Keltham: "I will admit, a lot of times my reaction to what you're saying is that it has, like, one benefit, but, one would sort of expect, a whole lot of other problems that came packaged with that one benefit."

"I meta vote to suspend this discussion branch and move back up the discussion tree; I have a sense that this line of questioning is not likely to resolve much further with small amounts of further discussion.  My general takeaway is that you don't think it would be catastrophic for me to ask Carissa some hopefully careful questions, so I will probably do that and get back to you on whether I'm still requesting a Queen meeting.  Assuming point three, which is, uh, kind of complicated, resolves well.  Or at all."

Keltham's thoughts show that he's politely waiting for Isidre to indicate whether she's okay with tabling this topic here.

Abrogail Thrune II: "That is probably wise.  So your point one is that you need to meet the Queen.  Your point two is that you need not only for Carissa to be okay, which she almost certainly will be, but you need to know that somehow despite knowing so little, and you think that the thing for you to do is to talk to Carissa about it.  Your point three is...?"

Keltham: "Feeling safe, myself, about renting Carissa to the Queen."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Safe in what sense... ah.  You're worried that the Queen is better at looking like she has absolute-power, and that Carissa will start to like her more than she likes you?"

Carissa Sevar: (But you see, Keltham, the Queen would turn me into a statue forever if it happened to be convenient. ...Asmodeus would too, not that she's sure she's supposed to admit that to herself. And I am weak and human, and bask in the gentleness of someone who'd have to be incredibly sorely provoked to destroy me eternally.)

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail would not in fact do that to Sevar unless incredibly sorely provoked, Abrogail does not say to Sevar at this time, both for personal reasons of future plans, and also, because Abrogail has already fucking said so and Sevar didn't listen because she was too caught up in her fear fantasy.

Keltham: "So, as near as I can tell, the three obvious pathways by which Carissa could end up being taken from me, are, one, that the Queen is going to be a vastly better sadist, two, that Carissa has a sex problem which I'm not going to go into if it's not already in her file but the Queen is going to have vastly more expensive sex toys, three, that the Queen is the other person who could plausibly have absolute-power over Carissa."

"My Carissamodel says that it is basically not possible to steal Carissa from me by pathway two - that there's no realistic amount of pleasure you can get from sex toys and without dangerous drugs that you can use to steal a Carissa from a Keltham.  I nonetheless check explicitly that you agree with my Carissamodel there."

"Being much better at hurting her than I am, and maybe looking like the Queen has more real power over her than I do, both seem like actual problems."

"These problems could plausibly be solved by mature reasonable adults with five minutes of negotations.  They are much bigger problems if what we're fighting is a 'trope' that requires the Queen to try to steal Carissa from me no matter how little sense that makes, and make concerning progress on it, before the Queen gets revealed as a traitor or the matter gets resolved with an amicable harem expansion."

Abrogail Thrune II: Wait.

If the fundamental reason why Carissa prefers Keltham is that Keltham will never statue her, and then Abrogail kidnaps Carissa for purposes of slow yet ultimately fake petrification, and afterward swears never to do that to her (barring deliberate betrayal etc) -

...could Sevar actually start falling in love with the Queen and start to lose attraction for Keltham.  Is that actually a thing they need to worry about here.

...is the part where Abrogail then ends up losing her throne or pregnant with Keltham's child also something she needs to worry about in that case.

Carissa Sevar: This thought hasn't occurred to Carissa, who is missing some important information on Abrogail's future plans, and she's mostly thinking about how Keltham's very cute and she should go into her punishment tonight aiming to work out that flaw even though it wasn't prominent among the ones listed. 

Abrogail Thrune II: Sevar, he's talking about tropes again, stop admiring how fucking pathetic you are and help me out here.

Isidre picks up another snack and consumes it, looking thoughtful, and maybe a bit confused and worried.  "I do agree that pleasuring Sevar is a most unlikely way for someone like the Queen to successfully steal someone like Sevar from someone like you," she says truthfully.  Anyone you can do that to is not strong enough to be worth doing it to.

Carissa Sevar: (She's not admiring how pathetic she is, she's developing a plan of attack to get it solved tonight!)

That hypothesis makes this more valuable to you as a test of his tropes theory though you understand why he wouldn't see it that way. You have lots of observations about how incredibly implausible it'd be for the Queen to steal Carissa, but you aren't sure how they hold up in tropeworld. In the actual, logical world, though, incredibly unlikely. 

Also, though he has good reason to put this line of thought on hold, the Queen would absolutely respect a preexisting arrangement, even if things are running on...tropes...she couldn't be the Queen of Cheliax if she broke a preexisting agreement between Keltham and Cheliax over Carissa, such as that she is his.

Keltham: "Eight hurrahs then for predictive modeling which has that form of pseudo-success which is advance prediction of someone else's more expert prediction," Keltham says, unfortunately in Taldane where it sounds less than entirely snappy.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail is no longer entirely sure she's safe to say that it's incredibly implausible because Abrogail is no longer quite certain it's true.  Keltham is right, in a way, there's - a sense in which Abrogail can give Sevar more powerful experiences, right now, than Keltham can give her.  Abrogail was planning the most powerful experience that would still let Sevar recover to health afterwards, well into the break-and-remake zone of torture.  Things like that have been known to ever affect a submissive's feelings.

But if - that's all a 'trope' - is she able to just -

"Suppose that 'tropes' do have power here, and we try to just - not test it at all, walk away," Isidre says cautiously.  "Does the 'trope' fight back, punish us for trying to defy it, I realize you're going to say 'no' but I'm wondering what the answer is instead."

Keltham: "We don't get to decide that there isn't going to be this huge complication.  Only the Queen can decide not to pursue Sevar.  And if a 'trope' is manifesting in her, then that's not something she will decide to do.  It's not that she can't decide it, but that she won't."

Abrogail Thrune II: "It's not that she can't, but that she won't" is unfortunately exactly the wrong literal phrasing to use, if you were hoping to not remind Abrogail Thrune that she is now the Queen of Cheliax, her mother is safely dead, the tutoress who said those things to her and backed them up with a whip was turned into a statue, eventually, and that the point of being Abrogail Thrune is that literally nobody gets to tell you what to do.  She has a junior partnership with her senior partner Asmodeus, and keeps to her side of that bargain, and that's it.

...but is it actually any more proof of her freedom, if she lets a 'trope' manifest through her, instead?

...though, according to Sevar, it's more that Keltham just happened to land in a universe where the Queen will do what the 'trope' wants, and now at this point Abrogail is genuinely confused about who and what she's supposed to say 'fuck you' to.

"But, to be clear," Isidre says cautiously, "if the Queen chooses of her own will not to cause a complication, then the result is that we've proven tropes don't govern here.  That's the only result, correct?  It's not that our head of government blinks out of existence or is subjected to a godlike level of mind control."

Keltham: "Right, but the problem there is that this scenario doesn't look like the Queen entering into grownup negotiations for how to rent Carissa, and that happening safely and with no complications.  It looks like there not being any particular need to rent Carissa to the Queen in the first place, because the Queen is just busy running her region like a sane person."

Abrogail Thrune II: You are not fucking helping me make this decision, little boy.

"I think that sane people occasionally take time off from running their country to sleep with people they are actually attracted to," Isidre says.

