" - well, that was fast," he says, turning to look at her, half annoyed and half amused. "Eventful day, hmmm? Stay there and shut up until I'm at a good stopping place." And he returns to his book.

Asmodia stays there and shuts up.

The more time he reads the better.

They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
...
...
...

"Right!" he says brightly, when he's finished the page he's writing and reshelved the books on the enormous bookshelves paneling the wall behind him. "Well, they'll probably raise you, which makes trying to get any actual training done a waste of time, but they might take their time about it. What's your guess, for how long?"

The thought crosses Asmodia's mind to lie, but only very briefly.  If she was found out, it might be a very poor start to her stay in Hell.

"It - my priority depends on whether the shadows got Keltham too, or if they can raise him - there's a chance I'll be a high priority, I don't know what that chance is - do you know what's happening in Cheliax right now, in the place I died?"

"You can lie, if you'd like, I don't mind," he says cheerfully. "If I minded I would simply make the punishment more fun until I was once again indifferent about whether you lie. You have to preserve your patience, if you do a lot of training new petitioners. I think we are getting the gossip ahead of everyone who isn't officially in line for it, what with you having come straight to me - good girl, by the way - but we'll know soon, from whether Dis has soldiers in the streets, whether there's a broader fight or a one-off bit of nonsense." Conspiratorially: "I think there might be a broader fight."

He can read her mind, then.  "I was reading a math book in my bedroom when I heard a Security alert telling me to resist negative energy, which I can't do, and then shadows attacked me and I died pretty quickly.  I don't know - why that place was swarmed with shadows, except, obviously, that they would have been after -"

"Sir, are you authorized to know about Keltham and his project?  I do not have any grasp of that but if you are reading my mind you know I am being sincere when I say that I don't know whether Hell has cleared yourself to know about it."  If he can see her mind then he knows that she is being very sincere, very humble, and only trying to serve Asmodeus's purposes and interests, when she thinks about how she is trying not to think about thoughts that may be classified information.

"You know," he says, "it's such a shame, how you want to be eaten by daemons. I think you'd make a quite satisfactory contract devil yourself once you'd had training. A real waste. Which means, of course, it'll be more expensive, for you to get what you want, since you're trying to buy something quite valuable away from those who lay claim to it. Did you ever consider being totally worthless? Of course, then, I suppose you'd have nothing with which to buy even your very worthless place keeping the floors shiny." He gestures, and, yes, there's a face there, moving very subtly in the glossy black tile, distorted like it's far away and underwater. Screaming, obviously. 

"I am authorized to know the business of anyone I own; if that means I just got a promotion, so be it, and if someone thinks I am not suited to the promotion and tries to kill me, so be that too. It would be a great sickness in the heart of Hell, were it ever correct for you to withhold something from me. If I feared this hypothetical promotion, I might choose to sell you off right away without asking, but that would be my choice, not yours. Do you understand?"

"Yes.  The shadows were obviously after Keltham who, if he knows anything like what he thinks he knows, and I think he does, is potentially the greatest weapon and asset that Cheliax has.  Keltham knows - Law, math standing behind things, underneath the world, underneath thoughts, ideas that could obviously be used to create weapons if somebody wanted but he somehow doesn't think like that."

Asmodia wonders why there might be a broader fight, what sort of broader fight, but doesn't have the temerity to ask - well, she thought it, so he knows it, but she hadn't meant to do that to ask.

"Fascinating," he says. "Write down everything you've learned since you heard of Keltham, while it's fresh. The quill on the left draws your blood; you may do a draft in ink, first, if you'd like, which would be the quill on the right. The potions on the third shelf help clarify the memory; they'll burn your tongue out, so if you have anything to say you may as well say it now."

That's pretty tame for Hell, she can't stop herself from thinking, if that was all there was to Hell, it wouldn't be that bad.  It's a really stupid thought and she already knows that he has an unending depth of torments vastly worse she does not need to be told or shown that part.

"If there's anything I should prioritize in case I get Raised almost immediately, sir.  Whether you mean me to write down math and ideas I learned from Keltham or also - all the strange things happening around him, like Ione getting book powers from Nethys and Pilar getting oracled by Cayden Cailean and the Queen suddenly deciding that Carissa Sevar is worth sleeping with, and all of that sort of stuff."

