Aspexia Rugatonn: That was the correct answer.  Well, a correct answer.  Including that suppressed horrified expression, if Pineda looked happy this wouldn't be a good idea at all.

"Try keeping the bargain this time so we can observe what happens."

"Everyone I trust to correctly handle god-agreements with Chaotic forces is outside the Palace, mostly at the front of the war."

"If you listen humbly to your elders and ignore anything they suggest about violating implied god-agreements, I believe you can handle this yourself.  If at some point it looks like I'm wrong and you start expecting it to not go well, I trust you to walk away from it without aggrieving your curse."

"My secretary will supply you with that authorization.  Do not explain why you have it or where the real constraints are coming from."

"Any else top urgent?"

Pilar : "No."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Rugatonn out."

Pilar : "I hate my life."

lintamande: Pilar gets handed her authorization and shown a meeting room to brief Security on whatever she wants them to do.

Pilar : Actually, the first thing Pilar needs to do - after saying that the waiting Skymetal Sword guard can go back, since they want the place to look normal, also her curse doesn't want to inconvenience the guy too much - is to talk to Crown intelligence about what the Crown wants Osirion to end up believing.

Security isn't going to be preventing these people from returning home, Cheliax can't hold them to trade for something else.  Lord Asmodeus's interests can only be served here by giving them some form of false impression or false information, so far as Pilar can tell.

Her curse seems to believe that giving another country wildly misleading military intelligence is a happy fun prank!  Pilar is not actually preventing herself from thinking repeatedly about how incredibly stupid that is.  She has much less practice at controlling her own thoughts than most Chelish people of her status.  Her curse, thankfully, does not seem to care.

lintamande: If they've already heard enough rumors to test whether there's a cake girl, with a reasonably well-designed test, then a) what a fucking disaster, it's presently unclear who's going down for it but someone's going to have to, and b) they're not going to be able to convince them that Project Lawful is nothing big.

Cheliax: This top Chelish expert on Osirion affairs just got emergency-teleported back from the front lines to the palace for this, just ran into the room, and has not actually heard about any of these rumors.

"Can somebody very quickly brief me on who the cake girl is, what Project Lawful is, and why it's a disaster that Osirion has already heard of her?" he says.

Pilar : Everybody is now looking at Pilar because, obviously, who else in this room would a) be in charge and b) know what people here are allowed to know about what Project Lawful is and why it matters.

"Somebody else say which rumors about the cake girl Osirion is likely to have heard," Pilar says.  "I mainly know the true version, I have not been tracking exactly which rumors exist."

Iarwain: Somebody who actually has been in the palace the last few days, internally screaming forever after the manner of competent intelligence officers dealing with other people who are not competent intelligence officers, recites the basics:

If something nice happens to you that people in non-Chelish countries would throw some kind of fucking party for, a girl is already there and already has a cake to offer you.

It's actually pretty good cake.

Nobody knows what happens if you refuse to eat it.

The cake girl doesn't give a shit about Forbiddances or wards on the room.

Nobody has spotted her teleporting.

Oh, and also the cake girl is one of the Project Lawful girls etcetera etcetera so she presumably has arcane vision, casts both cleric and wizard spells, her soul's price in the markets of Dis is astronomically high, may possibly be Abrogail Thrune, got transformed prettier after she joined Project Lawful, etcetera etcetera.

That's the main line of the rumors, there's too many variant versions for anybody to keep track of.

lintamande: "I have heard it rumored," someone else adds, very annoyed about it, "that some connection exists between the capabilities used by Cake Girl and the capabilities that deprived Nidal of diamonds - which Osirion might have noticed by now -"

Cheliax: "Ah," says the guy who just got back from the front lines.  That makes a lot more sense than panicking over Osirion believing a completely deranged -

- actually no it doesn't make sense.  "Without meaning to inquire as to anything I should not know, if that rumor's false, are we unhappy to have Osirion believe it?  Should we just be trying to confirm whatever it is they believe?  How did they end up believing it?"

Pilar : "You," Pilar says to one of the Securities hanging out who's not an intelligence officer, but one cleared to gofer for intelligence work, "find somebody who knows about the diamond thing, which I have not previously been cleared for, and tell them they immediately need to be in this room advising me with respect to what we do or don't want Osirion believing about a connection between the diamond thing and Project Lawful via the cake girl.  Go."

