Keltham: Tiny Keltham demanded to see the actual accounts of which 'essential public services' his share of the land-rent was getting spent on.
He was promptly provided them, in easy-to-read format for children with lots of helpful pictures. Lots of dath ilani children demand to see those accounts, at some point.
With great focus and concentration, tiny Keltham managed to read through twenty-two pages of that, before getting bored and running off to play.
(This placed him in the 97th percentile for how far most children read at that age.)
dath ilan: The explanation to tiny Keltham resumed the next day with the workings of Governance.
Conceptually and to first-order, the ideal that Civilization is approximating is a giant macroagent composed of everybody in the world, taking coordinated macroactions to end up on the multi-agent-optimal frontier, at a point along that frontier reflecting a fair division of the gains from that coordinated macroaction -
Well, to be clear, the dath ilani would shut it all down if actual coordination levels started to get anywhere near that. Civilization has spoken - with nearly one voice, in fact - that it does not want to turn into a hivemind. This is why 'dath ilan' deliberately doesn't have Baseline's agency-marker on it, like the name of a person; dath ilan is not allowed to become a person. It is high on the list of Things Dath Ilan Is Not Allowed To Do. There was a poll once - put forth either by wacky trolls or sincere negative utilitarians - over how many people would, if they were voting on it directly, vote to put the agency-marker back into 'Dath Ilan'; 98% of respondents said no.
Dath ilan has decided to definitely not turn into a hivemind. If it ever starts to get even close to that, everyone in Civilization will decide in nearly unanimous accord that they would rather do something else which is not that, and end up not there. Conformity levels are bad enough already, according to their democracy's collective vote on the desired levels of that! And predicted to get slightly worse over the next 10 years, according to the prediction markets that aggregate all of Civilization's knowledge into a single opinion that represents what Civilization as a whole can be said to know about any future observable, which few sane people would dare to question too much even in the privacy of their own thoughts!
But for moral purposes, for purposes of understanding what 'Civilization' represents as a decision individuals make to coordinate among themselves, it represents moving partway towards aggregating all coordinating parties in dath ilan into one macroagent that weighted-sums their utility functions together, at a weighting that ends up giving every subagent a fair share of the gains according to their individual utility functions.
dath ilan: If something like this macroagent actually existed, any time the macroagent faced a decision it had to make globally for one reason or another, it would make that decision in a way that reflected the preferences of everybody inside it. "Nobody anywhere gets to run a city where some children don't get to learn Baseline, even for the noblest possible purposes of scientific experimentation to see what happens if you raise kids speaking only your new improved language instead" - this is a decision made over everywhere; if there's any loophole somewhere, something will happen that most people in Civilization think should not happen anywhere.
(This example, to be clear, was selected on the basis of its controversy; propositions like "all children get to learn some human language during their critical maturation period" pass with much higher supermajorities. "Children don't have imaginary-ownership-tags pointing to their parents", goes the proverb out of dath ilan; there are limits to what Civilization thinks a guardianship-tag on a child should allow a parent to do.)
The system of imaginary ownership-tags, likewise by its nature, is something that needs at least some global structure. It can potentially divide into compartments that fit sub-social-systems, say where a family is tracking who owns what in an informal way that property-registers don't track. But there's not much reliability in owning the food in your refrigerator, if anybody anywhere in dath ilan isn't part of the system and can come in and eat your food in a way the police will shrug and not do anything about.
There is, at the top level, one system of private property. In the eyes of the rest of Civilization, weird experimental cities that are trying something else still have all the stuff inside them tagged as belonging to a persistent-contract representing that city; the rest of Civilization will not come in and eat their food unless the city's persistent-contract says they can.
dath ilan: Now in practice, dath ilani are still mostly human, and therefore way too computationally bounded to aggregate into even a not_too_visibly_incoherent-bounded_approximation of a macroagent.
Conceptually and to second-order, then, Civilization thinks it should be divided into a Private Sphere and a Public Shell. Nearly all the decisions are made locally, but subject to a global structure that contains things like "children may not be threatened into unpaid labor"; or "everybody no matter who they are or what they have done retains the absolute right to cryosuspension upon their death"; or the top level (in most places the only level) of the imaginary system of ownership-tags and its contract-specification-language.
The vast supermajority of Civilization's real economic activity takes place within the Private Sphere, supported and contained and constrained and structured by the Public Shell. It's not that activity inside the Private Sphere is uncoordinated. It's that the decision as to how coordinated to be, and who to coordinate with about it, can be left up to each individual, computed locally - so long as they don't kill anybody, or take stuff that doesn't belong to them, or try to raise their own flaming-ass children with a proper conlang and without flaming-ass Baseline contaminating their innocent smol minds.
Conceptually speaking, this division overwhelmingly factorizes the computational problems of the approximated macroagent, and simplifies the vast majority of dath ilan's decision problems immensely. It reduces the mental expense of almost all day-to-day life back to something individual humans can handle. Indeed, dath ilan does not want to become any more of a coordinated macroagent than that! Its prediction markets say things-defined-as-bad will happen according to its aggregate utilityfunction, so dath ilan isn't doing that.
This does however leave some amount of decision-power to the Public Shell. Some words must be spoken in one voice or not at all, and to say nothing is also a choice.
So the question then becomes - how, in practice, does Civilization aggregate its preferences into a macropreference, about the sorts of issues that it metadecides are wise to decide by macropreference at all?
dath ilan: Directdemocracy has been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by all individually voting on them. It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way. Get the number of direct voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process can save you.
(More than one thing goes wrong, when 10,000 people try to directly vote to steer their polity. But if you had to pick one thing, it would be that people just can't pay enough individual attention to the things that their polity tries to have them directly vote on. When they start to refer their votes to purported experts and specialists, the politics that develop there are removed from them as individuals. There is not much of a sense of being in control, then, nor are the voters actually in control.)
dath ilan: Republics have been tried, from time to time, within some city of dath ilan: people making group decisions by voting to elect leaders who make those decisions. It can work if you try it with fifty people, even in the most unstructured way. Get the number of voters up to ten thousand people, and no amount of helpfully-intended structure in the voting process can save you.
(More than one thing goes wrong, when 10,000 people try to directly vote on leaders for their polity. But if you had to pick one thing, it would be that voters don't individually have enough time to figure out which strangers they should vote for or why. When they start to refer their votes to purported experts and specialists, who are also strangers, the politics that develop there are removed from them as individuals. There is not much of a sense of being in control, then, nor are the voters actually in control.)
dath ilan: There are a hundred more clever proposals for how to run Civilization's elections. If the current system starts to break, one of those will perhaps be adopted. Until that day comes, though, the structure of Governance is the simplest departure from directdemocracy that has been found to work at all.
