" - not confused, that's the thing I predict you'd do. I think mostly I'd feel...embarrassed...and like it broke something, that I did that, and if we don't address it at all then it'll be a hole I need to steer around in the future?"

True answers are, perhaps predictably, harder to produce when you've burned all your feelings out. She feels like she's producing them by imagining some other Carissa.

Hypothetical:  Keltham starts requesting Detect Desires and truthspells from his god and using those to find out what Carissa wants and treating a thus-extracted admission of wanting something as a reason to believe that it's fine for him to do whatever it is to her.

- wow. Uh. The second part is definitely excellent, the first part is a little scary, but not in a way where she'd say no even if this were a saying-no sort of relationship. 

...yeah, that's not really the answer you'd expect from a dath ilani woman, possibly even one single dath ilani woman alive; but it has already dawned on Keltham that he's not in Default anymore.

Hypothetical: effects on relationship if Keltham had gone ahead and done that without asking Carissa about it at all.

"You'd....get a different way of me relating to you, I think? Where I try to do less steering, because you're doing more of it, and try to give you more of myself to work with..."

He needs to dare anything, ever, to ever test the things that are being claimed to him by Carissa's nine-year-old-level self-reporting, if he's going to make this relationship work at all.

Keltham, without any other warning, taps Carissa with one of his Truthspells.  "Tell me the effect of what I just did to you on our relationship."

Carissa does not need that dismissed yet, she thinks loudly. The entire point of not lying to Keltham is to be able to do this.

”I think I’m feeling things a little less intensely now than I usually would because I’m still a bit fried from the last couple hours,” she says. “Uh, obeying Security when they’re being very intense is sort of the same reservoir of something except without the payoff. With that said - yeah, I feel delighted that you did that, that you knew you could do that, and slightly stressed about the truth spell - it’s an enchantment, it feels like one, I know it’s not a very invasive enchantment -“

The illusion on her forehead has not flickered at all.

Keltham essays a Detect Magic, for lack of a Greater Detect Magic; the spell on Carissa looks to him like the one he cast.

...um.

Should he just - keep doing this.  It seems like cheating.  It seems a lot like cheating.  It seems like the sort of cheating that means nobody ever wants to cofound a startup with you.  Carissa just said she was delighted under the truthspell that he did it.  You could establish an awful lot of trust that way, modulo the chance that after they saw his first truthspell they were very thoroughly prepared, or maybe prepared before the first truthspell, etcetera, he didn't request Invisibility Purge today.

The common sense of dath ilan says to, like, think dangerous things through before you do dangerous things, not try to improvise them as you go.  Especially when you have two more Truthspells, to use later if needed - shit he should've cast Augury before he tried that, oh well, he'll get used to having magic eventually.

Is there anything he needs to ask right now...

"I'm not going to be upset if the spell fails here, or if you can't give the answer you wished you could," Keltham says.  "Are your self-reports to me, about what you're pretty sure won't hurt you, likely to be accurate?  Not honest, accurate."

"I really think so! Once we start doing things I haven't done before I will be less sure but then I'll tell you I'm less sure! I know I'm not dath ilani but you can't actually be an arms and armor enchanter while kidding yourself about whether things are going to work out the way you want them to."

Keltham exhales, feeling a bit shaky himself.  She could just be consistently mistaken on all levels of reflection, of course, but it's something; you'd expect somebody to notice if they were routinely wrong about that sort of thing.  He feels like he just - girlfriend gets thoughts access.  "I feel like I just stepped off a very narrow ledge I was standing on, but there happened to be something underneath my foot to support it."

"You can step outside and ask Security to dispel that, if you can't dispel it yourself, or resist it, or whatever.  I have two more truthspells, should probably keep one in reserve, but you can request the other one later if you think of something you want to say and have me trust."  Of course then she gets more time to prepare a deception but he could also just tap her two days later and ask if there was a deception then.  Oh, he should check that now.  "First, though, answer as soon as this question finishes, do you have any knowledge about the results of my last truthspell having been faked?"