Intuitions only partly magical tell Abrogail that Isidre needs to make this statement incredibly blatantly sharp for a Chelish person, so that it will come across as slightly sharp to Keltham.  Abrogail sends a side note to Sevar about how the very blatant sharpness is deliberate, and why it's there; Sevar may need to note for her own future that Keltham may need very loud signals for them to be perceptible to him at all, that's going to take some practice to calibrate right.

Are Sevar's thoughts by any chance flirtatious right now, in the sense that Sevar is thinking things she knows will get her punished.

Carissa Sevar: Sevar, cooperatively, thinks that this is hilarious and Abrogail deserves every word of the takedown Keltham has no idea he is delivering.

Abrogail Thrune II: She is really, really, really not looking forward to the conversation that's going to happen after Aspexia, Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek all get ahold of all these transcripts.  Maybe she can take out her frustrations on Sevar afterwards.

Keltham: "I agree in one sense, and I'm sorry that the Queen doesn't more often find people she's attracted to and doesn't have a wider field of choice.  But there's being Evil and then there's being stupid, you know, and messing around with the very important alien's girlfriend is definitely the latter thing if you're not being shoved around by 'tropes'.  Actually, even if she is being selected into existence by tropes from my standpoint she's still being unrealistically stupid from her own internal standpoint, presumably there's some story she'd tell herself but I don't know what it would be exactly."

Abrogail Thrune II: YOU REALLY ARE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE, LITTLE BOY.

"And there is no hope in you for the case where Abrogail rents Carissa, under terms agreeable to you, they both have a fine time, Abrogail doesn't go insane from overwork, Carissa respects you more for having done a usual dominant thing, and also gets to let out some steam in a way that you'll probably learn quickly at 18 Intelligence but aren't ready to do to her today... none of this holds any hope for you at all?"

Keltham: "Let me put it this way:  I would be much more hopeful about it in a world where Pilar didn't go to Elysium, Ione didn't deliver prophecies, and if Asmodia comes back from the dead with superpowers I would just call the entire thing off."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I do have enough pull myself to call in a Resurrection on Asmodia shortly, and whoever does it can check whether or not she has... superpowers?"

(An earlier attempt at Raise Dead on Asmodia failed; the fool couldn't manage to die by her own hand before Nidal's shadows turned her into an undead shadow herself, which requires Resurrection and a more expensive diamond.  Which, however, Cheliax now has.)

Keltham: "I'm not actually confident I can call tropes that finely; though I suppose, now that I've said it out loud, it's more likely to happen.  Not a bad test, I'd just as soon do it now, if it needs doing anyways.  Unless Asmodia is otherwise enjoying Hell a lot, and will be irate about being called back before the project has actually restarted, I should've thought of that earlier actually."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Hopefully, though it varies by the person, and in any case I'm sure Asmodia will agree that the test you've proposed is good reason to call her back from Hell to Cheliax a little early."  Abrogail is really sure about this, in fact!  Really, really sure!  Bet-her-kingdom-on-it sure!

(Abrogail is mistaken, but this is genuinely not her fault, here.)

Keltham: "Make it so, then."

Abrogail Thrune II: "It shall be done," Isidre says graciously; though, as a Paracountess of Cheliax, even SlightlyTooGoodCheliax, she is a little put out with Keltham giving her orders like that.  "And if we find that nothing unusual has happened to Asmodia - what does a rental agreement to the Queen of Cheliax look like?"

Keltham: "Look, I'm not sure that Asmodia failing to return with superpowers is enough of a test, here.  It is not predicted that strongly by 'tropes', it was halfway a joke before we started talking about it, which, yes, makes the 'trope' level stronger, but not that much stronger.  The Queen is a much stronger 'trope' and a much stronger test than that."

"But to answer your question, the thing I'd want to see before I rented Carissa to the Queen of Cheliax was - sufficient cause to believe that, if I had to fight with the Queen over Carissa's love and sexuality and possession, I'd win.  Like, not because a 'trope' said so, I don't think I can rely on that, I mean win inside a normal Golarion universe."

Carissa Sevar: Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak. Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak. Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak.

Shit she's supposed to be coming up with things for Isidre to say. 

I think if you lose Carissa, it won't be because the Queen stole her heart with her superior ruthlessness and sadism, it'll be because you shy away from using your own. A girl can be happy with a wide range of masters but not with one who isn't Evil, not with one who isn't interested in discovering what's in his heart however dark it is. And I think you're at risk of that problem even if you tell the Queen to go on her merry way.

Abrogail Thrune II: "I think," Isidre says seriously, "if you lose Carissa, it won't be because the Queen stole her heart with more ruthless sadism, it'll be because you shied away from using your own.  A girl can be happy with a wide range of masters but not with one who isn't Evil, not with one who isn't interested in discovering what's in his heart however dark it is.  After hearing some of what you said earlier, I do now worry you're more at risk of that problem even if the Queen's advisors talk her out of the whole thing."

Keltham: "Thought your earlier advice was not do anything I didn't want to."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm more worried now that you'll want to, and not do it anyways.  You were raised by a society that denies everything you are."

"Though may I also remind you that there's other women besides Carissa, if it truly proves that she wants more from you than you want to give her."

Keltham: That denies everything you are stings, the sort of sting where it's got more than just one grain of truth in it even if the statement is obviously literally false.

Keltham does have any social-emotional dignity, of course, so he's not going to hold it against Isidre that she pointed it out.  And he also has any epistemic dignity, so he's not going to automatically believe the whole thing and all its implications and connotations, just because it stings.

"Anyways," Keltham says.  "The obvious thought for how I could prevent the Queen from winning Carissa's heart through sadism is to write contract limitations on how much she can do to her there."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Keltham, you are a very sweet and innocent lad who grew up in an incredibly Lawful Good society with nothing resembling a Worldwound and this is, in our case, something of a problem.  Anything that the Queen would find satisfying, and that would appease for a time the deeper and darker needs buried far inside Carissa that you are not ready for, is something you are not ready to see written down as contract language."

"I would be very happy to write out language that I was confident would mean the Queen had not gone further than I would want her to go, but I would not want you to see that language.  If that works for you, we have a solution.  If you write down only permitted things that don't make a dath ilani worry, then the two of them might as well not have sex."

Keltham: "This is not really helping me feel like I can satisfy Carissa in the cuddleroom."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Even when you are ready to do such things to Carissa, she will not need them done to her very often.  Your usual activities in the bedroom will not be like that."

"And for you to deliver her with a smile into the gentle hands of the Queen of Cheliax, would be cruelty in its own way, and to your credit in her eyes; I would much advise kissing her when you inform her of it."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would not dream of presuming that Her Majesty is letting her own desire to torture Carissa get in the way of achieving their strategic objectives from this conversation but reminds Her Majesty just in case that Her Majesty can have Carissa without persuading Keltham of it, since, you know, they're lying to him about everything. 

Abrogail Thrune II: The new game Abrogail Thrune is now playing here looks a bit more like 'Do not actually end up attracting Sevar too much and subsequently end up married to Keltham.'  Isidre wasn't lying about the rental arrangement contributing to that not happening.

(Not sent to Sevar, of course.)

Keltham: "All right, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.  You, who does not actually want any complications here, write a rental contract whose terms you're confident prevents the Queen from breaking Carissa or winning her affection away from me by being too much of a better sadist, even if I can't read that part until possibly much later.  That handles sadism.  I think my brain is willing to believe that Carissa having an orgasm I can't give her yet is not actually a problem for our relationship."

