"All right, maybe Isidre didn't oversell how totally sensible of a person you were," Keltham says out loud like this is a completely normal and sane thing to say to the Queen of Cheliax.

'Abrogail', of course, is only gently amused; she knows the Outsider is ignorant.  "Let us all pray to Asmodeus that it is so and continues to be so."

"I can't guarantee that anything we can do here can keep the 'tropes' out of Cheliax.  Assuming they exist, like, literally at all.  Taking steps to defuse every hint of future possible conflict, complication, and open questions about Carissa Sevar between us, may heavily act to minimize whether any 'tropes' are going to start hanging around you personally and not just Pilar or Ione or Carissa or myself.  Assuming, again, that 'tropes' are even a thing."

"I hadn't previously thought us especially likely to get into a conflict over Carissa Sevar in the first place; but yes, if there's a threat to myself here, I am interested in minimizing it."  'Abrogail' is not that Good and is allowed to say such things.

"It's possible I shouldn't poke at this, but - you don't think the simplest solution is just to find somebody else?"

"I think you overestimate how often I find someone I am actually interested in, at all," Abrogail says softly.  A butterfly lands on her hand, where it rests on her chair's arm, and she lowers her head and gently blows to shoo it away.  "Maybe Carissa Sevar would be as common as iron in dath ilan; here she is gold.  You picked her up too easily to appreciate what you now hold in your hands, I think."

"I'd still walk entirely away from Carissa Sevar if that was the cost of a 'trope'-free life.  I am just worried that - walking away is not the correct way to prove that a 'trope' can have no existence?  A compact between us ensuring that I cannot possibly end up with Sevar under any circumstances, and my then having my fun with her and putting it behind me, seems possibly wiser.  Possibly.  You would probably know better than I."

"That question has occurred to me as well, several times.  I hope I don't end up regretting it a lot, when I say that I really have absolutely no clue which of those two courses of action is the better one, and we might as well take the one that's more fun, if we are otherwise determined to both be as extremely sensible as we can about it all."

'Abrogail' laughs; somewhat to her surprise, it's her real self's laugh as well.  Yes, that is the reason behind the decision, isn't it?  Abrogail can offer no better logic of her own.

"Then.  Shall we set our terms over Carissa Sevar?"

"I'm not quite sure about any of this, but I think we're supposed to do that in front of Carissa, possibly even if we're not fighting it out.  It may not be a matter of winning if we're not fighting, but it's the process that decides who controls her, and that open question in her mind should be resolved to close out the" reaction-binding-site "target shape that a 'trope' might hook itself into, at least if Carissa can act as a" viewpoint-character "thing that a 'trope' thinks has questions."

"Also that would be more romantic, according to intuitions I now apparently have."

"Also also I need Isidre to write some of the terms and then not look at them myself."

Also also also there is a chance that something goes weirdly wrong during the negotiation, and then while they are all probably doomed, they may still be less doomed if Isidre and Lrilatha are right there.

(Also also also also if Carissa suddenly realizes she's terribly wrong about what she finds hot, she should maybe be, like, someplace she can say that before it's too late; but this cannot and need not be thought, because it exceeds the maximum 'also' stack depth, plus it's too obvious.)

Any sane person would, at this point, suggest that the real bargaining happen between themselves, and that they just play it out again for Carissa once the outcome has been predetermined and they know their parts in the play, but that, Abrogail suspects (or 'Abrogail', for that matter) is far too terribly dishonest for a dath ilani.

...good luck, Sevar, thinks Abrogail, but then Sevar's had enough unexpected luck already that Asmodeus's hand there is clear.

"Mm.  That does present a... let us not say complication.  Doing this in front of Carissa, instead of simply presenting her with a sealed agreement between us, presents us with a matter of something that you gain and something that I lose.  What you gain is her affection; what I lose is something that I worry a dath ilani may not understand.  It has to do with Asmodeus's domain of pride, which, being something that belongs to a god, is not intrinsically defined in mortal terms; but in mortal terms... maybe I could say that I have a reputation for winning, and that you want me to do something that could be seen as losing.  Not in private between ourselves, but where others, like Carissa, or for that matter Isidre, can see it."

"I suspect translation difficulties around the word.  Is it like - the pleasure that you get from being a better player of your favorite game than most people around you, visibly and in a way you can prove to them?"

If pity was something that Abrogail Thrune went about feeling, she knows she would be feeling it now.  'Abrogail' feels it, therefore.  "That is something like what I might expect to remain in a society that had gone much much much too far in the direction of Good, after they'd taken something deep and real in human nature and flattened it down into a small sad remnant they deemed acceptable."

"Right, well, is it something like killing all the players of the game who are better than you so that you can be the best one left alive."

Keltham supposes this is a thing you can trade a sufficiently large heap of dead bodies for, exact size of heap depending on initial talent and practice.  Though to Keltham himself, it seems like this is completely missing the point of what dath ilan and yes he thinks is the meaning of pride in playing a game well and visibly better than others.  It proves you're adequate at the murder game, but the other gameplayers weren't even trying to compete with you in that.

