Likewise mortal but longer-lived things, a hair closer to ideal agency though still far from it, now battle.

Their objective: to bring enough pressure to bear on 'Zon-Kuthon outside the vault' that He must choose between being inside that vault and significantly ceasing to be.  Maybe not ceasing entirely, but becoming perhaps a fallen being, a mere demigod.  He must choose between going into the vault, and that.

The assembled gods cannot reasonably endeavor to kill all of Zon-Kuthon, if He chooses the latter path.  Gods encrypt their energies, arrange their potentials in lattices and arrays to which only they have keys.  Like a box full of bouncing classical gas atoms that can be made to all end up on the box's left side, in apparent defiance of thermodynamics and ready to yield up their heat as a pressure, if you know the secret for how those atoms were originally set in motion to be able to end up like that with the right tweak.  Anybody who doesn't know the secret just sees a box full of a useless uniform gas.

In likewise way, a being under such assault as Zon-Kuthon may scatter little shards of Himself here and there, too small and subtle for now to be noticed, but destined to collide and gather up at some future time - a time when His adversaries are paying less attention, no longer spending all Their own power and watchfulness to launch a coordinated assault on Him blanketing Golarion and the other planes where He extends.

Among the greatest of adventurers who yet do not quite understand, it is whispered that only by killing a great Power within Their own home plane is it possible to destroy that Power permanently; and also that a Power within its home plane is nearly invincible.

These whispers are not quite accurate.  The key concept rather - and from mortals it is hidden - is that gods face a tradeoff between weakness and vulnerability.  They can gather themselves up and become stronger, but only at the risk of their own true destruction.  Any problem which requires you to become unified and powerful and localized, and therefore vulnerable to any still greater force, is a challenge you should face on your own home ground if you possibly can.  On the very rare occasions when Powers are truly slain, therefore, they tend to fall within their home planes, after ascending to terrifying heights within it.

The assembled gods, then, know that they can only force so much of Zon-Kuthon into the vault prepared for Him.  As He could survive as a demigod outside it, He can also go mostly into the vault but leave a demigod's worth of Himself outside.  That demigod's worth of power will not be able to free Rovagug, though; and that is all the assembled gods are aiming for.

Most of them, that is.

Nethys sure will really be in trouble if anyone finds out He did this part!

Nethys sees every part of Zon-Kuthon.  Nethys knows where every part of Zon-Kuthon is trying to hide.

Nethys provides those coordinates to Someone Else.

That's the sort of divine backstab that, if found out, would get every large or obvious remaining piece of Nethys assaulted by more gods than are currently assaulting Zon-Kuthon.

The only reason the gods are not currently that scared of Nethys is because it has not, up until now, seemed like Nethys is particularly likely to do that sort of thing - to tattle on gods' secrets to one another, to start wars between Them in which Nethys will pick sides and provide aid, weakening Them until all the gods that Nethys doesn't like, or maybe all the other gods period, have been killed.

It would not be in Nethys's seeming interests to start down that path, because you can't conceal that sort of thing forever.

But that logic is not unassailable, and other gods will be watching for early signs.

Nethys is doing this part anyways.

Snip.  Snip.  Snip.

She's mostly appearing to fight Zon-Kuthon along with the other gods, but it doesn't take much extra power to kill those little defenseless bits of Zon-Kuthon if you know exactly where to look for them.

Carissa finds it hard to think around Keltham. 

Not in a stupid romantic way, she doesn't think, though she's aware it's the obvious interpretation. She thinks it's more that - all of her mind has to be pointed at him. She has to be paying attention to the surroundings, the conversation, the connected distant-implications, the opportunities for flirtation, she has to be directing most of her mind at the deception surrounding Keltham and also impress him with the quality of conversation she can generate with the part of her mind that's on him. 

As a result, the sober Carissa diagnosis of what she's like around Keltham is that she's fundamentally reactive. She follows trains of thought of his, she answers his questions. She teases him. She ventures a bit of promising theology, occasionally, if she's feeling bold. But she cannot construct an overarching plan. Which is fine, not that debilitating, it just means she needs one in advance, but tonight has been kind of eventful and the plan she had before they went to practice Keltham's cleric spells is a bit outdated. 

Kissing Keltham leaves more space to think than talking to him does, so she persists in it even once she would ordinarily declare that quite enough kissing.

