Keltham: "And it can't possibly be what it sounds like, but I'll ask anyways just in case.  Wish?"

Carissa Sevar: "Does what you ask for. - which is very bad and dangerous and there are organizations that'll kill you if they suspect you're trying to use a Wish. There are known safe phrasings for, like, fifteen, twenty things, very powerful things but not nearly as powerful as the spell's capable of but if you try something there's not a known safe phrasing for extremely bad things will definitely happen."

Keltham: "Combo with twenty Auguries?" Keltham says, before it occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't be giving ideas like that away.

Carissa Sevar: "Duplicating auguries doesn't work, you get the same answer. But there are more powerful spells for talking to one's god, like Commune, and ninth circle wizards with an INT of 30 do occasionally advisedly cast powerful Wishes, which I assume is how we got the known safe phrasings we do have."

Keltham: "How the flaming noodles do you get to INT 30, even with a +6 Intelligence headband you'd have to start from INT 24 which is dath ilan +3 and then that takes you to dath ilan +6, I'm not sure we even have anybody who's actually that smart and not just a measurement breaking down.  If anyone here is that smart and not restricted from communicating like gods are restricted, Golarion shouldn't exist."

Carissa Sevar: "One of the known safe wordings of a Wish is intelligence enhancement. Just +1; you need a chain of five Wishes cast in immediate sequence to get +5, and that's the most Wishes cast in sequence attested in all of history. So you'd have to start from 19, and we don't throw one of those often but in all of history we have. I don't know why having INT 30 didn't cause them to solve everything wrong in the world; maybe INT 30 doesn't actually perfectly correspond to the dath ilan + 6."

Keltham: "That... was a thought that had occurred to me earlier, yeah, but with people supposedly INT 30 running around, I feel a lot more credence in that thought.  That Detect Intelligence isn't measuring everything that dath ilan thinks of as intelligence, and that the spells and headbands only enhance - what we'd see as one relatively narrow aspect of intelligence.  Dath ilan separates smartness into a lot of factors, I suspect what you call Intelligence and Wisdom together would be, like, three of seven main ones, or some such."

"Somebody with general smartness 30 and not just Intelligence 30 should - shred apart the reality of Golarion as they walk through it, I don't think there's any way you can be that generally smart and not figure out, like, the idea of selection on heritable variation."

Carissa Sevar: "That could be. Though also maybe Archmage Nex a thousand years ago figured out selection on heritable variation but didn't, uh, tell everybody, because who knows if it'd have suited him. And there's no one that smart around now."

Keltham: "What's the current highest INT?  If there's Detect Intelligence then is there also a Detect Wisdom spell?  What's the average Wisdom of a wizard-tracked student with Intelligence 18?"

Carissa Sevar: "Probably the smartest person alive is Nefreti Clepati, the seventh circle wizard and ninth circle cleric of Nethys who heads the church of Nethys in Sothis. She's - Nethys-touched, so by all accounts sort of insane - and probably has, like, a 26 for both intelligence and wisdom, though I don't know for sure, I haven't met her. There is also a Detect Wisdom spell, and wisdom is a tiny bit higher than average for wizard-tracked students but not that much higher, maybe 12. ...wisdom increases over the course of your life, though, unlike Intelligence, so it'd be higher if you were looking at those same people at age 25."

Keltham: "Anything else on the same level as Intelligence and Wisdom that Nefreti also has a 26 in?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not that I've heard advertised, but again, I haven't met her, and one of the few stories I know about her are that she caused a massive explosion that flattened the temple of Nethys in Sothis, and Nethys gave her several more cleric levels for it."

Keltham: "Sounds like a kinda cool god, frankly.  That said I'm never praying to him."

dath ilan: In Keltham's mind, a hypothesis is taking shape, a mental model.

To a Chelish eavesdropper, it would look like rather a lot of ~~~~.  Seeing the idea as a dath ilani sees it, compactly and at a glance, requires a grasp of underlying math.  If Keltham wanted to say it to Carissa, he would need to spell out rather a lot of things and also use a whiteboard.

Keltham's thought revolves around a standard dath ilani concept that Taldane has no word for.  'Intelligence' translated into this word in Baseline; but Keltham is starting to suspect that this reflects a mistake that Carissa and other language donors are making, not a translation accurate in the world.  For translation purposes, one must then fix a new term.

Call this one 'thinkoomph'.

'Thinkoomph' is optimization-as-done-by-humans.  Its figure-of-merit is correct prediction, choice of action leading to desired outcomes, the power of inner thoughts over the outer world, the power of cognition to apprehend and effectuate reality.  Of course, humans do this in a weird idiosyncratic way, and a random possible simple optimizer that was about as powerful as an average dath ilani would not understand and manipulate reality in the same way as an average dath ilani.  But if everyone involved is a human, then to speak of 'thinkoomph' as a thing-humans-do whose figure-of-merit is optimization, is not too unsensible a concept.

Keltham does not need to think about this part right now, he has already chunked the notion of 'thinkoomph' long ago.  'Thinkoomph' is a view into the processes that humans do to produce optimization, viewed from the standpoint where its purpose is optimization, and where the information-theoretic goal of the viewpoint you're taking is to make it easy to describe those usual variations among humans that contribute to the variations in their optimization power.

Thinkoomph then is not a single number but a structure with some internals.  But it happens to be empirically the case that a lot of usefully-discussable smartness-components map not-too-terribly onto a unidimensional line, such that, holding the rest of a mind constant, you get more optimization power as you move up along the line.

For ease of visualization, then, consider thinkoomph as a seven-dimensional thing, because it happens that there's a useful component analysis like that in dath ilan which gives you seven dimensions.

Or consider thinkoomph as a machine with seven gears each of varying size, if you don't want to visualize seven-dimensional objects for some weird reason.

Suppose Detect Intelligence gives you an imperfect partial view of thinkoomph that's made up of, say, (1) speed/clarity of information retrieval plus (2) how much information you can maintain in short-term memory.  Detect Wisdom gives you an imperfect partial view of (3) the piece of thinkoomph that's perceptual clarity, which critically has a subpiece (3a) that is clarity and detail and accuracy of introspection.  Which is to say - shifting viewpoints from the machinery to the result that machinery produces - that Detect Wisdom imperfectly measures the machinery that grinds to produce reflection.

In dath ilan the proverb-poem goes:  'Beware lest what you can measure easily becomes all that you measure; beware lest it become all that you optimize; beware lest it become all that you ever think of.'

The people of Golarion know how to Detect Intelligence and Detect Wisdom, and that's it.  So they think there are two components of thinkoomph.  They invent two spells to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects and the thing-that-Detect-Wisdom-detects.

They invent headbands to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects.  The amount the headband sells for depends on how large of a shift it produces in that handy spell Detect Intelligence, which, as everyone in Golarion knows, detects Intelligence.  If the Detect Intelligence spell says that a headband produces a +3 to Intelligence, it's worth less money than if Detect Intelligence says that the headband produces +4 to intelligence.

Imagine now that nobody has invented Detect Wisdom yet, just Detect Intelligence.  Imagine that somebody with a vision of broader thinkoomph builds a new headband that would, if you could also run Detect Wisdom, show to produce a +3 to Intelligence and a +3 to Wisdom.  This headband is probably more expensive to build than the one that produces +4 to Intelligence, probably by a lot, and the Detect Intelligence spell says that it produces an inferior result than the +4 headband.  So nobody builds a headband like that, if they don't have Detect Wisdom.

Does either Intelligence or Wisdom incorporate creativity, outside-the-box solutions, outside-the-box hypotheses?  Maybe when Keltham dares to try on an intelligence headband, if he ever so dares, it'll be immediately apparent to him that this headband boosts every part of cognition that Owl's Wisdom didn't boost.  But Keltham is guessing that this will prove to not be the case.

Consider, then, the world in which Golarion has a Detect Intelligence spell and a Detect Wisdom spell, but these are only 3 out of 7 components of cognition.

It's not the kids with highest thinkoomph who get tracked to be wizards.  It's the kids with the highest Detected Intelligence.

It is of course famously true that in humans (and describing humans is what the concept of 'thinkoomph' is all about), most things you can measure about thinkoomph's components or outputs will all correlate with each other quite a lot.  The kids with Intelligence 14, which Keltham thinks was supposed to be the wizard-tracking threshold, do tend to have Wisdom 12 rather than Wisdom 10.  But if you were looking not-at-random at somebody with Intelligence 14, selected on high Intelligence, and asking 'what are the rest of their thinkoomph components like', then the rest are probably more like what their Wisdom score happened to be.

When you select on kids with high Detected Intelligence, you're not just selecting for kids with high general thinkoomph levels that produce high Intelligence along the way, you're selecting for kids whose Intelligence is unusually high compared to the rest of their thinkoomph.  That's why the Wisdom comes out as 12 instead of 14.

