in Civilization easier for you, despite you being different, because everyone is different, somehow, somewhere, everyone needs exceptions.  My parents did the very correct thing, then, and sort of gently tried to offer me opportunities to be more Good, if I wanted to be, but without suggesting that I couldn't still just be Evil if I wanted.  They argued with me about it, and tried to argue me into being Good, but only after I started it by trying to argue them into being more Evil."

"I left home as soon as I could pass the requisite financial maturity and self-governance tests, at thirteen.  I set up in a part of Default distant enough that my parents wouldn't visit me often enough to be annoying.  I got a very default job - doing a thing you don't have words for, setting up high-precision processes that do things, very mundane high-precision processes though, like some business wanted a tweak made to their high-precision process for selling things," this language really is not going to do 'computer programming' without a long digression, "and put all the money I could into the craziest investments I could find that basically seemed to me like they should work, some went up, some blew up, after five years of that I was ahead of the broader market but very barely.  I was hoping to - teach myself, if I kept investing like that, that I'd get good at it."

"For socialization I had a circle of friends my age writing, a kind of stuff that doesn't exist here, though I did a lot more reading and only enough writing to count, but it meant that when everyone was sitting around in a circle eating whatever people had brought in and talking about everyone's work, that I could keep up and talk about it.  I picked that writing circle because their themes were, not quite 'doompunk', not quite, Evil aesthetic, more like supervillainy, but not that really - the point was that they were people who could admire people who were selfish, so long as those people were clearly fictional and they weren't out there being selfish in real life.  Which, you know, beats people not even appreciating the aesthetic as an aesthetic.  I thought about trying to find a circle of other more selfish people, but always decided against it, because - I didn't want to take it from being my personal identity, to a group identity, it was mine and I didn't actually want to be around five other people doing it slightly differently and have debates about that."

"Civilization really does try hard to make it possible for people who are different to, just be like that and it's fine and their lives aren't about being different.  But a lot of us who are different don't want that, either, we don't just want to pass through it all unnoticed, we feel like we have something to prove, not because Civilization is telling us to prove it, but because we want to prove it anyways.  And if what you want is - to be acknowledged for it, to make people admit something, to excel so much that you're above average, Civilization isn't just going to hand that to you.  Not everyone can have things that not everyone can have."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has no idea what to say to that but her honest reaction is " - I'm terribly glad I didn't grow up somewhere Good, somewhere where - people'd think they made a mistake, having a child who wants to be paid for doing important work helping people -"

Keltham: It's not like Golarion is doing incredibly better than dath ilan on the strength of its greater selfishness.

Keltham elects not to say it out loud, for now.

"They didn't think I was a mistake, a person that they'd wish they'd never made and brought into the world.  Nothing like that.  Not even close.  They felt they'd made their own wrong life choices that had resulted in me existing, that's not the same as saying that I shouldn't exist, that if there's a button you press to get a Keltham, you don't press the button.  They just felt that they could've made other choices and gotten some other result instead, and then they would have felt like they'd made their own choices correctly, not that one possible child would be - more valuable to them than the other, if you put them side by side -"

"Their lives are also theirs, and their regrets belong to them, and they didn't try to make them be something about me or something of mine."

A sudden lump comes into his throat, as Keltham realizes, having not quite thought of it before:

Everyone who knows me thinks I'm dead.  Really dead.

The Keepers have to know.  The Keepers ought to tell anyone who's really broken up about it, right, it shouldn't be that much of an infohazard - that you wouldn't even tell the kid's own parents, he's still alive -

The Keepers will tell them that Keltham is still somewhere, probably many different somewheres but some weighing more than others, and that to say anything about the details is far beyond anything the Keepers can do.  The Keepers would not be able to foresee specifics like Golarion.

Dath ilan wouldn't put that much effort into cryosuspending every single person no matter what, if they expected all the selfish sadists to end up in worlds with masochists who give them everything they want.

Maybe hearing the current state of knowledge is actually worse for somebody than thinking their kid is just gone, because if they're just nonexistent, nothing any worse can be happening to them, and more importantly, you can be done thinking about it at some point.

Maybe the Keepers won't tell his parents, or anybody else who knows him, after all.

Carissa Sevar: The distinction Keltham is trying to draw doesn't make any sense to Carissa  - or, at least, not to the extent he's trying to say something more complicated than 'they get to wish they'd had a different kid if they want to', which is obviously true - but it doesn't seem like the time to say that.

Snuggle. 

Keltham: He's feeling a bit sad now, and will snuggle back and hope that she thinks of something to say so he doesn't have to.

Carissa Sevar: "I'm sorry. That in your world people can - die forever. They shouldn't."

Keltham: It is not entirely clear to him that people can.

Not that this is necessarily a good thing.  Though it could be!  Keltham doesn't know.  It depends on, you know, the entire state of the entire multiverse that he cannot in fact extrapolate in his tiny little mortal-sized brain.

But he should maybe not talk about this much until he's tried to figure out the ways in which it will be an enormous infohazard, which, again, it clearly will be, somehow.

"I suspect that - at the scale where whole universes interact, like that - time might not mean as much, or be as synchronized, as it is in Golarion.  If you can see dath ilan from here, if that's at all controllable, then it might be just as easy to see dath ilan's past as what I think of as its present.  That could be why Asmodeus wasn't trying to grab anyone else right away, if it was expensive, and if He knew that all that was needed was one dath ilani to get things rolling here, and that, in time, Golarion's Civilization would then ascend to where it could finish the job itself."

