"I think Asmodeus has expended a fair number of resources to make sure everyone headed there is offered the choice of Hell instead? But I don't know if that's because He considers Abaddon-death an emergency or because He wants them in Hell instead. I ...have never heard it's slow but I haven't asked, either - if people die brain damaged in this world they're normal in the next one, the soul remembers more..."

"Yeah, but just because there's somebody walking around who remembers being the person who got damaged and then got better, doesn't mean that, from a first-person perspective, if you get damaged enough to forget who you are, then that experiencer mostly experiences becoming you again.  That's why people go into cryonic suspension right away if they get Memory Degrading Disorder.  Sure, future tech might be enough to read back the memories you lost, but that doesn't mean that you experience turning back into you after you've simplified and shrunk to the point where you can't tell yourself apart from a lot of other people with Memory Degrading Disorder.  You might experience turning into somebody else instead."  This language is really not suited to discussing this subject matter, but then, it's not much suited to discussing anything else either.

"- huh, I'm not sure that's what I care about? If I got slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences but a bunch of copies of me from before that were still around I don't think I'd be very upset about that? I haven't considered this very much, maybe to dath ilani people it's obvious why I should care about that more than about whether there's still a me."

Blue and orange.  "I would in fact be quite upset about any Kelthams being slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences, even if I was one of the ones who survived unharmed.  I may be selfish but not to the point of intertemporal conflicts with my own copies from a few minutes earlier!"

- Carissa is not sure she understands that objection thoroughly enough to be sure her reasons for not minding aren't very Chelish! 

"I mean, I expect I would find being tortured aversive, it's in the definition, but the thing that makes torture-which-makes-me-no-longer-distinctly-me far far far worse than torture which doesn't have that effect is that then the things I think of as Carissa don't exist anymore at all. And if Carissa will keep existing no matter what but some threads of her end I ...don't understand why I'd mind. Maybe I'd mind if I understood."

"Yeah, that - makes some sense -"

"Sorry.  It's just that the thing you said sounded a bit - similar to an argument my mother once tried on me - about how a further implication of selfishness was that I shouldn't care about what happened to the Keltham of tomorrow, because he was a slightly different person from me, so screw him - and I'm finally in the region that's supposed to be Evil, now, but then you said that you didn't care about - and it just sounded like - sorry."

"This all probably doesn't sound very romantic-escalatory, does it?  Sorry bout that, I was somewhat better at dates in dath ilan when I knew all the conventions.  My respect for you being the woman who decided to fling herself on the sharp kitchen knife of my early learning experiences."

- Carissa's going to not touch that because once again she's not sure that the thing Keltham's pointing at is not a true thing about Cheliax she's supposed to be hiding. 

How to flirt back, though.

"I can flirt with people who have - magic items for it, can read your face so closely they might as well be able to read your mind, who have magic that does more than Splendour - I have done that, though not very much, because I tried not to get in over my head, at the Worldwound, there wasn't anything there worth getting in over my head for - but I want you, see, you think like no one in this universe and it feels - possible that I could think like that too, not after the centuries of perfecting it'll take me to be Contessa Lrilatha but, like, next year, sooner if I can squeeze a headband out of somebody, and - I want you, so you don't actually have to be good at flirting, unless you yourself get in the mood by flirting deftly at people, in which case I suppose you had better get good at it."

Keltham leans in to her and grins, broadly, even if she maybe can't see it.  "Well, thanks for taking all the uncertainty and plot tension out of our flirting, then.  Where I come from there's enough distinct books on romantic theory to fill this house's library ten times over, and most of them would say that just giving away the ending makes it be less fun, but right now my experiences would seem to be falsifying that.  I don't think that cuddling you on a roof and looking up at the stars is even slightly less fun if I know I can't fail."

"Well, you could fail at the planet-sized ambitions, maybe we can get enough plot tension out of that. And there is still the question of who will win the sexual varieties contest, though I have to say I'm optimistic."

"Not betting I'll win, but not giving up without any fight.  And by the way, things would be different if I had access to my own world's technology, just saying."

"Is there sex technology? That's delightful, actually. We will have to fix things up enough that we too can have sex technology. - don't tell me what the sex technology does, I want to try to guess."

"I don't even know what 1% of 0.1% of all the sex technology does, just the incredibly basic stuff that's in almost every cuddleroom and that everyone gets training in how to use.  But if you imagine something, I can probably take a pretty good guess as to whether it existed.  Using the simple rule that, if it sounds possible to our technology level, somebody somewhere has done it, and if it doesn't sound possible, there's still a 70% chance somebody has done it."

"Sex in midair."

"Probability 1.  Giant windpits, people going up very high in aeroplanes and jumping out and having sex on the way down, people getting into orbit around the planet and having sex there."

" - wouldn't jumping out of airplanes kill you, without magic -"

"Nah, somebody," in pre-Screened history but he's trying to call less attention to that, "just thought for another couple of minutes and figured out how to survive it without magic.  I'm pretty sure we do a lot of stuff you imagine takes magic.  For jumping out of airplanes, you fold up a giant cloth into a backpack and when you're getting near the ground, you unfold it and it catches the air and slows your fall.  I've been trying to figure out whether some people's home cuddlerooms have midair sex equipment, like, just 2%-rich people, not 0.1%-rich people who can put whole wind pits in their cuddlerooms.  Maybe a possible method there would be to wear metal bands and put lightning-magnets in the ceiling that hovered you by pulling on the metal, but I don't know if the math works on that without doing more math."

The cloth thing does not at all sound like it would work. "Cuddlerooms are - sex dungeons, except named adorably because no one is a sadist?"

"Like, the room of your house where you have sex?  Dungeon sounds sort of like whip but as a spatial place, so I don't think dath ilani would have sex wherever that is."

"Normal peoples' houses have one room. Rich peoples' houses have several rooms but still, you have sex in your bedroom usually, unless you're into weird things like sex on tables. Rich people who like tying people up and hitting them in ways beds do not natively enable might have a sex dungeon. I have never heard of a cuddle room and it translates as - indulgent in a bizarre direction -"

"Yeah, well, if you have an economy that can make more stuff per person, they also buy larger houses to contain all that stuff.  This place we're currently staying is larger than my parents' house by a factor of 10, but only because they were work-focused people who didn't have enough different hobbies that they'd want that many separate rooms.  My parents could in fact have afforded a house this size, though they couldn't have afforded to fill it all up with things we'd consider expensive."

"So yes, separate rooms for sex, because you own stuff that optimizes sleep and stuff that optimizes sex and they are almost entirely not the same stuff for anything larger-scale than a small pillow."

"I have been trying to figure out where in a bedroom you'd have sex, because the bedrooms here do not have anything that looks to me like a good surface for having sex on.  It is now occurring to me that people here probably have sex on the things you call beds, and then change the cloth outer surfaces of the bed, and then go to sleep there."

"Yes? - magicking the sheets rather than changing them, but yes. Is there some reason not to do that?"

"It's - kind of icky from a dath ilani perspective.  But maybe that's just because we wouldn't have magic for - clearing the room's air afterwards and so on?  It's just odd to think of doing something that is intrinsically and rightfully messy in the nice clean place where you sleep.  If this place has spare bedrooms not being used, I might ask to have one of those for my cuddleroom.  Kind of a group resource, really, under the circumstances."

"I am sure you can request a cuddle room if you want one. Tragically we will not be able to see the confused face of whoever authorizes resources for this project."

"Magic doesn't do capture of still and moving images?"

"They won't make the face if we might be watching!!!!"