"This leaves the problem of how to not have Carissa be attracted to somebody who, maybe, looks even more than me like somebody who could take absolute-power over her.  It leaves the question of whether I can win if the Queen tries to fight me over who owns Carissa, which is itself very much a 'trope'.  I have my own idea, but I'd be interested in hearing what, if anything, you would think of as the most obvious solution.  No, not just going ahead and demanding legal ownership of Carissa from Cheliax, the second most obvious solution."

Abrogail Thrune II: ...if Abrogail doesn't just lie, here, and she has now seen some of the consequences of lying to Keltham and having to live in the entire world you inadvertently created and shaped inside his head, then Abrogail has to admit, she is not immediately seeing it.  Abrogail Thrune wanting Carissa and Keltham wanting Abrogail Thrune to not have Carissa is not very likely to end, realistically speaking, with Abrogail Thrune sadly bereft of Carissa.

What is he actually thinking, though.  Come on Keltham.  Think of it.  (Isidre thoughtfully consumes a snack.)  Why aren't you thinking - there it is.

Iarwain: "Have the Queen sign a contract saying that she relinquishes all her potential ownership rights in Carissa Sevar, under all possible future circumstances where she and Keltham dispute Sevar's ownership, to Keltham?"

Keltham: "Doesn't exactly cover the case where the Queen is abusing Governance powers to keep control of Carissa."

"Look, the basic idea here is, you can't actually have two people with de facto absolute-power over the same person.  Either it's true that I could get Carissa and have anything I want from her and nobody who tried could take her away, or, alternatively, it's true that the Queen could get Carissa and take everything she wants from her.  Or neither of these things can be true, but they can't both be true simultaneously."

"If the basic premise of Carissa's sexuality is that she is and should be with the person who'd succeed in controlling her, then if the Queen could successfully take her away from me, Carissa is in a sense with me under false premises."

"So the question then becomes, what is the truth, here."

Abrogail Thrune II: What is Sevar thinking about this.

Carissa Sevar: She has EFFORTFULLY FENCED AWAY the part of her that thinks this is just really funny. It is, but this is not the time to think so and possibly she is not the person to think so.

Her sincere honest answer is that Keltham is more - something, the phrase she immediately thought of is 'terrifyingly creative' but she's 100% sure she will regret with great intensity having questioned the Queen of Cheliax's terrifying creativity - more dath ilani, the space of solutions he draws from is larger and once he gets competent he'll be able to use the Golarion pool too - he clearly thought he had a way of doing safe Wishes that might work and she can't even tell him he's obviously wrong -

- anyway, he's more something than the Queen of Cheliax and the Queen of Cheliax would beat him without trying in a ruthlessness contest or a solving your problems with any of murder petrification and mind control contest, but Asmodeus has committed to letting Keltham leave Cheliax alive and in one piece, and given that she thinks Keltham would win this contest, if both of them were trying. And also it's obviously not in Cheliax's interests to let it come to that, though it's maybe in Cheliax's interests to make Keltham realize that he does, actually, want to be the person who would have absolute power over Carissa even if he doesn't quite yet want to exercise it. 

Abrogail Thrune II: SEVAR THINKS ABROGAIL FUCKING THRUNE WOULD LOSE TO -

...is a 'trope' trying to provoke her here.

Iarwain: "Are you suggesting... some sort of duel?"  Isidre ventures cautiously.  "This sounds like essentially the opposite of what we want, here.  And I am, to be honest, a little concerned about your ability to take Abrogail Thrune in a direct contest of wills and powers."

Wait why did Isidre say that.  Damn it, Abrogail, get ahold of yourself, you have goals in this conversation.

Keltham: Well, at least she's not straight-up lying to him about that, that's an encouraging sign.

"I haven't the tiniest intention of fighting fair, Isidre, not against the Chief Executive of Cheliax.  The more impossible a problem is without cheating, the more it means you're supposed to cheat."

"She's more of a Good person than I am, by the sound of things, or Carissa thought she might not be that Good, but her advisors certainly sound Good-leaning.  All 'the good of Cheliax requires that you have no fun' and that.  The Church of Asmodeus yoinks her political capital if she actually tries to take Sevar; I can say I'll walk out on Cheliax if I lose Sevar to her and mean that, because I'm less Good than she is and have fewer existing bargains I'm constrained by."

"I'd expect Carissa's sexuality to accept that coin, if it's a reasonable and logical sort of sexuality.  The question of who is more willing to use their power is very much the determinant of who actually would end up with absolute-power over her - who it is that, if they so chose, Carissa could not escape from."

Carissa Sevar: Tell him if he'll walk out over me then he does win. And that - caring that much about me - is indeed something the Queen can't compete with, and the key to Carissa's sexuality, or as close to it as a person who still runs into a wall of Good every time he tries to have desires can comprehend it.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune has not felt quite this irritated in some time.  She is a good Asmodean - her compact requires it of her, yes, but that's not why she does it - and so she has her pride.  In a room near to this one, silently and unremarkedly, precious things burn; when you're at the eighth circle of sorcery you can do little things like that without bothering about the spells.

Well.  It's clear enough that Sevar thinks that Keltham has already won this contest, and with it her heart; so the question then becomes, does Abrogail Thrune choose to permit Sevar to go on believing that, and to convince Keltham of it too.

"Being willing to go to lengths great enough to take possession of her, is the key to Carissa's sexuality indeed," Isidre says.  No hint of coldness shows in her; Abrogail's Splendour is about her and she is no undisciplined child like these two.  "Or as close to it as can be understood for now, by a person who still runs into a wall of Good every time he tries to have desires about matters like that.  I think I have some idea of what you're planning now; I'd still want to hear it spelled out."

Keltham: "That Carissa's sexuality depends on the truth of two propositions that can't both simultaneously be true is, itself, very much a 'trope', and one of the deepest and most powerful ones.  Even more than the Queen of Cheliax being a complication, even more than her coming into conflict with me, the deepest 'trope' here has to be the question-of-fact, what is really true.  Everything else fell into place once I realized that."

"My proposal is as simple as it is unfair to the Queen.  If I meet her and know her and think she's worthy of Carissa at all, I offer to negotiate the rental agreement for Carissa.  In front of her advisors.  And with Carissa there to see it, because she's the one who has to know this truth and witness it.  I say plainly" (a dath ilani does not bother to add 'and truthfully' if they're bothering to let words leave their mouth at all) "that I'm worried about a more experienced sadist stealing Carissa from me, and if the Queen of Cheliax does that successfully, I will walk out on Cheliax and go make a revolution somewhere else.  I say that I want guarantees about my right, signed by the government of Cheliax and by the Queen and by the Church of Asmodeus in whatever capacity Asmodeus recognizes such things, to take Carissa with me if that happens, potentially including against her own will, if I so choose, to somewhere that puts enough value on a dath ilani to also recognize my possession of her."

"Having that right doesn't mean I'd actually exercise it, obviously, but nobody needs to say that in front of the Queen; and while Carissa might know what I wouldn't really do, I think she'll also understand the romantic gesture in the spirit in which it was intended."

