Yeah, he isn't really.  But Sevar got everything that was blocking further progress.

Right, but they shouldn't both of them be incapacitated at the same time, probably, so she'll take her punishment later. What's the less-pressing stuff. 

(Note to self which she doesn't really think she needs, avoid angering Gorthoklek.)

Okay, here's some less pressing stuff.

Also, this just in, Paracountess Isidre Thrune cordially requests your covert attendance upon her meeting with Keltham in fifteen minutes.

(It's not clear whether Security knows who Isidre Thrune is.  He presumably knows there's no such Paracountess.)

She'd be honored. Someone'll need to hit her with Fox's Cunning repeatedly....and maybe also Owl's Wisdom, there are disadvantages to having your cleverness run out too far ahead of your sense.

They'll do their best on fifteen minutes' notice, but of course a lot fewer wizards prepare Owl's Wisdom than Fox's Cunning.

Abrogail has a slightly nervous feeling at this point.  She has gotten the verbal transcript about Keltham suspecting her, or rather Isidre, of Detect Desires.  She is starting to understand why Sevar is so nervous about lying to Keltham; maybe she should have gotten it from transcripts, but living it is different.  Most people, if you tell them something that they're supposed to believe, will act around you like they believe that one thing.  Keltham... builds a world in his mind where those things would have actually been true?  And just completely lives there.  He lives in that world at you.

And then you're stuck in whatever world Keltham has decided you put him in.

(Yes, she's still too busy for this, but Keltham is leaving the palace tomorrow morning and even Abrogail does not wantonly waste her Teleports; she has a lot of places to be simultaneously.)

Paracountess Isidre Thrune, overly-Good person with an overly-large intelligence headband, who definitely has a whole lot of magically enhanced perception but is probably not actually using Detect Desires on people, rises to greet Keltham as he enters an even nicer meeting room.

Having a Paracountess of Cheliax rise to greet him as he enters is going to be a courtesy that is, like, completely lost on Keltham.  His thoughts show only a brief puzzlement about why Isidre would do that.

Keltham quickly seats himself, his thoughts showing an intention not to waste Isidre's valuable time; he requested this meeting and Isidre may not have her schedule cleared for it.

"I've probed my newfound sexuality some, and arrived at some answers," Keltham says.  "So, first, I'm pretty sure that I do not currently want, for my own sake, to demand that Cheliax hand over Carissa to me, and I can appreciate that it would be missing the point to do it for hers.  Maybe I'll find the 'gendertrope'* inside me, the sexual behavior pattern and way of thinking, that's the complement of hers, where I actually want absolute-power over Carissa enough that I want to go do that for myself.  But it's not there or not awake yet, and I'm not doing that until it is."

(*)  Baseline 'gendertrope' does not contain the syllable for the Baseline 'trope'; the sounds of the words are distinct.

Awww, too bad, but not a definite 'no', and not offense that it was suggested. 

"Understandable, and I believe very much correct, under present conditions," Isidre says.  "I won't say that the government of Cheliax stands ready to assist you in the future, but, I do thus stand ready."

She's taken the time to set up more two-way communication, this time, now that Sevar hopefully has any grasp of how to act slightly more professional around her.  And now that Abrogail is not springing an elaborate surprise on Sevar.

Pass to Sevar:

Keltham's thoughts are glossing over earlier thoughts about how he can use Detect Desires, with your consent on general rather than that specific use, to verify that you still want him even if you're in his absolute-power.  His thought on a possibly acceptable relationship is that, for so long as you still want him, you'll have no choice but to have him.  He doesn't seem to be thinking particularly on the morality of it... no, he's thinking that he's not sure what his Civilization would think of that, but would be delighted to watch them get into an enormous fight over it.

- well that seems like progress. Yes, that definitely seems like progress, though actually she doesn't know how Pharasma would judge it either. 

(It's much easier to be professional when one isn't having an elaborate surprise sprung on them; indeed, some would conceptualize professionalism as involving minimal elaborate surprises sprung on their co-conspirators. Carissa herself, who is young and naive and knows little compared to her vastly wiser superiors in the palace, has no opinions on the question.)