Every voter of Civilization, everybody at least thirteen years old or who has passed some competence tests before then, primarily exerts their influence through delegating their vote to a Delegate.
A Delegate must have at least fifty votes to participate in the next higher layer at all; and can retain no more than two hundred votes before the marginal added influence from each additional vote starts to diminish and grow sublinearly. Most Delegates are not full-time, unless they are representing pretty rich people, but they're expected to be people interested in politics and who spend a lot of time on that. Your Delegate might be somebody you know personally and trust, if you're the sort to know so many people personally that you know one Delegate. It might be somebody who hung out their biography on the Network, and seemed a lot like you in some ways, and whom you chatted with about politics in a forum visible to the Delegates' other voters so all their voters could verify that their Delegate hadn't been telling different people different stories.
If you think you've got a problem with the way Civilization is heading, you can talk to your Delegate about that, and your Delegate has time to talk back to you.
That feature has been found to not actually be dispensable in practice. It needs to be the case that, when you delegate your vote, you know who has your vote, and you can talk to that person, and they can talk back. Otherwise people feel like they have no lever at all to pull on the vast structure that is Governance, that there is nothing visible that changes when a voter casts their one vote. Sure, in principle, there's a decision-cohort whose votes move in logical synchrony with yours, and your cohort is probably quite large unless you're a weird person. But some part of you more basic than that will feel like you're not in control, if the only lever you have is an election that almost never comes down to the votes of yourself and your friends.
The rest of the electoral structure follows almost automatically, once you decide that this property has to be preserved at each layer.
dath ilan: The next step up from Delegates are Electors, full-time well-paid professionals who each aggregate 4,000 to 25,000 underlying voters from 50 to 200 Delegates. Few voters can talk to their Electors (more than very briefly and on rare occasions), but your Delegate can have some long conversations with them. If a lot of voters are saying the same thing to their Delegate, the Elector is liable to hear about it.
Representatives aggregate Electors, ultimately 300,000 to 3,000,000 underlying votes apiece. There are roughly a thousand of those in all Civilization, at any given time, with social status equivalent to an excellent CEO of a large company or a scientist who made an outstanding discovery inside their own field. Most people haven't heard of any particular one of them, but will be very impressed on hearing what they do for a living.
And above all this, the Nine Legislators of Civilization are those nine candidates who receive the most aggregate underlying votes from Representatives. They vote with power proportional to their underlying votes; but when a Legislator starts to have voting power exceeding twice that of the median Legislator, their power begins to grow sublinearly. By this means is too much power prevented from concentrating into a single politician's hands.
dath ilan: Surrounding all this of course are numerous features that any political-design specialist of Civilization would consider obvious:
Any voter (or Delegate or Elector or Representative) votes for a list of three possible delegees of the next layer up; if your first choice doesn't have enough votes yet to be a valid representor, your vote cascades down to the next person on your list, but remains active and ready to switch up if needed. This lets you vote for new delegees entering the system, without that wasting your vote while there aren't enough votes yet.
Anyone can at any time immediately eliminate a person from their 3-list, but it takes a 60-day cooldown to add a new person or reorder the list. The government design isn't meant to make it cheap or common to threaten your delegee with a temporary vote-switch if they don't vote your way on that particular day. The government design isn't meant to make it possible for a new brilliant charismatic leader to take over the entire government the next day with no cooldowns. It is meant to let you rapidly remove your vote from a delegee that has sufficiently ticked you off.
Once you have served as a Delegate, or delegee of any other level, you can't afterwards serve in any other branches of Governance. Similarly a Delegate can never again be eligible for candidacy as an Elector, though they can become a Representative or a Legislator. Someone who has been an Elector can never be a Representative; a Representative can never become a Legislator.
This is meant to prevent a political structure whose upper ranks offer promotion as a reward to the most compliant members of the ranks below, for by this dark-conspiratorial method the delegees could become aligned to the structure above rather than their delegators below.
(Most dath ilani would be suspicious of a scheme that tried to promote Electors from Delegates in any case; they wouldn't think there should be a political career ladder, if someone proposed that concept to them. Dath ilani are instinctively suspicious of all things meta, and much more suspicious of anything purely meta; they want heavy doses of object-level mixed in. To become an Elector you do something impressive enough, preferably something entirely outside of Governance, that Delegates will be impressed by you. You definitely don't become an Elector by being among the most ambitious and power-seeking people who wanted to climb high and knew they had to start out a lowly Delegate, who then won a competition to serve the system above them diligently enough to be selected for a list of Electors fed to a political party's captive Delegates. If a dath ilani saw a system like this, that was supposedly a democracy set in place by the will of its people, they would ask what the captive 'voters' even thought they were supposedly trying to do under the official story.)
dath ilan: The Nine Legislators of Civilization have two functions.
First is to pass worldwide regulations - each of which must be read aloud by a Legislator who thereby accepts responsibility for that regulation; and when that Legislator retires a new Legislator must be found to read aloud and accept responsibility for that regulation, or it will be stricken from the books. Every regulation in Civilization, if something goes wrong with it, is the fault of one particular Legislator who accepted responsibility for it. To speak it aloud, it is nowadays thought, symbolizes the acceptance of this responsibility.
Modern dath ilani aren't really the types in the first place to produce literally-unspeakable enormous volumes of legislation that no hapless citizen or professional politician could ever read within their one lifetime let alone understand. Even dath ilani who aren't professional programmers have written enough code to know that each line of code to maintain is an ongoing cost. Even dath ilani who aren't professional economists know that regulatory burdens on economies increase quadratically in the cost imposed on each transaction. They would regard it as contrary to the notion of a lawful polity with law-abiding citizens that the citizens cannot possibly know what all the laws are, let alone obey them. Dath ilani don't go in for fake laws in the same way as Golarion polities with lots of them; they take laws much too seriously to put laws on the books just for show.
But if somehow the dath ilani forgot all that, and did not immediately rederive it, the constitutional requirement that a Legislator periodically speak a regulation aloud to keep it effective would serve as a final check on the cancerous growth of legislative codebases.