"If everybody's being sane, the Queen and her advisors are like, sure, sounds weirdly extreme but he's obviously doing it to impress his girlfriend, they sign on like the totally sane grownups they are.  The limits on the Queen's sadism are in a sealed section of the compact that I trust you to write.  The conflict and the 'trope' have been defused, easily enough to call into severe question whether there was ever really any 'trope' at work in the first place."

"If the Queen is like, why, no, how could I possibly do that, I have strange reasons I cannot do that, then we know she's a giant 'trope' avatar and there's a foretold path of conflict and complication whose core question-of-truth is who Carissa Sevar really belongs to - both de facto and in terms of her core sexuality, because those two are the same thing."

"In which case, obviously, I stop negotiating that rental agreement, get back to my new research installation, and both we and the Queen's advisers do everything we can to keep the Queen and Carissa apart for as long as possible.  We do everything we can to, like, totally slow down all of that from actually happening, if that is at all possible, and try to delay everything into the future as far as possible, because, like, I already have a job."

"Eventually either the Queen loses power, or the two of us reconcile and kiss, or, if I screw up along the way, the Queen wins and Cheliax stays poor for longer.  Or Golarion ends up falling to the Worldwound because there wasn't really anywhere else that could offer the resources that Cheliax and Asmodeus could.  I suppose there's other possibilities within the 'tropes' that would then almost have to be governing, but I'd have to think hard about what they were; they'd be less probable."

Carissa Sevar: It seems possible that Carissa having feelings for Keltham is actually relevant as a qualification to pull this off. Because Carissa, unlike literally every other person in this operation, doesn't underestimate him. 

She doesn't know which specific thoughts in the last little bit have merited punishment but she has this feeling it's not going to be half an hour, one way or another.

Doesn't matter. Hell is forever and she can endure that, too.

Abrogail Thrune II: All right.  Abrogail thinks she is going to have to proceed under the assumption that the 'tropes' are real, and govern here.

Her reasoning is not complicated; why, Sevar herself might see it if Sevar had the requisite +6 headband of all mental attributes.

Keltham thinks he's describing a future event that he has to arrange in accordance with 'tropes'.  That event has already happened, without Keltham knowing it.  He has been fighting the true Queen this entire time, in front of Carissa, and, apparently to Carissa for now, won.

In dath ilan's rhythm of prediction, success, credibility, that is a victory he has won.

Abrogail has worked out by now a wordless sort of apprehension as to what sort of things 'tropes' are, namely, things out of stories, except that they're not the 'tropes' of Cheliax or Golarion, they're the 'tropes' of dath ilan.  But if dath ilan has, per transcript, girls who dream of becoming Dark Unilateral Rulers, then dath ilan surely also has a 'trope' for appearing to have won when you haven't, because the person you're fighting is smarter than you and you never knew how many of your plans were known to her from the beginning.

More the fool Keltham, if that thought hasn't occurred to him; and more the fool Carissa, if, knowing the true place of the Queen of Cheliax in all of this, it hasn't occurred to her to wonder the same.

...or she could just not decide to do any of that, and then her life wouldn't be a 'trope'.

Possibly then there wouldn't be any 'tropes' around at all, she's not sure how that works.

Ice and fire alternate, in an unoccupied room nearby.  Cycling between the two prevents the floors and walls from melting; it's not Abrogail's first time venting emotion where her adversaries will not see that and be warned.

Abrogail Thrune II: In the end, the logic behind Abrogail's last decision here is simple.

She doesn't actually want to spend the rest of her life like this.

She'd rather not be a 'trope'.

In fact, she now deeply desires that there be no 'tropes' anywhere near Cheliax.  Ever.

And while she's not quite sure that this is how any of this works, she's going to do her part there.

"Well, then," Isidre says, and sighs.  "I suppose you should go back and talk to Carissa and determine how she feels about being rented to the Queen, and I should see if you can meet the Queen at least briefly.  And then maybe move directly to the confrontation with her and her advisors in sight of Carissa, then or very soon after.  If everyone is sane, which I do expect them to be, Keltham, it should actually get done quite quickly - or I certainly hope so, because these are all very busy people.  But time today is no more time than time tomorrow, and if possible we may as well get this done while we can do it without burning Teleports."

Keltham: "You know, now that I'm thinking about actually doing this, I'm worried I may be about to make my life way more complicated than it actually needed to be."

Abrogail Thrune II: Asmodeus Himself is literally the only being who could possibly have ordained that Keltham not be a pile of ash in this moment.

"Keltham, I'm sorry, but my time really is up now," Isidre says.  "I do think I'd recommend going ahead with this course of action, over leaving things as they are; because I do still believe, in the end, that sanity will triumph.  I have no time to do more planning than this, with you, not now, I fear.  Talk to Carissa and let me know whether to move forward on meeting, and then confronting, the Queen."

Keltham: "All right.  Sorry for having taken this much of your time; I'll let you know my decision."

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre nods to him, still very graciously, and rises to go.

Can she get away with having Lrilatha and Gorthoklek done by illusion?  No, damn her to Abaddon, because Keltham knows that Lrilatha is one of her advisors, and may try to talk to Lrilatha, and without the actual Lrilatha no illusionist is going to successfully fake whatever Law Keltham finds recognizable in Lawful Evil outsiders.  Lrilatha is absofuckinglutely going to tell Rugatonn and Gorthoklek to actually show up for this.

This isn't going to be fun.  At least, not for her.

...and one way or another, in due time, she will have her fun.

Just as soon as she can figure out how to do it without that being a 'trope'.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is waiting in the next room. Kneeling. It seems wisest. She wonders if she is supposed to declare herself Security-screened and go back to Keltham or do her punishment first. She has no other opinions at all. If you were only reading her thoughts now it wouldn't be obvious she's previously had any other opinions.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Enough of this self-willed stupidity," Abrogail says, not bothering to leash her temper from her words backed by full Splendour.  "You are performing important work of Asmodeus that I, personally, delegated to you.  Thoughts are required of you to accomplish your function, slave of Asmodeus.  You will now start having thoughts or I will hurt you until you do."

Carissa Sevar: - fine. 

"You'll hurt me either way."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I'll hurt you more if you don't obey.  That's always been the way of Hell."

"Do you know who else in Cheliax, besides Keltham, does not think only what he thinks other people around him want him to think?  Me.  You want your Lawful Evil dath ilanism?  That much of it stands before you."

"Enough of your lies to yourself, to your thoughts, you have taken things far past the point where even you can pretend to yourself that nothing is wrong, and I will not permit you to pretend to yourself to be nothing."

"Do you love Keltham."

Carissa Sevar: " - what?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "I was reading your mind, what little of it you permitted to exist.  He won the contest for you against the Queen of Cheliax, he earned himself the key to your soul, I saw your triumph when he did.  You will not be made a statue for your answer one way or another, but the Crown now orders you to answer and in truth.  What are you to Keltham, now?  Are you his mistress?  His slave?  Has he stepped before Asmodeus in your heart and become your god?"

Carissa Sevar: " - no," she says, because that much at least is clear, "uh. To the last one. He doesn't have my soul, he doesn't have - real power over me that isn't the game we all play with this first life. Asmodeus owns me, Asmodeus has always owned me, Keltham would have to rule Hell to be my god, or take me somewhere else and you know perfectly well I don't belong somewhere else, and they wouldn't let me in."