Why the writing works better in her blood if it's possible to draft in ink, she does not need or want that answered it isn't meant as a defiance her brain just wonders that sort of thing and she knows it isn't needful for her to know it.  Why she wouldn't just be told to take the third-shelf potion right away.

The devil has been only half attending to her, flitting around getting more books off the shelves, but at that he stops. 

"Carissa Sevar," he says. "Tell me more."

(Who the FUCK is Sevar actually.  EVERYTHING SHE JUST SAID and the FIRST THING he wants to hear about is SEVAR?)

Keltham has discovered the very strange pleasure of snuggling somebody who can't snuggle back.  You wouldn't think this would make any sense, and yet, there's a strange... you know, he's not even going to analyze, he's just going to wrap his limbs around Sevar while she can't wrap back, and enjoy that for some reason.

Eventually his brain pings him with an impending boredom warning, because he is still, unfortunately, a dath ilani, and this activity is not one of vast complexity.  He can either escalate it, down a path where he's not quite sure what is or isn't sex, or he can restart the conversation from pre-forbidden-topic.  Keltham opts for the latter.

"Ready to be talked with while you can't escape?" Keltham says.

"Mmhmm."

"So I've got - smaller questions, subquestions.  Like how, when you told me that you'd made yourself prettier, I felt this weird sense of - both ownership of your appearance, or something, and a worry that you thought you weren't already attractive for me, like my brain thinks I'm now the center of your decision process -"

"I think it's all part of a larger question, that I think is a common thread running through my notes that got lost, but maybe you want to start with a smaller question first."

" - yeah, no, I think there's probably a larger thing there. So, some people just like hitting people in the bedroom, and that's fine, but it seemed likely once you mentioned you were growing romantic feelings - that you actually want an overall romantic relationship dynamic that's built the same way, where you have power and ownership and make decisions, where my sexuality is for you, and is yours to shape and enjoy and make demands of. And so I would predict you'd want - lots of things in that sphere."

Keltham takes a deep breath.

"So, you've now ever been partially exposed to snippets from the basics of the basics of childhood training for dath ilani, you don't have zero idea of how we see reality.  We're used to knowing things legibly.  Including places where Golarion might have the idea that it's important for people to obscure things, because you've built a weird not-quite-Lawful thing which requires illegibility to work."

"Like - bargaining, the way you first described how somebody would do that for my shirt.  You can imagine a non-dath-ilani with a shirt thinking 'oh no, I must conceal that the true value of my shirt to me is just a million gold pieces, if they think it's really five million I can get a higher price, if they know it's one million they can just give me an ultimatum to take one million one hundred thousand take it or leave it.  A dath ilani wouldn't be scared of things becoming legible, because they have more Lawful approaches that don't disadvantage them in the presence of that legibility; they know the right thing to do is refuse unfair but mutually beneficial trades with very high probability.  The real value they put on their shirt isn't a secret for them the way it's a secret for somebody bargaining the usual way for Golarion."

"I mean, if they were playing by Golarion's rules, they might still try to make the other person think it was five million if that was the game.  If it wasn't anything serious like negotiations with Cheliax, I could see myself playing the bargaining game the illegible way if that saved me time explaining things, I'd try to have fun with it even, though I doubt I'd be very good at it on the first try.  But I'd have a legible game to fall back on if the illegible game blows up or isn't going my way."

"If you're used to that being the way things are, trying to play an illegible game with no known legible Law underlying it feels like walking on wet ice... you don't have a lot of ice.  Feels unstable, like you're about to put your foot down wrong and fall over, any second.  As kids they train us to keep going anyways and parse the universe as we run through it, but that doesn't make illegibility feel safe."

"There's places even so where Civilization would - give somebody a hug and tell them it was okay to not be totally legible right away.  A mother who just gave birth to a child doesn't need to immediately put a value in unskilled-labor-hours on her baby's life, how much she'd pay to avert a 0.1% chance of various bad things happening, any of that.  Anybody who burst in and started quizzing her about that would be ejected from the maternity hospital and probably from most of the cities in Civilization."