"And if you think about it from the perspective of somebody who died - they just need - someone, somewhere, who's powerful enough, who can see them, and cares.  Or is willing to trade with something else that cares."

Some trades stretch across time.  It's a saying in dath ilan that usually means something rather different, there: just ordinary time in one world, coordinated trades that parents make with children who don't exist yet or haven't matured as economic agents.

Carissa Sevar: This makes so much more sense in light of Carissa's realization Keltham thinks there are infinite worlds but she isn't sure she would've had that revelation if she hadn't been listening to his conversation with Isidre. 

"That makes sense," she says, slowly. "...so, under that theory, you were the single dath ilani it was most important for Golarion to grab. ....and I was the place in Golarion it was most important to put you."

Keltham: "Yeah, that's a problem with the theory, I'm frankly actually not seeing that.  There are dath ilani with higher Intelligence, higher Wisdom, superior social skills, and a far more encyclopedic knowledge of what you have to do to get a Civilization booted.  I'm also pretty sure that Golarion isn't the most fun-for-me world I could possibly be in."

"It's almost as if something wasn't really optimizing all that hard, but that just straight-up doesn't make sense at the requisite power level, so a much better bet is that something else was being optimized instead.  Or I was cheaper in some unavoidable way than a smarter dath ilani, or Golarion was more accessible... or there were only the hundred dath ilani from the air-traveling machine to distribute, and not that many more places to put them..."

"I kind of doubt I'm going to get it after thinking about it for an hour, if I didn't get it in the first thirty seconds."

Carissa Sevar: Or it has to be an evil dath ilani because they have to be able to work with Cheliax, because a Good dath ilani Cheliax would just cheerfully ignore while deceiving and they're supposed to do something more complicated than that. And it can't be a genius because then Cheliax would fail at deceiving them. 

"You could try asking a very smart person," she says, because she kind of wants to get the conversation back on Isidre without indicating that she has any reason to think that conversation was of particular interest. "We do have a couple of those, though they tend very busy."

Keltham: "It's out of Isidre's depth.  She might have the Intelligence and Wisdom to be a Keeper - if there's not more to it than that, other unmeasured qualities, which there might be.  But she's missing background knowledge and the background knowledge is piled on top of other knowledge in a very tall pile.  That's basically what I told Isidre when she asked me to explain my hidden Kuthite cleric prediction, that the reason I hadn't tried to tell you earlier wasn't that I thought you were too stupid."

It's occurring to Keltham that in sufficient extremis, there's an emergency tactic which is his asking to put on Isidre's headband.

Well, Keltham now knows a threshold: if he ever becomes any more Good than the amount of Goodness required to do that, he'll end up destroying his own self in a way that will probably be a lot more final than his temporary inconveniencing on the airplane.

Or maybe it wouldn't actually be that bad!  Not knowing if it will actually be that bad sure could be one way to end up desperately doing something that actually is that bad!

Carissa Sevar: " - oh, it makes sense that the Crown would've really wanted to understand that, and it makes sense that you couldn't explain it to them." He seems tense, is that because he found Isidre suspicious, but didn't think of it at the time? She really wants those transcripts.

Keltham: "To be clear, that wasn't the only thing Isidre wanted to talk about, saying that now so it doesn't seem later like I was trying to mislead you about that."

Carissa Sevar: Politely puzzled Carissa! "I assume a very smart person who wanted to meet with you would have lots to say, and you don't have to tell me any of it you don't want to; presumably if she wanted me to hear all of it she'd have invited me too....well, handwaving some palace politics that perhaps I shouldn't handwave. But she could've let you let me stay."

Keltham: "Yeah.  I hadn't meant to spell it out explicitly, in case you got curious and then I couldn't answer right away, but since you seem to be deducing it anyways - there's a bunch of her stuff that was very much - some person with an overpowered intelligence headband reading about less intelligent people with potential relationship issues, and her deciding to optimize them, and one of the people she wanted to optimize was you."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I don't exactly know how I feel about that. On the one hand it is sort of interesting to have smart people try to think about your life for you, I'm always wishing I was smarter and could do that better. On another, I feel strange about it being someone I haven't met who is reading the project transcripts presumably in their capacity as a Chelish administrator. On another, there's something romantic about people having meetings with you about optimizing me, makes it - less like pretending. On another, you've been here for three days and they've been very stressful and you haven't actually signed up for responsibility for optimizing me! What if you don't want to optimize me? - possibly this is too many opinions to have about a one-sentence summary of a conversation I didn't witness. Sorry."

Keltham: "No, that all sounded pretty justified based on the actual conversation."

"To be fair, I'm probably being uncharitable to Isidre, right now, she had very serious and altruistic and important reasons for optimizing over us.  The way that very smart people do, in stories about very smart people, that are based on cautionary life events that happened to actual very smart people.  My bet, and it seems like a pretty sure bet, is that Golarion doesn't have many very smart people at all and in particular it doesn't have enough of them that they can form their own social groups and train each other in how to not make typical very smart person mistakes."

