"I'd worry that the Lawfullest place in Golarion isn't very much more Lawful than the coldest place in the Sun's core is cold.  Your concept of an oath is something that gets your soul destroyed by Abaddon if you break it, and you do it that way, instead of the way that gods do it, because nobody here has enough Law in them to swear what dath ilan would regard as a real oath."

"Though - maybe if I'd been to the Worldwound for longer than a few minutes, to talk to people knowing the language, I'd have a different impression.  I suppose I did meet Carissa Sevar there, which is something of an update about the general Lawfulness level; though I got the impression from you that, even for the Worldwound, she was special."

Keltham is now starting to worry that he's talking himself into a corner where he'll convince himself that he can't be sadistic to anybody because maybe all the masochists are just making a massive mistake about whether they're masochists.  Keltham is aware that this thought is stupid, but he doesn't know how to prove it's stupid and then generalize the same proof to shoot down his Isidre-reactive arguments for never being able to trust Carissa.

Abrogail will transmit all that to Sevar.

"She is.  But Keltham, I think you are - maybe disrespecting Golarion a little too much?  We aren't quite as bad as a dath ilani child of the age to have as little training in Law as we do.  Your concept of how much competence corresponds to how much grasp of Law is not correct for this place."

"Look, I get that I'm talking myself into a corner, I just don't know how to talk myself out of it."

He certainly is helpful, in some incredibly bizarre way, to anyone who might possibly be trying to corrupt him and manipulate him to their own ends!  Almost like nobody like her exists in his world!

Abrogail wishes she was more confident that this means she could take over the place in a week with the poor naive dears offering her no resistance, and not that everyone like her was successfully hunted and slaughtered and the memories of them erased from history except for Keepers who still remember very well how to do it.

If he feels really strongly about this he could pay the Grand High Priestess to evaluate Carissa's competence probably that's a bad idea, for many reasons but among them that Carissa doesn't actually know what the Grand High Priestess would truthfully say. 

What is the meaning of an oath is a hard question for us to answer, with our vocabulary, but it doesn't mean that oaths only mean to us their most obvious physical consequence, and many people who one way or another don't fear Abaddon still give their word and mean it, groping for a different basis for it to signify what it does.

There's really something to be said for doing things and checking whether they have good or bad consequences, assuming the consequences are recoverable. 

Also he could just directly bring this to Carissa, she'll in fact probably be upset and definitely at least somewhat turned-off but that's only a consideration against it, not absolute reason if he's too stuck.

Isidre speaks quietly, which is also its own Splendour.  "It's not that our oaths mean nothing to us except the threat of Abaddon, Keltham, we do - understand, why they are things that Lawful people swear.  By dath ilani standards none of us understand properly, because we cannot give the lectures you give and play the games you play, but we do feel what an oath means, even if we cannot say it."

"Sorry."

"I... don't suppose that it would help if I observed that one very normal way of solving this problem would be for you to hurt Carissa to her actual breaking point, so that you would subsequently know where that is.  And that you are completely incapable of this right now.  And that this indicates that you don't have an urgent problem here."

"You've never tried to hurt her in any serious way.  How do you know she's this easy to break?  I guess I am, in some sense, offended on behalf of Carissa's Chelish 'dignity'," she uses the Baseline loanword that Keltham used before.  "I don't suppose, though, that appealing to her dignity is much of an argument to you either.  Is there anything a Lawful dath ilani would say about - just trying to do a thing, to see what happens, when it won't be a disaster for it to fail."

"We've pretty much got a proverb in nearly those exact words, yeah."  He utters it in Baseline: an eight-syllable couplet, which rhymes and scans because Baseline was designed in part to make that proverb be a rhyming couplet.

(To Sevar:)

Sevar, watch yourself.  It's lovely that you're mastering the Law but Isidre isn't supposed to be its master.

"And - I'm sorry if I'm wasting your time by being obstinate to a point I should've gotten.  But hurting Carissa to her breaking point sounds like it just is the failure and the disaster."

"That's because you don't understand the meaning of anything you're doing."  More passion in Isidre's voice, now, and a hint of Isidre's real power in her voice (Isidre's, that is, not Abrogail's).  "Someone like Carissa desires to be hurt to her breaking point so that she can be broken and reforged and made what you want her to be, heated in fire and tempered, beaten and sharpened.  You're not ready to do any of that, you don't know how to bring her to that point, and you don't know what to do with her once she's there, but have the courtesy to her to not pretend that you tickling her too hard, or whatever it is you do with her in bed now, is going to shatter her beyond repair."

"I'm - I'm sorry, Keltham.  Bad memories.  I shouldn't have said that to you, you weren't the one I was really talking to."

He's a little confused by the concept of a Very Serious Person who, like, can't figure that out before she starts talking.  And then she wonders why he's worried that Carissa's self-reporting is going to be bad!  It's because you all have a nine-year-old's skill at self-reporting, at best, and that seems like not enough for, like, hey, how are you currently doing at being broken and remade, oh, wait, can't ask you that, it's all supposed to be illegible, cool.

