"Oh ho, are there other varieties of girl to be found elsewhere in Golarion?  Perhaps I should ask for pictures before I decide."

" - are there not, in dath ilan? Peoples native to different countries look different, they have dark skin near the equator and people far up north are very pale with very light hair and people in Tian Xia look - Tian, I don't know how to describe it exactly but it's very distinctive, their face shapes are different and their hair is finer and thinner and black even though they are pale."

"We - don't have that, no, because anyone can go anywhere with a quarter day's cost of labor.  Even if we started out with less travel, way back when - after a few generations of everybody mating with everybody all over the planet, I guess all the heritages just blended together.  People probably cared at all about preserving variety of appearance, back when that variety was dying out, it's just, there's so many other things to select on, when you try to decide who you're going to have kids with... and it's so much not a place where it'd be Governance's place to solve the collective problem by telling people they needed to start doing assortative mating on appearance instead.  Forbidden costs, not much of a reward.  Even in dath ilan we can't get all the public goods at once."

" - huh. Well, that makes two things Golarion has going for it on the sex front, a reasonable match of sadism and masochism and distinctive races. I have heard Chelish men assert that northern girls are the prettiest but they were at the Worldwound and might've been just trying to win points with the locals."

- Couldn't Carissa just observe whether they said the same thing around only other Chelish people?
- Not being able to clearly tell on the meta-level whether or not it is currently a time for social deception games to be going on seems super inconvenient and like somebody could get hurt!!

Keltham sets it aside; he does not need to solve all puzzles simultaneously, more evidence will arrive in time, and if jumping at every confusion prevents him from ever getting laid then this would constitute a symptom of meta-level dysfunction.  Like, it's one thing to do that when confusions happen once an hour, but another to do it when they happen once per minute.

Instead Keltham says, "Now I really want to ask what you think is the best thing Golarion has going for it sexually, but, spoilers."

"Well, I don't know if it's a spoiler if we can't do it. There's a seventh circle spell called Waves of Ecstasy which incapacitates everyone around with overwhelming pleasure and I don't think that's the best thing Golarion has to offer but if it were it seems like it wouldn't really be a spoiler for our evening, myself not being seventh circle. Yet."

"That sure does sound like the absolutely classic example of something you'd only see in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Wait, wizard spells are like that because they've mostly got to be useful in combat, right?  Is there a class of combats someone can best fight with Waves of Ecstasy?  Because that sounds like..."  Taldane doesn't have the word for trope.  "A particular literary theme."

"I think it's a modification of a very similar spell that incapacitates everyone around less pleasantly? But no, there are no monsters I've ever heard of whose secret weakness is sexual pleasure."

"And Golarion doesn't have the thing where, if there were monsters like that, you wouldn't find out until you passed a sexual experience test.  So if you haven't heard about them, they probably don't exist.  Check?"

"Some places in Golarion might have something like that but Cheliax does not withhold any information about the weaknesses of monsters from its soldiers deployed at the Worldwound, so yes."

"...right.  Sometimes I forget that you're a seasoned emergency response official on a level where - I don't even know who in Civilization would be comparable to you.  Even best-on-continent championship medical responders probably don't stack up to literally actually fighting alien invaders every day."

"There are championship medical responders? How do you evaluate them against each other, presumably they haven't all addressed the same emergencies!"

"Standardized trials, of course!  With prediction markets about performance under real future possibilities, in case somebody is only-testing-well in a way that the markets can notice."

"Oh, you were probing about people I find attractive, so.  I can't show her to you until I learn an illusion spell, and maybe something that boosts my memory, but in terms of people I would've screwed if I could've made it to where I could screw almost anyone compatible-and-available... ah, background.  There's this one woman who was, on scores alone, the second-best endurance medical responder for a region containing a quarter of the planetary population.  She wasn't the person you'd call in for one person having a brief medical emergency, she was the person whose performance degraded the least if she had to work for sixteen hours straight.  Except at her level, never mind sixteen hours, she could go for like thirty."

