...is she not going to win this one?  It seems so.

Did she doom herself to 'trope'hood by that not happening in front of Sevar?  She doesn't think so; that was a duel between herself and Keltham and not one that was really over possession of Carissa at all.

Well.  Perhaps Sevar's thought was correct, perhaps everyone but her underestimates Keltham; he is doing better than she expected, even now.  But at least to Abrogail, it seems like Keltham does flirt very close to the edges of losing his games and damning himself in one sense or another.  He just needs to be encouraged to go on playing them.

The Queen sighs.  "I suppose we could have it be - the kind of favors owed that are understood not to be enforceable even in the eyes of Asmodeus?  I am a little friendlier to you for borrowing Sevar, you are a little friendlier to me for making you look good in front of her."

"Maybe what I really want is the acknowledgement that my pride has any value at all, in this.  Especially since, as an outsider from a world lost completely to Good, you may not see or realize or understand the Evil thing that you are trampling on and perhaps also trample on it excessively."

"That is very much something I would prefer not to do.  I acknowledge explicitly, your pride is valuable; even the shadow dath ilan still has would be valuable, if maybe less so.  Let no value be destroyed that need not be destroyed."

He'd add that Civilization is not that lost to Good, like seriously lady your majesty; but who knows, maybe from her perspective it is that lost, just like Golarion from his perspective lacks almost any trace of Law.

"Is there anything helpful that can be told to the outsider to prevent his unintended rampage of value-destruction?"

It is far far far too late, unfortunately.  'Abrogail' will nonetheless try to explain the concept of how to treat royalty deferentially; and that the meeting she's currently having is in fact one where if she was having it with a Chelish citizen it would be 'incognito', meaning that she is pretending not to be the Queen, still Abrogail Thrune but not the Queen; meaning that Keltham is allowed to sit in her presence instead of stand, and she does not need a much fancier chair to protect the dignity of Cheliax.

(They do it in Taldor.)

...is she trolling him.

She isn't!  She shouldn't even try to explain all of this on the Queen's expensive time; after this, Keltham can get an emergency one-hour lesson in how to interact with a non-incognito Queen without that being an Incident if it happens in front of her advisors.  He can think of things he might need to say, and memorize how to say them in the more formal interaction, and hopefully enough of that will let him improvise around the edges if necessary.  Even then, if he suddenly hears Isidre's voice magically whispering in his ear, he needs to immediately pause whatever he's doing and listen and not argue.

(This will give Carissa Sevar slightly more time to recover; since, it has by now been reported to Abrogail, the cute little idiot went and submitted herself to her any-time-in-three-days torture session right away, without making sure it happened sometime when she'd have an hour or two to herself to recover afterward.  Was Sevar that stupid, that overconfident of her recovery ability, or had she just never previously gotten herself in important-project-screwup, mentally-insubordinate-to-the-Queen levels of trouble?  Probably all three.

It is infuriating that the child has gotten herself into a vital position where she needs to be accommodated for incompetence like that, rather than it being turned into a more object lesson.  But they're planning to try out Lrilatha running Suggestion on Keltham; and while that is expected to go well, Sevar needs to be in better form to exploit whatever change Keltham has then in his thoughts.)

Keltham is disturbed by the implication that the Queen has any advisors who don't understand the reason why a sane person would just ignore all this hugely time-costly crap.

...it's a not-as-Lawful-as-dath-ilan thing.  You wouldn't understand.

Does the Queen think this whole shenanigan is generating enough value that it's worth spending an hour of Keltham's valuable time, on trying to load, and shortly-afterwards forget, all this shit?  Or is this knowledge in some other way reusable and persistently valuable?

...to be honest, Abrogail does suspect that learning some completely pointless Golarion shit will be an important life experience for Keltham.

If that sentence needed to be prefaced with 'to be honest', does that mean all the previous sentences not so prefaced were possibly not honest.

It's an expression meaning, to reveal one's thoughts rather than concealing them, or to reveal the whole thought rather than concealing some of it you might otherwise be tempted to conceal.  This was the meaning Abrogail had in mind.

Or yes, in Golarion, to tell the truth where one might otherwise lie.  In many of the common scenarios where of course the other person would expect you to lie but maybe not if you said 'to be honest' in a serious-sounding voice first.

That really doesn't make any -

You need to talk about this with Sevar, Keltham, not me.

Yes.  Sorry.

Is Keltham ready for his etiquette lesson?