Pilar turns back to the poor confused soul from the front lines.  "I would have thought that we didn't want more attention called to Project Lawful at all but maybe that ship has sailed."

Iarwain: "I have an opinion to offer regarding that," says somebody much older and far more powerful than herself.

Pilar : "Speak, I have authority here for good reasons but know I am sorely lacking experience."

Iarwain: He nods.  "With all due disrespect to a number of people who should already be in Hell, that ship had in fact probably sailed after Nidal attacked your project site, we launched an emergency response with dozens of people with six seconds worth of intelligence clearance, and then a fucking god-war started immediately afterwards."

"That level of international scrutiny on an event with that many witnesses is simply not evadable.  It's not sufficient if the witnesses were all soul-sold and most are now on the Nidal front.  If you visibly block all information and all avenues of investigation about what started a god-war, some adversaries will start burning ninth-circle scrolls in order to kidnap targets or extract information from them."

"The explosion of rumors may be the better case than that scrutiny focusing narrowly on only things that actually happened."

Pilar : "Can anybody tell me if there's a policy about that, who runs that policy, and where they are so they can be inside this room instead."

lintamande: "The general policy for feeding spies misinformation is that it should be hard to immediately verify, leave them confident they weren't noticed, suggest further investigation within Cheliax, and contain things from a shortlist, per country, the Osirion expert will have theirs but it might be a bit out of date -"

Cheliax: "List had nothing about a Project Lawful on it last I heard," the Osirion expert says dryly.  "You want to know what we'd like Osirion to believe about our grain stores, I'm your guy."

Pilar : "Who would know which rumors we're supposed to spread about Project Lawful?"

Iarwain: Your project director would be the obvious candidate...?

Pilar : "I've been informed that individual is completely out of contact.  Can somebody tell me what our goals would obviously have been so that I can do more of whatever it was we were doing."

lintamande: "- keep enough cruft in the water that no one can narrow down on what might be true," a senior person says instantly. "'Project Lawful is a bunch of girls with random novel powers', fine, let's have them be as random and as novel and as uninformative about what actually happened to the Project Lawful girls as possible."

Cheliax: "So we want to show them exactly the cake girl they're expecting, is the idea here," says the guy who just got back from the front lines.

Pilar : "Unfortunately there is a sufficiently large grain of truth in the cake-girl-specific rumors" namely fucking all of it "that this should not be our policy with respect to the cake girl."

Cheliax: What part of that could possibly... the part about Forbiddances, presumably.  "Can we show them just the part that isn't true?"

Pilar : IF THERE WAS ANY SUCH PART, YES, THAT WOULD BE AN OPTION.

"Not from among the items listed.  We would need to generate new ones..."

...though actually, on reflection, the 'cake girl' is a weird intervention by Cayden Cailean which has never made any sense at all; and which seems almost absolutely unrelated to any of the things that are actually important about Project Lawful.

"General policy question," Pilar says.  "How do we feel about focusing attention on points that are true but really really fucking misleading?"

lintamande: "If you know enough about what's up with Project Lawful to evaluate that, yes, that's what some of the best misinformation is."

dath ilan: NNOOOO NOO NO NO STOOOOP THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS THAT IS NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS 

Pilar : "Okay, then I think we run with it looking to them like the cake girl is real, pending somebody with diamonds clearance saying if maybe that isn't such a good idea after all."

Cheliax: ...wait, what, that list was in significant part true but 'really really fucking misleading', WHAT.

lintamande: "No apparent teleporting," contributes someone with diamonds clearance who just walked in a minute ago. "We should just have someone walk the cake in."

Pilar : Pilar is pretty sure she doesn't teleport, she's not sure what she does instead but teleportation doesn't feel right.  It's not weird teleportation, it's not-teleportation-at-all.

But, okay, if they don't want to focus attention on teleportation with respect to the diamonds, cool.

"Cake girl should be able to walk in visibly and without teleporting, at the correct time, if she tries.  Then what?  I'd expect her to be kidnapped and tortured for information, but how do they do that, exactly?  And is there a way to make sure she ends up in Hell shortly after" CORRECTLY THIS TIME "which doesn't make it clear that we knew all along what would happen and were prepared for it?  Assume the cake girl can maintain her will under torture for an extended period and is able to supply deliberate misinformation, but would like to be sure of dying in time to get Raised after dawn tomorrow."

lintamande: "I don't think we should assume that of cake girl unless we've already done it to her. And even if she's ready to be Asmodeus's heroic servant, they'll have mindreading."