...his mind is evading by generating unspoken snark because he doesn't want to come to grips with Isidre's actual point that is being made with real force and emotion behind it.

(And hey!  Keltham knows that!  But if he didn't, he'd be all like, 'Oh, I am currently thinking about this scorching burn against your argument' and his self-reports would all be useless!)

...actually, did Isidre fake that slip so she'd have a chance to let the more emotional words through?  That would be, like, discussion over, in dath ilan, if you got caught doing it, but maybe it's not metaphorically illegal in Golarion... well, either people with intelligence headbands still slip like that, or, she doesn't know Keltham knows that somebody with high Intelligence shouldn't do that.  Well, somebody with high thinkoomph shouldn't do that, her actual thinkoomph is not whatever Detect Intelligence says and they don't know the difference, they presumably think that high Intelligence is as smart as the very smart people get.  Okay, maybe the slip was real.

Also he's not here to arrest Isidre, metaphorically or otherwise, he's here to consider if she's got a point.

...what?  What's ~~~~~~~~~ that's different from - better than? - Intelligence?

Abrogail transmits this all to Sevar, along with a note that Abrogail isn't going to try being emotional at Keltham again unless so advised.

(If Sever has professionally insubordinate thoughts about Abrogail's mistake, she can be tortured in the temple; if she has flirtatiously insubordinate thoughts it can go to the personal queue.)

Sevar is a reasonably quick learner and the thing she has learned is to not try having opinions about Abrogail's decisions, which for all she knows may have been the best available at the time. 

(She's...better at self-deception than most people, it's pretty obvious by now; her self-deceptions go deeper, grow more roots. She didn't just learn to quash the thought 'Abrogail makes mistakes', she uprooted everything nearby, replaced with 'you are too ignorant of the constraints on Abrogail to ever evaluate anything she does as a mistake'.)

Carissa has only tried being emotional at Keltham once and what happened was that he decided he needed to invent contraception about her sadness, it was very confusing, Isidre should be glad he's not handling Isidre's emotions like that. Maybe dath ilan encourages that because they don't want their people emotionally manipulable and also don't want them to learn to simply not care about other people.

"Does anything bad happen if I talk about all this sort of thing with Carissa directly?"

Passing it to you, Sevar, this is controlling your side of this game.

(Isidre looks thoughtful, and eats one of the small delightful snacks present by way of consideration.)

It's not generally advised to tell your submissives that you're having trouble regarding them as adults enough to make decisions, but the likely consequence is 'she'll think a little worse of you', not 'she'll walk out'. 

Also, if Keltham is feeling meaningfully constrained by fear Carissa will walk out, well, that's precisely why some people like to put that decision, too, in his hands, so that he can use reasoning processes that aren't meant for situations where the other person might get fed up and walk away. Uh, that came out too influenced by dath ilan, translate before you say it.

"It's not... generally advised to tell a submissive like Sevar that you're having trouble regarding her as enough of an adult to make decisions, but I expect the consequence is that she'll probably be upset and definitely turned off and in the worst case she will think a little worse of you."

"I don't think she'll walk out.  If you're afraid of that possibility, I would point out that she would very much like to have that option be removed from herself, and never again have to fear that you'll be afraid of her walking out and not say things to her.  She wants you to be able to think about her the way you'd think if you weren't ever afraid she'd leave you."

"I will admit, a lot of times my reaction to what you're saying is that it has, like, one benefit, but, one would sort of expect, a whole lot of other problems that came packaged with that one benefit."

"I meta vote to suspend this discussion branch and move back up the discussion tree; I have a sense that this line of questioning is not likely to resolve much further with small amounts of further discussion.  My general takeaway is that you don't think it would be catastrophic for me to ask Carissa some hopefully careful questions, so I will probably do that and get back to you on whether I'm still requesting a Queen meeting.  Assuming point three, which is, uh, kind of complicated, resolves well.  Or at all."

Keltham's thoughts show that he's politely waiting for Isidre to indicate whether she's okay with tabling this topic here.

"That is probably wise.  So your point one is that you need to meet the Queen.  Your point two is that you need not only for Carissa to be okay, which she almost certainly will be, but you need to know that somehow despite knowing so little, and you think that the thing for you to do is to talk to Carissa about it.  Your point three is...?"

"Feeling safe, myself, about renting Carissa to the Queen."

"Safe in what sense... ah.  You're worried that the Queen is better at looking like she has absolute-power, and that Carissa will start to like her more than she likes you?"

(But you see, Keltham, the Queen would turn me into a statue forever if it happened to be convenient. ...Asmodeus would too, not that she's sure she's supposed to admit that to herself. And I am weak and human, and bask in the gentleness of someone who'd have to be incredibly sorely provoked to destroy me eternally.)

Abrogail would not in fact do that to Sevar unless incredibly sorely provoked, Abrogail does not say to Sevar at this time, both for personal reasons of future plans, and also, because Abrogail has already fucking said so and Sevar didn't listen because she was too caught up in her fear fantasy.