" - right." She goes back over to the other room, heads over to the pile of bodies and finds a +2 headband because Security would be furious at her if she swaps for a +4. Changes it out. 

There are people gathered around for a heal. Of course they didn't interrupt her with Keltham even though he told them to. She tells someone to knock on the door and ask for the heal in five minutes, and then goes back to Keltham.

Dath ilani - shouldn't be weak enough to need two weeks of recovery time after their first experience with somebody trying to kill them, should they?  Though they certainly have a very, very different attitude towards violence than Cheliax.  You learn defense in reality so that aggression stays confined to counterfactuals.  Cheliax has public executions.

Dath ilan has executions too, in a certain sense; if you intentionally cause someone else's True Death, you don't get kicked to the Last Resort, you get forcibly and preemptively cryosuspended.  Not as a deterrent, obviously, because ideal agents ignore those, and Civilization doesn't build structures that would stop working if people became more ideal.  Because anybody that dangerous is more danger than Civilization wants to inflict on the non-true-murderers in the Last Resort.  Civilization has a motive to preemptively suspend people that dangerous irrespective of its effect on incentives; it's not a threat.

Obviously if a Chronicler or a family member asked to be present at the preemptive suspension, and the murderer didn't veto it, Governance would hardly block them.  You could probably do it as an ordinary concerned citizen and it's hard to see Governance stopping them without an overwhelmingly strong reason.  Governance, which has way too much power to say 'no' to things, has to be very circumspect about what it actually says 'no' to, if it doesn't want the Annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival to suddenly turn real.

Keltham has a suspicion that Cheliax's 'public executions' are not 'public' in the sense of 'open to sufficiently concerned citizens wanting to make sure everything has been done correctly'.  It rhymes with Carissa's earlier claim that the thing to do with rats is feed them to other rats in a frenzy of cannibalistic death and sell tickets.  Public executions, Keltham suspects, have tickets; though it's the sort of thing he should check later, maybe by asking Carissa what the equilibrium price of the tickets are rather than if the tickets exist at all, if he's feeling paranoid that minute.

It's not like it's not consistent.  It would pass muster as fiction.  Low-tech society with poorer coordination, sustained by economicmagic, with healing, resurrections, and afterlives.  Losing a finger isn't permanent until the distant Future can restore it; there are clerics.  Not-true-death means you come back - well, you come back if you had enough money to buy insurance.  Life in Golarion must be a pretty different experience for its relatively wealthy people and relatively poor ones!  Like, qualitatively different, two worlds with different tech levels.  But everyone gets the afterlife, it sounds like.  Unless they betray an oath.  Or Nethys touches them.  Or how common is that statue business, he should check with somebody else, Carissa doesn't seem like the type to fret about Statistically Improbable Awful Fates.

And, sure, you can imagine a society like that, where they don't give a shit about violence because the injuries aren't permanent.  Where they don't give a shit about death because resurrection and afterlives.  A society where people getting near the end of their natural healthspan, when they're starting to feel sick enough and stupid enough that they're not having fun, would have violent fights to the death with one another like that's a sporting event - actually maybe public executions wouldn't sell tickets, those are probably much more boring compared to suicide sports.  So why are executions public?  He'll try to remember to ask later.

You could tell a consistent story where a dath ilani boy would be a fragile little flower by comparison to all that, and he'd take a long time to recover from somebody almost sticking him with a sword and instead sticking that sword into a girl he met two days ago.

Keltham doesn't like this story, and he's trying to decide if that's his real self talking, or just his gendertrope.  Well, his gendertrope is him to no trivial degree, he's at 10.2 out of 12 on the gendertrope identification scale.  And it's not like zero optimization ever went into making the masculine gendertrope be a useful target for males to try to live up to.  But still.