Dath ilan has heritage-optimized itself over generations in full awareness of how all these measurement and optimization gotchas work.  They are doing their best to measure real-world results broadly, and doing genetics and statistics to them.  Dath ilan does not want to end up testing some weird projection of thinkoomph that originally started out correlated with thinkoomph, optimizing over this weird projection, and ending up with optimized things that have much more of the weird projected quality than they have thinkoomph.  Dath ilan wants actual thinkoomph and is explicitly not pursuing it the stupid way.

So you've got your kid with Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 14 and they get wizard-tracked and get a +6 intelligence headband or maybe, if they become spectacularly successful, a relic with +6 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom, and if they're incredibly insanely successful, they get 2 or 3 layered Wish spells on top of that.  They end up, say, with 27 Intelligence and 21 Wisdom; in dath ilani terms, those subcomponents of thinkoomph would now be at +4.5sd and +1.5sd respectively.

But their other 4 out of 7 thinkoomph characteristics are still around 14; or in dath ilani terms, if the scales match, -2sd.  Golarionites don't know how to easily measure these other components; they don't try to boost them; they don't think about them.

This sounds a lot more like a model consistent with Golarion, than the model where anyone with +6 thinkoomph has literally ever existed here.  You don't need training to be a Keeper at +6 thinkoomph, you just are one.

Inside Keltham's mind this is all a much shorter and better-chunked thing to think; what he thinks, roughly, is 'Hey maybe they got Goodhart's Cursed on Intelligence and Wisdom metrics'.

Only Keltham's actual thought is that thinkoomph is the underlying true value; Intelligence and Wisdom are imperfect proxy measures of thinkoomph; optimization over Intelligence and Wisdom will select not just on thinkoomph but on upward divergence of measured Intelligence and Wisdom scores from underlying thinkoomph scores; that this applies both to selecting students for wizard-tracking and for boosting them with Intelligence headbands later; and that this will of course produce people who may detect as +4 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom but who started with something like -2 or -1 underlying general abstracted-correlation-of-thinkoomph-components, and now have something more like +1 final-optimization-power as a result of all that Intelligence and Wisdom boosting.

Nobody with +6 thinkoomph has ever walked through this place.  They'd shred it around themselves like tissue paper.

Keltham: "Putting a pin in something to follow up on later," Keltham says, after the few seconds it takes for him to think the compact version of the thought.  "Detect my Wisdom, if it's 20 that's very bad news for your heritage optimization project and makes my heritage substantially more valuable.  If my Wisdom is 14 that's much better news for you.  Underlying reasoning behind that statement is gonna take a drawing-wall though."

"Do Wishes by any chance need to be spoken in a strange inhuman language?"  Wreaking total havoc if you state things the least bit incorrectly seems obviously reminiscent of bare-metal systems programming.

Carissa Sevar: "A couple of the known safe wordings are Taldane. The others are other things but other human languages, I think."

Keltham: "Can you invent an artificial language and say a Wish in that?"

Carissa Sevar: "...probably but you'd be starting without any known safe wordings so -

- look, I am sure dath ilan has an equivalent to this, uh, a thing where smart people immediately start thinking of a clever way to do it that will get around all the things they've been told might go wrong, but the clever way will also go wrong, and - maybe we'll eventually be able to use Wishes to do stuff but I think you are lacking the background of how everyone always tries to come up with a clever way to use Wishes to solve their problems and they sound like they'll work fine and then they don't and it's a disaster, which you'd have if you were from Golarion. And it's not that I don't want to rewrite the fabric of reality just by speaking aloud, I'd love to."

Keltham: "Carissa, I wasn't considering doing that on any remotely near-term timescale, I'm not completely shitpooping insane, I was just curious if anybody had maybe already tried the thing that a dath ilani thinks of in half a second," namely casting Wishes with a real actual proper specification language.

Or maybe that's overkill and all you need is Baseline instead of flaming Taldane!  Keltham isn't betting on it, he's not going to try it, but he sure is thinking it.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Just, we have, uh, maybe a trope, about people going 'oh, I thought of a clever way to do safe Wishes no one tried before' shortly before there's a smoking crater a Teleport distance across. Asking questions is fine. I don't know anyone to have tried that."

Keltham: "Don't do anything that would make Broom give me a sad look, got it."

...though this smoking-crater business, again, sounds like a result you would absolutely get if what you needed was a programming language for bare-metal systems programming and what you used was spoken colloquial Taldane.

To be fair, if that's true, it's a puzzle why any Wish works, let alone asking for an Intelligence boost.

Maybe he'll look into known safe wordings and unsafe wordings and check if there's anything really, really obvious going on there if the person reading it is a computer programmer.

...maybe he is being a typical dath ilani male in a certain way and he should stop doing that.  "I think I should maybe focus on the massage for a bit, relax again, and think about Isidre's other sexuality-requiring cognitive challenge posed to me.  So far I've done one of two."

Carissa Sevar: "All right." She was kind of hoping that Keltham would be annoyed, about her being argumentative at him, but either he wasn't or it just didn't occur to him that if you're annoyed at your girlfriend who belongs to you you can hit her about it. Oh well.

Massage in silence it is.

Keltham: After a bit of silence, relaxing again, mentally leaning into the massage, and yes, very briefly poking some internal curiosity about what exactly it is that is Pilar's obligate fetish precisely speaking, Keltham returns to contemplating more sexual questions.

How does he feel about renting Carissa out?

...mostly he's still getting a WHAT from his brain.

Can he evaluate it concretely rather than abstractly?

Not without having actually met the Queen of Cheliax at all.

Okay, but, Keltham does know some people.  He even knows some female people, in case this is a polarized gendertrope with respect to the renting individual.  How does Keltham feel about renting Carissa to his max-mutual-wordcount coauthor from his fic-circle back in dath ilan, who happens to possess the requisite parts?

...sad about never writing anything with her again, also, she's proooobably not a sadist like at all(??), also, maybe it actually is not a terribly good idea to think right now about people who believe he's Truly Dead.

Keltham knows some female people inside a totally different universe that is not that universe.  He doesn't know them very well but he can ask himself the concrete question anyways.  What if he were to rent Carissa to, say, Tonia Barrero, in repayment of the debt he owes her for an unexpected, un-volunteered-in-advance, at-best-semi-consensual truthspelling?

...

Still file not found, here, he doesn't know Tonia well enough.

Keltham knows what to do in this cognitive situation!  For purposes of testing this function, keep supplying imaginary values to the Tonia structure until he can complete the function call!  If at any point he gets a negative result he can then tweak values to see if there's any value that produces a positive result instead, and then he'll also know what properties he's looking for!

Let Tonia be a sadist, but, like, a young sadist who's only slightly more experienced there than Keltham, and in no danger of providing Carissa with an unforgettable experience less forgettable than other experiences she's already had, thereby causing Carissa to leave him for Tonia who is the superior sadist...

...actually Keltham is not sure he really needs this part of the spec, Carissa's current attraction to him is not because Keltham is a supersadist, and therefore it is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable that you can't steal Carissa from him by being a better supersadist.  Alas, that which is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable is not always Perfectly Reasonable.  Anyways, fix the current values at favorable ones to see if this function returns 'false' even under quite favorable circumstances.

Tonia can hurt Carissa slightly more than Keltham, but not threateningly so; she can't give Carissa an orgasm due to Carissa's eroLARP character arc posing a sex problem, so Tonia's not threateningly better than him there.  And if Tonia was, Keltham could always just tell Carissa she's not allowed... okay something reacted to that inside him, that didn't react to hearing about the magical-item Belt of No Touch.  Possibly because in this case there was any reason for it, and that made the scenario more real.

Or say mostly, in this scenario, Carissa is being rented to Tonia in order to provide Tonia with not-necessarily-reciprocated pleasure just like if Tonia had bought a sex worker in dath ilan.  Suppose Carissa doesn't hate it - Keltham's Carissamodel is now complaining that he is not supposed to check this and that offends her dignity of being harder to hurt than that, well, sorry, Carissamodel, that is not what Keltham is optimizing right now.  Carissa even manages to have a moderately fun time because Tonia hurts her some and reacts in a way that makes Carissa feel pride in her own sexual skills and it... actually matters to her that Keltham told her to do it?  Postulating this part feels hard; Keltham is not himself a Carissa and he is not sure what it is like on the inside to be a Carissa.

Keltham thinks he is at least not obviously not-okay with this whole sort of thing?  It feels a lot like asking, in an ordinary relationship, how you would feel about your partner going out for a night with somebody else who'd been like 'yeah screw flirting what's your monetary price'.  He wouldn't have objected to that back in dath ilan, he wasn't that monogamous with anyone.

...that these feel like similar questions, probably reflects Keltham failing to get to grips with the actual gendertrope here.  Isidre seemed to think this should not feel like the same gendertrope as sex work, even if it had similar gender ratios.

For one thing, Keltham was aromantic back in dath ilan because he is a romantically obligate sadist, or at least the very first masochist he ran into was the first person he ever started feeling at all like he needed something from her that was about it being from her and didn't funge with things he could possibly get from somewhere else.

How would Keltham feel about Carissa trading herself to somebody for - one unskilled-labor-week is, like 1.2gp or so?  Let's say 2gp, Carissa is hot.