She doesn't know she doesn't know that's always the safe thing to lean on with truth spells not knowing what instance he's referring to not knowing what anyone did -  "No?" She's totally uncertain whether that'd have gotten through or not, and if not whether Security managed to cancel it and do an illusion in time, but she'll proceed as if one of those things happened. They should've been ready with the illusion at least from 'answer as soon as this question finishes'. "I don't actually know when the last time you used a truthspell was," she continues. "Did you use one with Isidre, that might have been faked, she's powerful enough to cast that anti-Enchantment spell that your god gave you for the Kuthites and I bet she knows it. Uh, the last truth spell I remember you using was on Tonia the first day and I have no knowledge of that being faked." A definite lie, but if Security couldn't get a replacement in place by then they deserve -

(do they?)

- well regardless they will suffer much worse than what Carissa just did and she won't be sorry.

...okay, that could have been an instance of her quickly telling herself that she didn't know what he really meant by that, and delaying for somebody else to cast dispel, illusion, etc.  If so they're presumably prepared for this, but Keltham casts Detect Magic anyways.

Looks as he'd expect. 

"Are you done?" A good very obedient Carissa without an edge in her voice. "I can dispel it once you're done, but you can keep going, if it's helping. Or if it's not but you want to."

"I'm done.  You can dispel it yourself or get it dispelled, whatever's more convenient."

He did notice a possibility, but there's nothing obvious to do with the paranoia; most possible paranoia is not valuable on the margins.  He'll keep his eyes open to see if there's a pattern.

Also, if that thought he had was true, that implies the honesty of Carissa's earlier statements about her probably-accurate self-reports to him and that she was delighted to see him suddenly use truthspell on her, neither of which match up all that well to it's all a LARP, everything around you is a LARP.

She dispels it. "Are you okay?"

"Think so.  Just a little sad, not about your answers or anything, just that I can't give you full immediate girlfriend access to everything I thought about them."  He's probably not supposed to say the thing that he just thought, in case it was true after all.  "Are you okay?"

"I am okay but my day has featured a lot more tricky Truth Spelling than my days usually do and I am slightly less okay than I normally will be if you do that."

He should've seen that coming... stupid.  Girlfriend, right.  "Feel stupid, not because it wasn't worth it, but because I should've seen that part coming.  But it was worth it, or at least I'd evaluate so."

"Is this a hugging situation or a 'hugs are not a solution to the problem I have' situation?"

"Hugs're good. Seems worth it - seems important for you to feel like you can trust us - that's why I asked about the Contessa Lrilatha thing even though I saw her briefly in the hallways and apparently Cheliax being at war makes her ten times more terrifying."

Hugs!  "It's still so weird to think that your military people and your Governance people are the same people, like, failure-of-professional-specialization much?"

"I... wish I didn't have to say this, but I have more tricky sexuality self-report questions to ask you, even though it sounds like this is not at all a great time for that.  There's a time-sensitive question I'm considering, of the type 'window of opportunity to do a nice thing' rather than disaster-prevention type.  Not so time sensitive we couldn't cuddle for a few minutes before resuming."

"Luckily Security didn't ask me anything at all about my sexuality so I'm not very tired of talking about that. - actually correcting that, they asked if you'd inflicted any injuries requiring healing and they asked if you'd asked me to conceal anything from them under questioning. But mostly they did not ask about my sexuality and I'm not in fact tired of talking about it."

Headpats!  "Positive reinforcement for noticing you said a false thing and then correcting it."

"Uh, dath ilan thing, you'd do that with" a child "someone practicing the first layer of the Truthspeaking virtue, until the things they said started being mostly true the first time."

Literally everything Carissa just said was a lie orchestrated to convince Keltham she was practicing the first layer of the Truthspeaking virtue so why does she feel pleased about the headpats. Probably because it means she succeeded.

Keltham asks more tricky questions about Carissa's sexuality!

Hypothetical:  Keltham feels like he owes Tonia a debt for her own Suddenly Truthspell and doesn't have any money to repay it yet.  What happens to Carissa and their relationship if with zero warning Tonia is suddenly there inside their cuddleroom and Carissa gets ordered to serve her cuddlewise, with no pleasure for Carissa herself, and then Keltham walks out of the room and leaves her to it?