- okay. Carissa's project authority absolutely does not extend to giving the Queen of Cheliax orders but -

- no! You're bad at understanding where Keltham understands selection to be operating, it's over entire universes. More urgently, the thing to say here is 'I suppose I appreciate you presenting so clear a test of whether your theory is true. I....hope very much that it isn't, but if the Queen of Cheliax ends up inevitably in conflict with you then we'll prepare you for the betrayal of a Kuthite spy; I don't need to understand the patterns to acknowledge that if they're making good predictions they might keep doing that.'

And then once my Ring of Sustenance is working you can have me every night as long as Keltham doesn't end up concluding he was directed to this universe because it'd be the one out of an infinite number where he has the most fascinating sex.

"More that the universes with a Queen who doesn't complicate things would have failed to exist in the first place, or maybe from my perspective it's more that I inevitably landed in a universe with a Queen who would.  Though from your perspective, if the other universes still exist, it's arguable you should conclude that it's too unlikely that... well, never mind, that starts to trail off into complications again."

Keltham's thoughts are pretty full of ~~~~~~ right now, from the perspective of anybody listening whose nongrasp of probability theory would still have Bayes's Rule coming out as ~~~~~, to say nothing of anthropics producing persistent epistemic disagreements.

"So - if the Queen could rent Sevar from you for a few hours, and then seemed to have gotten Sevar out of her system and was able to maintain amiable relations with you - that would - prove that our world wasn't governed by those patterns?  And if that's a decision the Queen just can't seem to make, somehow, we look even harder for a Kuthite spy among your women?"

That is a WORSE VERSION of what Carissa suggested saying and she would light the Queen on fire about it if, you know, everything about the world were completely different.

Abrogail's instincts and boosted Splendour were warning her that Keltham would have found Sevar's version suspicious somehow, possibly because it's too characteristic of something only Sevar herself would say.  Sevar's mental insolence is, however, noted.

Abrogail's compact does require her to remain an Asmodean in good standing, and she probably stops counting as Asmodean if Sevar doesn't get tortured over this.

"For somebody who's never heard of the Law of Probability, you have a remarkable intuitive grasp of what that Law would tell you.  Yeah, that's roughly -"

"Well, except for the part where we do have to back up.  A lot.  Before we actually go try the experiment of the Queen renting Carissa from me."

"First of all."

"What?  Lady, what?"

"It is a common and accepted practice for a man who has taken a woman like Sevar - well, in the sense of a woman who's submitted herself to him, not in the sense of her having Sevar's facility with spellcraft - to rent out her, well, her sexuality.  Especially if for whatever reason he doesn't have the time or desire to fulfill some parts of her sexuality, and so occasionally rents her to somebody who does."

"The version of this you would - find least disturbing - is when the rental is to particular parties whom the man has carefully scrutinized, and in relationships where at least the woman, and usually also the man, considers themselves to be sexually turned on rather than turned off by the whole premise."

"Outside of Cheliax you would find more disturbing versions of the practice.  But also, to be forthright about this, even in Cheliax, it is - fundamentally considered that couple's own business if they want to do more disturbing things, including if the woman says that her man makes all the decisions about that."

"So usually when money is moving around that represents, you know, equalizing the supply and demand of something.  But this doesn't sound like a market, it sounds like - a sex thing to which the money is incidental.  There is not actually a standard market somewhere at which the price of somebody of around Carissa's quality, for half a day, is standardly five hundred gold pieces.  Check?  I think that's the first very basic point to confirm here."

"Yes, correct.  The practice is considered - very distinct from that of prostitution."

"Okay, and also you keep saying 'man' and 'woman' as if these were the appropriate abstractions over myself and Carissa.  Is this a," Taldane cannot say 'polarized gendertrope' because it lacks anything corresponding to the Baseline terms 'polarized' or 'gendertrope' or any simple way to compose those concepts.  "Is this a, behavior pattern that people in Golarion can adopt, relating to sex and relationships and so on, such that a bunch more men than women do one thing and a bunch more women than men do another?"