Plenty of Legislators pass through their whole terms of office without ever speaking any new regulation into existence. Their function is not to make regulations. Civilization already has regulations. Legislators mostly maintain and repair those regulations, and negotiate the changing preferences of Civilization about which final outcomes it wants to steer for using its policy prediction markets. New system features are terrifically expensive when everyone governed by them has to remember every relevant line of code. If you want any new feature implemented in Civilization, you'd better be ready to explain which old features should be repealed to make room.
dath ilan: The second function of the Nine Legislators of Civilization is to appoint the rest of Governance: In particular the Chief Executive, certain key officers below the Chief Executive, the five Judges of Civilization on the Court of Final Settlement of which all lesser Courts are hierarchical prediction markets. The Chief Executive in turn is the one person finally responsible for any otherwise unhandled exceptions in Civilization, and the one person who supervises those who supervise those who supervise, all the way down.
The key principle governing the Executive branch of government is the doctrine of Sole Accountability, being able to answer the question 'Who is the one person who has or had responsibility for this decision?' On this topic Keltham has already spoken.
From the perspective of a Golarion polity not being efficiently run by Hell - from the perspective of Taldor, say, or Absalom - they might be surprised at how few committees and rules there are inside of Governance. Governance does not try to ensure systemic properties via endless rules intended to constrain the particular actions taken; nor by having committees supposedly ensuring that no one person has the power to do a naughty thing by themselves. Rules and committees make power illegible, let people evade responsibility for their outputs inside the system, and then you really are in trouble. Civilization's approach is to identify the one person responsible for achieving the final outcome desired, and logging their major actions and holding them Solely Accountable for those; with their manager being the one person responsible for monitoring them and holding them to account. Or, on other occasions, Civilization's approach is to state desirable observables, and have policy prediction markets about which policies will achieve them. (Though even when it comes to following a policy prediction market's advice, there is still of course the one person who is Solely Accountable for following that advice else throwing an exception if the advice seemed weird; and the One Person whose job it is to correctly state the thing the prediction market should predict, and so on.)
This is the systemic design principle by which Civilization avoids a regulatory explosion of endlessly particular and detailed constraints on actions, meant to avert Bad Things that people imagine might possibly happen if a constraint were violated. Civilization tries instead to state the compact final outcomes, rather than the wiggly details of the exact strategies needed to achieve them; and to identify people solely responsible for those outcomes.
dath ilan: (There are also Keeper cutouts at key points along the whole structure of Governance - the Executive of the Military reports not only to the Chief Executive but also to an oathsworn Keeper who can prevent the Executive of the Military from being fired, demoted, or reduced in salary, just because the Chief Executive or even the Legislature says so. It would be a big deal, obviously, for a Keeper to fire this override; but among the things you buy when you hire a Keeper is that the Keeper will do what they said they'd do and not give five flying fucks about what sort of 'big deal' results. If the Legislators and the Chief Executive get together and decide to order the Military to crush all resistance, the Keeper cutout is there to ensure that the Executive of the Military doesn't get a pay cut immediately after they tell the Legislature and Chief Executive to screw off.
...one supposes that this personal relationship could also be the point at which the Keepers are secretly staying in control of the military via talk-control, yes, yes, fine. But at some level of paranoia it ceases to be productive to worry about this sort of thing, because how are you even supposed to rearrange your Civilization such that this becomes any less probable? The problem isn't the exact structure, it's that such a thing as talk-control exists in the first place. A slightly different arrangement wouldn't help with the paranoia there. The Dark version of this Conspiracy has a hidden Keeper controlling the Executive of the Military, not a clearly labeled one! Right? Right?)
dath ilan: And that's Governance! By dath ilani standards it's a giant ugly hack in every aspect that isn't constrained down to a single possible choice by first principles, and they're annoyed with themselves about it.
A lot of other dimensions, if they heard what passes for a political complaint in dath ilan, would probably try to strangle the entire planet.
dath ilan: And the key point behind the whole mental exercise, of beginning over from scratch, is this:
This is what an approximation of an attempt of a world to coordinate with you, should look like; this is how much of the gains from trade, you should at least expect; no more inconvenience and injury than this, should you expect from your government.
And if Governance ever gets too far away from that - why, forget it all, rederive it all, and start over. All of Governance is a dream, just as much as ownership-tags are a willing collective hallucination; if it turns into a bad dream, it's time to wake up. Your next-best alternative to Governance, if it departs from this standard, is at least this good. So, if that time comes, you can do Something Else Which Is Not Governance.
They run an annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival, in dath ilan. Sometimes you have to defeat the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military. Sometimes the Military is still made of nice people who aren't going to fire on a civilian population, this rehearsal; and instead you have to distrust the Network and all of the existing politicians and Very Serious People and organize your own functional government from scratch by the end of the day.
And the point of all that rehearsing is to decrease the friction costs to overthrow the Government; because lowering the cost of overthrowing Governance decreases the amount that Governance can be inconvenient or injurious at people, before, Governance knows, its people will overthrow it.
Well, and the other point is to more accurately estimate those friction costs. They are, by dath ilani standards, quite high, on the order of 5% of GDP depending on how much institutional expertise gets lost and how many days people have to miss work. Nobody would lightly suggest overthrowing the Government. That's like losing twenty days' worth of income for everyone! One shouldn't do that without a really strong reason!
Keltham: Tiny Keltham was not ultimately satisfied with this explanation once it completed. Tiny Keltham did, in fact, start trying to band together with other children to overthrow Governance. Tiny Keltham convinced four other boys and one girl to go in with him on that.
And what happened after that point would be a story for another day. But let's just say that if, in fact, all of the grownup adults in Golarion are secretly collaborating to construct an elaborate false reality around Keltham, it would not be his first time.
dath ilan: Well, what was Civilization SUPPOSED to do there, slap down tiny Keltham immediately? You don't want to discourage that kind of initiative and spark! Adorable smols banding together to try to overthrow the entire world government should have an educational and fun experience about that!
lintamande: "So they....played along in order to show you how futile it was?" Gregoria asks.
Keltham: "Gregoria, try to let go of the Conspiracy hypothesis here for twelve seconds. When a group of six adorable children set out to overthrow Governance, you don't need a special additional effort to make their attempts seem futile to them. They are not, in fact, going to win."
"Now imagine you're a Civilization that thinks that these children are showing a spark of individualism that's important to prevent all that Law from turning dath ilan into one giant 'hivemind' - uh, group intellect. Which I was vehemently against, obviously, but your average dath ilani is only slightly less vehement about that."