"My sexuality does not seem basically opposed to renting Carissa out to a woman I know, given sufficiently favorable conditions.  It is not happy with strangers.  I haven't asked my sexuality about men because I don't, currently, really know any Chelish men; standard Civilization 'gendertropes' suggest higher resistance but I haven't been able to ask myself."

"I think the three main conditions, here, are, one, getting to know the Queen of Cheliax like at all, two, figuring out whether Carissa is all right with this, in a way that doesn't just trigger 'hey you can run a sword through me and this isn't even a sword so I'll be fine', and three is, uh, complicated.  Any thoughts about one or two before we tackle that.  I don't get the impression that I can just ask Carissa if she's fine with being rented, or can I?"

Keltham's thought processes are wordlessly trying and wordlessly rejecting sort-of pre-thoughts about ways he could put his unspoken third want into words; it's not easy to read.

Isidre will temporize by discussing want one, while Abrogail waits to see if Sevar has advice on want two.

"The Queen is, obviously, another very busy person, but considering your potential importance to Cheliax it is plausible the two of you should meet in any case, and you may as well do that before you depart the palace.  I can try to arrange a meeting tonight."

"Though it would be nice to know, before that, that matters had been arranged to avoid any explosive runes going off in our faces as a result of unrolling that scroll."

"Mostly a want-number-three issue, I suspect, but I also cannot make any representations to the Queen until I understand the effects on Carissa, and how and if Carissa ends up being okay with that, and how I end up knowing that."

Carissa thinks Keltham could reasonably ask her in what condition she expects to return, if rented out, or if subjected to any number of other things, but should probably not be encouraged to just directly talk to her about everything because then their relationship will be too healthy and functional. (She feels a pang about this which she ignores.)

"You could simply ask me about the effects of different scenarios," says Isidre, "and I could give you an answer which would be quite good and reliable, based on having sufficient familiarity with Sevar's kind of submissive.  I suspect you're not going to accept that, so, you can also ask Sevar in what condition she expects to return, if rented out.  Or what happens to her if you subject her to any number of other conditions, if you don't want to highlight that one as one that she'll notice especially.  That, if not some other things, I think you could ask her plainly."

"I apologize for not being able to simply join states of belief with you, but yes, the problem is that I don't just need an answer that's actually good, I need an answer I know is good.  Two isomorphic problems from my perspective, but very different problems from yours."

"I - think Carissa has some equivalent of what a dath ilani would call 'dignity', which translates via Share Language to Taldane dignity but I suspect is really not the same thing at all.  Carissa's 'dignity' is that she is impossible to truly hurt, even by running a sword through her and then refusing to Raise her, which is what makes it safe for the man to whom she's completely given herself to do anything he wants with her, and not be afraid."

"And if we were all in dath ilan, she could tell me that was true, and I would maybe check in with a Keeper first to see if they thought Carissa was in generally good," epistemic health, "belief-health, but then the fact that Carissa thought that was true about herself would be very reliable evidence, because dath ilani know how to see within themselves if that sort of thing is actually true."

"The fact that I got trained in that explicitly, and warned about a lot of pitfalls, suggests that, if that training actually did anything, Chelish people should actually be much worse at distinguishing - what should be true about themselves, what they want to be true about themselves, from what actually is true about themselves."

"I'm worried that Carissa is just answering me from within her model of what Carissa should be and that model is not rigorously separated and distinguished from what Carissa is.  Which seems like the really obvious mistake that, say, I would make, if you took all the dath ilani training out of somebody otherwise with my exact heritage."

"If I try to discuss this with my Carissamodel, my Carissamodel says back that Chelish dignity also says that it's her place to safeguard her own safety and not rely on anybody else to protect her when she's giving herself away, that it would be undignified for her to be relying on me to think about her safety.  I don't then feel happy and reassured when my Carissamodel says this back to me, and I don't know where to go from there."

An observation that might be useful to Keltham is that - by the standards of dath ilan, it's plausible that almost no one is competent to know what they actually want and what they can withstand, and yet they do still have to make decisions and do things, and it can simultaneously be true that they might be wrong and that it is impossible to do better than treating them as if they're right, until one encounters actual reason to think they're specifically wrong about something specific; trust withheld in full generality can be damaging.  