Abrogail Thrune II: Truth, if Sevar's thoughts to herself are not complete lies.  "You love Keltham, and if you don't like it put that way, feel free to say what he is to you instead.  Will you, then, obediently continue lying to him, working against his best interests, and tempting him from Axis into Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, because human emotions are a terrible guide to decisionmaking and being unfortunate enough to occasionally suffer them does not make me beholden to them."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail laughs then, cold and clear and dark like midnight high upon some mountaintop.  "Fair enough, little Lawful Evil dath ilani.  I suppose it's what I told you to become.  Love him, use your love to seduce him, choose without emotion to betray, is that the path you would now walk?"

Carissa Sevar: "I've gotten somewhat wary of predicting how this is going to go. But for as long as no one can figure out how to safely lie to him, we're going to have to give him people who almost aren't lying. And then, obviously, make sure they don't have a shadow of an opening to actually choose him; but I don't. You would hunt me down if we fled to Lastwall; you would hunt me down if we fled to Sothis; you would hunt me down if we fled to Heaven, and, again, I do actually hate them and they wouldn't let me in."

Abrogail Thrune II: Trustworthy for now, perhaps, as long as she doesn't begin to believe that Keltham - her perfect, shining Keltham, who won her from the Queen of Cheliax - might also come to have the power to stay Hell and to defeat Asmodeus Himself.  Abrogail forbears to point this out; it will become a note in Sevar's file.

"I assign you no further tortures, Sevar.  Do not mistake this for mercy, but only me taking care not to tread on my senior partner's games.  Rugatonn it will be who decides whether all this heresy you are thinking and the emotions in your heart constitute a matter that we would, not proactively at all, correct with pain and torment in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law."

"Let us pray that Asmodeus did foresee that I would visit your bedroom, that everything now within your heart is only another piece of His own grand design, that we all remain on a pathway He has laid out for us, because Hell help us all if we have left it."

"Go then to your lover, foolish and pathetic child, and learn from him to become something greater than this."

"Oh, and good luck convincing him to rent you out.  I honestly had no idea at the time why that was something you wanted in the first place, and in retrospect I wonder if I should have had somebody ask you that instead of jumping on the opportunity."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune claps her hands and disappears, which is to say that some distance away, Abrogail Thrune dispels her illusion.  She does not actually have the time to stand around there and talk to Carissa Sevar.

Carissa Sevar: Because it has as predicted been incredibly effective at getting Keltham to be possessive, and to think of himself as in a contest for ownership of his girlfriend, and to get him to feel jealous and insecure about the idea that someone else might own her more truly or hurt her more meaningfully, and to generally change modes to one where he's trying to prove himself within the Chelish system. 

She doesn't argue. 

She returns to Keltham's suite.

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Is your proposal here that we read in a couple hundred people on everything we know about the secret that may have started the godwar.... so that the betting markets resolve."

"Yes," the Prince Merenre says. "Precisely because something about the situation may have started a godwar. It's important, so we need to be competent to reason about it, so the betting markets need to be something more than a fancy layer of fuzziness on top of all my personal guesses."

             "I trust precisely thirty people with this," says the pharaoh of Osirion. "And all of them know better than to bet against you, ever, about anything where they don't have inside information."

"In principle we can fix that with more lopsided payoffs," says Merenre. "They can't be infinitely confident in my being better than them."

            "I predict their bets-against-you will cluster around yours, if they're allowed to know yours, and maybe even if they aren't. What I want here is people who'll think of something you haven't. And less of a spread - because come on,  this is ridiculous -"

"Where are the markets at right now?" a serious, stiff-robed priest asks.

             "Our eighty percent confidence interval spans 'totally useless except to Abadar and three mathematicians' to 'the destruction of the multiverse'".

"- how are they even resolving that -"

            "Oh, the usual. That's not the point, the point is, I can't govern like this."

"What if we get predictors from Axis," says the King-Consort. "They've got better participation than us, there's a convenient list of exactly who to ask-"

            "Can't afford them."

"If this project is as important as the 50th percentile projection, we can give them the Sphinx."

              "- there's a policy proposal, I guess, raffle off every archeological relic in the country, except our God in his wisdom has copies of all of them already -"

"Can you ask Him to pay to subsidize the prediction markets in Aktun?" says Merenre tiredly. This is technically a breach of protocol - they're not supposed to acknowledge, even in private, that the person of the pharaoh is not the person of Abadar Himself - but it's been a long two days since they first learned from Abadar of a complicated situation.                      "We subsidize all the prediction markets in Aktun," says the pharaoh, who is not actually the person of Abadar Himself but is closer than most mortals come, and doesn't use the 'we' just as an affectation. "There's still the security question." There are reasons that sometimes when there are ongoing wars you don't just subsidize a bunch of public markets.

Fe-Anar, the Pharaoh's father, mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which no one who doesn't talk to proteans at least weekly, or have permanent Tongues, could hope to understand; it translates approximately to 'lol fuck the security question'. 

             The pharaoh has permanent Tongues, and also did not need it to know what his father was going to say there. "One thing We would pay a lot to resolve is 'odds that Osirion and Cheliax end up at war over this," he says sharply, "and I expect Hell would also observe that with fascination. And while We don't find the arguments for squishing anomalies before they change Golarion persuasive, obviously, and are appalled that that's been policy for so many millenia, obviously, We're trading with a lot of entities that do find those concerns persuasive. But really We'd make it all public in Axis, subject to some standard nondisclosure agreements, if it weren't obviously an avenue for interference by Hell."

"They've got to have their own predictions."

             "Only relevant market public in Hell is the one for the souls of some various adjacent parties, which, uh, keeps getting more expensive, I don't know how to interpret that exactly -"

Fe-Anar mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which translates best to 'fuck Hell'. 

             "Amen," says everyone else, fervently; they keep on top of how the Maelstrom says that one. 

"Is there not," says Merenre, "some kind of ordinary Aktun market participation contract understood to be robust against Hell - really I'm astonished that all Aktun market participation contracts aren't understood to be robust against Hell -"

             "They're robust in the sense that if they're fucking around, We'll take their money, in the long run."

"And that long run is measured in - transaction volume? What goes wrong if we just subsidize it."

                "That long run is measured in transaction volume and also in time for arbitration courts to make them eat penalty clauses that're still financial in nature -"

"So pay the courts to work inside a time-dilated demiplane. With all earned respect,  if this has a one in ten chance of being as important as it looks, you aren't spending enough money on it!"

               "I literally cannot afford to spend money on ten things like this, so I need some way to figure out which one is going to get me more than a math textbook!"

"The arbitration courts do already run at whatever speed is necessary for them to resolve in the contractually obligatory time. That's a month sidereal, for current events prediction markets," observes a sparkling ball of gears floating above one of the conference-table seats. 

"Do they promise they won't speed up and start settling everything overnight?"

"They do not," says the sparkling ball of gears, with what might be faint amusement. 

"First prediction market," says the King-Consort. "Pay a hundred top performers in Axis with a share of future returns from the work of Abadar's new cleric, to get up to speed and then predict what'll go wrong if we make the betting open in Axis and try to beat Hell at what is, in the end, our game, more than theirs."

"The future returns from the project aren't ours."