"The fact that these children's efforts are going to be massively futile is a problem. There was a prediction market about how to end up discouraging us all the least."
"Which I know about because my parents used to tell this story for years at parties with their own generation, afterwards, until I moved out of home one year earlier than usual for my age cohort."
lintamande: "They...tried to make you think you were succeeding at overthrowing the government?"
Keltham: "That is somewhat closer to what happened, yes."
"Buuuut oh look it's dinnertime, we should all go do that, shouldn't we? Yes we definitely should."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Evening
lintamande: Dinner does not get them to stop having questions about dath ilan's government! What sorts of things do you tell your delegates about? The whole thing actually sounds kind of like the Chelish system of baronies and counties and duchies, except more intentional; maybe there's a way to preserve Cheliax's existing system but turn it into that?
Keltham: Keltham kind of didn't bother his Delegate all that much? He didn't particularly want to change Civilization by voting at things?
Keltham just paid off one of his friends to do some research on the Network to find him a Delegate. (Professional political matchmaking is not looked kindly upon for all sorts of reasons; it would be an absurdly concentrated target for corruption attempts.) His friend came back with a 52-year-old-but-not-grandfather-troped Individualist type, formerly the beloved manager of some small company, living fifteen minutes away in Default, who was just starting out as a Delegate after retiring.
Keltham went to a dinner party with three other potential voters to check the guy out, he seemed pretty gung-ho on pushing out the Private Sphere against the Public Shell relative to the current balancing point. Keltham tossed the guy his vote along with a spreadsheet of Keltham's personal preferences over some Civilizational desiderata, yes he was serious he'd like to see much less altruism in future generations, and then mostly forgot about it.
Now and then Keltham would check in, and see that his guy's Elector had switched votes to a Representative who was negotiating with one of the Legislators to switch their vote in exchange for influence on the next Chief Executive being an ex-business-manager type instead of an ex-trader and with less of an emphasis on pondering that person's effective-philanthropy bets and more emphasis on how they'd run their business.
...Keltham was not under the impression that current Counts would take well to their Barons handing them spreadsheets of utilityfunction weights, or Barons warning Counts they were about to change their allegiance to a different Count. He thought that Counts would tend to have militantly strong views about keeping their current jobs. Is Keltham wrong about this?
lintamande: Oh no they totally would, they'd be furious. But they're going to be furious about most possible solutions, here.
Keltham: Welp, they can try to pay an unreasonable amount so people will be more cheerful about it, but Keltham expects that some point or another it's ultimately going to come down to 'You can have ten pounds of spellsilver in exchange for going quietly, or you can have zero pounds of spellsilver and also have to pay for a Raise Dead afterwards.'
lintamande: ....it might come down to that but it's not very smart to be saying that now, because, well, then if any of them find out they might decide they'd rather stop things getting to that point.
Keltham: They'd better leave it out of any reports they file about dinnertime conversations, then, and Keltham will be sure not to say it during class.
You can't actually make spellsilver cheap enough to produce +6 intelligence headbands for everybody and not have your society change at all. Especially insofar as your current 'social-system_design' is, in fact, stupid. But anybody who can't work that out on their own gets to be taken by surprise, Keltham supposes.
How was the Share Language (Baseline) and Keltham's use of Baseline loanwords thrown into Taldane, by the way? It made his life easier, definitely, but he's not sure how it felt from the other end.
lintamande: It mostly made sense? The extra specificity seemed worth the occasional needing to mentally rewind several sentences and try to piece together what they were saying.
Probably various people will catch on that they're going to lose their hats, and some of them will rebel about it, but if they find out at different rates it'll be harder for them to coordinate on rebelling about it.
Keltham: Well, if they don't tell any other Counts about it, maybe they can have some of the ill-gotten stuff of any extra-'extractive' Counts who didn't go quietly.
Keltham does remember how all majoritarian coalitions are theoretically unstable because a subcoalition could kick somebody out and redivide that person's gains among themselves - if for some odd reason they weren't using logical decision theory, that is.
lintamande: People will be doing those calculations, yes. As long as the Project has the backing of the Church and the Queen the outcome's not really in question, but it's still better not to advertise anything worrying.
Keltham: Are there places or people outside the classroom to whom Keltham should avoid saying particular things?
lintamande: Probably he shouldn't say this stuff to the spellsilver consultants or people like that? Security's been screened and anyone Asmodeus has chosen is safe obviously.
Keltham: He had in fact worked that out himself, but Keltham thanks them nonetheless for the advice. Why trust what you can verify? as the saying goes.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Still Evening
Keltham: After dinner, Keltham, who previously sent off a certain letter discussed with Carissa, now receives a reply on the evening Teleport! It comes with a package, even!
Abrogail Thrune II: To Keltham out of dath ilan:
Abrogail Thrune II: I cannot, alas, afford the time to properly monitor and control your possession's shaping, at this remove. As such, take all this advice with a grain of salt, and consult Subirachs perhaps. She can forward further questions on to me, if she cannot answer them herself.
Your basic concept of treatment appears to me sound. I am in fact impressed with you for inventing it, including such details as warning your possession that she is not at all to punish herself - though I would have phrased it as saying that the responsibility for punishing her while she was chained lay entirely with myself, and I would not tolerate my prerogative being usurped.
I would be greatly interested in hearing if there is Law governing such matters, known to you. I do not expect, under the circumstances, that dath ilan taught you how to torment one's possession while she is chained to a bed - but I wonder if they taught you other principles that were relevant? What shaped your intuitions to suggest that? Most people I need to correct about that sort of thing, and then even after they are corrected they do not really seem to understand. If there's favor due for my answers and actions in the rest of this letter, I'd call in some or all of it for a detailed reply there.
Abrogail Thrune II: Your concern that teaching your possession to show you truthful pain, might in the end not teach her truthful pleasure, is likewise sound. The objective is to train her to allow any of her real reactions through unimpeded, when you demand it so, not only pain.
I am enclosing a collar which increases sensitivity to tickling. This is loaned to you, not given, but I do not expect to need it back anytime soon.
If you can press from your possession screams of pain and laughter both, that she cannot think about and cannot stop arising from herself, I expect you can make some progress on teaching her body to show its true reactions once more in the realm of pleasure. There are cheats for that directly, items enchanted whose touch causes ecstasy, but to use those cheats comes with its own dangers. It seems prudent to try things this way first.