"I'll go ahead and ask about the romantic part, though.  Is it having a couple of other people go off and decide what to do with your life among themselves?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not exactly? It's - 

- so when I went to the sex shop, there was this sort of pervasive assumption that it was - a little like a costume shop, I don't know how to explain it - that some people like to dress up as the possessions of other people during sex, in the same way as some people like to dress up as dragons during sex, and so they'd sell you the outfit for it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But at the Worldwound people were doing something different, something better suited to me, where - you could give terms up front, obviously, but whatever terms you gave, those were real. They weren't a costume, they weren't a game, the whole thing was obviously in an overarching sense governed by the treaty so no one was risking being maimed or murdered but you wouldn't say 'oh, hmm, I'm bored now'.

And I was slightly worried that the nobility, being the nobility and sort of aliens at best anyway, had the concept but only the costume-party concept." Yep, that's the problem with the Chelish nobility, that they might be assuming by default that their relationship is one of equals-with-some-pretense, definitely not that everyone who doesn't know exactly what's going on assumes what's going on is that Cheliax gave the alien some welcoming gifts. "And if they're asking you, then - then they're not working off a costume-party concept. Even though it's a sort of silly thing for them to have done and I'm sorry you were inconvenienced."

Keltham: "I guess - that is very much the kind of respect that dath ilan wants out of its very smart people who are smarter than the other people.  The sort of thing where, if you say, I'm Keltham's, they take that at face value and go talk to Keltham - though I did not, myself, see that at the time, because I am still very much - trying to locate in concept-space what it means that you gave yourself to me."

Carissa Sevar: Yes, very respectful, Isidre sure is that. "Well, see, that's the complicating bit, right, that you didn't actually sign up for being in any sense responsible for me. So I feel respected but also you should definitely feel free to say 'I continue to delegate Carissa-optimization to Carissa', you didn't acquire an obligation to do it.

What does it mean to you, that I gave myself to you."

Keltham: That my brain continually feels like it's wavering on some sort of huge ledge and I am constantly wondering which things I am to do with you and which not and which decisions you're supposed to make for yourself and I'm supposed to make for you.  Because you still think, Carissa, on some deep level, that I grew up in Golarion, that of course I must know what you really mean, that it should be obvious, and because it's obvious it's fine not to be legible...

"That I have to figure out for myself what I actually want from you, since I don't have the excuse and easy way out of just asking you what you're willing to give, and that I guess I'll see where that takes me," Keltham answers out loud.  "It's also obviously this huge act of - loyalty, trust, something I don't have words for - and it impresses me and - makes me wish that I understood all the connotations, everything that somebody from Golarion would take for granted, so that I could appreciate better exactly what that act means," and stop being terrified that its real meaning is owing you something I can't pay back.

Carissa Sevar: Lean. "Well, there's no hurry. And I can try to explain, except I don't know exactly where to start, I already explained the bits that are really obvious and the rest is probably, you know, fire elementals don't know what fire is."

Keltham: "Isidre, allegedly, has some idea of what fire is.  But among the many, many things I didn't ask her and should've when I had the chance was, 'Wait so am I allowed to just directly say all this to Carissa and ask her about it, or do you predict something bad happens if I do that?'"

Carissa Sevar: Oh, I bet she knows what fire is. 

Carissa Sevar: "...what kind of bad thing are you thinking of?"

Keltham: "As the saying goes, knowledge of the bad thing that happens to you if you hear the dangerous-information is often the same dangerous-information.  I mean, not for book spoilers, maybe, but for a lot of the more serious stuff.  I'd have to go through it all piece by piece to figure out if there were any exceptions to that -"

"I'm being evasive.  Why am I being evasive."

"I'm being evasive because thinking about what Isidre said requires my romantic and libido parts to be booted up to think about it properly, and those parts are not presently booted."

"Do I endorse that answer?  Yes, I endorse it."

Carissa Sevar: "...okay." That seems bad for Cheliax's goals. Also confusing. Carissa is pretty sure that when one feels vulnerable and confused then one is much more inclined to have sex - though that's the kind of thought where, now that she's thought it, she can notice probably isn't a human universal and is probably instead the kind of thing that might divide people by whether they like being hit or not. "Do you want a massage, I think that is the standard sort of thing that's nice even when one isn't in the mood and can get one into it."

Keltham: "I have - some sort of guilt feelings you're going to tell me I shouldn't have, because it's not the point, and then the feelings aren't going to go away - that you're - a topnotch weapons specialist who gave herself to me, to make anything I wanted of her, and instead of making you into a better weapons specialist whose creations can destroy fifty demons per second, I'm getting a massage from you."

Carissa Sevar: " - so, I hesitate to describe my ideal endgame here, because I'm very worried that you're going to, like, take it as 'if I don't achieve that, then I wronged Carissa by taking her up on it in the first place', which is not the point at all. But my ideal endgame here is that we build a dath ilani city in conquered Nidal and get all the modern conveniences Civilization invents before anyone else and I have so much spellsilver I can do every project that comes to mind as soon as it does and I make us immortal -- though we can still visit Hell sometimes, maybe have a vacation place in Dis -- and sometimes you have a very spirited try at hurting me until I say 'no', and you can't do it."