"The cleric's ours -"

         "The cleric's - so it's not clear he is, is the thing, Abadar's tried to show me what He's looking at but I don't understand it, and I certainly don't know that he considers himself to have entered into a trade relationship with us where we can conditionally commit his resources according to our model of what he'll be willing to pay for later -"

"A share of future returns from the project conditional on the target agreeing that this market served his interests -"

"Not to harp on this too much, but, all of what was just proposed plus 'inside time-dilation', we're already later to this than I'd like because of the Zon-Kuthon war -"

               "Because of the Zon-Kuthon war We have fewer resources to run bits of Aktun in time-dilation than We'd like."

"Can you put numbers, when you say things like that, like, precisely how much time-dilation can we have at what multiplier on its usual cost."

               "I really can't."

"I mean, give me an order of magnitude -"

                "If Abadar were able to put orders of magnitude in His visions then We would have so many fewer problems!"

"Proposal: a communication to the target in Cheliax to the effect 'subsidizing prediction market in Aktun, evaluate policy questions relevant to you with promised share project returns, reply yes no"

"Cheliax is we believe committed to not murdering him if in their evaluation he starts to look dangerous to their interests but they're neither above nor prohibited from neglecting to prevent his capture by Nidal. Which isn't to say not to contact him, it might be worth it, it's just to say, I continue to want some way of evaluating these ideas before we try them other than gut instinct."

"Yeah, all right."

"Market now, contact him in the dead of night if the market thinks it's a good idea, ready to grab him if he decides to leave Cheliax -"

                   "Have you learned anything from the last two days," says the pharaoh. "We will make absolutely no plans with a twelve-hour time horizon. Who knows which gods will be at war by then."

Cayden Cailean: Cayden Cailean has taken more of Himself out of Elysium than is wise.  He has gathered more of His attention (which is His self) into one place than is wise.  It is not easy for a god to truly spy on the mortal realm and it comes with a risk.

The more powerful Lawful Evil gods who would leap on Him and tear Him asunder if they saw Him so vulnerable, Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon, are respectively exhausted and sealed/wounded/maybe-dying.  There would be very little appetite for another godwar while the world is just recovering from a previous one that ended only hours ago; and Cayden Cailean would be more defended than Zon-Kuthon.  Even so it is not the sort of behavior pattern You adopt if You want to live forever, or even for another thousand years, statistically speaking.

But with Nethys also exhausted, now, they have few other options for knowing what they must know.

Cayden Cailean: The meeting He is spying upon concludes, and Cayden Cailean sends a message.

Meeting in Osirion went mostly as Nethys's Scenario 2, but there were substantial divergences.  Spoke of Keltham as Abadar's cleric rather than the Otherworlder, prediction markets unsure of Keltham's impact rather than solidly on technological revolution of Golarion, substantial credence to the multiverse ending up destroyed.

Milani: Disquieting.  Still, I think we have little choice but to proceed as if we have not yet wandered off Nethys's road.  I hope He returns to us before we leave it fully.

Cayden Cailean: They're so eager to work with Keltham.  So ready for everything Keltham could offer them.  They want so much to be his Civilization, wanted it long before Keltham came here, and all they lack, they believe, are the things that Aktun is forbidden to tell them, that Keltham knows.

What happens when Keltham reaches Osirion is going to break their heart.

Milani: Assuming we are still sufficiently on Nethys's pathways that Keltham enters Osirion at all.  The divergences have already begun.

What of it?

Cayden Cailean: I am tempted to meddle.  After so much, much time of having to conserve our strength and choose our opportunities, running around doing things is quite addictive.  I observe the mortals so closely and I find Myself thinking, 'Is there some way I could meddle and make it go less sadly for these few mortals personally?  I like them.'

Milani: Not to go all Lawful Good on you, Cayden, but to agonize over the hurt feelings of a handful of souls you've spied upon, in the light of other stakes and other costs, seems too Chaotic Good even for Me.

But go ahead and meddle, if you can find any way to do it that promotes the interests of Pharasma and Asmodeus relative to what would've happened otherwise.  And our own interests, of course.  And keeps to Nethys's road while it lasts.  And doesn't give away exactly what's playing out to opposed gods like Abadar.

Cayden Cailean: I keep thinking to myself that I need another drink, and yet, I cannot imagine how much mead would be enough to deal with this crap.

Iarwain: Before Carissa gets back to Keltham's current suite, she's intercepted by a Security who informs her that Maillol is, if not exactly fully functional, functional enough to receive her handoff.  Sevar keeps going out of contact and that's not fun for Project Lawful.

Carissa Sevar: Understood. (They should really be training a Carissa impersonator to substitute for her but also it's very much to her advantage that she thinks they don't have anyone.)

...that means she should also probably take her punishment before she goes back to Keltham, and she's currently in the wrong mental state for it, namely euphoric and full of giddy terror, but she's not actually the out-of-control child Abrogail seems to think, she can talk herself around. She trots over to the temple and contemplates dath ilani Lawful Evil, which they do tell stories about apparently, Evil Keepers who wield the Law for their own benefit. She wants to be that. Cheliax doesn't understand dath ilan but it does understand how to harden Evil in someone's heart, how to turn human weaknesses in so they feed Evil impulses not Good ones. She needs that. And she deserves punishment, because she erred, and doesn't want to blunder through the world unpunished until she faces the ultimate punishment for an error too big to overlook. Asmodeus said to punish her as his Law requires, because otherwise she'll err too far before reality shows up to correct her. 

Keltham has her childish, stupid heart, because he's rich and powerful and willing to walk away from Cheliax over her and it's very cute, but Cheliax owns her body and soul, and this is, in the evaluation of a system designed for punishing weakness and building Evil in human hearts, what she needs. 

There, that's better. She will just have to not let all that Asmodean conviction be shaken by the sight of Maillol. 

Ferrer Maillol: If you weren't Chelish you wouldn't be able to tell that Maillol is shaken, hurting, doesn't have it fully together, and keeps trying to figure out if there's some way he can be not on this project.  Having been the recipient of two visions from Asmodeus makes it effectively impossible; he may know, now, things that he can't put into words.

Maillol wants to be not on Project Lawful when it hits day 4.  Day 3 was, in fact, past his limit.

The sight of Sevar, looking not particularly emotional, not that he'd be able to tell if she has her own act together, does not please him.  Even knowing how much Sevar, who helped make this bed, is probably also going to have to lie in it, with the Queen, for longer, there is still a flash of hatred in him, for her having not saved him from what was almost entirely his own mistake.

(Maillol has not been informed of what actually happened there, and very very few people in Abrogail Thrune's dominion ever will be.  Spreading such gossip about Her Infernal Majestrix, if you are a Security reading Sevar's thoughts, say, is the kind of conduct that gets you turned into a statue, or sent to whatever other fate is your worst realizable fear.)

He accepts the project handoff, questions Sevar about a few of the Keltham budget items she approved, thinking and talking mostly on reflex.

Carissa Sevar: What does he think of the possibility of demonstrating Suggestion to Keltham with his advance consent, probably having Lrilatha do it because he finds it credible that she obeys Asmodeus directly, and then swearing to him it hasn't been done otherwise, in order to get him to agree an adversarial Cheliax would be running rings around him with mind control.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol has to think hard about this, and strain bruised portions of his mind.  What was Asmodeus's will?  He said not to enchant Keltham.  Did He really convey exactly that, when He spoke not at all in words?  It's hard to blank out all of your own guesses about what Asmodeus could be planning, what Asmodeus could have intended, to ask what Asmodeus meant, when what you need is to hear what Asmodeus told you to do, and the concepts and bounds set around it were neither your own nor mortal at all.