"Now consider all of the Alien Invasion Rehearsal people, and the sections of Governance who think about weird scenarios where, for some reason, you can't send in ten medical techs, you have to send one medical tech who works ten times as long.  Everybody wanted her in their weird emergency response plans.  The number one endurance medical responder for her region wasn't into working with Governance on weird scenarios nearly as much, or the number one people for other regions, they just wanted to spend all their time responding to medical emergencies, go figure.  So she was like spending half her time on actual patients, and half of her time maintaining all of her certifications for being hypothetically called in on every imaginable kind of weird medical emergency by every branch of Exception Handling.  Lots of people watching the transmitted moving pictures of her doing that, treating simulated aliens that famous authors dreamed up, things like that.  She was rank 5 famous, only one in a hundred thousand people had more identity recognition than her.  If you were really lucky you might personally see her simultaneously treating four pretend wounded bodies during an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival."  Or during an Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival, which was when Keltham had actually been pretend-nearly-killed by the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military and gotten his game life saved by her in person.  "And also she was pretty.  Merrin, was her name."

He'd almost said 'Miran', but remembered the difference between her game alias and her real name barely in time, which is a little embarrassing for somebody who was once your teenage crush.

Because it is entirely hypothetical, the idea of a crisis where one person might need to work for thirty hours straight. Carissa, being a wizard, hasn't done it, herself and she can certainly appreciate the exceptional talent inherent in not having your performance degrade over the course of thirty hours, but clerics, at the Worldwound, work hours like that during every rush, at least once every month. 

To be the right trade for Asmodeus Keltham does not have to solve everything, or even half a percent of everything.

If he teaches us metalworking, that would be enough.

" - neat," she says, and giggles. "How do ...Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals go."

"Well, just because we don't have endless hordes rushing at us from the Chaotic Evil afterlife doesn't mean we'd like to all pathetically roll over and die if someday we did get invaded, though usually we'd suppose them to be invading with machines or cleverness.  So we try to prepare ourselves, rehearse for it, just in case.  Some of the best writers and the best just-in-case military people - and maybe some Keepers, I don't know - all get together, and plan out how they would invade us if they were aliens with particular capabilities.  Then during the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival they get to tell us, this city got wiped out, or everybody in this region just got mind-controlled, or whatever, and then everybody in the region who got mind-controlled will pick up whatever pretend weapons they get issued and rush over to pretend to try to kill the rest of us.  And, I mean, that also increases resilience if someplace gets hit by a catastrophic earthquake, because people have rehearsed who to coordinate with and which houses to check and how to look for bodies before their brains rot, that sort of thing.  But running it as an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival instead is more fun."

"Sex technology: sexy alien invasion rehearsal festivals, yes or no."

"Has absolutely happened on a citywide scale, but only in a city where everybody opted into that and all the underage kids got sent away for that day."

"Are kids not allowed to participate in sexy alien invasion rehearsal - I guess they probably wouldn't have passed their competence tests -"

"Well everything is a spoiler at that age."

"Are you supposed to figure it all out yourself?? I feel that this would lead to some hilarious misconceptions! Like the jokes about peasants who go to a priest thinking they're infertile and it turns out they just hadn't known you're supposed to put it in."

"You try for a period to see where you end up on your own and then you learn about the standard optimal way of doing it.  As opposed to, I don't know, starting out by knowing all about how it goes?  That sounds a lot less exciting."

Girls would get pregnant. If they didn't know how to avoid that. 

Carissa has been specifically directed to stop entertaining opinions about things like that. It's bad for her eternal soul. And to stop telling Keltham things for no reason. It's bad for her longevity. "Maybe another thing we're doing all wrong for foolish reasons," she says. "I guess you could ask the girls if there's anyone who has no idea what she's doing." 

"That sounds a biiit more dangerous in a world where there's serious diseases transmitted by sex and no cheap contraception, though I guess a wizard could afford to solve both of those... but you don't seem like you'd be able to afford clever infrastructure for keeping secrets like that, from only exactly the people who can afford to stay ignorant?  So I'm mostly guessing you're joking?"

Aaaaaargh he's already good enough at inference it's hard to gloss over things - "Yeah, I would be surprised if you found any takers in Cheliax. There are some countries that protect their daughters from sex by not letting them near men instead of by telling them about it, so I guess you could try to meet those, once we steal all the women from all the countries that don't let them do things."

That's the most horrible take on spoiler protection that Keltham has ever heard.

"I suppose they may as well get some benefit out of it, yes.  But it wouldn't be me having sex with them?  I already know where to put it, unless the people older than me have been hiding the real target area."