Keltham: "I'd expect you to warn me in advance if I was getting close to making you say 'no' and not just struggle to get away, if I hadn't otherwise rescinded that order by then.  That is not something I am ready to fight my brain about right now.  And even if that changes, I suspect I still might find it hot."

"It - actually does help that you have and know any possible endgame, it helps my brain believe that you weren't just stepping into a vast empty void that it is my sole task to fill like a," and once again Taldane does not have the word 'computer programmer', "god.  I'm not sure you grasp quite how little I know about what a Carissa Sevar could maybe possibly probably be thinking."

Carissa Sevar: "If this works at all you're going to be incredibly rich and powerful. Like ninety nine percent of the female population of Golarion I like it when men are rich and powerful, and I am better at extrapolating than most of them. And I know what I would do with wealth and power, because I am a wizard, and wizards are very good at turning money into ridiculously cool magic stuff. ...though also if you get bored and drop me in a month I won't feel cheated, I have too much Chelish dignity to be upset about not getting something which never belonged to me."

Keltham: "That sounds - like a piece of the dignity that would exist in my world, maybe.  The world of Kelthams.  Like how I didn't think that Civilization owed me any appreciation unless I could force that."

"I keep poking my brain if it's ready for a massage and my brain keeps insisting that it's beneath you and I'm trying to decide whether I should execute the tried and true response of blowing up my brain with explody things and just getting the massage."

Carissa Sevar: "I assume it would be pushing you too far, in confusion-about-how-Chelish-dating-works and uncertainty-about-who-is-getting-paid-what, if we ordered Pilar in here to give you a massage while I watched and showed you a bit of complicated spell-scaffolding?"

Keltham: "That would... induce confusion about Chelish dating, yes.  Why Pilar in particular and not, say Meritxell?"

Carissa Sevar: "Pilar's here, everyone else is all the way in Ostenso? I don't know if you're important enough to get someone teleported in to give you a massage during a war when we're using all our teleport capacity for logistics."

Keltham: "Because they did the resurrect here.  I feel like I should have seen that answer without having to ask it.  Anyways, I've been advised by Isidre that I am Not Ready For Pilar."

"Oh, right, this seems safe to say.  After the very strange thing happened to Pilar, Isidre got a hunch and asked Security to ask a few questions.  Pilar has a fetish for being forced, or as Isidre put it, a rape fetish, a term I assume has some interpretation other than 'wanting unwanted sex' which is not outright self-contradictory, and it's an obligate fetish to the point where she'd feel actually-raped if I made her talk about sex before having it with her."

"I infer though it was not said explicitly," oh my ass Taldane how you can you take that many syllables to say that, people would just not say it, "that this was the point at which Isidre decided to come over and futilely attempt to find out exactly why I think one of the girls is secretly some kind of traitor, possibly without knowing it herself."

Carissa Sevar: Pilar's not really the ideal person anyway. If the way Keltham works is that he has a hard time abusing girls he respects then the obvious thing is to try to get him in bed with a girl he doesn't respect, but all the research harem are at least reasonably competent, and she can't think of an obvious excuse for him to be introduced to a new, useless girl.

"Huh. So - she asked Pilar, noticed it matched - and thought you were onto something with the mysterious logic above the gods you can't explain to us? And it's usually just a fetish for not being in a position to refuse, or for it not mattering if you want it, rather than for not wanting it. I think."

Keltham: "Yeah, basically.  I gave Isidre some other guesses of what that logic said about some other things, and there's - a test we could run, sort of, but it's a strange one and to consider it I have to boot my sexuality.  Which seems to be noticeably stirring in response to the Pilar discussion.  Non-self-contradictory version.  Brain really.  Yes really.  The thought of getting a massage from you now seems notably more appealing."

"Oh, uh, meta-comment, the thing I'm doing now where I think out loud more in front of you when we're in private is because you're my girlfriend and get more access to my thought processes."

Carissa Sevar: Okay, Carissa does actually need to urgently seek correction at some point about how much she likes Keltham, not because it's going to inspire her to betrayal, she really isn't worried about that at all and assumes they aren't either, but because having such an unAsmodean impulse twenty times a day definitely breaks other things and she needs to know which other things and get them corrected as quickly as possible. 

"That is a very sweet policy. I like it. I can - try to think out loud more in front of you as well?"

Keltham: "It's not actually easy, dath ilani only make it look easy.  It'll take practice, and in particular one of the first skills you'll need to learn is the ability to say 'Wrongthought', meaning 'Wait that isn't what I was actually thinking', because the words that come out of your mouth will be different from the thoughts you actually thought."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. Well, I'll try it. Maybe on my own, at first, unless you want to see me try it, but I do expect it'll be a bit harder to learn with an audience."

Keltham: "Oh, that's probably a good idea if you haven't had any anticonformity training, yeah."

"I'm not sure how much resistance a Chelish adult has to falsely believing that they're thinking the things that they think the people around them want them to be thinking.  But, like, I kinda suspect the massive amount of counter-training we dath ilani got as kids was actually doing something."

Carissa Sevar: Hmm, do you think?

Carissa Sevar: "I haven't had anticonformity training, yeah," and appreciate the warning this is something you might do to us because wow it sounds kind of nightmarish in the same way as having the Queen show up to mock you for your thoughts from the transcripts she's reading. Except in the opposite direction so getting both at once is double nightmarish.