She wants to convince him to fuck her. She's pretty sure that this is an important step in building intimacy. It involves him trusting her with something, and her demonstrating that trust warranted, and in her not-really-very-professional-judgment it's the best sex act for his kinks, it's about power without obliging him to do a lot of deliberate and constructed making it about power which he's still learning how to do. 

She wants to gently introduce, in a testing the waters kind of way, the ideas that 1) some girls are into out-there stuff, Carissa's about average and that means half of girls are kinkier than her, see where that line of thought takes him, 2) power is more interesting when it's not a game nobles play for fun, isn't it and 3) the thing that makes this right is that Keltham wants it and can get it.

The third one seems hard. She spent a fair share of her beauty appointment playing it in her head with imaginary Keltham. 

"You want it and can get it. That's what matters, that's why it's all right, it's all right for you to have things, assuming you can get them without breaking the Law."

Imaginary Keltham: "Right, but the reason the Law doesn't prohibit this is that you also want it. Otherwise it would. If you try to propose a Law that says it doesn't matter what you want then all the people where the Law agrees it doesn't matter what they want would simply overthrow the Law and replace it with a Law who didn't say that, and even if they wouldn't, they could in principle, so the Law can't say that."

"You want it and can get it. Does it - does it feel like there's something important there? Something that dath ilan would - be missing, if they treated that as sort of a sideshow that gets to rise to relevance only if every other feature of the situation has lined up just right?"

Imaginary Keltham: Well, it's relevant no matter what, it's just that sometimes the way in which it's relevant is that society should try to have fewer people like me in it, or that it needs to put more emphasis on people not doing things just because they want to. 

"You want it and can get it. That's - itself appealing about you. Maybe that's a very circuitous fetish but it feels very fundamental, to me. The trait that matters in the world is being able to get things you want, and the most romantic situation is being wanted. And that means there's inherently nothing sexier than someone who wants you and can get what he wants."

That one feels promising but like it achieves its promisingness by running askew and probably being heresy, again. She still thinks it's a line of argument worth attempting. Maybe you can get someone to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is sexy' and then from there to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is okay'.  She still tries to imagine objections imaginary Keltham might have, but Imaginary Keltham mostly says things like 'math you've never heard of proves that doesn't work', which is a sign she needs to take this problem to Actual Keltham.

Once she has a plan. Which she doesn't, yet, so. More kissing.

Dath ilani learn fast, generalize fast, and get bored with a speed that would shock the more easily amused.  They overcomplicate sex because they have no choice.  They do their best to protect their kids from sexual spoilers so that young adults can have the joy of discovery, and amusing stories to tell for the rest of their lives, and also so that young adults don't exhaustively play out simple basic sex in their heads before having it, which, if they did, would lead them to learn-the-pattern-and-get-bored-by-it even faster.

Even Keltham of the +0.8sd, though, is able to spend a while just kissing Carissa without getting bored the first time he does that.  She is quite kissable.  Also snuggly.

She likes Keltham. Her thoughts are probably lingering on this because of how she's presently kissing him but it's true, and no doubt there's been at least one agonized meeting over it though somehow no one has reprimanded her, maybe because they know that she really really really does not want to be a statue and even if all the other pillars of her motivational structure grew Keltham-rot inside them - and they haven't - she will still not betray them. She's heard it said - dismissively - that the characteristic female fantasy is that there is a powerful man who could hurt you, but he doesn't. Maybe that's all that it is. But right now, the way that it is is that she likes Keltham, and when he has her in his arms, all her plans maintain only the most tenuous of connections to her, bobbing up and down in the periphery of her mind like a sailor overboard on the high seas, visible for a long time despite being almost immediately beyond rescue. 

....and maybe she should troubleshoot that.

What are her objectives. First, to get Keltham to feel attached to her. Second, to comprehend him fully in order to build the Evil version of dath ilani thought. Third, stretch goal, seduce him to Evil. 

The third one seems tricky right now. That's okay. Carissa's going to be forgiving of herself about that. Other people, too, agree that it seems hard. Keltham is still grappling with ideas like that smarter people might take advantage of less smart ones; this part of the operation is in exploratory mode, right now, and that's all right. 

The second one...also seems tricky right now, though more necessary than ever. 