But it's more that - Keltham has a sense that - there's something false about Cheliax's rejection of the idea that violence could be harmful.  That it rhymes with Permanent Cheerfulness and Acting Like Sex Still Works Normally.  The pain is still real, the suffering is still real, even if the injury and death are temporary and discarnation isn't the end.  This is like - the sort of weird equilibria exhibited as stuff that might happen, if not for Civilization and not for mental training, hence why people have to go on playing strange games with children to let them be not that.  A proving-things-to-people equilibrium like a duke's crazy son being challenged to prove his courage by racing a rhinoceros.  Where people try to show off really hard how much injury and death don't matter to them, and end up dumping Asmodia's body in a corner without any respect shown to it while her soul's not in it.

If dath ilan had healing and resurrections, it would not be like that.  He doesn't think the Kelthamverse would be like it either.

Or maybe he's wrong.  He hasn't lived in the Kelthamverse plus healing, resurrection, and afterlives.

But the fact that Chelish people still end up in shock for two weeks after their first fight with demons - suggests that their forcing their minds to be disdainful of violence's impact - doesn't quite work.  Is possibly making things worse for them.

"I want to be safe, not feel safer," is what Keltham says to Carissa when she gets back.  "I don't think the foreseeable difference in the psychological impact of a semifamiliar place where an attack happened, versus a completely unfamiliar place somewhere else, is great enough to count against a 0.1% difference in actual securability.  And - maybe this doesn't apply in this case, but - in dath ilan, if a mental shock isn't mostly better in the morning, and hasn't reached a new equilibrium after three days if it's not better in the morning, that would be the point at which you'd talk to somebody smarter or better-disciplined about mental errors you might be making that would cause internal conflicts to get stuck and not resolve.  I won't push myself if it turns out I can't recover that fast, won't try to act outwardly normal if that's not true, but - it's the recovery timescale I would've guessed if you hadn't mentioned anything."

"Oh, and I register with my amateur Security posturing that it seems to me that bringing Pilar back or contacting her early in the afterlife - to see if she has any idea how or why she was put there - is a Security issue higher than her ordinary resurrection priority."

"...yes, I should think that it is. I'll pass that along, and pass along that they should decide where to put us based on whatever's actually safest." What a convenient preference from Keltham. "It'd be great if you're all right in a couple of days, some people are, and you can definitely talk to a priest about it if you want - and some of the ways people aren't all right might be irrelevant to you, like, people get flinchy in similar situations and that's a big liability if you have to hang out on the same wall fighting demons but much less of one if you never have to encounter a Kuthonite again."

"I have ever been through a trauma contingency class and am already forewarned against deciding to never talk to an archon again or wanting to spend the rest of my life staying inside Forbiddances.  But positive reinforcement for double-checking."

"You know, another thing that's conventional wisdom at the Worldwound is that after a big rush all the survivors should get laid, because it prevents trauma. No one really believes it prevents trauma but it's a good excuse."

"Heh.  Conventional wisdom in dath ilan would be wait for the next morning to not form weird associations.  I suspect that, even for a tremendously resilient masculine male like myself, this is a next-morning thing."

"As you like." She thinks the associations are the point, but that sounds like a losing argument. 

If they always follow violence with sex, that could, like, possibly be an important factor in understanding Chelish society.  Still, he shouldn't rush to conclude that a previously unobserved social equilibrium can't have any useful functions for the people who equilibrated with it.

"I wouldn't stop you if -"

Wait what.

Brain probe.

"I... apparently would want to stop you if you wanted to run off and have sex with somebody else instead, unless it was with somebody I already knew and then I might have different opinions depending on my relationship to them?  To be extremely super clear I remember the explicit conversation we had yesterday about that exact topic where it was explicitly said we were not committing to other stuff like that by deciding to have sex."

Snuggle. "But it'd be nice, if it were your call who I had sex with. It'd be sexy. It feels right."

And coincidentally, all of the other girls who marked down high scores on his romantic-interestingness scale, plus one who hid herself and is the traitor, will all have equally impossible and un-realistically-evolvable sexualities configured around the exact details of his unreasonable preferences.