There's genuinely something terrifying there, something that feels like realizing you're not standing over solid ground but on a tightrope over the Abyss.

Or like noticing you could peel all your skin off. It's true but did you really need to notice it.

Of course most thoughts are the thoughts you're supposed to have. 

How about a change of subject.

"Well, when it comes to having girls by force, I think there are actually more women with that fetish than men who want to fulfill it, so maybe you can have fun without handwringing about the market value of the experience you're getting for free. Or maybe you can charge, though the specific nature of the fetish does make it seem hard to do that."

Keltham: Keltham forbears to point out that this is not plausibly an evolutionarily stable mating-market equilibrium.  He's made his point, it's time to give it a rest.

"I don't think it's - obtaining by force - maybe more like having them struggle inside their chains?  Possible logistical difficulties there, sexually speaking, but logistical difficulties are there in life to be solved."

"Though I think I should not attempt for a fair while to do that with anyone who is not following an order saying that they cannot verbally argue with me to be let out, which I suspect rules out Pilar outright even apart from Isidre's warning.  Or maybe I'm wrong about how that would work."

"Also, I think I'm actually ready for that massage now."

Carissa Sevar: Oh good. That was the goal. Carissa will start on that massage. "Yeah, I think if where you're at is that you need the girl to not be arguing with you, then that's fine" for now "but it rules out Pilar, based on what you said, and probably lots of other girls who won't feel wronged but won't know what you're playing at. Perhaps you will have to require introductory classes on dath ilanism before anyone is comprehensible enough you can fuck them without getting horribly confused."

Keltham: "Dath ilani ends up in alternate universe, trains the most intelligent people around him in dath ilanism so he has a pool of compatible sex partners?  Yeah, I don't think that book would turn into a bestselling novel anytime soon."

Carissa Sevar: "Why not? I'd read it. But really, I think this is the premise of a romance novel marketed to women. Powerful man from another world comes to transform your own, happens to be incredibly sexually unfulfilled and want you in particular - that's a female fantasy. Most authors don't have much imagination and just make him a Duke but it's the same principle." The massage was a good idea, Keltham totally has some muscle tension.

Keltham: She's pretty okay at massage for somebody whose civilization obviously never gave her a single training class on how any of it works and may not even collectively know!  This will probably have a net positive effect!

"Civilization's got some different romance novels, gotta say.  Veeerrrryyy different.  Going on recently popular media, a stereotypically standard female-appealing fantasy would be to find that they're secretly the daughter and heiress to a Dark Unilateral Ruler in an alternate universe with economicmagic that lets the Dark Ruler run the entire place as a criminal mastermind, with a Corrupted Governance that makes everybody believe that most people elected her when actually they didn't, and now the new Dark Heiress has got to pretend to act like an Evil supervillain for an extended period, and navigate a complex and chaotic web of criminal personalities to end up with a harem of four men each with distinct powers and personalities, on her way to either seizing or inheriting the Dark Rulership."

Carissa Sevar: " - okay, I think that'd be a hit in Cheliax too, but for some reason which no doubt you'll diagnose down the line, the actual romances I've had the misfortune to pick up have all been much worse than that. Also probably dath ilan would consider literally all our rulers even the very capable ones to be Dark Unilateral Rulers."

Keltham: "Your Queen's not unilateral according to Isidre, she had to coordinate with Asmodeus to take over Cheliax and now has to keep track of how much political capital she has with the Church of Asmodeus."

"Also, remember these are romance novels for Intelligence 17 women, being written by Intelligence 24 women.  I'm not sure how much diagnosing of the difference actually remains to be diagnosed after that."

Carissa Sevar: "...yeah, I guess that's probably sufficient. And sure, Cheliax has a Dark Alliance between Her Imperial Majestrix and the Lawful Evil god Asmodeus, though if they disagree on anything it's not very visible to their subjects." Most of the time.

Keltham: "I am worried that your Alliance is not quite Dark enough, frankly, based on interacting with Isidre and hearing some of her concerns about how much fun the Queen isn't having.  Very smart people in dath ilan tend to lean Good.  The obvious potential problem with that, if not otherwise averted, is that when you care about a very large number of people, you can end up with very large numbers inside your mental decision processes and especially the parts that do abstract thinking.  That can produce thoughts at," edges and vertices of the space of thoughts, "extremes you wouldn't get with a more naturally selfish person where the weights don't go much larger than the weights they put on themselves."

"Now this, to be clear, is a problem you have to solve with more Law, rather than less Law.  If it's a predictable fact that certain ways of thinking are going to make certain mistakes, predict it and then don't make the mistakes.  If a Good person ends up thinking it's a good idea to break an oath and go to Abaddon in order to save some larger number of other people from going to Abaddon, they could imaginably be right by their own measures, in which case there's no arguing with the," utility function, "values that entities assign to final outcomes.  But I would far more expect to observe that Good people end up systematically mistaken about how much good oathbreaking really does, for example because of the further consequences of people not being able to trust Good people's oaths any more, or anyone's oaths because that person might be secretly Good, or just because Good people usually and systematically end up not saving as many people as they hoped with the sacrifices they make."

"If you have a lot of very smart Good people, they can train each other out of mistakes like that.  I doubt Golarion even bothers to collect statistics on the kind of mistakes that very smart people make."