"The obvious way to make sure someone who is captured makes it to Hell is to give them a slow-acting, but not noticeable or easily treatable, poison; when noticed they generally won't assume she'd been poisoned before being captured."

Everyone looks to the Osirian expert for how Osirion does interrogations.

Cheliax: "Osirion doesn't consider itself bound not to employ torture, but does little of it by Chelish standards because it's not really very useful for their goals.  The pharaoh is known to have a Sense Motive of basically mindreading, but he doesn't involve himself in much directly.  They also have actual mindreading, obviously."

Pilar : Pilar is confused by the concept of torture not being useful; she has always had the impression that people who aren't her will go to great lengths to avoid it.  She's also confused by the concept that nobody gets suspicious of prisoners who mysteriously die a few hours later, but this is less important.

"And I suppose that if somebody has a scroll of Mind Blank to tap cake girl so the Osirians do need to use torture, that does make it too obvious... well, maybe they'd think it was just Project Lawful bullshit?"

Cheliax: "I think that if the cake girl looks like a girl the Osirians are very unlikely to move to torture within the indicated timeframe."

Pilar : Osirion.  Right.

"...do we have other ways of doing something very misleading with the cake girl, assuming that she does not get to use her in fact fairly impressive ability to withstand torture in order to deliver misinformation."

Cheliax: Is she actually the cake girl.

You don't work in intelligence for this long, and not notice when an inexperienced subject is possibly failing at a task of pretending not to be somebody.

lintamande: "We could send some person who isn't the cake girl and doesn't know anything in with the cake, having gotten a Suggestion immediately before to bring the cake in, poisoned. All they learn from her is that she was inexplicably seized by the urge to bring this cake in, and we learn - once she shows up in Hell - what Osirion knew enough to ask her about."

Pilar : "Constraint:  We'd need somebody who would afterwards feel really cheerful about that having happened to them.  Do we have anybody like that?"

lintamande: Everyone stares at her incredulously. 

"We could....subsequently raise them? And commend them on their service to the Crown?"

Pilar : "That works great on me and at least eleven other people in Cheliax, but unfortunately this is a hard constraint and it runs off how people will actually feel and not what they are supposed to feel."

lintamande: Some new conclusions are quickly reached about how many girls are in Project Lawful and what makes them special.

Iarwain: It is, however, not added to the rumor mill, for fucking once, because these people are professionals specifically in the intelligence services, and furthermore have a good idea of who gets interrogated and possibly executed if there's a new rumor about there being exactly 12 girls in Project Lawful.

Project Lawful: (...you could do something genuinely actually nice for them afterwards, her curse does not suggest.)

Iarwain: Message to Pilar from somebody in this room:  Is this a visible hard constraint where I can use it to find out whether someone is truly loyal to -

Pilar : Reply:  No, unfortunately, and yes I know exactly how stupid that is.

lintamande: "Someone who has been sentenced to, and is in the middle of, a slow execution, gets dragged out to deliver cake instead, dies more cleanly?"

Pilar : "We do have to Raise them afterwards to get the info, right, but I guess I could use my authority to ensure that they were cleanly killed again, immediately after that..."

Project Lawful: (Asmodeans.  Why.  Pilar's curse is not particularly Abadaran but even it wants to yell "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED OFFERING MONEY" at this point.)

lintamande: "Could also track them down in Hell, which might be more inconvenient but doesn't run the risk of them refusing. I do think we should consider it possible that the Osirians will Soul Bind their captive to keep the secret, so this'd have to be worth that, to Asmodeus."

Pilar : "Can anybody give me a completely different line on how to mislead the Osirians with the or a cake girl?  This line is looking increasingly less promising."

Iarwain: "We could go to the opposite extreme and try to make Project Lawful or cake girl look significantly more impressive than the reality - you'd know better than I would if that's realistically possible.  Seventh-circle wizard walks in looking like the real cake girl, with Mind Blank and Dimensional Anchoring and a few other things up, serves them some cake, chats with them, ignores anything they try to do to her, leaves."

"Are we okay with them knowing about the weird constraint that prevents us from arresting them?" somebody asks Pilar.  "Because if we're not, we should make it look like cake girl is not with Chelish services, and if we are, she should very clearly have the ability to turn them over to Security but not do it."