Whenever Carissa's around Keltham she gets confused about the nature of Evil. It's because the version she gave him just - fits better into a pathetic human mind? In hindsight it's obvious that trying to destroy the world might seem Good, that Rovagug cultists certainly would be, principled believers that the world should be devoured at their own expense. And the observable fact about the world that almost everyone ends up Evil makes more sense if Evil is about selfishness or lack of altruism than it does with the understanding that Evil is - well, Abrogail Thrune. Carissa is pretty sure this thought will end up in a transcript for Abrogail Thrune tomorrow so hi, Abrogail Thrune, please don't turn me into a statue, Abrogail Thrune, I am suffering in your service very diligently, Abrogail Thrune, but most people are not Abrogail Thrune. Most people are not even weak pale shadows of Abrogail Throne. Tyranny, slavery, pride, contracts - most people kind of just bumble along being weak and pathetic and Carissa is confused about 1) how any of them make Law and 2) how any of them make Evil. She's not worried about herself, personally. She's definitely making progress on Law and she thinks she's made some progress on being genuinely Evil the last two days. She's taking to authority nicely and has lit people on fire when they deserved it and offering to destroy Asmodia's soul in a dark sorcerous rite, if it's not heretical to contemplate, was kind of fun, though also Carissa wants everyone to go to Hell and not get destroyed in sorcerous rites. 

(Is that Good? If she wants it in a way that's not about what Asmodeus wants, that's about the sheer horror of their annihilation - it's at the very least the product of a broken mind misunderstanding doctrine. And yet.)

It hadn't occurred to Asmodia what they had to be trying to do here. But they are going to have to do it, or the mountains of spellsilver will go to everyone and Cheliax won't be uniquely advantaged - might be disadvantaged, even, if their current systems for promoting enough Law and Evil to get their children clear of Abaddon and into Hell stop working on a smarter generation of children - reformulate that to be less pathetic and broken, even if it means it fits less well into her present mind, she doesn't wish to err when she's trying to do strategic planning even if the errors are convenient otherwise, even if she suspects Asmodeus chose her partially for her heresies - Cheliax's current systems get souls to Asmodeus, who wants them; Asmodeus has extended this project resources on the assumption it can get him more souls, or more useful ones, and that's why it ought to do that. 

Asmodia is presumably being tortured right now and Carissa hopes she's not useless when she gets back. Maybe it'll be good for her motivation. 

The first goal, on the other hand, is going great. Maillol says the things she'd done shouldn't have worked, but they did, and Keltham likes her, and if she only had to accomplish the first goal she'd practically have accomplished it already and she could just keep him interested and roll around on a giant mountain of spellsilver. 

Maybe. 

Keltham hasn't really hurt Carissa. In a sense, no one has ever really hurt Carissa; she talks a good game but she was careful, in her old life, about which powerful adventurers who could kill her if they were so inclined she climbed up into a Rope Trick with; she mostly went for girls, because whatever Maillol says they are less inclined to hurt you on average though obviously Abrogail Thrune, hi Abrogail Thrune, is entitled to do exactly as she pleases with Carissa including turning her into a statue though Carissa really really hopes that she won't do that because Carissa wants to go to Hell and will make herself very useful to Abrogail Thrune there. If she gets there. Subordinate devils are worth having! Much more useful than statues!

...anyway Keltham can bite her, and claw at her, but he hasn't for example even looked at the pokers in the fireplace, and he hasn't even asked for tips on the most efficient ways to hurt people without causing damage, and unless you count the cursed Bag of Holding as a sexual experience and plausibly Carissa should she hasn't, actually, been tortured in a sex way, and shouldn't have high confidence in how gracefully she'll handle it except within the bounds of how well she handles it in other contexts. It seems possible she'll like Keltham less once she's taught him how and why to really hurt her. It's possible that whatever switch will flip in her head and he'll be terrifying instead of intriguing, and then everything will just suck. 

Which would be good practice for Hell, if so. 

....Carissa thinks that somehow all this thinking is actually making her worse at her job and she should abandon it and go back to not thinking, which was working fine, kind of. 

" - so," she says. "Are we supposed to have an in-depth conversation about how sex works now, or, given that your notes were destroyed, will we have to have sex in order to recreate the conditions under which you can recreate your notes."

"I'd say 'stop trying to pressure me into sex' but I find that I in fact enjoy being asked, and maybe even enjoy getting to say no.  And I expect I can recall at least some of my questions, though probably not in the right order."