Another might be that one commonly solves this by hurting their Carissa to her breaking point such that they subsequently know what it is, and Keltham probably literally isn't capable of that yet, but the fact he's not also means this isn't very urgent.

"I've sometimes made mistakes of that kind myself," Isidre says.  "By the standards of dath ilan, then, I'm a child, and, except for you, there's nobody in Golarion who can raise me to adulthood or teach me how to protect myself.  I nonetheless think I'd be upset if you told me that I wasn't allowed to have the sort of sex I find satisfying because I was not by dath ilani standards competent to decide that I wanted it.  I think I'd actually be offended even if you told me merely that you needed to check over my thinking and sign off on it first."

"And there's - I feel like there's some even more precise way that a dath ilani would say that thing I just said, going on your class transcripts.  Something more Lawful to say about what people have to do when they're not competent, and how they might be wrong, but if you don't specifically know that they're wrong and never trust them anyways - I haven't actually attended your classes, and I can't put it into words."

Oof, yeah, that's valid.  "Let me... think about that."

Though it's - a little too persuasive, maybe, like this is what happens when somebody with an Intelligence-Wisdom headband (even if that's not really thinkoomph, just three components of thinkoomph), tries to bend their will on persuading you and presenting only one side, instead of calmly listing out all the arguments and counterarguments to be summed.

She's supposed to what.  Who does that.  What the Abyss is Abrogail supposed to do about that.  Of course Isidre is trying to persuade him, she didn't come to this meeting without having any goals.

Abrogail transmits Keltham's most recent thoughts to Sevar, with a note that Abrogail doesn't think she can quickly grasp or adopt the dath ilani behavior that Keltham is thinking of, and can only try to sound more "Why of course I am totally telling you about all the downsides of this contract, look at these three right here," which she was already trying to do in places.

Ah, Keltham. Carissa thinks her preferred phrasing might've been better in that regard but yields to Abrogail's superior Splendour. It's like - it's like if the thing you're trying to do is figure out who to send on patrol, and if someone brings up that those two just had a bad breakup and won't get along, your job isn't convincing them they're wrong, it's figuring out what the best patrol group is with the new inputs. Act like the decision power is already yours and you don't need to convince anyone, and then like you need the patrol to nonetheless perform well against demons.

One objection to what Abrogail just said is that it proves too much, Keltham shouldn't buy and abuse literal children (yes he should but they're not going to get him there yet). So it might be worth acknowledging his concerns as perhaps outweighing her clever response in some cases, but pointing out that Carissa was judged competent by her society to swear the Worldwound oath, which is as competent as her society is capable of acknowledging her to be, and so even if one doesn't want to declare everyone competent until proven otherwise they could extend it at least to those who've served at the Lawfullest place in Golarion. 

(Modulo carefulness to not come across as too good at reading Keltham, but Abrogail knows that.)

Keltham is now thinking that Isidre basically seems to be presenting a story about a search algorithm that quickly reaches quiescence, and then you've got to choose the option with highest expectation-of-utility, which, yes, Keltham supposes that's terribly mysterious if all the Law is unknown to you.  But isn't it obvious that Keltham wouldn't be here if his meta-level prediction process hadn't suggested that there was further value-of-information in trying to figure out the likely consequences to Sevar better than he can get by just asking Sevar?  And Isidre hasn't even given him reason to believe that Sevar would be mostly probably right, just, sort of presented a social story about why you have to act like you believe somebody's words independently of whether they're true.  And sure, there's situations where the incentives and payoff matrices are structured such that Governance should just take people at their word independently of what the prediction market says about the probability it's true, but, like, at least ask?

Well, actually he can just ask.  "You've said, basically, that I should act like I believe Sevar regardless of the probability that she's right, but if she's only 10% likely to be right, that's probably a bad idea?"

Abrogail supposes that's what she gets for prompting him into thinking about the Law behind anything.

"I don't suppose it would help if I pointed out that Sevar was trusted by us to take the Worldwound oath, which is as mentally competent as Cheliax can possibly acknowledge anyone to be?  That she served, and served well, in the Lawfullest place in all Golarion?"