Pilar : "I think the fact that we had to let them go probably falls under the incredibly fucking misleading category."

"We're running out of time here, I like this option best of anything so far, let's roll with it."

Carissa Sevar: Eight hours after the Queen of Cheliax took her, Carissa Sevar gets a teleport to the fortress which is the new home of Project Lawful and goes to the temple to check in. The plan is for her to return to Keltham while still a little fragile - it's good for him to know what that looks like, and less costly than keeping her away from him for what might be the entire next day - but she really really wants a situation report first, so she can stop feeling like nothing is quite entirely real, and so she can get a precious rundown on what Keltham thought about in the Grand High Priestess's hearing. 

She just spent several hours napping, but she still looks fairly exhausted, and something a little deeper than 'exhausted'. She is carrying a dagger, because in hindsight she really should have one, and dressed like the heir to a county.

"How's my Keltham."

Ferrer Maillol: 'My Keltham' what, what did the Queen do to her?  Brainwash her into Keltham's sex slave or mistress or Abyss-knows-what so long as she had an extra three minutes?

"Usual condition," Maillol replies.

Aspexia only has limited Detect Thoughts per day that use her caster level; she hasn't been constantly reading Keltham the way the Queen can.  No Keltham behaviors merited emergency checks.  Occasional spaced spot-checks didn't turn up much of interest, besides an advance read on everything obvious Keltham thought to try with metalworking.

If Carissa is trying to scan the full transcripts, she'll see that Keltham is thinking he should maybe try dating Meritxell next rather than any of the Complicated Girls, but isn't quite sure that his brain will actually do that if he's no longer aromantic; also the earliest morning transcript shows Keltham repeatedly reminding himself that Carissa will be all right and that he will not receive any new info about this until later.

Carissa Sevar: "- I can work with that. My plan is to go find him and probably spend the afternoon with him, then authorize lies for Ione, Asmodia and Pilar; I want a Telepathic Bond with you, ideally tomorrow, so we can coordinate even when I'm occupied. Also, I am fourth circle now and would like the chance to copy some spells off Security."

Ferrer Maillol: You know what's really, really, really fucking annoying in Cheliax?  People who bear up much better than you under torture.  Also wizards in general.

"Copying spells will be arranged, Telepathic Bond arranged, I have noted your intended whereabouts.  I will not move ahead on returning our extra students until you tell me you're ready for project responsibility handoff, and either that looks accurate to me or I'm overruled by High Priestess Subirachs about your readiness to return to duty... please confirm that's acceptable."  It is not actually easy to remember that this is now his boss.

Carissa Sevar: "That's acceptable. Ab- Her Imperial Majestrix thinks I lack common sense on this front and with that in mind I'll consult High Priestess Subirachs before I say I'm ready."

Ferrer Maillol: No shit.  "Acknowledged, and that's High Priestess Jacint Subirachs, seventh-circle," Maillol says, just in case somebody didn't actually mention that part to her.  He goes to a map temporarily pinned to a wall until everybody learns the fortress, and points out where they are, and the paths to Carissa's new supervisor, to her bedroom, and to Keltham's bedroom.  "I suggest that I have somebody else notify Keltham you're waiting for him in his bedroom or yours; he's presently in the library-study hall."

Carissa Sevar: "I'll wait for him in his, and someone can tell him so now." So he doesn't wonder if he's not supposed to bother her or something.

She heads off, still looking mostly content if slightly haunted, down the indicated path.

Keltham: Keltham will stride about as fast as he can without running as soon as anybody tells him.

He'll slow down before he gets to his bedroom; he's not to suddenly burst in, looking out of breath.

It has been impressed on Keltham with a few smiling but rather stern words from Aspexia Rugatonn that it is his place now to hug Carissa, not pester her about anything she doesn't seem to want to talk about, and in particular not to demand lots of reassurances about how fine she is or ask for lots of details on how she isn't, until she seems to be fully her previous self.  Yes, even if Carissa says otherwise and that he should do what he wants and pester her, Keltham is allowed to ignore her on this particular occasion though after that he should go back to believing her again.  No Aspexia is not going to explain what axioms derive those conclusions, she's busy, ask Carissa a day or two later.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is sitting on Keltham's floor near the fire, playing with her dagger. She hasn't decided how to enchant it yet but she's going to do something incredibly cool.

dath ilan: Sharp kitchen knives are in fact one of the most convenient ways to hurt yourself or somebody else, if you want to hurt somebody including yourself, and you are not in a good mental state to figure out any more optimal ways of causing damage.  'Stabbed with a kitchen knife' is very much an archetypal Worst-In-Category Thing such that it Actually Happened To One Person You Know Though Not Yourself Personally.