Parts of Keltham are not happy with this.  Because Carissa is his?  Because Keltham is insecure about whether that would mean Carissa still liked him more than she likes anybody else?  Because Keltham is supposed to give permission first?  Keltham doesn't know.

But if Keltham orders Carissa to do it?  For whatever reason?

- then that's okay.  Possibly.  At least if all the other call values are set to Imaginary Tonia settings.

And with likely settings on the Queen of Cheliax, rather than favorable settings on Tonia?  If, in exchange for an ultimately insignificant symbolic amount of money, and with at least some pressure on the side to deny a trope and perhaps the entire theory of tropism, Carissa is rented to Abrosomething Thrune?  Older than Carissa, with the same de facto ability to chain her for real if she really wanted (assuming that Keltham did not object, which he would), probably a much much more experienced sadist than Keltham, with access to far more powerful sex toys that are the equivalent of overpowered vibrators with biofeedback functions and, yes, the ability to make Carissa come.

...it's not quite an obvious 'no'.  It basically depends, Keltham is pretty sure, on whether Keltham is afraid that Carissa can be taken away from him by somebody being a better sadist to her, than he can be for a while yet.  If somebody is the more skillful manipulator of masochism, of, what did Isidre call it, submission, can they steal away Carissa's feelings from him?  The threat of giving Carissa an orgasm, the threat of also having potential absolute-power over her, seem less real than that.

Keltham's hindbrain, which may, of course, be entirely factually wrong about everything, intuits that it is basically not possible to steal Carissa by giving her a good-enough orgasm.  Hurting her, maybe, understanding the deep keys to her sexuality that Keltham is still struggling with; but not with humanly reasonable amounts of pleasure short of dangerous drugs.

And as for the absolute-power threat, in part, it doesn't feel as real because Keltham has not internalized a model of whatever it is that Carissa has inside her.  But also, it's impossible for two people to both have potential absolute-power over someone.  If they came into conflict, after all, only one of them could get their way.  So long as that person would be Keltham, rather than the Queen of Cheliax, everything would be fine, right?  It just has to be clear to Carissa that if Keltham and the Queen fought over her, Keltham would be the one to end up with her; if that's true, the keys to her sexuality would be safe.

...not that Keltham is thinking that he can, like, wield more political power inside Cheliax than its own Nearly Unilateral Chief Executive.  But the Queen of Cheliax has to be sensible and consider things like political capital with the Church of Asmodeus, while Keltham can be much less sensible and walk out on Cheliax if the Queen steals his girl from him.  It shouldn't be about power alone, Keltham doesn't think; differential willingness to use power should be an acceptable coin to Carissa's sexuality.  It controls who would actually end up with her, if it came to that.

Keltham's not willing, not today, to bargain a probabilistic or absolute walkout on Cheliax, in order to tell the government of Cheliax to hand Carissa over to him in-legal-reality, to say that he considers her a necessary part of his gains-from-trade.

Telling Cheliax that he considers Carissa a necessary part of his gains-from-trade and he'll walk out if the Queen steals her, either by kidnapping her, or by renting her from Keltham but then giving her an experience that shifts her romantic focus away from Keltham to the Queen?  She's Keltham's, the Queen can't have her except temporarily?

Sure!  That, he feels totally willing to do.

Carissa would... probably find that hot?  Keltham's Carissamodel confidently finds it very hot if Keltham actually wins at it, but Keltham is not entirely confident in his Carissamodel.

Well, at least Keltham should definitely win?  He can't really see any functional Chief Executive being like 'lol no I'm gonna take Carissa and watch you walk out on Cheliax', and even if the Queen wanted to, her advisors would stop her.  She's an overly-Good person in an overly-Good government that has to be stopped by Asmodeus from resorting to outright mind control when it looks like that might be for the greater good of the country.  Keltham isn't pure Evil, sure, but he's not that Good, which means he should win this particular contest.

Of course, that's only if people are running on sanity.  If the Queen is running on tropes, she'll try to steal Carissa no matter how bad it would be for Cheliax if she succeeded... but then if those events are running on tropes, it's impossible to win Carissa's true love-sexuality without winning a fight for real power over her, the Queen should ultimately fail to do that after making worrying progress, and then end up kicked up out of Cheliax and/or harem-recruited.

Anyways, he's got enough of an answer that his next step is to ask Isidre to meet again and check his model of how all this works.  Or ask Carissa?  He kind of wants to ask Isidre first, before he tries to talk with Carissa; Isidre is more willing to be legible, and nothing blows up if he says the wrong thing in front of her.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has thought up a reasonable amount of opinions about contraception and magnetism despite being distracted every few seconds by contemplating the fact that Keltham is probably contemplating Isidre's offer.

The Queen -

- there's not actually much point contemplating what having sex with the Queen of Cheliax would be like, and not just because that definitely counts as flirting with her. It will probably be awful. Carissa is a grown adult and is going to go to Hell someday and can handle awful. It'll probably be - so, being hurt isn't upsetting, being hurt can be fun and even when it's more than she can take, like the cursed bag, it's not upsetting, it's bad but it's a specific kind of bad that's all right. There are things that are actually upsetting, and - 

- thinking about them is just asking for it -

- no, she'll just think about how to orchestrate a convincing demonstration of Suggestion to Keltham instead.

Keltham: Pending questions resolved into a state of quiescence, Keltham relaxes more into the massage.  It's nice.  Does he want to command some non-reciprocated sexual service from Carissa, at the end of this?

The idea of ordering her to do it - seems more comfortable now, possibly it has something to do with having heard that she has any coherently imaginable endgame, maybe it's just a shock having had time to sink in and for Keltham to adjust.

But then his libido might go offline for a while.  He shouldn't expend his newly refilled ero reservoir if he needs to have another conversation with Isidre today... it's not clear how urgent this whole thing is, exactly?

"Carissa," Keltham says out loud, his voice coming out sounding as relaxed as he is, "I'm too relaxed right now to really want to move, so can I ask you to have them return my reply to Isidre that I'm interested in further discussing her second suggested course of action, though I'm not yet on a definite yes.  And can I possibly get a yes-no in the next ten minutes about whether or not Isidre wants to meet me again today."

(It wouldn't occur to Keltham that Isidre might not imagine him to be capable of a quick reconsideration and answer.  One hour is a long time to think in dath ilan, and sure it may take longer to reconsider some major life questions, but there's no presumption that you can't do it in an hour.  It similarly wouldn't occur to Keltham that he ought not ask a Senior Governance Official for a yes-no answer in ten minutes; somebody like Isidre is surely interrupted often enough, and good enough at task-switching, that she's checking her tiny-task queue every eight minutes, in Isidre's computer-based and network-connected task management system; which will continue to go on existing in Keltham's imagination and his preprogrammed social reflexes unless and until he thinks explicitly about that question for literally half of a second.)

Carissa Sevar: "I'll ask but she might not be interruptible that soon," says Carissa, who'd say that even if Isidre wasn't the Queen of Cheliax.

Keltham has further thoughts on renting Carissa to the Queen of Cheliax. That's terrifying, but definitely a success. Carissa is going to let herself enjoy her success without dwelling too much on its implications for whether she gets tortured which is ultimately not the thing that matters here.

Keltham: (How would Carissa know that, if it was true?  But if it's info Carissa shouldn't have, from his perspective, on the gaslighting hypotheses he's always considering in the back of his mind, she wouldn't just blurt it out, would she?  If they were that bad at LARPing they'd have screwed up by now surely.)

((Of which it is said in dath ilan:  Being suspicious is easy, being suspicious of the correct 1 out of the 1000 pieces of information you received today is hard.))

"Make it so," Keltham says.  "And then continue the massage, if you're still okay with... rephrase, continue the massage and tell me if you're running out of easy energy for it."

Carissa Sevar: So she steps outside, flags down some staff, and delivers Keltham's message for Isidre. "I told him that someone important probably couldn't get him an answer in the next ten minutes, but if she happens to be free," or reading my thought-transcripts full time anyway, hi Abrogail -

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail does in fact have a country to run!  And either Otolmens suddenly really likes Cheliax, or She really dislikes somebody else!  Abrogail had not in fact realized before now how incredibly important it is to not piss off Otolmens in any way!  However she does realize it now and Aspexia can stop repeating it at her!

Carissa Sevar: Carissa goes back in to give Keltham a massage. "They'll knock if they get an answer."

Keltham: The massage continues to be nice.

Keltham doesn't... especially feel like massaging Carissa back, apparently, if he is honest with himself about that.  He would do it if they were trading pleasures, obviously, but he does not seem to really actually want to give massages.

He still feels grateful for it, and a need to do something nice for Carissa in return, no matter how much she says he doesn't have to; he wants to anyways.

Keltham doesn't feel like massaging her back.  But he does feel like... buying a massage for her, as soon as he's got any 'gold pieces'?  That seems like the blatantly obvious solution -

The thought of a stranger touching Carissa's naked body does not feel especially pleasant.