"And the other thing about Civilization is that we do not often have to worry about fifteen percent of the population dying.  There are not millions of people in fixable-seeming horrible situations, and if there were, you would be working on it with a lot of other people rather than nearly alone.  Which probably helps a bunch in practice to keep our smart Good people from ending up at weird extremes without them having to be incredibly Lawful about that."

"To a dath ilani, Isidre reads strongly as someone with overly large problems to worry about, insufficient Law by dath ilani standards, and an intelligence headband too much more powerful than the headbands of the people around her."

Carissa Sevar: Did he think that at Abrogail. Carissa bets he thought that at Abrogail, and she feels this is the best thing that ever happened, even though objectively it's probably bad for her interest in being of no interest to the Queen. 

"....that makes sense. I have never heard the Queen called Good but I guess maybe a project like hers attracts Good advisors. Though her primary advisors are sent straight from Hell, probably because that's one of the only ways around this problem in Golarion."

Keltham: "Then the Queen's advisors may not know - may have forgotten? - how humans actually work in some ways, which is another problem Isidre was trying to optimize over."  Should he actually be discussing the Queen a lot with Carissa, if there is a huge not-yet-defused Carissa-Aborgail interaction bomb that might not be tropetarily inevitable.  "I have noticed an ulterior motive to change the subject about this, can we go back to talking about fetishes or romance."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes absolutely. Do you want me to just list various things that people with your taste sometimes like and then you can decide if you like them or not."

Keltham: "Maaaybe go a little slowly on me and just list, like, one more?  Partially for internal speed limit reasons, and partially because not-spoiling-the-fun-by-finding-out-it-exists-too-far-ahead-of-when-you-can-do-it."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay, one more. Having a girl blindfolded and deafened so she has no idea what's happening around her except when you touch her."

Keltham: "I was going to say that's also a thing that has ever occurred to dath ilani to try, focusing on touch instead of other senses.  But I'm realizing that in a sadistic context and maybe one where you are blindfolded and chained, this is a very different concept."

"Libido has started all the way back up, mysteriously," there are physiological signs of this, which Keltham is not bothering to verbally observe, because he expects Carissa can decode the way he just shifted and adjusted his position on the bed.  Golarion beds sure are ill-suited to being a massage table on top of all their other ill-suited functions.  "I request quiet, but continued massage, while I try to consider some things Isidre said."

Carissa Sevar: She nods, silently, and proceeds, silently, and imagines Contessa Lrilatha telling Abrogail to leave Carissa alone, because that must be - that's pretty much what Abrogail said happened. How would that even go. Would you go find a couple dozen other Carissas to distract Abrogail with. Poor dozen other Carissas who didn't have the good sense to be in the right place at the right time. 

(She hopes they're not statues. That's not entertainment-at-the-misfortune-of-another, that'd just be sad.)

(That's not heretical, right? Wanting every soul to find its way to Asmodeus?)

Keltham: Keltham tries to figure out how he'd feel about telling the Chelish government - well, not to give him Carissa or else, because, like, that is stupid on so many different levels both as decision theory and as a trap that Isidre could be setting for him if she was less than absolutely trustworthy.  Please give him Carissa permanently or until he gives her back, to do with as he pleases, and have that be the regulation of Cheliax and not just an arrangement between the two of them, formalizing what Carissa gave him informally, as Carissa herself wants according to your very smart people; and in return Keltham charges Cheliax very very slightly less of their GDP increase, or some such.

It's not - particularly landing, at this point?

In a world with Pilars, Keltham can see, somehow - not with the eyes of dath ilan but with the eyes of his own sexuality, that had no place available for it in dath ilan in a way that wasn't anyone's fault - Keltham can see how there could be a submissive!woman gender-subtrope that is like being pursued and dated, but more so.  He can imagine how that gender-subtrope of woman might think it was more romantic for a man to desire her so much that he came in and just took her away, paying costs to do that but never asking.  The question of how this ends up with the right people matched, and without giant flaming obvious incentive problems if a man likes a woman who doesn't like him back, may perhaps rest on Golarion institutions unknown to him; or it may be a reason why this desire unsatisfiable in reality is fed mainly by Golarion romance novels.

He can imagine that Carissa wants that - even if he's pretty sure he's not imagining it correctly, true to the real Carissa Sevar, it's enough to explain why a possible person would want that.  To be in - metaphorical bed-chains, in her larger social and legal situation, chains that she wears always, as proof that a man wanted her that much.

Carissa wants it, let's suppose that to be true; does that situation appeal to Keltham himself?

...not really.  The part where Carissa gives herself to him feels deeper and more meaningful, to him, than that choice being taken away from Carissa so that Keltham no longer knows she's still making it.  It's a choice that says Keltham is worthy, that he and his sexuality are worth so much to Carissa, that she has judged him and chosen him even though she could have had another, that he is valuable to Carissa in a way he was not so valuable to any woman in dath ilan.

Is there some way you still get that in full measure, if somebody is with you because they can't escape within Golarion and have opted not to escape to the afterlife?

Keltham isn't seeing it, for now.  Maybe his thoughts are being too crystalline and logical about it; too denying of subtleties and forcing it all into 'well, but then therefore' where people could just opt to not conclude that therefore.  Maybe there is a way that Keltham can know Carissa still finds him worthy, even as she lives truly in the world where she has no other choice.  Well.  Like the Detect Desires spell, for example.  If you have that around for people who can afford it, then it is obviously going to change some things -

SHIT.