Abrogail Thrune II: When it comes time to test her pleasure again, do not neglect the fundamentals of Carissa's sexuality: real power over her, real possession of her, that no other could take her from you if you wished to keep her, that you have gone and will go to great lengths to keep her, that she could not escape you, that whatever kindness she has of you was your own choice between that and cruelty, that nothing within or without would restrain you from greater cruelty if you felt any wish for it, and so if she happens to receive kindness that is your true gift to her unobligated.
My imagination of Isidre is yelling at me not to press you too far, too quickly - but be it clear that if I were Keltham testing his possession's capacity for pleasure, I would be forcing her firmly into the bed-chains, allowing and indeed demanding her sincere resistance and then overcoming whatever resistance she offered; to do otherwise would pointlessly handicap myself.
I enclose a 5-charge rod of Curse of Magic Negation. A charge will last one and a half hours when applied to your possession; I would advise enhancing it with your own Bestow Curse (3rd circle) targeted narrowly on her ability to overcome the resulting Spellblight of Negation. (You will also need to have requested a Remove Curse, to negate your own Bestowed Curse afterwards.) A Bull's Strength and Cat's Grace should do for yourself, and allow you to physically overpower her once she cannot cast magic against you. The 1st-circle wizard spell Ray of Enfeeblement is a possible backup here, but it is better if you can overpower your possession without handicapping her apart from her magic. Don't flinch back from fighting in a way that requires you to heal yourself during or herself afterwards; there is nothing you can do that Subirachs cannot undo. Being overpowered now and then by her Keltham is good for a Carissa.
I enclose an order commanding Security to drag Carissa Sevar to your bed, should you so wish, in case it's easier that way the first time. You will however be more likely to get the results you desire if you can manage to do it yourself and without flinching.
Abrogail Thrune II: A possibility for avoiding that flinch: Quietly take one of Carissa's stray hairs, and then ask one of your other relationships to Alter Self and Disguise Self to Carissa's appearance, so that you can rehearse the subdual, with your target voluntarily not using her magic.
I enclose a signed requisition permitting a woman of your choice to borrow a rod which will extend the duration of Alter Self when used by her. I'd expect there to be one of those on-site, or if not, it can come by Egorian. Feel free to try other games of that variety using the same requisition.
Abrogail Thrune II: It would be foolish in any of these regards to do any such act for your possession's sake rather than your own. She is liable to notice the difference. What you cannot enjoy for yourself, want for yourself, you should not do.
It would however be equally foolish to want something of your possession and not take it, for what you think is her sake. She wants above all for her owner to be Evil, powerful, and unrestrained. Without those qualities it is not possible for somebody to really be in possession of her. Kindness means nothing from a boy obliged by binds of Goodness to be kind. It is necessary to find your caged cruelty and free it, to lay forcefully to rest her fears over whether it is your will or hers that governs, before she will be freed to fully appreciate those other times when you choose kisses and gentleness instead. Others could give her a soft touch, did she wish that. She would, in fact, have a hard time finding another boy to face down the Queen upon the throne and extort control of her from Cheliax.
Think first of your own wants, and when you are done thinking of those, you should find that there seems hardly any need to think of hers.
-- Abrogail Thrune II, Queen of Cheliax
Abrogail Thrune II: PS: It's fine to owe me favor, or call it due; and better yet if you wish to repay by answering my question in the third paragraph. Any morsels of Law about this matter would be greatly precious to me. But one hears reports that you may be more comfortable if I disclose what some prices would ordinarily be, and you may pay those instead do you wish.
These amounts are not particularly significant to myself - my time in writing this letter would cost more, if I knew how to put any sensible price on it, which I don't - at least, not short of you using your god's spell on me? I would much prefer the answer to my question, even if it's only that you don't know how you knew.
Yet, as I'd have you understand our ways, I will also stretch out my hand for yours. So:
Collar that increases tickling sensitivity: Loan-price 20 gold / week.Metamagic rod of spell extension: Loan-price 150 gold / week (for outright loan, however, not occasional borrowing).Rod applying Curse of Magic Negation: Loan-price 30 gold / week + 300 gold / charge used.
Stay Evil, Abrogail
Keltham: ...he may possibly require a few additional minutes to come to terms with this Letter and fully process it.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Night
Keltham: Yo, Carissa. Good time for Keltham to try that Security test with the heating-stone and keeping Detect Magic running?
Carissa Sevar: Works for her!
Carissa is intensely curious how Keltham will handle pain. Optimistically, maybe dath ilan has been lying to him and he'll realize there's a place for it. Pessimistically....maybe dath ilani are different and pain is actually just bad for them? In which case she's going to need to figure out how to use them in Hell. It would be incredibly wasteful to just have all resentful dath ilani turn into paving stones because no one can figure out anything better, and she's not optimistic anyone else is going to figure out something better.
dath ilan: Keltham would be so confused if he knew what Carissa was thinking! What is there to be curious about? Pain is ouch and bad. If it's severe pain you use mental disciplines to dissociate from it as much as possible. Masochists apparently get sexually aroused by it and submissives feel dominated by it, both facts entirely irrelevant to Keltham who is neither.
Dath ilani try to keep themselves simple, so that their theories of themselves can be simple without being false. "All self-models are potential traps but complicated self-models are actual traps," goes the proverb out of dath ilan. If dath ilani seem complex to the eyes of another world, it's perhaps because they are using some unfamiliar simplicities, shorter words in Baseline. 'Pain is bad and I don't like it' is a perfectly reasonable way for a mind to be, and correspondingly a helpfully simple thing for a theory of the self to accurately say.
Keltham: Keltham notices that part of him is less than cheerful about the fact that Carissa was available, since now an ouch badthing will happen to him. Keltham notices that part of him is scared he's going to perform so unimpressively that Carissa will fall out of love with him.
Keltham proceeds to the cuddleroom anyways. (It's not that this is a sexy thing per se, but that the cuddleroom is in fact where the heating-stone from Subirarchs's collection happens to be.)
"Carissa, I notice that I'm more scared of performing poorly on this test and you thinking I'm unworthy than I am wincing about the upcoming pain. Any strictly truthful remarks that come to mind about that?"
Carissa Sevar: "...dath ilani answer, I expect you won't be very good at it so if you're in fact not very good at it then that won't shift what I think of you, because I could just go ahead and think it now. And you'd properly be compared to other people who just learned cantrips, anyway, not combat wizards with years of training, and even if you do badly by that comparison it's not like I picked you for your security wizarding ability."