...having Keltham actually do this to you feels very different when it's happening to you directly than when it happens to Sevar in the transcripts.  This was not how Abrogail expected this conversation to go.

"There are many more female prostitutes than male prostitutes, and then most of the male prostitutes serve male customers.  I would guess that a similar ratio holds between female-submissive couples where the woman gets rented out, and male-submissive couples where the man gets rented out, and then most of the time the man gets rented to other men."

"I admit I don't understand why this is an important question."

"Because you are describing something that is on my own terms somewhat odd and unexpected and I am trying to figure out which existing concepts it maps onto."

"In dath ilan, we have systems of revocable delegation that people can use to aggregate into much larger political factions in a way that remains legible at every level of organization.  Among its other uses, this permits Civilization to annually form a Masculine Faction and Feminine Faction to negotiate with each other about what common masculine and feminine behaviors should be, not one standard for everyone, but pieces you can make your own behavior out of and have them be quickly describable to others and mesh well with other standard behaviors.  Like, grandmothers are one subkind of women and grandfathers are one subkind of men, that sort of thing.  This requires real Lawfulness and therefore shouldn't be able to exist in Golarion, and therefore all of your notions of what grandmothers and grandfathers should be like, must come from somewhere else -"

"I'm probably digressing here, my point is, you're describing something weird enough that I'm trying to fall back to basics and make sure of my foundations.  You are describing a system in which somebody, usually a man, does something with a second person, usually a woman, that falls into a standard pattern that they both understand, and which some third party therefore also understands."

"That system of meshing behavior patterns is that the party of the second part -" Taldane please, you can't use that many syllables for that, your contracts would be infinity pages long.

"That meshing-pattern system is that Two tells One that One can do whatever One wants with Two.  After which One rents out some of Two's time to Three, but it's not that Two is anything like a rentable resource that One rents into a market for Twos, it's that One and Two and Three all think that's hot.  And maybe also Two likes to trade oral sex for footrubs and Three likes to give footrubs and One does not like to give footrubs, and usually you'd just solve this problem by Two and Three forming a secondary or tertiary relationship," like normal sane people do when monogamy isn't working for someone, "but if Two gave themselves fully to One, then One is supposed to decide who Two fucks, so One being able to demand money for that from Three, is a symbol of how One still has all the Two and hasn't given any of it back to Two to use, or Three paying One is symbolic of how much Three isn't taking away some of what Two gave One, Three is paying One for it.  Is that about right?"

Carissa is concerned about Keltham's inference-pattern here but they're not lying and they're not describing something that doesn't exist in Taldor, so - probably it's just the kind of concerned Keltham is going to be ten times a day until he learns how Golarion works. 

Probably. 

"Righter than I would have expected, frankly."  They've hit on something governed by a bit of Law, maybe?  Or a pattern, a 'trope'?  "Is it - something you would find acceptable, if it was something that Sevar found acceptable?  Maybe I should back up and ask whether Sevar has said anything to you yet about you getting to decide who she sleeps with?  Because if she hasn't, I would predict that you wouldn't even need to ask her explicitly, just wait for her to raise the topic herself."

(There is an art form to these things, you don't ask someone, 'Do you find that unacceptable', because then they'll look for reasons to reject it, you don't even ask them 'is that acceptable' and wait for them to consider the contrary, you add on clauses like 'if Carissa found it acceptable' so they can focus on that and then add another topic afterwards.  You don't want them to have nothing to think about except the question of what unacceptable aspects they can find.)

"We've had that conversation, yes."  Though it of course occurs to him to wonder whether Carissa reported it to Security and now it's being used to fake an advance prediction that's actually a retrodiction.