Keltham: Keltham doesn't smile at her; that would be lying.

He's got healing, they've got resurrections, it wouldn't be an actual emergency.

"Carissa," he says, softly, instead of his usual 'Hey' of greeting.

Carissa Sevar: - she sets it down, gently, and stands up. 

"Keltham," she says back, and then shakes her head. "I'm okay. ...I should qualify that. I feel okay. I feel really good. I don't feel normal, and, uh, Abrogail and the site manager both told me very sternly that I was not okay and possess no common sense, so I guess, I shouldn't say I'm okay with so much counterevidence. But I feel okay."

Keltham: He does smile at that; it's what somebody should sound like if they had a Huge Thing happen to them which was not actually catastrophic; and it totally upset lots of their internal equilibria, but didn't trash them so hard that it trashed all the meta-level processes, so they can still consider things like what other people told them.  "Snuggles are available for those who seek them," Keltham says, and doesn't ask her at all about how her day went.

Carissa Sevar: Snuggles are sought. "I want to tell you at some point but not right now. I think once you have independent interest in...two or three of the things that happened, and once I have been officially declared Okay by nosy busybodies in the government."

Keltham: "That's fine," Keltham murmurs near her ear.  He's surprised, hearing those words from his mouth, and then more surprised when he realizes that he actually meant them and doesn't need to say 'wrongthought' and back up.  "I just need to know you're alive and will be okay, I don't need to know why that's so."  Want to, sure, need to, no.

Carissa Sevar: "I am alive! I will be okay! That I feel incredibly confident about. I'm hoping for better than okay, really, I think I might - feel safer - and I'm fourth circle."

Keltham: "That's a good thing and you get congratulations on it, right?"

Keltham: NOT THAT PEOPLE LEVELING UP AND GAINING POWERS WHEN THEY HAVE SEX IS AN EROLARP TROPE OR ANYTHING

DOES SHE LITERALLY HAVE ERO-XP

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, it's a good thing, it means I can cast more powerful spells! ...I am really tempted to say 'I am not going to shatter if you ask the one question you're clearly dying to' but I guess maybe I should consult a priest about that."

Keltham: "It'll keep.  A lot of questions do, in fact, they're exactly the same question a day later as right now.  It's like food that never spoils."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Anyway. I am very very glad it happened. I don't want it to happen again for a little while. I might....ever want something like that to happen to me again, but that doesn't mean you have to do it, or find a picky powerful person."

Keltham: "I'm glad that you're glad."

"If you don't want it to happen again for a little while, we don't need to worry about any of that for a little while."

"Or I can go write it down somewhere to revisit in two weeks, if you're worried I'll otherwise forget about it completely, and your brain will otherwise keep nagging you to make sure it knows the issue won't get dropped."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not really worried about that. Should I be?"

Keltham: "No," Keltham says, instead of his more usual cautious don't think so that he almost said.  "You won't forget about it if it's a thing that's important to you."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay." She snuggles him quietly for a little while. "I really like you. Abrogail thinks I am in love with you. I haven't been in love with anyone before so I don't know how I would tell."

Keltham: "Neither have I before.  Got a spell for that, Detect Love?"

Carissa Sevar: "Don't think so. Don't think the gods know what love is either, probably."

Keltham: That would explain some things about Golarion.

...he doesn't know how he knows this, but he knows he must not say that out loud, right now.

Okay, search complete, it's because Carissa doesn't need to go correct whatever he misunderstood about Golarion right now.  Maybe that's not all of what he knew, but it's a large-enough chunk to make sense.

"The first layer of advice out of dath ilan," Keltham murmurs, "would be that it doesn't matter whether you call it 'love' or not, it only matters what it is.  If you know what you're feeling and the question is just whether to call that 'love', there isn't really a question there at all, because you already know everything that the answer could have told you."

Carissa Sevar: "The question is, when I tell you how I'm feeling, have I given you a better understanding, or a worse one. If I pick the wrong word then you'll have the wrong idea. So we need the same one, at least."