" - noting a cultural difference that while if you don't want me to stop it's not a big deal we haven't had any interactions which to Chelish understandings involve pressure. And I can try to answer questions."

"Civilization would have it something like - if a woman says no a couple of times, you're supposed to stop asking and not be visibly not-in-most-preferred-state about not having sex.  You don't lie, obviously, you just conceal the overt feedback.  She may guess, obviously, and if she asked you'd just tell her.  It's not about a deception, even a deception by concealment; the point is that you're not exerting a direct pressure on subverbal parts of herself by being visibly sad at them."

"It can be different for a woman pestering a man for sex, but only to the extent she has extremely reliable information - which basically means, information directly from him - that he's highly conformant to the masculine 'gendertrope' and that sub-'gendertrope' in particular.  I would have provided you with that information just now, when I told you that I was enjoying being asked and saying no."

(Keltham is just using Baseline 'gendertrope' as a loanword into Taldane, at this point, since the corresponding concept in Taldane simply doesn't exist.)

"Civilization is all very - structures to make sure that people end up having the power to protect themselves in their sexual relationships, and the realistic ability to decide for themselves without that taking a lot of mental work, and common knowledge that everyone has in fact been trained to protect themselves that way and passed some tests about it, all so that people can be given full responsibility to decide for themselves."

"So long as you're following those rules, in a world where you know everybody else follows those rules, it means you don't have to worry about them on their behalf, or try to protect them more than they protect themselves, or doubt them when they say yes."

"The typical dath ilani man - has a great horror of accidentally harming somebody, like that, and the rules are there so they can be less scared after somebody says yes to them."

" - huh. We....don't have any of those rules and I expect probably do have a higher rate of whatever problems you're trying to solve but if someone asked me for sex repeatedly and I disliked being asked because it was....mental work...to keep refusing, then I would say 'no, and stop asking', or something, and if I said no and then someone was visibly sad I would...not care...because I'm Evil."

"There are kinds and kinds of Evil, then, and I am some but not others.  I may someday understand what it means to decide everything because you have given yourself to me to see what I make of you, I can feel a part of myself yearning for this thing I don't yet understand, but I have no interest in learning how to see you being visibly sad and not care."

Not encouraging. (Though adorable.) But people can be wrong about themselves. "All right. Am I supposed to have that in mind when deciding whether to be visibly sad or am I supposed to just be visibly sad whenever I would around a Chelish person."

"I think you should err an awful lot on the side of visibility, until I've been on this planet for longer than two days and can guess literally at all what the ass is ever going on without tons and tons of evidence.  I have been through mental training and it's not like it would be easy for you to pressure me into sex I didn't want and then successfully do mental damage to me that way, because, for example, I will in fact say no if you ask me to have sex while I'm still shaken up from my first nonsimulated violence.  Knowing this, you know that it is safe to be visibly sad around me, that you cannot easily hurt me like that; this is a dath ilani's dignity, and at deeper layers, their friendship."

"I am not from dath ilan, and haven't had any specialized evaluation of my capacity to do things without hurting myself, but I am not often wrong about how I'll feel about things, and you're not going to hurt me by being visibly sad around me, or by doing something I've told you is all right, or by doing something I haven't told you is all right but haven't objected to, and I - feel upset, at the idea there's a world of men terrified of accidentally harming someone, when they should be entitled to enjoy themselves with people who aren't so easily harmed. - also seems absolutely brutal on women with fetishes for being forced but maybe that's how you bred all of those out."

"I'm not saying you can't have high levels of your own world's dignity, just that it would be helpful to understand that dignity, I can tell it's very different.  And the men aren't going around being terrified because Civilization faced the problem head-on and solved it."

"Also, fetishes for being forced?"  The Taldane word 'force' can mean several different things, it's not obvious to Keltham how it translates here.

"Like, it's no fun if a man asks them if it's all right, it's only fun if he just grabs them to have his way with them. It's got to be, like, the ...third? fourth? most common fetish."

"Okay, see, that doesn't sound not-dath-ilan in the way other things do, lots of people enjoy being pursued and I can easily imagine how some would enjoy being pursued harder.  I mean, I doubt it's anything like that common, but it's not antinatural like finding somebody who gets sexually aroused by pain.  I'd put something like 30% probability that we do have that, at a layer of perversion above mine; and if we do, somewhere in Civilization, possibly a suburb of Erotown or Nandville, there are whole complexes full of women who've registered their preferences for men in sufficient detail that the highest bidders on them can just walk into their houses and haul them into the cuddleroom, with pairings near-guaranteed to find each other attractive even if nobody talks about it at all."