Keltham is not used to his brain working like this, and it's causing his self-model to stumble over itself repeatedly.

...he could pay one of the other girls to give Carissa a massage from him?

For that matter, if he doesn't have any gold yet, he could tell Ione to do it after she's recovered.

Is Keltham allowed to do that, does it count as something Ione offered him?

Well, Keltham doesn't have any massive anti-legibility issues with Ione, so he can just ask, which will make his life massively simpler.  Keltham's guess is that Ione's objection, if she has any, will be that Carissa might ask what got traded to Ione for the massage, and Ione doesn't want to mention the Nethys thing to Carissa.  But they could just tell Carissa it's a secret, so that doesn't seem like a problem?

Seems like a plan.

Ferrer Maillol: One of Ferrer Maillol's last coherent recent thoughts, as Contessa Lrilatha herself dragged him by the scruff of his neck into the temple torture chamber, was that he has now realized what kind of project disaster surpasses starting a god-war.  It's being told that one of your stupid oversights just managed to ruin a lot of hard work put in by Aspexia Rugatonn, Contessa Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek, all of whom are now personally pissed at you, and Gorthoklek will be visiting you during your stay.

Ferrer Maillol is currently driven into a rather extreme mental state, and begging Asmodeus to do something, anything, to deliver him.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus does that very very rarely, as one might expect.

As it happens, though, Ferrer Maillol is currently in a state unusually apt to receive messages from Asmodeus, who has a message to deliver.  It conveniently concerns a matter on which Maillol has already been partially instructed.

And Asmodeus does need to do this often enough, if very very rarely, that people ever hear about that time Asmodeus did it once.  That way they'll go on sincerely pleading to Him in the extremity of their torture, which He enjoys.

Besides, it's amusing.  Have a vision, tiny squirrel!  Asmodeus in His finite mercy has given you a temporary reprieve from all the infinite torment that will someday be yours.

Iarwain: Eight minutes later there's a knock on Keltham's door.

Keltham: Keltham is sufficiently relaxed that he'll take a moment to see if Carissa does anything about this without him having to speak.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, she can get the door. She - wasn't particularly expecting an answer that fast. 

Iarwain: "Ah," says a young-looking palace page-boy who wouldn't be out of place in Taldor and would never actually be seen in Cheliax, sounding audibly sort of stuttery, with annoyingly long pauses between stutters, "ah, um - are you, uh, are you, Sevar, I have, uh, a message, for, ah, uh, Keltham?"

While he stutters, rapid messages delivered by magic where Keltham can't hear:

Queen's transcript is ready for Sevar.

Asmodeus has given them a directive to move Keltham to a new location, one that will somehow be more protected from divine interference than even the palace, as soon as Aspexia can get a new Forbiddance spell and put that up tomorrow at dawn.  They're not to spare any expense, this time; Cheliax is suddenly wealthier than expected, for reasons to be described later.

The anti-interference divine protection should prevent any more oracles from being created, even if someone on site isn't soul-sold.

Maillol is still recovering.  Sevar's input is requested in Maillol's place about the new project setup.  Possibly Keltham's input should be solicited too?

What do they tell Keltham, what message does the page have for Keltham?  Some lies seem required and Sevar is the only one who can authorize them.

Carissa Sevar: - okay. Most urgent question is what to tell Keltham. ...they're setting up a new project site, and want his input into anything it'd be particularly useful for it to have. If he asks for an explanation, the damage to the villa was more extensive than expected. "Yes, Keltham's here. I can take a message, or depart, if it's secret."

Iarwain: "I, ah, uh," the page-boy audibly pulls himself together.  "Damage to the villa, ah, more extensive than expected," he recites.  "New project site, uh, being set up?  Moving tomorrow at dawn.  Does Keltham have, uh, input, on anything particularly useful to have, there."

Keltham: Whiteboards, Keltham wants to yell immediately, but that word does not actually exist in Taldane.  Besides, he can use his own Prestidigitation now.

"Is there a meeting I should be at?" Keltham calls.

Iarwain: They'd obviously have to set up a fake meeting for him, and echo information to and from the real meeting, but resources are available to do that if Sevar thinks they should.

Carissa Sevar: They're just passing memos around since half the people involved in the decision process are also essential for the war effort. He could meet with someone in Acquisitions if he wants, though.

Iarwain: "Uh, it's mostly, uh, paper going back and forth, because of, uh, the war, and deciders being too busy, but there's still, uh, I was told, uh, you can talk to Acquisitions if it's not a paper thing?"

Keltham: Keltham pulls himself up to a sitting position in bed, thereby ending the massage; this sufficiently increases the probability that he should meet with Isidre again, before leaving the palace tomorrow, that he should conserve his ero energy for having a callable libido while he does that.  "I've got additional questions but it doesn't sound like you've got additional answers, like why this is a tomorrow-at-dawn thing," is the palace considered not-safe.  "I will think about what we need, and probably go talk to Acquisitions in the likely event that this isn't a piece-of-paper issue.  Who do I go to in Acquisitions, if you were told that?"

Iarwain: The page names a random name, which can readily be allocated to whoever plays that role.

How/when does Sevar want the Queen's transcript of Keltham, for her to review?

Carissa Sevar: Security has decided to do additional screening of project involved people for not being secret Kuthite agents. Then Carissa can be absent for her further screening and can get the review of the transcript done, as well as her punishment, which she expects she should take at the palace because Abrogail might want to watch.

Iarwain: Security policy would usually call for Sevar being escorted off as soon as she was told about the Security review, should they lie about that part or should Sevar be immediately escorted out after this?

Carissa Sevar: They should not lie about that but they don't have to tell her now, it might be convenient to tell her in ten minutes after she's gotten Keltham's reaction to the relocation.

Iarwain: Affirm, somebody will check back in on you in 10.

Keltham: "Anything else?"

Iarwain: "That's, uh, it."  The stuttery page departs.

Keltham: Weird speech patterns, huh.  You wouldn't think somebody like that would find their comparative advantage running messages.  Maybe he was scared for some reason... well, if it's something bad they're doing, you wouldn't send somebody visibly scared of it, so probably it's just the whole godwar followed by mortalwar.

...maybe that's just what talking sounds like at Intelligence 10.  Keltham has never actually met anyone with Intelligence 10.

"Okay, apparently we've suddenly got to figure out all of our project infrastructure wishlist," Keltham says.  "Better classroom setup, breakout rooms, larger white writing surfaces would be nice even if Prestidigitation, library for reference books as we can get them, material experimentation laboratory for melting metals, biological laboratory where we keep the stocks of mice, whatever you do for a magical laboratory, regular so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard training setup for me, am I missing anything."

Carissa Sevar: "Do you want a cuddleroom separate from your bedroom? Do you want a bedroom like this one? Plumbing? Hot water?"

Keltham: "...yes to all of those important things."

Keltham: "There shall furthermore be, if at all possible, plumbing and hot water for my Carissa; and, predicting my future self's desires, for other people who might end up with a Keltham possessive adjective in front of their names."

Carissa Sevar: "It counts as flirting, by local rules, if you let it be known the criteria was as such. Nothing wrong with that, just, so you know. Hmm. Do you want the cuddleroom stocked like would be conventional or should it start out empty, to avoid spoilers."

Keltham: "Storage closet to which you've got the key, you take things out of the closet as I figure them out?"

"And you know, considering the overall situation, I am not really concerned about it being overly fast relationship escalation if everyone in my research harem gets the simultaneous information that I might be interested in dating some of them."

Carissa Sevar: Keltham feeling possessive of his presents from Cheliax is a good thing. "Should they bother stocking the library with the kinds of books we normally put in libraries or are those bad enough to be useless and you'd rather start with empty shelves and fill them out with specific things we specifically want?"

Keltham: "Unsure.  Thinking.  Reference books, those meant to teach subjects, we should have no matter how terrible they are.  For the more relaxed section, I think we at least start with some books that research haremettes enjoy reading, or they state their personal favorites and those get added to the library for others to read, maybe.  I don't think I need any extraneous terrible books thrown in on top of that.  Relaxed library section isn't as urgent as the reference section."

"Do we need to tell them, like, kitchens and dining rooms must exist somewhere, I'm assuming that sort of thing gets handled well without our input but I check that assumption."

dath ilan: Obviously they have favorite books.  Only the Lost Dead have no favorite books.

Carissa Sevar: "They'll handle that. I mentioned plumbing and hot water because that is not at all considered a thing you just have everywhere by default and probably restricts the number of places they can put us severely, but most places have kitchens and dining rooms and, you know, servants and security and sunlight and so on."

Keltham: "If you can't add plumbing to something that didn't previously have plumbing then how does anything ever end up with plumbing?  Also, 'servant' doesn't Baseline well?"

Carissa Sevar: "People with job responsibilities of keeping the place clean and cooking the food and running messages and going to the market for food. I think mostly plumbing gets...added to new buildings, or when a building is majorly renovated in a way that involves knocking down most of the walls. Maybe for something this important they'll get a high-level cleric in to add plumbing with Stone Shape."