Keltham doesn't say anything about 'how convenient', because this is not, on that hypothesis, Carissa's own fault in any way, nor would she have the ability to explain it.  Unless it's the other path to the same end, Chelish Governance faking an elaborate ero-LARP around him.

Or on the less literary hypotheses of reality - maybe dath ilan has no masochists because nobody ever tried following up severe nonsimulated violence with sex?  He wants to think it can't be that simple because somebody in Civilization really would have figured it out and then figured out a less costly way to get the same result.  But if it's some weird brain thing you can't guess from parts of the model pinned down by other observations, maybe they really wouldn't have figured it out.  Or maybe nobody would volunteer for the Wanting To Be Hurt Process even if it didn't take the nonsimulated violence, because, um.

"Aw crap," Keltham says.  "That gets into serious sex stuff which in turn reminds me.  I wrote down a list of my pending questions that I managed not to ask you during sex.  It was in my bedroom.  I wonder if it survived the invasion.  Or I wonder if Security picked it up.  I used a second-layer-of-naughtiness spoiler cipher to write it, which is the highest level of spoiler I can read reflexively.  Is Comprehend Languages going to go right through that?  It's legit kind of personal."

"Comprehend Languages can't read ciphers. I could go and get -"

There's a knock on the door. "Uh," someone says, ducking their head, "we were told to get you for healing?"

"On it."

While he's doing that Carissa will clean her dress, and tell Security about Pilar and about Keltham's instructions for where to put him, and think at them some more details about the plan, which is approximately just to keep Keltham happy and wait for Maillol who she assumes they'll have just after dawn and who she expects will be really angry with her, though she's not sure about what. And can someone go to Keltham's bedroom and - possibly actually use Shrink Item to move his entire bed to the library, and grab ciphered notes -

"Is this everyone?" Keltham says when he sees the next version of the room.  "I may have two healing surges left, I doubt I have three."

"This is everyone." The room is fairly packed, and nearly all male; most but not all of the new arrivals are uniformed.

Keltham background-notices the gender disparity and background-updates that pseudoviolent professions, well, actually violent in this case, may have the same gendertrope association in Cheliax as in Civilization.  This is too unsurprising to propagate much updateness elsewhere.

Heal.  More?  Heal.

"And that's it for the day."

(Actually, why aren't they already saturated on fourth-circle priests who would have teleported in and done this already?  File it under things to maybe remember to ask later.)

"Security's going to bring you your possessions from your bedroom. I suggested they also bring the bed, since this is the only secured part of the villa right now, we can set it up in that back room."

"Where's everyone else sleeping?  Not to amateur-argue-with-Security but if I'm the only one sleeping here overnight and everyone else is going back to Ostenso, that does seem like the point where it'd be cheaper to set me up in the palace instead of protecting the whole place just for me?  To be clear I'm not expressing a preference, just a puzzlement."

"I think everyone else is probably going to sleep on the library floor."

"I've never actually wanted to sleep in the same bed as other people so I haven't found out if I actually can, but I will at the very least note that I would be okay sleeping in a smaller bed and letting others use my large one.  Even if I picked tonight to be the moment when I find out whether I can fall asleep next to you, which doesn't sound like a terrible thing to try at least once, that still only requires a significantly smaller bed."

"I don't know if the villa of the Archduke of Sirmium has any normal-sized beds but I can suggest that they look. But also, we'll be fine, the girls were about to enlist and there's a lot of sleeping on the ground on the trip up to the Worldwound."

"Keltham?" a tired Security man says from the doorway.

"Question mark?"

"I'm so sorry, but your room appears to have been - targeted as an early priority during the attack. With a lot of Fireballs. We have some people casting Mending now but we don't expect your possessions to be salvageable." His head remains ducked.

Something feels off about his presentation, to Carissa's mental model of Keltham, but she's not sure if it's a Cheliax versus Taldor off or a Golarion versus dath ilan off.