Keltham: He notices himself wanting to say lots of things to Carissa, asking her if this is something he really needs to do, telling her about the letter from Abrogail, and what he thought about that, and how that's why he decided he needed to do this...
Explain in detail his theory of how, in fact, he has to do this tonight, because otherwise it's just going to go on nagging at him with the anticipation making it worse...
While Keltham is noticing himself wanting to do all these things, he has gone ahead and touched the heating stone to his left arm, spoken the command word once to attach it and again to turn on the heating effect, and cast and caught Detect Magic.
Of this there is also a discipline out of dath ilan, which is to just go do the thing.
lintamande: At first it doesn't even hurt too badly; it's like touching a hot plate of food, not like touching an open burner. At first. But when you touch a hot thing like that, you put it down, and if you don't, then it does start hurting.
Every round Keltham needs to make a concentration check with a steadily increasing DC. He rolls surprisingly well, actually; it's a full minute before he loses the spell, and even then it's a close thing.
It's about twenty seconds after that that he rips the awful thing off his arm.
Keltham: If by that you mean that Keltham speaks the command word to detach it. Ripping it off is a mistake he won't make; he visualized that process in advance.
Before Keltham channels positive energy to heal himself, he'll see whether he can still cast and catch Light under his present circumstances.
lintamande: It takes a lot more deliberate effort to concentrate than usual, but yes!
Keltham: Keltham will give himself a further minute to experiment with trying out the disciplines that are supposedly supposed to help with dissociating from pain.
(There are lessons you can sign up for, in dath ilan, to get actual practice with that in advance; they are considered Ill-Advised Consumerism for most normal people who probably won't need them, because, like, you will remember that pain. Had Keltham known of his future trip to Golarion, obviously, he would have taken those lessons and a lot of other lessons too.)
...has Carissa been reacting to any of this, at all.
Carissa Sevar: She's pretty sure she should NOT look like she's taking detailed notes for future reorganization of Hell purposes. That would raise questions she is not planning on answering right now.
Carissa Sevar: So she will just be patiently adorably attentive. And have a healing spell of her own ready in case he forgets how in a panic or something. He's not handling it that badly, but, still.
Keltham: At least Carissa doesn't look openly horrified at his performance. Not that she would... yeah, it's not actually much in the way of likelihood-ratio.
Channel Positive-aspected healing energy and done.
Carissa Sevar: Snuggle. "I am very curious what you thought of that," she says truthfully.
Keltham: "Tell you in a moment. Part of me is a lot more worried about what you thought of that. I'm being nice to that part, so you first."
Carissa Sevar: "It's longer than I expected, to the extent I was forming expectations, which I was trying not to because it'd stress you out? Also I really really want to problem solve you being nervous what I'll think of you but probably this is not the time."
Keltham: "I'm aware. My guess is that it gets resolved by time, by success at mining spellsilver, by sufficient deep-down confidence in not-Conspiracy that I start actually trusting truthspells, and by some advice I recently got from Abrogail. Advice that made me think again about whether I'd been holding back and delaying on flinchy-feeling things I should do to adapt to Golarion."
"This was part of that, and -"
"I don't know what I was expecting. It was an ouchy badthing, very ouchy, very bad, it made it hard to concentrate. I would probably need more practice to dissociate from it per standard disciplines, well enough to even leave it on my arm for ten minutes, never mind maintaining Detect Magic through it."
"I'm not... really feeling like more of a native to Golarion as a result. Maybe I should have taken more time to focus on the injury, and experience the fear that healing wasn't real or wouldn't work. So I'd have updated more on injuries being temporary and pain being less of an important signal, after I healed myself."
Carissa Sevar: "Huh.
A thing I get out of pain is a sense of - myself, as something distinct from all the inputs I'm getting, as something stronger than those, and it's a - not a nice feeling exactly but an important one, one I seek out - I don't know if that's what you mean by 'dissociate from it' -"
Keltham: "Nnnnooooo, that's sort of - denying the pain's meaning, denying it as something that's a part of you as opposed to just being there, severing the feelings and thoughts downstream of it?"
Carissa Sevar: "Huh. And - a sense of delight and power from the fact that this is happening and you're enduring it and the thing you are is untouchable by it?"
Keltham: "Nnnnooooope."
"Nooooot even slightly."
"That's, like, somebody who's not a Keeper but who has a lot more 'dignity' than I do, seeing evidence that... say specifically a 'startup founder' realizing their brilliant company is inevitably failing? Updating and throwing away one of their most cherished hopes? A kind of awfulness that means something, that you want to not look away from because the details are part of reality and your pride is to accept reality whatever that is, and where the unpleasantness is part of the process of you becoming a different and better person; and to update correctly in the face of that is your skill and your art and your mastery, which you would execute correctly even if everything else was turning to ash around you."
"I cannot say that I have ever in my life heard it suggested that anybody would want to relate to physical pain that way. It's something you'd want to experience as little as possible. The details of it are the last thing you want. If you were paying attention to it, it would be so you could do the thing where you pay a lot of attention to an emotion and question what it means and look at the perception in so much detail that you've killed the emotion, which, to be clear, is something that's generally considered a hazardous thing to do to one of your emotions."
Carissa Sevar: " - so, uh, it might be that this is a fundamental difference between dath ilani and Chelish people, but when you say that the first thing I jump to is actually just that dath ilani are wrong about this and missing out."
Keltham: "Preeeettty sure it's that fundamental difference one."
Carissa Sevar: "If you can choose how you relate to things at all, even a little, with practice, I don't see why you wouldn't relate to physical pain that way. Not seek it out, maybe, but have the skill to relate to it in that fashion when it comes up."
Keltham: "I'm not sure I can. It feels like a 'type-error'. It's pretty easy to imagine - the direction I'd have to move in, even if for now I've chosen not to go there, to become somebody who could burn his current personality to ash by borrowing Asmodia's headband for an hour, and take pride in his 'dignity' for accepting the hurt and updating."
"Doing that with pain? I don't - know what series of mental changes I'd even try, to do that, regardless of whether or not I want to."
"Physical pain doesn't mean things the way that thoughts do."
Carissa Sevar: "Sure, but the way I relate to it does mean things, and pain as I experience it is - a combination of whatever raw input I'm getting and how I'm relating to it."
Keltham: "I'd definitely have been proud of myself if I'd been able to run through ten minutes holding Detect Magic on my first try. I'm thinking that you mean something else, by all this, but I want to check to make sure I'm not in fact overcomplicating things and missing something that's supposed to be very simple and obvious."