Does Isidre do that to the people around her.  Cast Detect Desires around them, or have it cast by a cleric who reports to her, and maybe not a cleric of Asmodeus either.

Keltham is trying not to believe it too hard, but his brain just shouted very loudly "YES SHE DOES", because Isidre knows far too much about what various people want.  And it is extremely the sort of deontology violation that you'd expect from a Good person with a deficit of Law, an overly powerful intelligence headband, and horrifying problems that are horrifically large.  Isidre would reason that the privacy violation was just not really that important, on the scale of twenty million people; and even if her intelligence headband lets her fake some intuitive shadow of the Law of Coordination, she might still argue to herself that knowing more true facts about somebody is not something that ought to cause a breakdown of coordination.  Keltham isn't even sure she's wrong, he doesn't have her problems.  Call it 75% probability.

But suppose Carissa is fine with Detect Desires being used on her.  Though, maybe that aspect has to be illegible so Carissa doesn't have to admit to herself that she could escape by wanting to be free... well, leave aside the deontology violation of doing it without asking, suppose the thought experiment anyways.  Or maybe Carissa says Keltham is entitled to Detect Desires her and truthspell her whenever he wants, because that is part of what it means to give herself to him, and they never have to make mutually legible why or whether Keltham is doing that.

Consider that Least Convenient Possible World, for the argument against putting Carissa in a situation where the 'absolute-power' (Keltham thinks the Taldane word in Baseline) that Keltham has over her has been formally materialized and made real.  The world where Keltham casts Detect Desires every morning, or multiple times per day because Least Convenient Possible World, and the spell always says that Carissa still wants him and judges him worthy and would have him hold 'absolute-power' over her.

Then what?

Then Keltham does not really see the added appeal from his perspective; but it is not obviously, or not legibly obviously, something he couldn't do for Carissa to make her happier, at little cost to himself.

Except for where his mind just screamed that he is tilting further on that dangerous narrow ledge he is standing upon.  And also, Isidre warned him not to have that done to Carissa unless he wanted it for himself.

Keltham doing it because Carissa wants it is probably not what Carissa wants either.  The Golarion woman's romance novel is about the man who wants you that much in that way and not because he thinks it is something you need to be happy.

Maybe someday Keltham will come to feel for himself the thing that is the male complement of the gender-subtrope that Carissa has, where he wants for himself to make that 'absolute-power' real, and cast Detect Desires as a guardrail around it, and make it so that if Carissa can't stop wanting him then she can't stop having him either.  Maybe someday he'll understand better the grounds he stands on in Golarion, and it will no longer seem like something that would get you kicked out of most cities in dath ilan... well, no, not actually, they're just not going to do that to you in dath ilan, if Carissa is standing there saying 'get the fuck out of our private business, Civilization, I don't need you to protect me'.  No victim no crime, as the proverb goes.  So it isn't like that.  But maybe someday it will stop feeling like that.

Also Civilization would... what would they even think of a situation where Carissa is going 'Let me out, Civilization, I don't want to be here anymore!', to test the bounds of the chains placed on her and be reassured that they are real, and Detect Desires is showing that Carissa wants desperately for Civilization to laugh maniacally and say 'No you belong to Keltham now!'

Keltham is sad he will never get to subsidize this question in a voting prediction market.  He really wants to know what Civilization would think of it.  Well, no, actually he wants to see the enormous flamewar and Very Serious People shouting at each other that would happen if this question really came up.  But also he wants to know what Civilization would think of it.

What does the Kelthamverse think of it?

...The Kelthamverse is, what, three days old, at this point?  The Kelthamverse knows that it is a tiny baby world and wants to refer the question back to Civilization so that it has a good starting point.

But, mostly, this thoughtsearch has reached quiescence; there is not much expected value of logical information in searching further.  Keltham finds no desire within himself, for his own sake, to transform Carissa's free gift to him into a metaphorical chain that she wears always; and for him to do it for her sake is almost surely not what Carissa wants.  He will reopen the question when and if he finds within himself that gender-subtrope that is complement to Carissa's.

And meanwhile, he is not going to say anything to Carissa that sounds like 'Never forget, you've got the right to leave at any time!' because that would be stupid.

Carissa Sevar: It's somewhat nervewracking, knowing Keltham is thinking and having no idea what he's thinking, being totally unsure whether at any moment he'll say 'great, okay, I resolved all my internal Good-training, go crawl into the fire' or 'hey, was that Isidre secretly the Queen of Cheliax in disguise, it was inferrable from several things she said' or 'I've decided Cheliax is too Good, can we relocate operations to Razmiran?' or .... actually, coming up with scary things Keltham might say isn't a productive thing to be doing. What if instead she tries to understand magnetism, so she can be impressive next time they try Prestidigitation, and then whatever happens will happen. Give up hope and endure.

Keltham: "Carissa, meta-question, if I suspect Isidre of doing something that might or might not be incredibly criminal in Cheliax, maybe it is, maybe it's the sort of thing people like her are quietly expected to do, is that something I talk to you about."

Carissa Sevar: Wow that's substantially worse than 'crawl into the fire'! 