"That is what I would expect an overly Good society to tell its children was what happened if they let themselves feel any real pride."  And they wouldn't be wrong, per se, but still, there's more to it than that.

"It is sometimes hard to explain things like this to me, though I want to understand them all eventually, and your time is valuable; I don't know if we want to go down that conversational..." subtree they have no word for subtree how the ass do you convey 'subtree' in Taldane.  "Thing you can go down.  What are the consequences?"

"We do this in a manner that looks less like you winning and my losing, that looks less like things are taken from me and you are taking them by being greater and mightier in your own person than the Queen of Cheliax.  To the extent we cannot do that, or you do not wish to, you offer me something I value in return.  I am more open than many rulers would be to the latter course," because most of the real pride-trampling has already occurred, at this point, and she may as well get paid for it.

Not that Keltham has very much he can trade that could possibly be worth as much as Abrogail Thrune has already lost of her pride to this stripling.  If he ever stops being valuable to Cheliax and Asmodeus withdraws His protection, she has more than a curious interest, now, in seeing what happens to dath ilani as they are slowly broken.

"If Carissa was something that had a normal price I would offer you ten percent discount on her, but I don't know if that still works for sex things that aren't really about the money."

Where does she start.

"It... doesn't work for sex things, no, and your suggestion sounded incredibly strange for Golarion.  You should, at some point, tell Sevar about what you said there, and have her explain things to you."  So Abrogail can read the transcripts of Carissa's thoughts when she hears.

"Among other things, did I not know you for something that is from further beyond our world than ordinary outsiders, it would be - something you should not say, to suggest that any part of the Queen's pride is worth only that much money."

"Carissa herself, being rented, is worth something to you; if this were a real price in money, that amount would be either set to balance supply and demand, or else her real value to you would be somewhere around twice what you were paying me, assuming that renting her cost me nothing significant.  If you lose something in pride that is nonetheless less important to you than what you gain by having Carissa, it decreases your total gains from the trade.  Which doesn't matter if it's a supply and demand balance, I'd just sell to somebody else.  But if it's a non-market fair-division problem, then losing something in the course of gaining Carissa's rental decreases the fair price to you of her rental, hence the discount."

"The Law is straightforward if it's actually about the money, I don't know what we're supposed to do if it's a sex thing.  Do you have a suggestion in mind?"

"In truth I am not clear on what I could ask from you, at this point, which would be appropriate.  Most of the things that are wanted from you are things that Cheliax wants, not that I want, and it is I and not Cheliax who loses here.  You could agree that you owed me a future favor appropriate to the real cost to me of my lost pride in this matter; it requires some trust from me to you, that you will repay, but no more trust than you are already being given in some ways."

(Say the key words as if they mean nothing, make sure to add some more distracting words later, hope he is that naive and does not know to be wary of Asmodeans bearing bargains...)

"Lady, I mean, you sort of are the person who gets to rent Carissa in the first place, here?  And the sexy-price that was suggested to me by Isidre did not strike me as being in the range of what that is actually worth to you - the value you gain from it - given that it's worth this much of your time at all, and given what I expect your finances are like."

"I am doing this because it will, supposedly, I hope, be good for Carissa, because I think it will impress my girlfriend, and because I want fewer 'tropes' messing with me.  And since that's an adequate reason for me to do it, and this is all a sex thing in the first place, and we are all hopefully friends here, and also probably really because I am still thinking of this as somebody else having sex with Carissa only it has to be done in a way that makes my brain shut up about it -"

"For all of those reasons, I haven't asked you for anything like what the Queen of Cheliax can afford to pay for anything that's worth her time at all, or asked you to explicitly owe me a favor afterwards."

"...uh, I hope we're not starting to have a real conflict here, where we're contesting negotiating abilities or something.  If we're starting to have a real conflict that calls into question who gets to have Carissa, or whether this agreement takes place at all, then it should happen in front of Carissa for 'trope' reasons."  And Lrilatha and Isidre should be there.

"...one addresses the Queen of Cheliax as 'Your Majesty', not 'Lady', to be clear."  Even 'Abrogail' says this, albeit she does not say it as sharply as Abrogail Thrune would wave someone off to torture-execution.

It would figure that, in Abadar's World, they are not as naive about bargaining as about some things.  But he still, Abrogail hopes, does not realize the game he is really playing, or how deadly it can be to him in an Asmodean country.

"I hadn't hoped that would be an irreconcilable point of conflict, no," says Abrogail.  She shrugs.  "Your point is a very fair one, and I should have seen it myself; my apologies for that.  I suppose it could be something like - I agree to owe you a favor proportional to how much I really gain from sex with Sevar, and you owe me a favor proportional to the real cost to me in lost pride of how you got to look impressive in front of Sevar while negotiating that."

"It's considered ill practice where I come from to take on debts with no legible caps on their objective magnitude, unless you're creating a child in which case you don't have a choice and somebody's got to do that sometimes.  I suppose that since the real cost and real value are being assessed by reference to your own values, you could feel safe with that?  Though for edge-case coverage reasons I'd want the explicit understanding that the favor you owe me is greater than the favor I owe you, say by a factor of at least two, that they are positive in sign, and that the two can potentially be partially cancelled against each other."