"I'll authorize it," he says.  "Make sure you tell Keltham exactly what you're going to do, get his permission for exactly that, do exactly that, no tricks, no games, no cleverness, no taking advantages, nothing else you're trying to accomplish on the side, as if Keltham could read your own thoughts down to the depth of your soul, and don't assume that Contessa Lrilatha already knows that, tell it to her anyways."  Maillol is writing down those instructions, even as he speaks, they cannot be entrusted to memory.

Carissa Sevar: "I understand. Thank you."

Right. That's that over with, then. 

She notices herself trying to think of something else to say, and makes herself turn and walk away towards the torture chamber.

Children tend superstitious - it's worse if you cry, it's worse if you don't, it's worse if you seem scared. Carissa's not a child. She doesn't know the heart of whoever's on staff, she doesn't know what they enjoy seeing, it probably doesn't matter very much. The benefits don't derive from the punishment being executed exactly correctly; anything that requires that much finesse can only happen in Hell. There is to a first approximation nothing at all she can do that will matter. 

Torture details spoilered.

It's the second most physically painful experience of her life, and opening Abrogail's gift bag earlier helps a lot to appreciate how much it could be worse.  Unlike Abrogail's bag, which is meant to amuse Abrogail to think of it, disciplinary torture is meant to educate and improve the soul and not just be pleasing to Asmodeus.

They show you what's coming, to let you contemplate your error.  They apply it only somewhat painfully at first, so you can still think coherently about your mistake, and fear how much worse it's going to get, and regret, and then they make it worse and worse to drive the behavior firmly out of you, once you've had that chance to fix in your mind what you did wrong and how much you regret it.

If you want your pain to mean something, if you want to relate productively to your own torture and suffering, Asmodeus's torturers are doing all the right things to make sure you can.  At least if you've been sent in for corrective torture, and not this-is-the-fate-you-should-have-feared-and-now-you-have-earned-it torture.

The Queen's order calls for the corrective sort of torture.  It's a good thing that happened before Abrogail became less optimistic about whether Sevar could be salvaged, or more personally annoyed with her.

Carissa Sevar: It lasts a lot longer. At least Carissa thinks so, she never actually asked how long the bag lasted. This had a duration written neatly on the scroll she turned in. And she's pretty sure it's longer, because her voice is much, much hoarser, and her face much stickier with snot and tears, and she gets tired, in a way she doesn't think she has before, random uninjured muscles screaming about having been tense for so long.

It'll be worse in Hell. 

She understands her mistakes better. She won't make them again. There isn't another way to get this result; dath ilan tries to do everything with rewards, but that just builds stunted little Good people who'd go to Abaddon rather than not get their fair share of a deal. 

Carissa would never, ever go to Abaddon. If you told her this was all that was left to her forever, more of this, she wouldn't go to Abaddon. She is strong where the people of dath ilan are weak; she can live in worlds they can't. 

She hopes someone is reading her mind because she requests healing adequate to conceal signs of injury from Keltham but can't seem to make her mouth move right now.

Iarwain: Sevar's still in the middle of important work and the palace torture room has a fairly serious priest on staff, even with the war; and also with the war on, fewer people are being tortured in the palace than usual.

Cure Moderate Wounds.  Restoration.  Have a nice day.

Carissa Sevar: Right. Keltham. Her Keltham-feelings have been all burned out, which is good, she didn't even remember to focus on that. Maybe love is just the kind of emotion that automatically dies faced with anything real.

She washes her face and fixes her hair and goes back to Keltham.

Keltham: Keltham has no idea that Carissa was in a much better mood half an hour earlier.

He asks how her Security screening went.  That took a while.

Carissa Sevar: "It did, they were way more thorough than usual, spent a bunch of time on asking me trick questions under a Truth Spell which I must say is kind of unpleasant, and they made me do everything with the headband off and with it on. - I'm not actually complaining, it feels like all the security Cheliax knows how to throw at a thing like this just barely might be adequate for the actual stakes. 

I did get the chance to ask about whether the absolutely-no-messing-with-Keltham-no-matter-how-justified-it-looks order would permit consensually demonstrating to you mind-control spells, and the person who was the direct recipient of Asmodeus's vision thought yes with enough precautions and advance communication, so if that's something you want to see demonstrated, seems to be allowed."

Keltham: "Seems a little scary, the mind-control experiment I mean, but you gotta be able to do slightly scary things that seem clearly necessary, and that one does.  Let's move forwards on it... no, first I want your own direct opinion on whether they're going to be able to find someone to run the experiment who is really actually extremely that trustworthy."

Carissa Sevar: "One of the precautions was it'd be Contessa Lrilatha. I think she's that trustworthy anyway but with a direct order from Asmodeus involved there's no question."

Keltham: "That'd do it."  Keltham is actually slightly impressed - that was better than he'd visualized being possible to get, himself.

Keltham has met with Isidre again!  Many things were discussed of which he can only tell Carissa some right away (so as not to give her impression that the parts he's talking about were all that happened).  Isidre does think it's safe to ask Carissa some direct questions of the 'what happens if I do this?' type.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa'd be happy to answer those.

Keltham: Okay!  Uh, for a start, Keltham's going to do the thing where some questions matter more than others but he's going to mix them up to not make it too blatant what sort of answers he's looking for.  He doesn't know if they have the sort of relationship where Keltham can do that without explicitly announcing it, which is better, obviously, in terms of not biasing the subject.  Do they have the sort of relationship where Keltham can do that sort of thing, and it's okay so long as Carissa gets told about the shenanigans within a reasonably short time afterwards?

Carissa Sevar: (He's so - not cute. Contemptible, not cute.)

"Yes, you can do that. I don't even particularly feel wronged if you try to conceal which questions you care about the most and then don't tell me afterwards you were doing that, in Cheliax sometimes people are just doing that and it's considered fair enough."

Keltham: "I mean, in dath ilan, sometimes they don't tell you for years what the experiment was about, but there's explicit understandings there that I didn't want to assume would automatically carry over to Golarion and you."

"Also, I just realized that I went and asked 'is it okay if...' instead of ordering you to tell me the consequences of something, sorry, brain tired from Isidre discussion, I think for tonight I may ask... I think for tonight I'm ordering you to take the questions I ask in dath ilani speech patterns and reinterpret them to be about me ordering you to tell me things, I don't intend on doing that all the time but that was a tiring conversation and it's been a day."

Hypothetical: what happens if Keltham managed to hurt Carissa enough that she yelled 'Stop!' without realizing what she was doing, and then Keltham reacted to that by immediately removing her from her chains even if Carissa apologized and said to continue.  Obviously that's not going to break Carissa or anything, Keltham wants to know the hypothetical effects on their relationship, is Carissa turned off, confused, is it generally good or bad for them.

Carissa Sevar: " - not confused, that's the thing I predict you'd do. I think mostly I'd feel...embarrassed...and like it broke something, that I did that, and if we don't address it at all then it'll be a hole I need to steer around in the future?"

True answers are, perhaps predictably, harder to produce when you've burned all your feelings out. She feels like she's producing them by imagining some other Carissa.