(Abrogail Thrune is enjoying how much his thoughts are dreading this.  It's not much at all, but at least she gets to torture him a little.)

Are they done here? - Keltham asks himself.  He didn't - get a chance to talk about, well, what's actually going to happen to Carissa.  Which Keltham apparently needs to treat as an infohazard for probably like at least a month or something.

Unfortunately Keltham came into this conversation with a clear goal, namely, get his brain into a position to decide whether it was comfortable renting Carissa to the Queen, but with no real idea of how to accomplish that goal.

...internal interrogation suggests that, on the one hand, their overt interactions have not been very - sexy, doesn't really create any relationship where Keltham rents Carissa to her... oh.  In retrospect, maybe that's what the Complicated Flirting was about; it was just that Keltham was much more worried when that happened, about the Queen possibly trying to open her eroLARP route at him, so he shut it down.  He was probably not supposed to do that.

Still, that the Queen flirted (hopefully just pseudo-flirted) at him, at all, is an acknowledgement of Keltham as a sexual-romantic-relationship-having-thing, and that is... possibly enough for whatever weird thing is inside him, Keltham does not understand the rules at all.  Well, it's enough provided that the Queen is in fact incredibly hot, which she is.

But maybe add safety margin?  Why do something your brain just barely approves of, when you could do not that.

"I think the dath ilani thing to do in this situation, if it could manage to come up in dath ilan, is that we both tell each other a mildly embarrassing naughty story from our early sexual experiences, in a way meant to acknowledge that the other person's story is sexy and funny, and then we have a relationship that is not just about project management or 'trope' avoidance and my brain is more confident that I can rent Carissa to you."

Yes, fine, Abrogail Thrune just wants to be done with this and send Keltham off to his torture session.  Even 'Abrogail' wants to be done with this, though she's not showing it, of course.

'Abrogail' tells a somewhat funny, mildly sexy story that could plausibly have happened to a teenage royal in Taldor before she took over the country.

Keltham will not ask a number of large-looming questions.

Keltham will tell her about that time when he and his carefully spoiler-protected fellows were just figuring things out, and Keltham got to be the one who figured out that, if a certain girl 'wasn't sure' she'd ever had an orgasm, that almost certainly meant she'd never had one.  She then grimly resolved to keep up with her age cohort and get it done within the next hour, not even as a trading-pleasures thing, just get it done; and Keltham got very determined about helping her with this clearly established Goal; and those mental postures, as they would realize at a future point in their lives, were not the most helpful possible mental postures they could have taken.

Dath ilan definitely is a place.

The Queen's chuckles and smiles will read to almost anyone in Golarion as genuine, if they're stupid enough to trust whatever reading skills they're opposing to the Queen of Cheliax.

Did that help?  Keltham isn't sure.  The Queen seems too old, too Very Serious; if he shuts his eyes, his brain doesn't really understand what she would do with Carissa.  If he opens his eyes again and thinks about how the Queen is incredibly hot... frankly that seems to be doing practically all the work here, combined with the earlier flirting.

But he tried the obvious thing and their time is not infinite; his brain is hesitant about the rental but not saying no; and it's time to proceed... with... the plan.

Okay, you know what, he's just going to do this, it can't be that bad, it's just an hour of hearing about absolutely insane nonsense whose very existence is somehow opposed to his own fundamental nature in every way but without that being legible enough to explicitly fight back against, and if he can do that for a minute he can do it for an hour.

Keltham departs for etiquette lessons.

...that was strangely satisfying, in the way of finally having somebody fall into your power whom it had previously been unreasonably difficult to torture.  Is it trivial?  Absolutely.  But he doesn't know that, he has absolutely no clue, and somehow that makes it work.

Maybe she can find future excuses why Keltham definitely needs even more etiquette lessons.  He'd need them in Taldor.

Maybe she can figure out what Keltham most hates about etiquette and design 'improved' etiquette she does in fact have a country to run, and needs to get back to running it literally now.

Carissa does, before she closes her eyes while lying in Keltham's bed, contemplate whether it'd be a disaster if she falls asleep. A normal person would, in fact, either be annoyed or feel inclined to pretend to be, if they came back to their fancy fancy room to find their girlfriend/slave asleep in their bed, but Keltham is an alien and won't even realize he's supposed to mind.

Her next thought is about an hour later, and it's that she would have expected Keltham to be back by now. She sits up.

There's a piece of chocolate cake on a plate next to her.  It looks a lot like the piece of cake that Pilar tried to give her yesterday morning.  No sign of Pilar herself.