Keltham: "The second layer.  Go down to the details that are smaller than the word, the things you saw that made you want to use the word, the perceptions that came before you tried to describe it to anyone else.  Describe those perceptions.  It will take much longer than using a word, but you'll have less of a problem of the same mouth-sound meaning different things to different people."

Carissa Sevar: That feels like - mental work. Of the kind she's maybe been told not to do. And half of what she's performing here for Keltham is that she is competent enough her preferences can be trusted, so. 

"Mmmmm. I think I don't wanna try that right now. Maybe in the morning. Unless it's an order."

Keltham: "It is not an order.  And that's fine.  I wasn't trying to give you a problem to solve, I was - being Keltham at you, being dath ilan at you, in case that was something that helped.  And so you'd know that whatever internal puzzles you have, there'll be a way to solve them, later, they won't just stick around being unanswerable.  In the rest of Golarion, maybe, but not in my bedroom."

Carissa Sevar: "Love you."

Keltham: "I sure feel something for you that I've never felt for anyone before, but I, too, don't feel like putting down all the mental work to describe it precisely, right now."

Carissa Sevar: Kiss?

Keltham: Symmetrical mouthdocking!

Carissa Sevar: And a while after that - "I think I am up for sex and I think it might actually be - really nice and something special I can only get when I'm like this - but. Probably I should ask a priest. If that's even something you would want."

dath ilan: A potential MISSED OPPORTUNITY that is RARE?  This canNOT be permitted.

Keltham: "Sure, let's ask.  Should I go have somebody run a message to someone?"

Carissa Sevar: -giggle. "I guess so. The priestess in charge here is called High Priestess Subarachs. I haven't ...met her ....and might need to talk to her for her to decide....but that would require getting out of bed. I don't want to get out of bed! You are here! And it's so cozy."

Keltham: "Well, I do need to be temporarily not-in-the-bed but it will be only temporary."

Keltham rises up, reshirts himself, opens door, calls for Security, please run a message to High Priestess Subasomething from Keltham, Carissa Sevar who just got back from her tryst with the Queen wants to talk to somebody about whether she's okay for sex, consider this to be Keltham asking for the favor of her coming all the way down to his bedroom to talk to Carissa without Carissa having to walk around excessively moving and thinking.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa should feel incredibly embarrassed about that and very worried about the first impression she is leaving her new advisor in her descent into darkness but instead of this, she doesn't.

"You're very good.

- you know what you should do, if you don't mind, is, you should come up with a description of what's different between fragile Carissa and normal Carissa, in case mine isn't very satisfactory once I am recovered and try to come up with one."

Keltham: "Are you also giving me a small adorable puzzle to keep my mind occupied and not talking to you, by any chance?"

Carissa Sevar: "No! If you want to talk to me you can talk to me! Just, I said that, and then I thought, I think normally I wouldn't say that, and then I decided not to try to notice all the differences. But you could, if you wanted. I think the point of all this is that you get to figure out exactly how you like your Carissa and what to do to her to get that."

Keltham: "I'll go take some notes, then."  In Baseline.

Keltham gets the scrapbook he's been using and brings it into bed.

Note 1:  Carissa seems a whole lot more capable of being happy, somehow, hopefully this is something that doesn't wear off completely or takes a while to do so.

Note 2:  Fragile Carissa knows that she is fragile and not constantly proclaiming her invincibility, which wouldn't be a good look on her all the time, but it is nice to know that she has an internal sensor for it and yes fine it's cute Keltham will write that.

Note 3:  She's like a tiny cute Pet Animal of some kind, which you wouldn't want to take care of always, but might want to take care of on correspondingly rare occasions like this one.

Carissa Sevar: She is so curious but she won't peek! 

Keltham: "You're allowed to know eventually, you just have to be in rough equilibrium before you see.  I'm not going to go overwrite your self-model while it's unusually fragile and maybe also changing, if I guessed anything on here wrong."

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, that makes sense and sounds right." It's not what Abrogail did, at all, but then Abrogail was trying to build Carissa a new way on purpose; Keltham doesn't know what he's doing and might build her a worse way accidentally, and is being appropriately cautious, given that.

Maybe they can kiss some more until the priest gets here.

Jacint Subirachs: Knock knock, quite gently.

Keltham: Answer answer.

Keltham is trying to ignore the very strong eroLARP character warning signals he is getting from how hot this priestess is, and that would be easier if Carissa hadn't just leveled from sex.