Carissa Sevar: That is not what she means!! What she means is that suffering is a fundamental part of the human experience and that relating to it with strength and joy and satisfaction feels about as basic and fundamental as being able to relate to anything else that way! But she's not sure she should say that!
"That's not the thing, no. I mean, that is very satisfying, achieving something despite it being painful, but I mean - something you can do even if you, I don't know, accidentally injure yourself by walking into a table. Just orienting to that experience as something - like a startup founder getting bad news - it really seems to me like something anyone ought to be able to do -"
Keltham: "Well, any sex worker in Civilization who can do that - even if she's not sexually aroused by the pain, so long as she's - present, participating, doesn't hate it, isn't just enduring it for money, if it means something to her that isn't negative and doesn't completely trash the rest of sex - is no doubt very very very rich."
Carissa Sevar: "- I wonder if this explains the Good people who hate Hell, if they're - like you that way, and assuming everyone is like them -"
Keltham: "In Baseline, 'typical-mind fallacy'. We got training in not doing that, not assuming everyone else was like ourselves. So presumably everybody in Golarion by default runs off and assumes everyone else's brain works like their own."
Carissa Sevar: " - yep, that sounds about right." But it's a pretty big problem how Hell is where everyone should go.
Keltham: "Think I'll try attaching the stone to my arm again, just to see if I can possibly do your thing even though it seems like I obviously can't."
Carissa Sevar: " - huh. I really hope that works."
Keltham: "97% it won't, but don't worry, we get training in being able to do things without being influenced by our belief we can't do them. Don't suppose it counts by the way if I'm also doing this out of my masculine 'gendertrope', and to prove that the pain isn't able to drive me away from doing this again."
Carissa Sevar: "Maybe? If the way you related to pain was having as part of your gendertrope that you are tough and pain is irrelevant to you, it can't touch the thing that you are, that'd be - closer to where I am than the thing you just described."
Keltham: "Just the tough part. I expect that pain in sufficient quantities can touch the thing that I am, break it or erase it in the flood of negative 'feedback', 'neural-circuits' being 'neural-trained' out of existence by the constant enormous 'error-signal' everything gets."
"What I'm proving is that this quantity of pain is not that amount. There's a saying out of dath ilan, 'I have a price, but I'm not cheap.'"
"Now quiet a moment while I actually try this, I want to concentrate."
Carissa Sevar: Obedient quiet Carissa!
(It can't possibly be this easy but it would be really nice, if it could.)
Keltham: Keltham puts the stone on his arm, dissociating from the part of himself that wants to flinch and destroying-by-reflection the fear of just that action itself which is not itself the pain.
He waits until his brain understands that the stone itself is not the pain.
He tries to put himself into the frame of mind of somebody who relates to the coming pain as if that were dignity, as if he were proud of how it cannot touch him, leaving the core of him unchanged.
What's the equivalent for pain of 'I am not my beliefs, I am that which updates them, I am not my plans, I am that which chooses them'? Keltham is not... his pain, he's the thing that is unmoved by it? Negative neural feedback does in fact sort of move people though?? Keltham is not his desire not to be in pain? Keltham sort of thinks he is made out of, among other things, desires like that one?
"Carissa, temporary not quiet: do you know what the equivalent should be of 'I am not my beliefs, I am that which updates them, I am not my plans, I am that which chooses them' for pain?" (This, the second layer of Impartiality, Keltham speaks in Baseline.)
Carissa Sevar: That feels like such an important question and she's never thought about it at all - "I'm not sure, but maybe - I am not what I sense, I am that which - makes sense of it -"
Keltham: All right then. 'I am not my sensory input, I am that which interprets it.' He doesn't really see that helping? But he'll try to take that mental posture anyways. And take pride in being unmoved by the pain, a sense of delight that it cannot destroy him...
Keltham speaks the command word twice.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa prays very very sincerely to Asmodeus to show Keltham whatever it is, if Asmodeus even knows it, that Keltham needs here.
lintamande: He takes slightly longer to get to the point of calling it off, this time.
Keltham: ...and remembers this time to look at the burn left on his arm, the seared tissue that he let just go on getting damaged and damaged. Remembers to feel the fear that he's maimed himself for life, that healing won't work for him this time, that physical injury is real and lasting and scary and destroys your life ever after, until you have to go step into the Future and leave your friends behind not to be seen again unchanged, because your life is so much less happy now and your friends wouldn't want you to stick it out just for them...
And heal.
"Yeah, that... basically didn't work even while I had enough concentration left to try to make it work. The pain kept calling my attention back to it. Trying to say that I was the mind interpreting pain, instead of identifying with the 'sensory-input', didn't help; telling myself that I was strong and delighting that I could pass through it didn't help. What helped was either dissociating from it or my attention briefly going elsewhere before it got yanked back."
"But actual plus side, I remembered to experience the fear of injury, and watch healing work against that. I think I'll have an easier time asking for martial-arts training from Security, now."
(Because Keltham is rather in doubt of his own ability to subdue and chain even Meritxell, with just a Bull's Strength and Cat's Grace, and dath ilani self-defense-only or group-safe-subdual skills.)
Carissa Sevar: "Huh. Well, I'm sorry it didn't work. I think that might mean there are certain kinds of devils you don't get to be but I'm not sure that was on your agenda anyway.
If Security does their jobs you shouldn't - need martial arts training? Though I'm sure they'll help if you want."
Keltham: "It seems important to 'truly-living-in' Golarion that I - stop mentally living in a place where major injuries can't be healed and result in permanent decreases in quality of life. I expect martial arts training to help with that, if it's the kind of training that you wouldn't do in dath ilan because consequences."
He's going to learn that first, get over the simple shock of inflicting and receiving physical violence; and then come back to the question of how he feels about violently physically subduing Carissa, given that it means something deep and positive to her and her sexuality.
Carissa Sevar: - nod. "Makes sense. And I guess we might eventually want to go places not surrounded by bodyguards, once Nidal's defeated, and any other gods that need it."
Keltham: "That thought had not particularly occurred to me. I think that's more a question of having endless spellsilver and enchanters to make our defenses, rather than being able to punch harder than anything that tries to punch us or, you know, toss a dozen fireballs at us... which I am not really seeing the punching thing helping with, but what do I know."
"My bedtime should be soon. Did you want - to try the heating stone yourself, while my handy healing is around?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, I do."
