"Pilar's here, everyone else is all the way in Ostenso? I don't know if you're important enough to get someone teleported in to give you a massage during a war when we're using all our teleport capacity for logistics."

"Because they did the resurrect here.  I feel like I should have seen that answer without having to ask it.  Anyways, I've been advised by Isidre that I am Not Ready For Pilar."

"Oh, right, this seems safe to say.  After the very strange thing happened to Pilar, Isidre got a hunch and asked Security to ask a few questions.  Pilar has a fetish for being forced, or as Isidre put it, a rape fetish, a term I assume has some interpretation other than 'wanting unwanted sex' which is not outright self-contradictory, and it's an obligate fetish to the point where she'd feel actually-raped if I made her talk about sex before having it with her."

"I infer though it was not said explicitly," oh my ass Taldane how you can you take that many syllables to say that, people would just not say it, "that this was the point at which Isidre decided to come over and futilely attempt to find out exactly why I think one of the girls is secretly some kind of traitor, possibly without knowing it herself."

Pilar's not really the ideal person anyway. If the way Keltham works is that he has a hard time abusing girls he respects then the obvious thing is to try to get him in bed with a girl he doesn't respect, but all the research harem are at least reasonably competent, and she can't think of an obvious excuse for him to be introduced to a new, useless girl.

"Huh. So - she asked Pilar, noticed it matched - and thought you were onto something with the mysterious logic above the gods you can't explain to us? And it's usually just a fetish for not being in a position to refuse, or for it not mattering if you want it, rather than for not wanting it. I think."

"Yeah, basically.  I gave Isidre some other guesses of what that logic said about some other things, and there's - a test we could run, sort of, but it's a strange one and to consider it I have to boot my sexuality.  Which seems to be noticeably stirring in response to the Pilar discussion.  Non-self-contradictory version.  Brain really.  Yes really.  The thought of getting a massage from you now seems notably more appealing."

"Oh, uh, meta-comment, the thing I'm doing now where I think out loud more in front of you when we're in private is because you're my girlfriend and get more access to my thought processes."

Okay, Carissa does actually need to urgently seek correction at some point about how much she likes Keltham, not because it's going to inspire her to betrayal, she really isn't worried about that at all and assumes they aren't either, but because having such an unAsmodean impulse twenty times a day definitely breaks other things and she needs to know which other things and get them corrected as quickly as possible. 

"That is a very sweet policy. I like it. I can - try to think out loud more in front of you as well?"

"It's not actually easy, dath ilani only make it look easy.  It'll take practice, and in particular one of the first skills you'll need to learn is the ability to say 'Wrongthought', meaning 'Wait that isn't what I was actually thinking', because the words that come out of your mouth will be different from the thoughts you actually thought."

" - huh. Well, I'll try it. Maybe on my own, at first, unless you want to see me try it, but I do expect it'll be a bit harder to learn with an audience."

"Oh, that's probably a good idea if you haven't had any anticonformity training, yeah."

"I'm not sure how much resistance a Chelish adult has to falsely believing that they're thinking the things that they think the people around them want them to be thinking.  But, like, I kinda suspect the massive amount of counter-training we dath ilani got as kids was actually doing something."

Hmm, do you think?

"I haven't had anticonformity training, yeah," and appreciate the warning this is something you might do to us because wow it sounds kind of nightmarish in the same way as having the Queen show up to mock you for your thoughts from the transcripts she's reading. Except in the opposite direction so getting both at once is double nightmarish.

There's genuinely something terrifying there, something that feels like realizing you're not standing over solid ground but on a tightrope over the Abyss.

Or like noticing you could peel all your skin off. It's true but did you really need to notice it.

Of course most thoughts are the thoughts you're supposed to have. 

How about a change of subject.

"Well, when it comes to having girls by force, I think there are actually more women with that fetish than men who want to fulfill it, so maybe you can have fun without handwringing about the market value of the experience you're getting for free. Or maybe you can charge, though the specific nature of the fetish does make it seem hard to do that."

Keltham forbears to point out that this is not plausibly an evolutionarily stable mating-market equilibrium.  He's made his point, it's time to give it a rest.

"I don't think it's - obtaining by force - maybe more like having them struggle inside their chains?  Possible logistical difficulties there, sexually speaking, but logistical difficulties are there in life to be solved."

"Though I think I should not attempt for a fair while to do that with anyone who is not following an order saying that they cannot verbally argue with me to be let out, which I suspect rules out Pilar outright even apart from Isidre's warning.  Or maybe I'm wrong about how that would work."

"Also, I think I'm actually ready for that massage now."

Oh good. That was the goal. Carissa will start on that massage. "Yeah, I think if where you're at is that you need the girl to not be arguing with you, then that's fine" for now "but it rules out Pilar, based on what you said, and probably lots of other girls who won't feel wronged but won't know what you're playing at. Perhaps you will have to require introductory classes on dath ilanism before anyone is comprehensible enough you can fuck them without getting horribly confused."

"Dath ilani ends up in alternate universe, trains the most intelligent people around him in dath ilanism so he has a pool of compatible sex partners?  Yeah, I don't think that book would turn into a bestselling novel anytime soon."

"Why not? I'd read it. But really, I think this is the premise of a romance novel marketed to women. Powerful man from another world comes to transform your own, happens to be incredibly sexually unfulfilled and want you in particular - that's a female fantasy. Most authors don't have much imagination and just make him a Duke but it's the same principle." The massage was a good idea, Keltham totally has some muscle tension.