Yes, Carissa is over there in the bed.  You can tell which object Keltham is pointing to, it's the adorable one.

Jacint Subirachs: This is probably more of a two-person talk than a three-person talk.

Keltham: Understood.  Please note that Carissa is not to have sex without his approval.

Jacint Subirachs: Does she really give off that vibe?

Keltham: Why trust what you can just as easily verify?

Keltham departs.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will stop being quite so flopped. "High Priestess."

Jacint Subirachs: "Chosen of Asmodeus.  You have permission to fall back down into the bed."

Carissa Sevar: - okay, well, she'll take that. Flop.

"I have been advised that I am not able to judge my readiness for duty right now. By several people. I want to encourage Keltham to have sex with me and I want to check whether that would be a bad idea. Or if there's some other reason to tell him it's a bad idea, I guess."

Jacint Subirachs: Carissa Sevar is, to an experienced eye, even more fragile than she looks to Keltham.  To an Asmodean eye it would be contemptible, if you didn't know that this is what she is like only a few hours after finishing up a date with Abrogail Thrune that took her to fourth circle.

In fact, the Queen's brief said that the part that put Carissa up to fourth circle was just the foreplay, and Carissa's alignment aura is now noticeably slightly stronger than when that foreplay completed.  And here she is using words and everything!

So, her readiness for sexual operations?  To Jacint's eye, Carissa is being very honest, very vulnerable, looks very relaxed and happy, obviously has no reserves left to deal with anything going even slightly wrong, and is unlikely to be able to run much in the way of deceptions on Keltham.  Jacint could probably break Carissa with a few words, right now, or simply by ceasing to guard her own words much... if Jacint felt like simultaneously pissing off Abrogail Thrune for ruining her latest masterpiece while it was recovering into its new shape, and also pissing off Aspexia Rugatonn, and also pissing off Asmodeus.

If Carissa were at all considering having normal sex with a normal person, the answer would clearly be no.

And then Carissa would need to be given something else to occupy herself, to prevent her from becoming bored and then trying to put herself back together faster or in interesting new ways.

"I estimate it will probably be safe for you with Keltham," Jacint says, "and safe for him spiritually, if I instruct him to back off or stop if you seem to be in increasing distress, and make it clear that he is to consider that advice from myself that he should indeed follow, rather than being a request from you that he is to refer back to only his own desires.  You will not be able to deceive him about much, if anything, but he has already been instructed not to pester you with questions and to back off there as well."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes. He's been good about that and I will tell him I'm not ready - and probably burst into tears - if he starts being pushy." She makes a little bit of a face about her own patheticness. 

Jacint Subirachs: "It would be a lovely thing to see, but he is not ready and this is not the time for it either."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. "Thank you. I'll come see you tomorrow, probably, to discuss more."

Jacint Subirachs: "As Asmodeus wills.  Literally and specifically wills, in this case, since that was your decision."

Jacint departs.

Keltham: "Upshot?"

Jacint Subirachs: "Yes, but back off if Carissa seems to be in increasing distress.  That's not a request from Carissa that you should refer back to your own will and wants, that's advice from me.  Which you should ignore only if you have decided to break your possession.  For which this would also be not a good time if you wanted that to have pleasing results later."

Keltham: You could have just said... never mind.

"Understood."

"Pain, probably in very small amounts by her standards: good, neutral, bad?"

Jacint Subirachs: "Neutral, for her, in those very small amounts.  I suppose positive if you are enjoying yourself in it and she knows that."

Keltham: Keltham is not quite sure what to feel about that 'neutral' thing, but thanks her and goes in to rejoin his Carissa.

Carissa Sevar: "Hey. Did she say yes? She said she was going to say yes."

Keltham: "She did."

Keltham is currently more curious than aroused, but this is not hard for somebody as pretty and vulnerable-looking as Carissa to fix, if she is being proactive.  Is she being proactive?

Carissa Sevar: She'll pause a bit to see if he's going to be, but if not, then, yes, she will. She will drape herself on him and pet him and make small delighted noises about absolutely everything.

Keltham: That'll get him revved in short order.  He didn't know that level of Sexy Adorable was even possible.  Everything about Carissa is brighter, somehow, than she seems usually was before, rather, hopefully.

Very small amount of pain to see what happens, at some point when he feels like that?