Keltham: Keltham hands it over to her.
"Probability you do this on the first try? I've got mine but it'll be overridden by your probability as soon as you say it."
Carissa Sevar: " - thirty percent? It wouldn't be a test to be Security if most people with the relevant combat experience could do it on the first try, or even if they could mostly do it on the tenth."
Keltham: "Huh. Fair point. I was at seventy, so if you don't do it I'll know I was undercorrecting for Carissa being less exceptional in this quality relative to Golarion security wizard candidates than she'd be in dath ilan."
Carissa Sevar: "I do bet I won't ask you to take it off at any point in the ten minutes, just, I bet I slip up at the cantrip at some point."
And she tries it.
Carissa Sevar: There is something there, even if Keltham's not the kind of entity that can understand it, the sharpness of it, the ways that every instant becomes momentous and significant, the parts of her mind she can feel come alive as she tries to marshal more of herself towards the task than she ordinarily could.
It's awful, of course, but she doesn't mind, she really doesn't, she wishes Keltham could have this -
She loses the cantrip six minutes in. Doesn't ask him to stop, just makes a small sad sound and tries a different cantrip. Holds that one until the end.
Keltham: "Do you want healing on that?"
Carissa Sevar: Why does he always have so many questions.
Noncommital sound.
Keltham: "Yes, yes, you're right, I shouldn't have asked you anything, I should have noticed there was something I wanted without you prompting me to check that within myself, I still haven't been out of my Lawful Good world for two weeks okay."
"Let's try you out on a different task that requires concentration, while you're in pain."
He'll attach the heating stone somewhere, turn it on, and see if that impacts her skill.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is - confused, for a little while, until she puts together - oh, he thought that was hot, watching her in pain. That makes sense. That makes the whole attempt much better, somehow, if Keltham was enjoying it - it's like Abrogail petting her and telling her she suffered beautifully -
- also, she can at this point make him apologize for being Lawful Good just with noncommittal noises, which is progress, if not nearly as good as him actually being Evil.
She will do her tired and distracted best to please.
Keltham: Him seeing her in pain will more than make up for any hitches in her skill, when it comes to succeeding in her task.
(Any unorchestrated reactions there, at this relatively low level of awful pain?)
Carissa Sevar: Yes! Getting your Carissa extremely tired from ten minutes of very difficult magic practice is a good way to get her to forget to overthink everything about her life and reactions and relationship!
Keltham: He is really really happy, and will tell her so, once she's all finished, and he's taken off the heating stone from her and healed her. Carissa in so much pain with her hips writhing as she tries to serve him, is the hottest thing that there is, and he's proud of owning her, and he felt powerful for making her do this, in pain, just because he wanted it, and he's proud of himself for having done some of the work on reshaping her with pain to naturally express feelings again, and he's so in love with her and he doubts any other woman will ever be able to compete.
If this is something that's in Asmodeus's utilityfunction and Asmodeus helped Keltham get it for Asmodeus's own purposes, Keltham still acknowledges the favor owed.
Ending the day like this was the correct decision, including the part where he went through some self-inflicted pain he'd been putting off and now doesn't have to put off anymore. He feels generally better, and though it's not a promise and only time will resolve the prediction-market, he predicts good skill for his next day's work on the Project.
Carissa Sevar: You know what would be nice, is if it was someone's job to tell Carissa telepathically if this was actually a good outcome or if she's just absurdly susceptible to people saying nice things while they hurt her. Abarco didn't say any nice things while he hurt her.
Probably it's fine.
"Not sure you said proud of owning me. Before."
Keltham: "Probably not. But Abrogail's letter to me called you my possession a lot and, you know, fine. If that means I get to keep you." He boops her on the nose. "Socially_constructed-imaginary-ownership_tag pointing to Keltham. If any food crops grow on you, nobody else gets to eat them."
Carissa Sevar: She beams at him wordlessly for a while.
She is pretty sure that is actually quite good news for the project and doesn't just seem like that because aforementioned susceptibility to people who are nice while they hurt her.
"Love you. Love you so much. Not totally sure you understand, still, but - yes. Imaginary ownership tag points to Keltham and you'd be - terrified, by all that means - but 's good. 's really good."
Keltham: "Any parts I don't already know about need to be spelled out and agreed to by me before they take effect. Knowing this, any terror that needs to be handled at that time is my future self's problem."
"...unless there is still cause for my present self to be terrified given that, in which case you should notify me so; the Law governing these matters does tend to imply that, if I would predictably panic later, I should panic now. Problem #6 on conservation of expected evidence, emotional conjugation thereof."
"Should no such further notification be required, however, you are permitted to just cuddle instead of replying."
Carissa Sevar: Snuggle. "Yes, course. It's not - stuff you're supposed to do, anyway, just - stuff that wouldn't get you kicked out of any cities, because people would see the imaginary-tag and go, ah, well, in, that case, it's all right - I'm not making any sense, am I? All my sense goes and flies away when you hurt me enough. No terror. You don't need to be scared."
Keltham: Good good. There shall be additional snuggles then.
In time Keltham shall stagger off somewhat tiredly to his proper bed; the thought that he could also just go to sleep in his cuddleroom will not, in fact, occur to him.
Carissa Sevar: Her boyfriend is a ridiculous alien.
But one who said that he considered himself to owe Asmodeus a favor, if Asmodeus helped him get this.
She puts herself together and drags herself out of bed.
Pilar : "Cookie from Snack Service. Apparently you recently had some sort of unanswered wish or question that I can help you with, somehow. Not my curse, me."
Carissa Sevar: " - huh. I....don't know. Security, can we get a thought transcript?"
Security: Message: They could, but Security is guessing this is about the part where Carissa Sevar recently thought that she wished somebody had the job of telepathically telling her whether this was a good outcome? Security did notice that part, what with him being telepathic but that not, in fact, being part of his job.
Carissa Sevar: Oh. Right. Probably.
Pilar : Pilar will of course wait patiently for further instruction or questions.
Carissa Sevar: "I thought a couple of minutes ago that I wished there was someone whose job it was to tell me if I'd done well or not. I have to say it's very weird that Cayden Cailean is watching my sex life closely enough to catch that."
Pilar : "It's a very weird to be called upon by Cayden Cailean to give somebody else Asmodean theological advice when I'm not a priest of Asmodeus but... I kind of do think I know..."
"Should I say it, sir?"
Carissa Sevar: "Go ahead."