"But when Civilization gives someone a hug and tells them it's okay not to make up numbers today, what that relies on, very crucially, is the expectation that the numbers the mom isn't making up and doesn't know to herself are roughly correct numbers in the sense of leading to roughly the same decisions as better numbers would.  The reason we give a hug of it's-okay-not-to-be-legible-today to the mom who just gave birth is that, if she did make up numbers about the value of her baby's life to her, they'd be more like four million labor-hours than four labor hours.  She's not going to frantically drop her baby in order to save a water-glass from falling and breaking.  If you expected her to get decisions like that wrong you'd tell her to make up legible numbers immediately and run them past somebody else."

"Someone tells me that she's given herself to me, to do with as I want, and if I'd grown up in Golarion we'd probably both be fine from there.  But in reality, I'm pretty sure there would be some things I could do that were really not what you had in mind, like, like taking that sharp thing... +3 vicious nasty bigsword, and killing you with it, and then after you're brought back I just kill you again and tell Cheliax not to bring you back that time.  That is probably really not what you had in mind, and just to be very clear, it is not what I had in mind either.  And you can't spell out things like that for me, my model predicts you replying, because then it's you telling me what I can't do, and contrary to the nature of this thing the way it needs to be.  In this case there's no problem, right, because it so happens that I don't want to do that to you, my brain is generating the correct answer despite it being illegal to tell me an underlying Law.  But that also means I'm playing an illegible game that has no known legible game behind it, and I feel like I'm walking around on wet ice every time I try to think about moving forward with it, because I did not grow up in Golarion, and I am not confident that the numbers I'm not making up are roughly correct ones."

"Done."

Actually if that specific thing happens she'll be so fucking promoted in Hell, but there's no way to - oh, wait, yes there is. 

"I contemplated whether you might do that and decided if you did I would have an incredibly lucrative storytelling gig in Hell telling people about the fascinating very brief experience of trying to explain sadism to an alien from another world.

- uh, I realize that was just an example."

"...this feels like some strange reflection of a dath ilani's dignity where you can't possibly offend them in various ways without making a deliberate and adversarial effort about it.  Except it's about you being - invincible, not something that can be truly hurt by anything - something like that."

Carissa finds herself noticing that she shouldn't lie about how her sexuality works because she has no idea what the Second Law of inferring peoples' sexualities does. She assumed Keltham noticed she was faking earlier through training she could learn to subvert but if he's using the Second Law, then the only way out is truth, not necessarily her truth but real truth, the only thing that will have the right truth-properties on the Shadow Plane Of - what did he call them - tropes.

"....part of Chelish dignity is definitely that you only offer deals if you genuinely mean them, that you're not relying on any - altruism or mercy of the other person that was not specified up front. In practice, if you like the sort of things I like, that - kind of means you have to be awfully invincible? Or - mostly I slept with people at the Worldwound where the treaty proscribed them killing or permanently disabling or kidnapping me, and that was enough. 

I don't think the core thing that is important to me is being invincible. I think the core thing that is important to me is - not being foolish, and if I assumed there was some safety where there wasn't, then that was foolish, especially across a species gap, so I had to assume there might be none, and it's very satisfying, to be able to assume that.... and another part of it is that something very important to me is being safe. I think part of why I like being hit is that - one way of being safe, right, is to never have bad things happen to you, but another is to never have bad things be bad for you, to transmute them all through arousal and the admiration of others and sheer determination into something that you're good at, and prized for. I feel safer when someone is hitting me than I ever feel otherwise, because I know I can handle something I didn't previously know I could. You could drive a sword through me, no one would stop you, but I'm safe even if you do, so I'm not scared....I don't know if I'm making sense." She's not lying, though.

"I'll try trusting you about it, then," he says, in almost a whisper, feeling rather scared himself.  Until you tell me to stop.  He doesn't say it aloud; it's supposed to be illegible.

HOW is Sevar DOING that.  Abrogail has repeatedly glanced over at the transcript, reading every few steps as the quill writes them; and Abrogail can't understand anything about how Sevar figured out how to say exactly what she said.  Maybe it'll come clear once she gets the full transcript with Sevar's thoughts, but Abrogail somehow doubts it -

"We are in the middle of a war," hisses Aspexia Rugatonn.  "Asmodeus is in the middle of a war.  Pay attention."

"I am.  The war is predictable."

Carissa can't think of anything to say that'd possibly improve on that outcome, so she just lets all her delight show on her face.