Or it has to be an evil dath ilani because they have to be able to work with Cheliax, because a Good dath ilani Cheliax would just cheerfully ignore while deceiving and they're supposed to do something more complicated than that. And it can't be a genius because then Cheliax would fail at deceiving them. 

"You could try asking a very smart person," she says, because she kind of wants to get the conversation back on Isidre without indicating that she has any reason to think that conversation was of particular interest. "We do have a couple of those, though they tend very busy."

"It's out of Isidre's depth.  She might have the Intelligence and Wisdom to be a Keeper - if there's not more to it than that, other unmeasured qualities, which there might be.  But she's missing background knowledge and the background knowledge is piled on top of other knowledge in a very tall pile.  That's basically what I told Isidre when she asked me to explain my hidden Kuthite cleric prediction, that the reason I hadn't tried to tell you earlier wasn't that I thought you were too stupid."

It's occurring to Keltham that in sufficient extremis, there's an emergency tactic which is his asking to put on Isidre's headband.

Well, Keltham now knows a threshold: if he ever becomes any more Good than the amount of Goodness required to do that, he'll end up destroying his own self in a way that will probably be a lot more final than his temporary inconveniencing on the airplane.

Or maybe it wouldn't actually be that bad!  Not knowing if it will actually be that bad sure could be one way to end up desperately doing something that actually is that bad!

" - oh, it makes sense that the Crown would've really wanted to understand that, and it makes sense that you couldn't explain it to them." He seems tense, is that because he found Isidre suspicious, but didn't think of it at the time? She really wants those transcripts.

"To be clear, that wasn't the only thing Isidre wanted to talk about, saying that now so it doesn't seem later like I was trying to mislead you about that."

Politely puzzled Carissa! "I assume a very smart person who wanted to meet with you would have lots to say, and you don't have to tell me any of it you don't want to; presumably if she wanted me to hear all of it she'd have invited me too....well, handwaving some palace politics that perhaps I shouldn't handwave. But she could've let you let me stay."

"Yeah.  I hadn't meant to spell it out explicitly, in case you got curious and then I couldn't answer right away, but since you seem to be deducing it anyways - there's a bunch of her stuff that was very much - some person with an overpowered intelligence headband reading about less intelligent people with potential relationship issues, and her deciding to optimize them, and one of the people she wanted to optimize was you."

"Well, I don't exactly know how I feel about that. On the one hand it is sort of interesting to have smart people try to think about your life for you, I'm always wishing I was smarter and could do that better. On another, I feel strange about it being someone I haven't met who is reading the project transcripts presumably in their capacity as a Chelish administrator. On another, there's something romantic about people having meetings with you about optimizing me, makes it - less like pretending. On another, you've been here for three days and they've been very stressful and you haven't actually signed up for responsibility for optimizing me! What if you don't want to optimize me? - possibly this is too many opinions to have about a one-sentence summary of a conversation I didn't witness. Sorry."

"No, that all sounded pretty justified based on the actual conversation."

"To be fair, I'm probably being uncharitable to Isidre, right now, she had very serious and altruistic and important reasons for optimizing over us.  The way that very smart people do, in stories about very smart people, that are based on cautionary life events that happened to actual very smart people.  My bet, and it seems like a pretty sure bet, is that Golarion doesn't have many very smart people at all and in particular it doesn't have enough of them that they can form their own social groups and train each other in how to not make typical very smart person mistakes."

"I'll go ahead and ask about the romantic part, though.  Is it having a couple of other people go off and decide what to do with your life among themselves?"

"Not exactly? It's - 

- so when I went to the sex shop, there was this sort of pervasive assumption that it was - a little like a costume shop, I don't know how to explain it - that some people like to dress up as the possessions of other people during sex, in the same way as some people like to dress up as dragons during sex, and so they'd sell you the outfit for it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But at the Worldwound people were doing something different, something better suited to me, where - you could give terms up front, obviously, but whatever terms you gave, those were real. They weren't a costume, they weren't a game, the whole thing was obviously in an overarching sense governed by the treaty so no one was risking being maimed or murdered but you wouldn't say 'oh, hmm, I'm bored now'.

And I was slightly worried that the nobility, being the nobility and sort of aliens at best anyway, had the concept but only the costume-party concept." Yep, that's the problem with the Chelish nobility, that they might be assuming by default that their relationship is one of equals-with-some-pretense, definitely not that everyone who doesn't know exactly what's going on assumes what's going on is that Cheliax gave the alien some welcoming gifts. "And if they're asking you, then - then they're not working off a costume-party concept. Even though it's a sort of silly thing for them to have done and I'm sorry you were inconvenienced."

"I guess - that is very much the kind of respect that dath ilan wants out of its very smart people who are smarter than the other people.  The sort of thing where, if you say, I'm Keltham's, they take that at face value and go talk to Keltham - though I did not, myself, see that at the time, because I am still very much - trying to locate in concept-space what it means that you gave yourself to me."