Keltham: "If it's a 4th-circle cleric spell or lower then I will do it, I do not want to fight the lingering Good parts of my brain every day about whether I should be lending other people my bathroom."

Carissa Sevar: She's been taking down his requests on paper. "I will note that it is a major cost to you for anyone to not have plumbing even if none of us mind that much. It's a third circle cleric spell, but getting good results with it also takes practice - though I guess maybe a kind of practice that's useful for you to get."

Keltham: "I don't currently know about any 3rd circle spells worth a spellslot and have been spending them on Truthspells and Auguries and so on instead to save my god resources.  And, yeah, it is not implausible that I should get any practice with detailed magical work, at all.  But not urgently, so if somebody else can do that exact part, great."

"Quarters for outside experts, short-term and longer-term.  Somebody who knows how to take care of mice, for example.  Or a place to put up somebody for three days while we talk to them about metallurgy."

"Meeting room suitable for the Chelish equivalent of Very Serious... for if Isidre and five of her friends decide that they need to come in and talk to us.  Suite suitable for somebody like Isidre to stay in overnight if that's necessary.  The fact that we're being moved out of the palace this fast is suggestive of them not wanting us here for any number of good or bad reasons, meaning that they'd come to us instead of us going to them, presumably... or do we just get a meeting room with a big two-way mirror that connects to the palace?"  He's got to remember that this is not actually a low-tech world, it's a magitech world, they may have videoconferencing.

Carissa Sevar: "Guest room for visiting royalty, meeting room for visiting royalty, paired mirrors exist, I'll note that's another option, no idea which is cheaper in wartime -"

Keltham: "I mean, not royalty, people who are important.  Like in Governance and so on."  Relatives-of-important-people, what, why.

Carissa Sevar: Ah, Keltham.

" - yep, people who are important in general, not just royalty, but high enough quality they can host royalty."

Keltham: Keltham is confused about why relatives of important people require higher hosting requisites than important people themselves!  But he is not going to ask because it is probably not the most key question right now.

Iarwain: After some further brainstorming, which is not going that fast anymore, and currently consists of Keltham sitting with his eyes closed trying to think of another thing, Sevar gets inaudibly poked about whether she's ready for her 'Security review'.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, ready.

Iarwain: There's a knock upon the door!  This time there's three sober-looking Securities outside it.

"A security review has been required for Carissa Sevar," one of them says.  "You have up to one minute to finish up any current tasks, do not cast any new spells."

"Everyone on this project is being rescreened," one of the other Securities says, more politely, to Keltham.  "Except for you, I suppose.  Protocol says that as soon as Sevar knows that's going to happen, she needs to come with us immediately and not cast any more spells along the way."

Separately:  Sevar, it's been pointed out that this project needs a new codename, we can't keep calling it 'this project' in front of him, he may eventually ask us what we're calling it.  It'd be good practice to have something internally that we can also use in front of Keltham, reduces the prospect of him somehow overhearing the real name.

(The current actual codename is Project Pet Outsider, with the form of 'pet' implying that somebody, such as Asmodeus, owns that pet.)

Keltham: Part of him wants to object that obviously Carissa is not the traitor, but that is not how real life works and also it is not how tropes work.

"Understood," Keltham says, wondering why part of his brain just went all queasy... well, no, it's pretty obvious, it's because that's Carissa they're security-reviewing.

But this, too, is not an objection that grownups make, and Keltham does not make it.

"Carissa, do you just give the list to Security to run to Acquisitions, do I take it down to Acquisitions."

Carissa Sevar: The project can be...Project Keltham, or Project Lawful, or Project dath ilan, she doesn't know how Keltham's translation even handles 'pet'. "Tasks finished," she says to Security. "They can probably take it down to Acquisitions for you. I should see you in a couple hours." Snort. "You know, unless I'm secretly a Kuthite traitor."

Keltham: Not actually funny.

Keltham doesn't say it.

He really hopes his life doesn't run on tropes.

Iarwain: Two of the Securities peel off as soon as they're out of sight of Keltham's door and get on with their real jobs.  The remaining one escorts Carissa to a room where she can review her notes, and hands her a sealed packet that contain the Queen's slightly censored transcript of Keltham's thoughts.

The Security also recounts recent events at somewhat greater length.

Rather a lot of diamonds suddenly materialized around Otolmens's oracle.

There's an obvious thought about where those diamonds might have come from, and their best hopes there seem to be actually coming true.  Nidal shifted to a more tightly defensive, conservative, and dare one hope, worried posture afterwards.  It's not the same kind of game-over as if Zon-Kuthon had been destroyed and his clerics depowered, but the remaining timeline is looking like months, not years.

Nobody has any good idea of how Nidal managed to piss off Otolmens this much, except, obviously, that it had something to do with Nidal's intentions for Keltham.  It nonetheless implies that people should tread even more carefully, which shouldn't, in fact, be possible in the first place when you are dealing with an Otolmens event, but nonetheless, do consider, this is what happens when Otolmens gets pissed.  If anybody manages to piss Otolmens off at Cheliax instead, then perhaps all the diamonds in Cheliax will be teleported to Lastwall!  It is the considered belief of Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn that this would be a bad idea, and people should not do it!  Or come close to doing it.  Or think too much about doing it.  Or do anything that is 'not technically doing it'.  Or do something that really shouldn't piss Otolmens off that much if Otolmens is being reasonable.  Just don't, fucking, mess, with Otolmens.  If anybody thinks that Rugatonn is trying to tell them anything especially complicated here, they should come to Rugatonn for clarification about how she is really, in fact, saying something very simple.  Or they can just kill themselves directly.  Rugatonn is happy with either outcome.

Maillol, who received Asmodeus's vision while being personally tortured by Gorthoklek, briefly and barely pulled himself together to communicate the bones of their Lord's vision:  Asmodeus communicated a complex attitude about Otolmens's sudden gift, which suggests that Otolmens has well overpaid for the new project to have adequate security precautions; and while they shouldn't even remotely try to spend as much as Otolmens actually paid, they're not supposed to just take the money and run, either.

The new project location will have actual fucking security this time, and any complaints about the budget should be considered in the light of Otolmens's apparent concern and corresponding generosity.

Asmodeus's sent vision requires very strongly that Keltham needs to be not too far from Ostenso.  Asmodeus's vision implies that Keltham should be within the designated region the moment it's safe; so as soon as a new Forbiddance can be put up, somewhere Nidal hopefully won't know about; hence, shortly after dawn tomorrow when Rugatonn can request a Forbiddance spell.

They're currently thinking of renovating an old coastal fortress.

Carissa Sevar: Wow. 

Carissa's preferred thing to tell Keltham about this is the truth, that Cheliax is acting on orders from Otolmens; she thinks that Keltham is more likely to break rules in a way that offends Otolmens accidentally than he is to do so deliberately, and if he were doing it deliberately he'd likely at least take cautionary measures like running it by Carissa first or maybe talking to Broom. Otolmens intervention seems like the sort of thing that might be clearer from Keltham's perspective than theirs and which is therefore going to end up being even harder to hide. She assumes Aspexia Rugatonn will veto this, so she wants to give a story that isn't incompatible with telling him that later, which probably means just telling him that the relocation is for Security reasons they can't disclose at this time. 

Carissa would appreciate a further briefing on known things about Otolmens, at some point.

Coastal fortress seems fine. Keltham seems plenty attached to luxury, even knowing how desperately poor everyone in the world is; she isn't sure if it'll actually hit him for Evil if they fund his luxuries with brutal taxation of some distant village but it seems worth exploring. Plumbing is a must. 

She assumes from the fact the packet is sealed that she is intended to read it alone.

Iarwain: On usual policy they could, in principle, tell Keltham that they're doing it on orders from Broom's god, so long as they don't tell him that Broom's god is specifically about world-destroying or multiverse-destroying threats and allow him to go on thinking that She's mostly about preventing giant flaming Wish craters.  Rugatonn would have to review the disclosure that this move was on Broom's god's request, but she wouldn't necessarily say no.

Security also notes that Cheliax, of course, acts on only Asmodeus's orders, even if Asmodeus perhaps bargains with other gods as part of His business; even Otolmens surely would not dare to instruct Him so, or give Him orders to pass along, and the generosity of Her payment suggests that She bargained with Asmodeus from a position of weakness.  To suggest that Cheliax is in any way acting on Otolmens's orders would be a lie, which Sevar is welcome to authorize explicitly.  (Weirdly, Security does not hurt her about this.)

Her assumption is correct, Security will depart as soon as Sevar wants to read the transcript.

Carissa Sevar: Hmm. With approval from the Grand High Priestess, she wants them to tell Keltham that their present understanding is that Broom's god of messes requested the move and heightened security generally, and that Asmodeus instructed it, and maybe even that the instruction was specifically to go somewhere near Ostenso. The most obviously useful thing here is Keltham being reluctant to leave the area, though mostly Carissa's operating on the assumption that this has weird correlates she can't see.

And she'll take a look at the transcript now. She does not ask if that means her mind won't be read while she reads it; it might instead just mean her mind is being read directly by Abrogail or something, and anyway 'my mind isn't presently being read' is a bad starting point for thought.