"...at the Worldwound you are obligated to report things like that, to a different Lawful church if you think your own might fail to handle it. Here....I guess talking to me about it is a reasonable thing to do, let me think if there's a reason not to tell me -"

Are they going to have to escape -

"I think you should tell me."

Keltham: "Isidre knows way too much about what various people want, and this isn't dath ilan so the people around her don't have a good sense of what you can't do with just an intelligence headband.  I suspect Isidre of having somebody, maybe a cleric not of Asmodeus, casting Detect Desires and reporting to her.  If she's not that cleric herself, come to think, or maybe it's also a wizard spell I didn't think to ask -"

"Anyways.  I'm at 75% probability that's what she does and that's taking into account how little I know."

"Targets would have included you, Pilar, maybe me if Asmodeus didn't specifically direct otherwise, and possibly, I am less sure about this part, the Queen of Cheliax."

Carissa Sevar: Even in Taldor -

- but old Cheliax is Taldor, new Cheliax is Asmodeus's -

- safer not to lie. Except for how everything is a lie. Carissa has never found lying to be difficult before and these days it's like navigating a dungeon blindfolded. 

The fact that Cheliax could mind control Keltham and hasn't is useful evidence of good faith, and also she's already told him that - but also making it clear that Keltham wouldn't notice if sufficiently powerful people did it makes it impossible to preserve an escape avenue where Keltham concludes there's a rot that doesn't extend to the top - 

" - I'm going to start by saying things I'm very sure of and then get to things I'm less sure of," she says. "So, invasive divinations by default feel like something, it's possible to notice them happening to you. Probably, uh, Contessa Lrilatha, or the Queen herself, could cast an invasive divination you couldn't even detect - they could also do mind control that felt like your own choices - but anyone much less powerful than that would be running a reasonably high chance that their targets would notice. Unless there are some powerful secret magic items involved, which there might be.

When you cast Detect Desires on me I felt it, and I could've attempted to fight you off and probably succeeded. We should .... make sure you know what that feeling is and that you haven't felt it at any time in the last couple of days. Strongly predict you haven't, though. When the priest on duty at the Worldwound first got a revelation from Asmodeus about you, his instructions to me suggested that Asmodeus had very firmly prohibited - a very wide class of things including some we don't even think of as bad behavior - with respect to you."

Carissa Sevar: "I haven't noticed unexpected invasive divinations or enchantments cast on me though I consented to a truth spell and some invasive divinations for Security screening for this project and I'm third-circle, not fourth, that makes a substantial difference in how powerful you'd need to be to be sure I wouldn't notice. And Pilar's second, which makes her even easier to hit. - and Pilar might've agreed to screening for various weird things, when she got back from Elysium, because she'd spent a bunch of time around Chaotic outsiders...

Trying to cast an invasive divination on the Queen of Cheliax is definitely an incredibly serious crime, like, they would execute you on the spot after making sure you weren't spying for somebody sort of crime. I think trying to cast an invasive divination on people involved in a secret project would be considered a big deal also. I - it might be one of those things where the Church and the Crown aren't entirely on the same page.

It is definitely the kind of thing you'd report at the Worldwound."

Keltham: "Somewhat reassuring, and also, in retrospect, I shouldn't have said 75% for Detect Desires, that was too narrow a hypothesis, rookie cognitive error - magical items, sure, maybe, a function on that irreplaceable relic headband.  Or is there something that's like Fox's Cunning, Owl's Wisdom, Eagle's Splendour, but for reading people -"

Carissa Sevar: True, not that damning, sort of inconvenient to admit but Keltham's already noticed a bunch of its correlates in various places. 

" - yeah. There is. Uh, not a spell, but there are magic items for it, and it's - a stereotype about nobles - that they're all ridiculously enhanced at it -"

Keltham: "That - would plausibly be it, yeah.  I don't know what it can't do.  And if it's legal and not considered socially unacceptable, then Isidre seems like the sort of person who's extremely likely to get the most powerful version of it that exists."

"Well.  Maybe I ran ahead too far of my inference speed limit, there, too influenced by the 'trope' where you walk up to somebody and grimly say 'I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you know too much' and then prove that they couldn't have reached their conclusions from only the information they were supposed to have.  It would be more likely that Isidre was doing something undetectable and legal than that she was doing something incredibly illegal and where she might get caught."

Carissa Sevar: Of course dath ilan has stories about that, and finds a special joy in discovering and uncovering it. 

Abandon hope and endure.

No. Win.

"I'm still not sure what a trope is but - yeah, I'd expect someone in her position is much much likelier to be achieving her results with powerful magic that no one really objects to - it works just as well if the other person has Mind Blank up, which is the intuitive line between 'just being uncannily good at looking' and 'using invasive magic' -"

Keltham: "Mind Blank?"

Carissa Sevar: "Eighth circle incredibly powerful abjuration that provides approximately categorical protection against divinations and enchantments targeting you. You can't get around it with a Wish, that's how powerful it is. If someone tries to scry the room you're in, the room will appear but you won't. If someone casts Detect Intelligence they'll detect all intelligent minds in the area except yours."

Keltham: "And there's magic items of it but they cost eight million gold pieces and who knows they might be cursed."

Carissa Sevar: "I actually don't even know a magic item of it to exist at all but if it did it'd certainly be priceless."