Yes, very respectful, Isidre sure is that. "Well, see, that's the complicating bit, right, that you didn't actually sign up for being in any sense responsible for me. So I feel respected but also you should definitely feel free to say 'I continue to delegate Carissa-optimization to Carissa', you didn't acquire an obligation to do it.

What does it mean to you, that I gave myself to you."

That my brain continually feels like it's wavering on some sort of huge ledge and I am constantly wondering which things I am to do with you and which not and which decisions you're supposed to make for yourself and I'm supposed to make for you.  Because you still think, Carissa, on some deep level, that I grew up in Golarion, that of course I must know what you really mean, that it should be obvious, and because it's obvious it's fine not to be legible...

"That I have to figure out for myself what I actually want from you, since I don't have the excuse and easy way out of just asking you what you're willing to give, and that I guess I'll see where that takes me," Keltham answers out loud.  "It's also obviously this huge act of - loyalty, trust, something I don't have words for - and it impresses me and - makes me wish that I understood all the connotations, everything that somebody from Golarion would take for granted, so that I could appreciate better exactly what that act means," and stop being terrified that its real meaning is owing you something I can't pay back.

Lean. "Well, there's no hurry. And I can try to explain, except I don't know exactly where to start, I already explained the bits that are really obvious and the rest is probably, you know, fire elementals don't know what fire is."

"Isidre, allegedly, has some idea of what fire is.  But among the many, many things I didn't ask her and should've when I had the chance was, 'Wait so am I allowed to just directly say all this to Carissa and ask her about it, or do you predict something bad happens if I do that?'"

Oh, I bet she knows what fire is. 

"...what kind of bad thing are you thinking of?"

"As the saying goes, knowledge of the bad thing that happens to you if you hear the dangerous-information is often the same dangerous-information.  I mean, not for book spoilers, maybe, but for a lot of the more serious stuff.  I'd have to go through it all piece by piece to figure out if there were any exceptions to that -"

"I'm being evasive.  Why am I being evasive."

"I'm being evasive because thinking about what Isidre said requires my romantic and libido parts to be booted up to think about it properly, and those parts are not presently booted."

"Do I endorse that answer?  Yes, I endorse it."

"...okay." That seems bad for Cheliax's goals. Also confusing. Carissa is pretty sure that when one feels vulnerable and confused then one is much more inclined to have sex - though that's the kind of thought where, now that she's thought it, she can notice probably isn't a human universal and is probably instead the kind of thing that might divide people by whether they like being hit or not. "Do you want a massage, I think that is the standard sort of thing that's nice even when one isn't in the mood and can get one into it."

"I have - some sort of guilt feelings you're going to tell me I shouldn't have, because it's not the point, and then the feelings aren't going to go away - that you're - a topnotch weapons specialist who gave herself to me, to make anything I wanted of her, and instead of making you into a better weapons specialist whose creations can destroy fifty demons per second, I'm getting a massage from you."

" - so, I hesitate to describe my ideal endgame here, because I'm very worried that you're going to, like, take it as 'if I don't achieve that, then I wronged Carissa by taking her up on it in the first place', which is not the point at all. But my ideal endgame here is that we build a dath ilani city in conquered Nidal and get all the modern conveniences Civilization invents before anyone else and I have so much spellsilver I can do every project that comes to mind as soon as it does and I make us immortal -- though we can still visit Hell sometimes, maybe have a vacation place in Dis -- and sometimes you have a very spirited try at hurting me until I say 'no', and you can't do it."

"I'd expect you to warn me in advance if I was getting close to making you say 'no' and not just struggle to get away, if I hadn't otherwise rescinded that order by then.  That is not something I am ready to fight my brain about right now.  And even if that changes, I suspect I still might find it hot."

"It - actually does help that you have and know any possible endgame, it helps my brain believe that you weren't just stepping into a vast empty void that it is my sole task to fill like a," and once again Taldane does not have the word 'computer programmer', "god.  I'm not sure you grasp quite how little I know about what a Carissa Sevar could maybe possibly probably be thinking."

"If this works at all you're going to be incredibly rich and powerful. Like ninety nine percent of the female population of Golarion I like it when men are rich and powerful, and I am better at extrapolating than most of them. And I know what I would do with wealth and power, because I am a wizard, and wizards are very good at turning money into ridiculously cool magic stuff. ...though also if you get bored and drop me in a month I won't feel cheated, I have too much Chelish dignity to be upset about not getting something which never belonged to me."

"That sounds - like a piece of the dignity that would exist in my world, maybe.  The world of Kelthams.  Like how I didn't think that Civilization owed me any appreciation unless I could force that."

"I keep poking my brain if it's ready for a massage and my brain keeps insisting that it's beneath you and I'm trying to decide whether I should execute the tried and true response of blowing up my brain with explody things and just getting the massage."

"I assume it would be pushing you too far, in confusion-about-how-Chelish-dating-works and uncertainty-about-who-is-getting-paid-what, if we ordered Pilar in here to give you a massage while I watched and showed you a bit of complicated spell-scaffolding?"

"That would... induce confusion about Chelish dating, yes.  Why Pilar in particular and not, say Meritxell?"