Iarwain: Abrogail's transcript contains a censored section right at the most exciting part about the Second Law, with notes saying that Keltham thought things about other people's knowledge of these truths driving them insane and possibly collapsing the universe, that most of his thoughts were incomprehensible ideas with no remote conceptual neighbors in any language that Abrogail knows, and that the parts that did make it through were incredibly fucking disturbing.  Abrogail is obviously saying this because she knows how terribly curious it will make Sevar about the one part she most wanted to know, but it is also true, and Rugatonn requires further thought on whether Sevar gets to see this.

Abrogail has included a more detailed explanation of why Sevar is being tortured, with particular torture codes from her sheet being noted at particular points that all sum up exactly to the total amount of torture she received in her original note.

The most severe torture code is annotated on the section where Keltham thought about his secret plan to establish a fully legible meta-level signal via the no-verbal-objections order.  This looks like a huge setback for their corruption plans.  If Sevar noticed this at all, which was her job, then she didn't think about it in words and it didn't show up in her thought transcript, meaning Abrogail got blindsided here.  Abrogail isn't sure how to recover, Sevar didn't say anything to the effect of how most masochists wouldn't go along with it even if Sevar herself is fine, or how she could do it for a month no problem but after any longer of not being allowed to scream and beg she would probably start to feel sad.  Maybe when Keltham gets to the appropriate point Sevar can confess that she's starting to feel sad.  Keltham is unfortunately explicitly suspicious that Cheliax is trying to lure him into rape.  But even if Sevar's opinion is that any objection to Keltham's plan would have made him too suspicious, Sevar didn't apparently notice, and definitely didn't report it explicitly.  Bad Sevar, go to your torture room.

The second-worst torture code is for Sevar thinking about how the Queen of Cheliax was being stupid for saying a 'worse version' than the one Sevar suggested.  When, in fact, the Queen of Cheliax has higher Perception than Sevar can fucking dream of and it was warning her off Sevar's version verbatim, possibly because Keltham would've been able to identify it as coming from Sevar.  Sevar's failure to imagine that the Queen of Cheliax could have any good reason for presuming to not do exactly what Sevar said reveals an actual problem of subordination here and that's why this punishment is severe.  Thinking about lighting Abrogail on fire despite knowing you might get punished for thinking that was not the problem, that's just flirting and will be dealt with separately.

The third-severest torture code, also appearing in the original sum of codes Carissa was given, is the fee for making the fucking Queen of Cheliax spell all this out for Sevar in the annotations because Sevar apparently cannot imagine her Queen ever being professional about anything.

Carissa Sevar: - okay, you know what, that's actually completely reasonable. And it's true that Carissa has been having a hard time imagining her Queen being professional about anything, though in her defense, that's because -

- well, the thing Keltham said, about how a pragmatic person in the Queen's position would simply have sex with someone other than Carissa.

But. The Queen is who she is, and wants what she wants, and is clearly quite good at her job while wanting some things that offer constraints on how she does her job, and Carissa was in fact underrating that, internally, assuming the Queen was less capable than she was, and the punishment is warranted, and she should have assumed the punishment would be warranted. She'll get it done before she leaves for a coastal fortress in Ostenso.

She's extremely annoyed about the part she really wants being censored, but she thinks nonetheless she understands the Second Law stuff well enough to be working around, now, and well enough to be considering some strategies like saying dramatically ironic things that have no payoff at all because reality doesn't actually pay attention to dramatic irony. (Keltham made a face, when she asserted she wasn't a Kuthite spy.)

She has several ideas for working around the no-order thing, though she didn't see what Keltham was playing at until the transcript and isn't delighted by it. Firstly, she's not actually sure that it wouldn't ding a person for Evil, if they are in the habit of ordering their slaves not to refuse them and vaguely intend that, if ever disobeyed about that, they'd stop the game and let the slave go. In Carissa's particular case it's going to be more complicated but as a general order Keltham's in the habit of giving it seems in some ways advantageous; maybe they can arrange for him to give that order to someone else who 1) will understand Keltham's intent as the obvious 'you are not entitled to refuse me, so don't', 2) has adequate self-control and won't in fact trigger it and 3) (this one might be inconvenient) will react with arousal to treatment they desperately wish they weren't subject to. And then make it gradually clearer to Keltham over time that the reason he's being obeyed is because he's entitled to obedience, not because it's sexy per se. Secondly, Carissa's planning to eventually raise with Keltham that always following orders is in fact less sexy than sometimes breaking orders and being suitably punished for that, so hopefully he can just not-update the orders about 'no' as they gradually transition to a model where he doesn't have her obedience so much as the right and means to compel it. 

Can someone alert Carissa please when Maillol's competent to take over project duties, and in the mean time hand her any project related work that's been sitting, so she can hand it off to him in relatively good shape while she goes for her punishment?

(She's not scared, even though she's definitely never had half an hour before and knows this kind of thing is not linear in effects. That would be pathetic, and she's not that pathetic.)

Iarwain: Project stuff!  They're only giving her the things that other stuff is urgently waiting on, but that's still some work, and she's not going to be as fast at it as Maillol.

Keltham's requests to Requisitions are all things that would be routed to Sevar anyways because Keltham requested them and who knows what he's thinking or how he'll react if anyone says no to anything.  The requests now have budget line items attached to them, but are otherwise the same as they submitted, basically.  Sevar needs to decide whether to sign off on each of them.

If she signs off on absolutely everything, including the 2-way mirrors, the total cost will be somewhere around the vicinity of a +6 intelligence headband.

Carissa Sevar: She's going to reject the mirrors for now both because they're a big chunk of the budget and because the mirrors are a sense in which Keltham would be less contained and she gets the sense that what Otolmens wants is Keltham maximally contained. She approves most of the other things. She is definitely not experienced at this but still within an hour she can hand things off to Maillol in reasonably decent shape - "if he's ready for a handoff, is he?"

Iarwain: Yeah, he isn't really.  But Sevar got everything that was blocking further progress.

Carissa Sevar: Right, but they shouldn't both of them be incapacitated at the same time, probably, so she'll take her punishment later. What's the less-pressing stuff. 

(Note to self which she doesn't really think she needs, avoid angering Gorthoklek.)

Iarwain: Okay, here's some less pressing stuff.

Also, this just in, Paracountess Isidre Thrune cordially requests your covert attendance upon her meeting with Keltham in fifteen minutes.

(It's not clear whether Security knows who Isidre Thrune is.  He presumably knows there's no such Paracountess.)

Carissa Sevar: She'd be honored. Someone'll need to hit her with Fox's Cunning repeatedly....and maybe also Owl's Wisdom, there are disadvantages to having your cleverness run out too far ahead of your sense.

Iarwain: They'll do their best on fifteen minutes' notice, but of course a lot fewer wizards prepare Owl's Wisdom than Fox's Cunning.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail has a slightly nervous feeling at this point.  She has gotten the verbal transcript about Keltham suspecting her, or rather Isidre, of Detect Desires.  She is starting to understand why Sevar is so nervous about lying to Keltham; maybe she should have gotten it from transcripts, but living it is different.  Most people, if you tell them something that they're supposed to believe, will act around you like they believe that one thing.  Keltham... builds a world in his mind where those things would have actually been true?  And just completely lives there.  He lives in that world at you.

And then you're stuck in whatever world Keltham has decided you put him in.

(Yes, she's still too busy for this, but Keltham is leaving the palace tomorrow morning and even Abrogail does not wantonly waste her Teleports; she has a lot of places to be simultaneously.)

Iarwain: Paracountess Isidre Thrune, overly-Good person with an overly-large intelligence headband, who definitely has a whole lot of magically enhanced perception but is probably not actually using Detect Desires on people, rises to greet Keltham as he enters an even nicer meeting room.

Keltham: Having a Paracountess of Cheliax rise to greet him as he enters is going to be a courtesy that is, like, completely lost on Keltham.  His thoughts show only a brief puzzlement about why Isidre would do that.

Keltham quickly seats himself, his thoughts showing an intention not to waste Isidre's valuable time; he requested this meeting and Isidre may not have her schedule cleared for it.

"I've probed my newfound sexuality some, and arrived at some answers," Keltham says.  "So, first, I'm pretty sure that I do not currently want, for my own sake, to demand that Cheliax hand over Carissa to me, and I can appreciate that it would be missing the point to do it for hers.  Maybe I'll find the 'gendertrope'* inside me, the sexual behavior pattern and way of thinking, that's the complement of hers, where I actually want absolute-power over Carissa enough that I want to go do that for myself.  But it's not there or not awake yet, and I'm not doing that until it is."

(*)  Baseline 'gendertrope' does not contain the syllable for the Baseline 'trope'; the sounds of the words are distinct.

Carissa Sevar: Awww, too bad, but not a definite 'no', and not offense that it was suggested. 

Iarwain: "Understandable, and I believe very much correct, under present conditions," Isidre says.  "I won't say that the government of Cheliax stands ready to assist you in the future, but, I do thus stand ready."