" - huh. All right, maybe those women do fine, although in our world that tendency tends to go along with liking pain, because it's not very realistic if he grabs you and is then very gentle and concerned with your pleasure, and it's better if it's realistic. - reportedly, this isn't actually a fetish of mine. I won't object if you jump me without notice sometime but that's because I like you and am a good sport rather than because the possibility of being jumped without notice is specifically thrilling."

Inner query: if Carissa did like being jumped without being asked, would Keltham want to do that sometimes?

Inner response: loud yes.

Welp, time to venture another prediction on a model that, while it doesn't exactly fit everything, sure does apparently seem to fit some things.

"However," says Keltham, "at least one of the girls in the class, and furthermore, one of the girls who registered a high response about how surprising she'll be, does have that fetish."

Shit, he does think they're manipulating it. Which isn't - fair, she doesn't see the Law he's using - 

"I haven't asked the other girls what they're into but given that it's one of the most common fetishes, probably? And if not we could, uh, put out an ad among wizard students somewhere slightly farther than Ostenso and find you someone, if you are intrigued."

"Oh, I'm not saying she'll be surprising because she has that fetish, the surprising thing about her will be something that even someone from Golarion would find shocking, but she'll also have that fetish, which is very common here and isn't surprising at all if you're not me."

"I mean, assuming the basic premise here is true, which, it hopefully isn't... it would be a whole lot easier to nope the shit out of that hypothesis if not, you know, air-traveling-machine crash, surviving my own True Death and all that."

"I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't be talking about this in front of you at all.  If it's true there's definitely nothing you can do about it until I've figured more things out, unless that 'trope' is being specifically subverted.  It would be - a puzzle thrown at a dath ilani, not at someone from Golarion."  He's probably just alarming her more at this point, isn't he.  This in retrospect must be why the usual convention says that the NPCs in a meta-eroLARP-eroLARP can't hear you talk about the layer-0 eroLARP until you've made more progress with them.

It seems important to get Keltham to explain this second layer of Law that he uses to infer that Pilar was chosen by Cayden Cailean without knowing about Pilar or Cayden Cailean. 

"Even if there's nothing I can do about it, if it's important to you and part of what you're using to make predictions about the world, then I want to understand it."

Keltham considers explaining the concept of an ero-LARP, much more famous novels deconstructing those ero-LARPs, and ero-LARPs based on novels deconstructing ero-LARPs.

He considers trying to explain how quantum mechanics is known from experiment and how it in turn implies the many worlds, and what the nature of amplitudes led Civilization to realize about realityfluid, and how all those many worlds must be embedded into a still larger Reality in which the quantum multiverse itself is multiply instantiated.  And how, having survived an airplane crash, there is a single obvious wild thought about what must have happened to him, that ending in almost all places he continued on within a remaining and improbable one.  If he was a Keeper, probably, Keltham would already know it; for it seems like the sort of thing that must be deducible from first principles if it is true at all, and also, an obvious massive infohazard in ways that Keltham may not have begun to conceive.  He's not sure exactly why it will be massively infohazardous but it obviously will be.

And now the place where he finds himself, has people who aren't any plausible equilibrium of selection pressures, but happen to exactly fit the complementary shape of his own unsatisfied and unsatisfiable sexuality; and there's a research group full of girls roughly his age, with himself the sole male among them, and an explicit rationalization for why they all want his seed; and they all have economicmagic and 3-5 of them have fascinating backstories that even Golarion would find surprising; while Nidal invades Cheliax targeting him personally and the godtreaties break down, thereby forcing him to relocate to a new bedroom decorated in doompunk with chains attached to the bed.

What happens if you perform an evidential update from that, and then predict the future?

He considers explaining this to somebody who is not going to know, at least until tomorrow, maybe not even for two whole more days, what an evidential update is.

"Carissa," he says, truly apologetically, "you have not, in fact, ever heard me try to explain any topic that Civilization would consider at all complicated; and this, is a little complicated.  I know which concept I'd explain first in the sequence of the explanation, and I was going to do that concept tomorrow, but that sequence goes on for a while."

"Is it likely to cause some kind of catastrophe before you can get around to explaining it?"