Shit, that's an actual blunder on her part.  She jumped on this interesting new successful-predictions-for-credibility trick, and didn't think ahead to how dath ilan would be far more practiced in that, far more sophisticated in it, and far more practiced at catching out simple tricks like the one she just tried.  Make a wrong prediction next, to make up for that, or would that itself be the Childishly Obvious Recovery Tactic After Getting Caught Stealing A Successful Prediction in dath ilan?

"And?  Is this a way that we can try to prevent this silly pointless triangle between you, Sevar, and the Queen from - Keltham, I'm sorry, I shouldn't pressure you on this, if the concept is unfamiliar.  If the answer isn't obviously yes, then - but I don't suppose it's obviously true that money and a small fair trade is the answer?"

(He's an Abadar cleric, it might work.)

Keltham even if he's taken everything maximally well is going to want to ask Carissa. It'd be great news if he didn't but he will. They should let him go and keep reading him to see which parts he did take well, and show Carissa the transcript so she can confirm her working Second Law understanding, and then she can do damage control on whichever parts he didn't take well.

And then probably at some point she will be punished a lot but it would ideally wait until there isn't any immediate damage control needed.

"If this was a market problem yes, but it's not, that's part of why I was asking that.  It's not obviously no.  I think mostly this is all too alien for me as a thing to do with money, and I need to let it sink in over more than just one minute."

"I suspect I would probably want to meet the Queen before renting anybody I care about to her, even if that practice was something that turned out to work for my brain at all, which I am not promising at this point because my brain mostly feels numb.  And it's possible that the result of meeting the Queen - Arbograil Thrune Number Two, what was it again - will be that I think she's such a blatant walking living avatar of my memory patterns that I'm not going to think there's any hope in just letting her get it out of her system.  I say again, if you could be like, oh, well, there's a sensible person who isn't manifesting 'tropes' at all, that sensible person wouldn't be messing with Asmodeus's project, during a godwar, over Carissa, at all, in the first place."

"You make a solid and potentially concerning point."

"But if Abrogail Thrune II is not - manifesting 'tropes', as you put it - then I would have actually liked to see - a resolution where the Queen has a few hours of fun and Carissa has some fun and you are cheerful about that.  And not the case where, once again, the Queen's advisors just shout her down and tell her to get on with her job and go sleep with somebody else she isn't really attracted to.  People who are innately Evil cannot, must not, try to be too Good, it isn't good for them."

"I must say that - my loyalty to the Queen - makes me wonder if the correct course is not simply to say all these things to the Queen herself.  Withholding information from her would usually be considered an act of disloyalty, depending on the stakes."

"Clever, and it possibly might even work, going on the patterns themselves, because to know them is sometimes to be able to avert them - though this itself, of course, is only another 'trope'.  But if you do that -"

"I guess I didn't actually put a confidentiality seal on anything, and sort of assumed given the subject that this part was not just all being transcribed and copied to the Queen, but still.  I recommend in strong terms, and request even if retroactively, that you tell her only the part where the 'tropes' are trying to force her to introduce complications in a place they clearly aren't needed.  And not mention to her that the two most obvious fates for her if she tries it are, first, being revealed as a traitor and removed as Queen, and second, ending up as my girlfriend.  Because if it's the first one, let's not let her know that we know, and if it's the second one, I have no intention of telling any of my kids that is how I met their mother."

Actually now that he's said it out loud, it doesn't sound too bad as a story to tell your kids?  Kind of awesome, actually.

A relationship with Keltham does seem increasingly desirable!  It is not the one he has in mind and Asmodeus has explicitly forbidden it so Abrogail isn't going to go there.

This does leave the point about the first of these two fates not being all that desirable either, really; and Keltham is visibly-to-her being quite sincere about what these 'tropes' would imply as likely outcomes for her.

"I - cannot promise I'll never tell her, it's potentially a matter of loyalty, but I will consider it well and take your words under advisement."

"On that topic - I don't suppose, before I go - though I am already running quite over my time - that you've come to any new thoughts about sharing dath ilan's heritage with Cheliax?"