Abrogail Thrune II: She's taken the time to set up more two-way communication, this time, now that Sevar hopefully has any grasp of how to act slightly more professional around her.  And now that Abrogail is not springing an elaborate surprise on Sevar.

Pass to Sevar:

Keltham's thoughts are glossing over earlier thoughts about how he can use Detect Desires, with your consent on general rather than that specific use, to verify that you still want him even if you're in his absolute-power.  His thought on a possibly acceptable relationship is that, for so long as you still want him, you'll have no choice but to have him.  He doesn't seem to be thinking particularly on the morality of it... no, he's thinking that he's not sure what his Civilization would think of that, but would be delighted to watch them get into an enormous fight over it.

Carissa Sevar: - well that seems like progress. Yes, that definitely seems like progress, though actually she doesn't know how Pharasma would judge it either. 

(It's much easier to be professional when one isn't having an elaborate surprise sprung on them; indeed, some would conceptualize professionalism as involving minimal elaborate surprises sprung on their co-conspirators. Carissa herself, who is young and naive and knows little compared to her vastly wiser superiors in the palace, has no opinions on the question.)

Keltham: "My sexuality does not seem basically opposed to renting Carissa out to a woman I know, given sufficiently favorable conditions.  It is not happy with strangers.  I haven't asked my sexuality about men because I don't, currently, really know any Chelish men; standard Civilization 'gendertropes' suggest higher resistance but I haven't been able to ask myself."

"I think the three main conditions, here, are, one, getting to know the Queen of Cheliax like at all, two, figuring out whether Carissa is all right with this, in a way that doesn't just trigger 'hey you can run a sword through me and this isn't even a sword so I'll be fine', and three is, uh, complicated.  Any thoughts about one or two before we tackle that.  I don't get the impression that I can just ask Carissa if she's fine with being rented, or can I?"

Keltham's thought processes are wordlessly trying and wordlessly rejecting sort-of pre-thoughts about ways he could put his unspoken third want into words; it's not easy to read.

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre will temporize by discussing want one, while Abrogail waits to see if Sevar has advice on want two.

"The Queen is, obviously, another very busy person, but considering your potential importance to Cheliax it is plausible the two of you should meet in any case, and you may as well do that before you depart the palace.  I can try to arrange a meeting tonight."

"Though it would be nice to know, before that, that matters had been arranged to avoid any explosive runes going off in our faces as a result of unrolling that scroll."

Keltham: "Mostly a want-number-three issue, I suspect, but I also cannot make any representations to the Queen until I understand the effects on Carissa, and how and if Carissa ends up being okay with that, and how I end up knowing that."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks Keltham could reasonably ask her in what condition she expects to return, if rented out, or if subjected to any number of other things, but should probably not be encouraged to just directly talk to her about everything because then their relationship will be too healthy and functional. (She feels a pang about this which she ignores.)

Iarwain: "You could simply ask me about the effects of different scenarios," says Isidre, "and I could give you an answer which would be quite good and reliable, based on having sufficient familiarity with Sevar's kind of submissive.  I suspect you're not going to accept that, so, you can also ask Sevar in what condition she expects to return, if rented out.  Or what happens to her if you subject her to any number of other conditions, if you don't want to highlight that one as one that she'll notice especially.  That, if not some other things, I think you could ask her plainly."

Keltham: "I apologize for not being able to simply join states of belief with you, but yes, the problem is that I don't just need an answer that's actually good, I need an answer I know is good.  Two isomorphic problems from my perspective, but very different problems from yours."

"I - think Carissa has some equivalent of what a dath ilani would call 'dignity', which translates via Share Language to Taldane dignity but I suspect is really not the same thing at all.  Carissa's 'dignity' is that she is impossible to truly hurt, even by running a sword through her and then refusing to Raise her, which is what makes it safe for the man to whom she's completely given herself to do anything he wants with her, and not be afraid."

"And if we were all in dath ilan, she could tell me that was true, and I would maybe check in with a Keeper first to see if they thought Carissa was in generally good," epistemic health, "belief-health, but then the fact that Carissa thought that was true about herself would be very reliable evidence, because dath ilani know how to see within themselves if that sort of thing is actually true."

"The fact that I got trained in that explicitly, and warned about a lot of pitfalls, suggests that, if that training actually did anything, Chelish people should actually be much worse at distinguishing - what should be true about themselves, what they want to be true about themselves, from what actually is true about themselves."

"I'm worried that Carissa is just answering me from within her model of what Carissa should be and that model is not rigorously separated and distinguished from what Carissa is.  Which seems like the really obvious mistake that, say, I would make, if you took all the dath ilani training out of somebody otherwise with my exact heritage."

"If I try to discuss this with my Carissamodel, my Carissamodel says back that Chelish dignity also says that it's her place to safeguard her own safety and not rely on anybody else to protect her when she's giving herself away, that it would be undignified for her to be relying on me to think about her safety.  I don't then feel happy and reassured when my Carissamodel says this back to me, and I don't know where to go from there."

Carissa Sevar: An observation that might be useful to Keltham is that - by the standards of dath ilan, it's plausible that almost no one is competent to know what they actually want and what they can withstand, and yet they do still have to make decisions and do things, and it can simultaneously be true that they might be wrong and that it is impossible to do better than treating them as if they're right, until one encounters actual reason to think they're specifically wrong about something specific; trust withheld in full generality can be damaging.  

Another might be that one commonly solves this by hurting their Carissa to her breaking point such that they subsequently know what it is, and Keltham probably literally isn't capable of that yet, but the fact he's not also means this isn't very urgent.

Iarwain: "I've sometimes made mistakes of that kind myself," Isidre says.  "By the standards of dath ilan, then, I'm a child, and, except for you, there's nobody in Golarion who can raise me to adulthood or teach me how to protect myself.  I nonetheless think I'd be upset if you told me that I wasn't allowed to have the sort of sex I find satisfying because I was not by dath ilani standards competent to decide that I wanted it.  I think I'd actually be offended even if you told me merely that you needed to check over my thinking and sign off on it first."

"And there's - I feel like there's some even more precise way that a dath ilani would say that thing I just said, going on your class transcripts.  Something more Lawful to say about what people have to do when they're not competent, and how they might be wrong, but if you don't specifically know that they're wrong and never trust them anyways - I haven't actually attended your classes, and I can't put it into words."

Keltham: Oof, yeah, that's valid.  "Let me... think about that."

Though it's - a little too persuasive, maybe, like this is what happens when somebody with an Intelligence-Wisdom headband (even if that's not really thinkoomph, just three components of thinkoomph), tries to bend their will on persuading you and presenting only one side, instead of calmly listing out all the arguments and counterarguments to be summed.

Abrogail Thrune II: She's supposed to what.  Who does that.  What the Abyss is Abrogail supposed to do about that.  Of course Isidre is trying to persuade him, she didn't come to this meeting without having any goals.

Abrogail transmits Keltham's most recent thoughts to Sevar, with a note that Abrogail doesn't think she can quickly grasp or adopt the dath ilani behavior that Keltham is thinking of, and can only try to sound more "Why of course I am totally telling you about all the downsides of this contract, look at these three right here," which she was already trying to do in places.

Carissa Sevar: Ah, Keltham. Carissa thinks her preferred phrasing might've been better in that regard but yields to Abrogail's superior Splendour. It's like - it's like if the thing you're trying to do is figure out who to send on patrol, and if someone brings up that those two just had a bad breakup and won't get along, your job isn't convincing them they're wrong, it's figuring out what the best patrol group is with the new inputs. Act like the decision power is already yours and you don't need to convince anyone, and then like you need the patrol to nonetheless perform well against demons.

One objection to what Abrogail just said is that it proves too much, Keltham shouldn't buy and abuse literal children (yes he should but they're not going to get him there yet). So it might be worth acknowledging his concerns as perhaps outweighing her clever response in some cases, but pointing out that Carissa was judged competent by her society to swear the Worldwound oath, which is as competent as her society is capable of acknowledging her to be, and so even if one doesn't want to declare everyone competent until proven otherwise they could extend it at least to those who've served at the Lawfullest place in Golarion. 

(Modulo carefulness to not come across as too good at reading Keltham, but Abrogail knows that.)

Keltham: Keltham is now thinking that Isidre basically seems to be presenting a story about a search algorithm that quickly reaches quiescence, and then you've got to choose the option with highest expectation-of-utility, which, yes, Keltham supposes that's terribly mysterious if all the Law is unknown to you.  But isn't it obvious that Keltham wouldn't be here if his meta-level prediction process hadn't suggested that there was further value-of-information in trying to figure out the likely consequences to Sevar better than he can get by just asking Sevar?  And Isidre hasn't even given him reason to believe that Sevar would be mostly probably right, just, sort of presented a social story about why you have to act like you believe somebody's words independently of whether they're true.  And sure, there's situations where the incentives and payoff matrices are structured such that Governance should just take people at their word independently of what the prediction market says about the probability it's true, but, like, at least ask?