She's pretty okay at massage for somebody whose civilization obviously never gave her a single training class on how any of it works and may not even collectively know!  This will probably have a net positive effect!

"Civilization's got some different romance novels, gotta say.  Veeerrrryyy different.  Going on recently popular media, a stereotypically standard female-appealing fantasy would be to find that they're secretly the daughter and heiress to a Dark Unilateral Ruler in an alternate universe with economicmagic that lets the Dark Ruler run the entire place as a criminal mastermind, with a Corrupted Governance that makes everybody believe that most people elected her when actually they didn't, and now the new Dark Heiress has got to pretend to act like an Evil supervillain for an extended period, and navigate a complex and chaotic web of criminal personalities to end up with a harem of four men each with distinct powers and personalities, on her way to either seizing or inheriting the Dark Rulership."

" - okay, I think that'd be a hit in Cheliax too, but for some reason which no doubt you'll diagnose down the line, the actual romances I've had the misfortune to pick up have all been much worse than that. Also probably dath ilan would consider literally all our rulers even the very capable ones to be Dark Unilateral Rulers."

"Your Queen's not unilateral according to Isidre, she had to coordinate with Asmodeus to take over Cheliax and now has to keep track of how much political capital she has with the Church of Asmodeus."

"Also, remember these are romance novels for Intelligence 17 women, being written by Intelligence 24 women.  I'm not sure how much diagnosing of the difference actually remains to be diagnosed after that."

"...yeah, I guess that's probably sufficient. And sure, Cheliax has a Dark Alliance between Her Imperial Majestrix and the Lawful Evil god Asmodeus, though if they disagree on anything it's not very visible to their subjects." Most of the time.

"I am worried that your Alliance is not quite Dark enough, frankly, based on interacting with Isidre and hearing some of her concerns about how much fun the Queen isn't having.  Very smart people in dath ilan tend to lean Good.  The obvious potential problem with that, if not otherwise averted, is that when you care about a very large number of people, you can end up with very large numbers inside your mental decision processes and especially the parts that do abstract thinking.  That can produce thoughts at," edges and vertices of the space of thoughts, "extremes you wouldn't get with a more naturally selfish person where the weights don't go much larger than the weights they put on themselves."

"Now this, to be clear, is a problem you have to solve with more Law, rather than less Law.  If it's a predictable fact that certain ways of thinking are going to make certain mistakes, predict it and then don't make the mistakes.  If a Good person ends up thinking it's a good idea to break an oath and go to Abaddon in order to save some larger number of other people from going to Abaddon, they could imaginably be right by their own measures, in which case there's no arguing with the," utility function, "values that entities assign to final outcomes.  But I would far more expect to observe that Good people end up systematically mistaken about how much good oathbreaking really does, for example because of the further consequences of people not being able to trust Good people's oaths any more, or anyone's oaths because that person might be secretly Good, or just because Good people usually and systematically end up not saving as many people as they hoped with the sacrifices they make."

"If you have a lot of very smart Good people, they can train each other out of mistakes like that.  I doubt Golarion even bothers to collect statistics on the kind of mistakes that very smart people make."

"And the other thing about Civilization is that we do not often have to worry about fifteen percent of the population dying.  There are not millions of people in fixable-seeming horrible situations, and if there were, you would be working on it with a lot of other people rather than nearly alone.  Which probably helps a bunch in practice to keep our smart Good people from ending up at weird extremes without them having to be incredibly Lawful about that."

"To a dath ilani, Isidre reads strongly as someone with overly large problems to worry about, insufficient Law by dath ilani standards, and an intelligence headband too much more powerful than the headbands of the people around her."

Did he think that at Abrogail. Carissa bets he thought that at Abrogail, and she feels this is the best thing that ever happened, even though objectively it's probably bad for her interest in being of no interest to the Queen. 

"....that makes sense. I have never heard the Queen called Good but I guess maybe a project like hers attracts Good advisors. Though her primary advisors are sent straight from Hell, probably because that's one of the only ways around this problem in Golarion."

"Then the Queen's advisors may not know - may have forgotten? - how humans actually work in some ways, which is another problem Isidre was trying to optimize over."  Should he actually be discussing the Queen a lot with Carissa, if there is a huge not-yet-defused Carissa-Aborgail interaction bomb that might not be tropetarily inevitable.  "I have noticed an ulterior motive to change the subject about this, can we go back to talking about fetishes or romance."

"Yes absolutely. Do you want me to just list various things that people with your taste sometimes like and then you can decide if you like them or not."

"Maaaybe go a little slowly on me and just list, like, one more?  Partially for internal speed limit reasons, and partially because not-spoiling-the-fun-by-finding-out-it-exists-too-far-ahead-of-when-you-can-do-it."

"Okay, one more. Having a girl blindfolded and deafened so she has no idea what's happening around her except when you touch her."

"I was going to say that's also a thing that has ever occurred to dath ilani to try, focusing on touch instead of other senses.  But I'm realizing that in a sadistic context and maybe one where you are blindfolded and chained, this is a very different concept."

"Libido has started all the way back up, mysteriously," there are physiological signs of this, which Keltham is not bothering to verbally observe, because he expects Carissa can decode the way he just shifted and adjusted his position on the bed.  Golarion beds sure are ill-suited to being a massage table on top of all their other ill-suited functions.  "I request quiet, but continued massage, while I try to consider some things Isidre said."