Keltham: Hypothetical:  Keltham starts requesting Detect Desires and truthspells from his god and using those to find out what Carissa wants and treating a thus-extracted admission of wanting something as a reason to believe that it's fine for him to do whatever it is to her.

Carissa Sevar: - wow. Uh. The second part is definitely excellent, the first part is a little scary, but not in a way where she'd say no even if this were a saying-no sort of relationship. 

Keltham: ...yeah, that's not really the answer you'd expect from a dath ilani woman, possibly even one single dath ilani woman alive; but it has already dawned on Keltham that he's not in Default anymore.

Hypothetical: effects on relationship if Keltham had gone ahead and done that without asking Carissa about it at all.

Carissa Sevar: "You'd....get a different way of me relating to you, I think? Where I try to do less steering, because you're doing more of it, and try to give you more of myself to work with..."

Keltham: He needs to dare anything, ever, to ever test the things that are being claimed to him by Carissa's nine-year-old-level self-reporting, if he's going to make this relationship work at all.

Keltham, without any other warning, taps Carissa with one of his Truthspells.  "Tell me the effect of what I just did to you on our relationship."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not need that dismissed yet, she thinks loudly. The entire point of not lying to Keltham is to be able to do this.

”I think I’m feeling things a little less intensely now than I usually would because I’m still a bit fried from the last couple hours,” she says. “Uh, obeying Security when they’re being very intense is sort of the same reservoir of something except without the payoff. With that said - yeah, I feel delighted that you did that, that you knew you could do that, and slightly stressed about the truth spell - it’s an enchantment, it feels like one, I know it’s not a very invasive enchantment -“

The illusion on her forehead has not flickered at all.

Keltham: Keltham essays a Detect Magic, for lack of a Greater Detect Magic; the spell on Carissa looks to him like the one he cast.

...um.

Should he just - keep doing this.  It seems like cheating.  It seems a lot like cheating.  It seems like the sort of cheating that means nobody ever wants to cofound a startup with you.  Carissa just said she was delighted under the truthspell that he did it.  You could establish an awful lot of trust that way, modulo the chance that after they saw his first truthspell they were very thoroughly prepared, or maybe prepared before the first truthspell, etcetera, he didn't request Invisibility Purge today.

The common sense of dath ilan says to, like, think dangerous things through before you do dangerous things, not try to improvise them as you go.  Especially when you have two more Truthspells, to use later if needed - shit he should've cast Augury before he tried that, oh well, he'll get used to having magic eventually.

Is there anything he needs to ask right now...

"I'm not going to be upset if the spell fails here, or if you can't give the answer you wished you could," Keltham says.  "Are your self-reports to me, about what you're pretty sure won't hurt you, likely to be accurate?  Not honest, accurate."

Carissa Sevar: "I really think so! Once we start doing things I haven't done before I will be less sure but then I'll tell you I'm less sure! I know I'm not dath ilani but you can't actually be an arms and armor enchanter while kidding yourself about whether things are going to work out the way you want them to."

Keltham: Keltham exhales, feeling a bit shaky himself.  She could just be consistently mistaken on all levels of reflection, of course, but it's something; you'd expect somebody to notice if they were routinely wrong about that sort of thing.  He feels like he just - girlfriend gets thoughts access.  "I feel like I just stepped off a very narrow ledge I was standing on, but there happened to be something underneath my foot to support it."

"You can step outside and ask Security to dispel that, if you can't dispel it yourself, or resist it, or whatever.  I have two more truthspells, should probably keep one in reserve, but you can request the other one later if you think of something you want to say and have me trust."  Of course then she gets more time to prepare a deception but he could also just tap her two days later and ask if there was a deception then.  Oh, he should check that now.  "First, though, answer as soon as this question finishes, do you have any knowledge about the results of my last truthspell having been faked?"

Carissa Sevar: She doesn't know she doesn't know that's always the safe thing to lean on with truth spells not knowing what instance he's referring to not knowing what anyone did -  "No?" She's totally uncertain whether that'd have gotten through or not, and if not whether Security managed to cancel it and do an illusion in time, but she'll proceed as if one of those things happened. They should've been ready with the illusion at least from 'answer as soon as this question finishes'. "I don't actually know when the last time you used a truthspell was," she continues. "Did you use one with Isidre, that might have been faked, she's powerful enough to cast that anti-Enchantment spell that your god gave you for the Kuthites and I bet she knows it. Uh, the last truth spell I remember you using was on Tonia the first day and I have no knowledge of that being faked." A definite lie, but if Security couldn't get a replacement in place by then they deserve -

(do they?)

- well regardless they will suffer much worse than what Carissa just did and she won't be sorry.

Keltham: ...okay, that could have been an instance of her quickly telling herself that she didn't know what he really meant by that, and delaying for somebody else to cast dispel, illusion, etc.  If so they're presumably prepared for this, but Keltham casts Detect Magic anyways.

lintamande: Looks as he'd expect. 

Carissa Sevar: "Are you done?" A good very obedient Carissa without an edge in her voice. "I can dispel it once you're done, but you can keep going, if it's helping. Or if it's not but you want to."

Keltham: "I'm done.  You can dispel it yourself or get it dispelled, whatever's more convenient."

He did notice a possibility, but there's nothing obvious to do with the paranoia; most possible paranoia is not valuable on the margins.  He'll keep his eyes open to see if there's a pattern.

Also, if that thought he had was true, that implies the honesty of Carissa's earlier statements about her probably-accurate self-reports to him and that she was delighted to see him suddenly use truthspell on her, neither of which match up all that well to it's all a LARP, everything around you is a LARP.

Carissa Sevar: She dispels it. "Are you okay?"

Keltham: "Think so.  Just a little sad, not about your answers or anything, just that I can't give you full immediate girlfriend access to everything I thought about them."  He's probably not supposed to say the thing that he just thought, in case it was true after all.  "Are you okay?"

Carissa Sevar: "I am okay but my day has featured a lot more tricky Truth Spelling than my days usually do and I am slightly less okay than I normally will be if you do that."

Keltham: He should've seen that coming... stupid.  Girlfriend, right.  "Feel stupid, not because it wasn't worth it, but because I should've seen that part coming.  But it was worth it, or at least I'd evaluate so."

"Is this a hugging situation or a 'hugs are not a solution to the problem I have' situation?"

Carissa Sevar: "Hugs're good. Seems worth it - seems important for you to feel like you can trust us - that's why I asked about the Contessa Lrilatha thing even though I saw her briefly in the hallways and apparently Cheliax being at war makes her ten times more terrifying."

Keltham: Hugs!  "It's still so weird to think that your military people and your Governance people are the same people, like, failure-of-professional-specialization much?"

"I... wish I didn't have to say this, but I have more tricky sexuality self-report questions to ask you, even though it sounds like this is not at all a great time for that.  There's a time-sensitive question I'm considering, of the type 'window of opportunity to do a nice thing' rather than disaster-prevention type.  Not so time sensitive we couldn't cuddle for a few minutes before resuming."

Carissa Sevar: "Luckily Security didn't ask me anything at all about my sexuality so I'm not very tired of talking about that. - actually correcting that, they asked if you'd inflicted any injuries requiring healing and they asked if you'd asked me to conceal anything from them under questioning. But mostly they did not ask about my sexuality and I'm not in fact tired of talking about it."