Well, actually he can just ask.  "You've said, basically, that I should act like I believe Sevar regardless of the probability that she's right, but if she's only 10% likely to be right, that's probably a bad idea?"

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail supposes that's what she gets for prompting him into thinking about the Law behind anything.

"I don't suppose it would help if I pointed out that Sevar was trusted by us to take the Worldwound oath, which is as mentally competent as Cheliax can possibly acknowledge anyone to be?  That she served, and served well, in the Lawfullest place in all Golarion?"

Keltham: "I'd worry that the Lawfullest place in Golarion isn't very much more Lawful than the coldest place in the Sun's core is cold.  Your concept of an oath is something that gets your soul destroyed by Abaddon if you break it, and you do it that way, instead of the way that gods do it, because nobody here has enough Law in them to swear what dath ilan would regard as a real oath."

"Though - maybe if I'd been to the Worldwound for longer than a few minutes, to talk to people knowing the language, I'd have a different impression.  I suppose I did meet Carissa Sevar there, which is something of an update about the general Lawfulness level; though I got the impression from you that, even for the Worldwound, she was special."

Keltham is now starting to worry that he's talking himself into a corner where he'll convince himself that he can't be sadistic to anybody because maybe all the masochists are just making a massive mistake about whether they're masochists.  Keltham is aware that this thought is stupid, but he doesn't know how to prove it's stupid and then generalize the same proof to shoot down his Isidre-reactive arguments for never being able to trust Carissa.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail will transmit all that to Sevar.

"She is.  But Keltham, I think you are - maybe disrespecting Golarion a little too much?  We aren't quite as bad as a dath ilani child of the age to have as little training in Law as we do.  Your concept of how much competence corresponds to how much grasp of Law is not correct for this place."

Keltham: "Look, I get that I'm talking myself into a corner, I just don't know how to talk myself out of it."

Abrogail Thrune II: He certainly is helpful, in some incredibly bizarre way, to anyone who might possibly be trying to corrupt him and manipulate him to their own ends!  Almost like nobody like her exists in his world!

Abrogail wishes she was more confident that this means she could take over the place in a week with the poor naive dears offering her no resistance, and not that everyone like her was successfully hunted and slaughtered and the memories of them erased from history except for Keepers who still remember very well how to do it.

Carissa Sevar: If he feels really strongly about this he could pay the Grand High Priestess to evaluate Carissa's competence probably that's a bad idea, for many reasons but among them that Carissa doesn't actually know what the Grand High Priestess would truthfully say. 

What is the meaning of an oath is a hard question for us to answer, with our vocabulary, but it doesn't mean that oaths only mean to us their most obvious physical consequence, and many people who one way or another don't fear Abaddon still give their word and mean it, groping for a different basis for it to signify what it does.

There's really something to be said for doing things and checking whether they have good or bad consequences, assuming the consequences are recoverable. 

Also he could just directly bring this to Carissa, she'll in fact probably be upset and definitely at least somewhat turned-off but that's only a consideration against it, not absolute reason if he's too stuck.

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre speaks quietly, which is also its own Splendour.  "It's not that our oaths mean nothing to us except the threat of Abaddon, Keltham, we do - understand, why they are things that Lawful people swear.  By dath ilani standards none of us understand properly, because we cannot give the lectures you give and play the games you play, but we do feel what an oath means, even if we cannot say it."

Keltham: "Sorry."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I... don't suppose that it would help if I observed that one very normal way of solving this problem would be for you to hurt Carissa to her actual breaking point, so that you would subsequently know where that is.  And that you are completely incapable of this right now.  And that this indicates that you don't have an urgent problem here."

"You've never tried to hurt her in any serious way.  How do you know she's this easy to break?  I guess I am, in some sense, offended on behalf of Carissa's Chelish 'dignity'," she uses the Baseline loanword that Keltham used before.  "I don't suppose, though, that appealing to her dignity is much of an argument to you either.  Is there anything a Lawful dath ilani would say about - just trying to do a thing, to see what happens, when it won't be a disaster for it to fail."

Keltham: "We've pretty much got a proverb in nearly those exact words, yeah."  He utters it in Baseline: an eight-syllable couplet, which rhymes and scans because Baseline was designed in part to make that proverb be a rhyming couplet.

Abrogail Thrune II: (To Sevar:)

Sevar, watch yourself.  It's lovely that you're mastering the Law but Isidre isn't supposed to be its master.

Keltham: "And - I'm sorry if I'm wasting your time by being obstinate to a point I should've gotten.  But hurting Carissa to her breaking point sounds like it just is the failure and the disaster."

Abrogail Thrune II: "That's because you don't understand the meaning of anything you're doing."  More passion in Isidre's voice, now, and a hint of Isidre's real power in her voice (Isidre's, that is, not Abrogail's).  "Someone like Carissa desires to be hurt to her breaking point so that she can be broken and reforged and made what you want her to be, heated in fire and tempered, beaten and sharpened.  You're not ready to do any of that, you don't know how to bring her to that point, and you don't know what to do with her once she's there, but have the courtesy to her to not pretend that you tickling her too hard, or whatever it is you do with her in bed now, is going to shatter her beyond repair."

"I'm - I'm sorry, Keltham.  Bad memories.  I shouldn't have said that to you, you weren't the one I was really talking to."

Keltham: He's a little confused by the concept of a Very Serious Person who, like, can't figure that out before she starts talking.  And then she wonders why he's worried that Carissa's self-reporting is going to be bad!  It's because you all have a nine-year-old's skill at self-reporting, at best, and that seems like not enough for, like, hey, how are you currently doing at being broken and remade, oh, wait, can't ask you that, it's all supposed to be illegible, cool.

...his mind is evading by generating unspoken snark because he doesn't want to come to grips with Isidre's actual point that is being made with real force and emotion behind it.

(And hey!  Keltham knows that!  But if he didn't, he'd be all like, 'Oh, I am currently thinking about this scorching burn against your argument' and his self-reports would all be useless!)

...actually, did Isidre fake that slip so she'd have a chance to let the more emotional words through?  That would be, like, discussion over, in dath ilan, if you got caught doing it, but maybe it's not metaphorically illegal in Golarion... well, either people with intelligence headbands still slip like that, or, she doesn't know Keltham knows that somebody with high Intelligence shouldn't do that.  Well, somebody with high thinkoomph shouldn't do that, her actual thinkoomph is not whatever Detect Intelligence says and they don't know the difference, they presumably think that high Intelligence is as smart as the very smart people get.  Okay, maybe the slip was real.

Also he's not here to arrest Isidre, metaphorically or otherwise, he's here to consider if she's got a point.

Abrogail Thrune II: ...what?  What's ~~~~~~~~~ that's different from - better than? - Intelligence?

Abrogail transmits this all to Sevar, along with a note that Abrogail isn't going to try being emotional at Keltham again unless so advised.

(If Sever has professionally insubordinate thoughts about Abrogail's mistake, she can be tortured in the temple; if she has flirtatiously insubordinate thoughts it can go to the personal queue.)

Carissa Sevar: Sevar is a reasonably quick learner and the thing she has learned is to not try having opinions about Abrogail's decisions, which for all she knows may have been the best available at the time. 

(She's...better at self-deception than most people, it's pretty obvious by now; her self-deceptions go deeper, grow more roots. She didn't just learn to quash the thought 'Abrogail makes mistakes', she uprooted everything nearby, replaced with 'you are too ignorant of the constraints on Abrogail to ever evaluate anything she does as a mistake'.)

Carissa has only tried being emotional at Keltham once and what happened was that he decided he needed to invent contraception about her sadness, it was very confusing, Isidre should be glad he's not handling Isidre's emotions like that. Maybe dath ilan encourages that because they don't want their people emotionally manipulable and also don't want them to learn to simply not care about other people.

Keltham: "Does anything bad happen if I talk about all this sort of thing with Carissa directly?"

Abrogail Thrune II: Passing it to you, Sevar, this is controlling your side of this game.

(Isidre looks thoughtful, and eats one of the small delightful snacks present by way of consideration.)

Carissa Sevar: It's not generally advised to tell your submissives that you're having trouble regarding them as adults enough to make decisions, but the likely consequence is 'she'll think a little worse of you', not 'she'll walk out'. 

Also, if Keltham is feeling meaningfully constrained by fear Carissa will walk out, well, that's precisely why some people like to put that decision, too, in his hands, so that he can use reasoning processes that aren't meant for situations where the other person might get fed up and walk away. Uh, that came out too influenced by dath ilan, translate before you say it.

Abrogail Thrune II: "It's not... generally advised to tell a submissive like Sevar that you're having trouble regarding her as enough of an adult to make decisions, but I expect the consequence is that she'll probably be upset and definitely turned off and in the worst case she will think a little worse of you."

"I don't think she'll walk out.  If you're afraid of that possibility, I would point out that she would very much like to have that option be removed from herself, and never again have to fear that you'll be afraid of her walking out and not say things to her.  She wants you to be able to think about her the way you'd think if you weren't ever afraid she'd leave you."