She's felt it before, of course, she has Fox's Cunning and uses it sometimes when she's stuck on a spell structure, or on how to get an enchantment to lay nicely. It's wonderful, it feels like the difference between being groggily half-awake and being properly awake except on top of awakeness. It feels like the sort of conversation you have with another person where each of you sees exactly where the other is going so you get three words into a sentence and the other person says eagerly 'yes' and you can move on to the next piece, having placed a conceptual pointer, except with just one person. 

Right now it's mostly just making it harder to refocus her attention away from the Queen's threat to petrify her. Which is silly. The threat made sense: Carissa is glad to live in a country where Queens issue such threats, because contemplating their overthrow really is a very grave crime and if there were no penalty more serious than more quickly meeting Asmodeus then more people would do it, and that wouldn't do. Carissa understood this incentive problem to mostly be solved with a very, very protracted death but she can appreciate why the Queen would have assessed Carissa's own incentives as being different. And very simple. 

And she's not going to overthrow the Queen, because she isn't an idiot, so it's fine. Except that it seems like there are actually a lot of ways that Carissa could fail, from here, in ways that made people very angry at her, and -

- it's always been true that she'll go to Hell no matter what.

- digression, why does Maillol think that the Queen might want to have sex with her? Why would the Queen want that? Should Carissa want the Queen to want that? She leans no, because being around the Queen more feels like it makes it more likely one ends up a statue underground. Maybe if she has succeeded tremendously at her project and built dath ilan but evil and better. If that happens probably she will not end up a statue underground.

(The Queen could be bluffing. Asmodeus has chosen Carissa, perhaps He wouldn't tolerate that. There was no hint of it in her voice or manner but then, there wouldn't be.)

Okay, setting that aside with more mental effort than it ought to take but not more than she has on hand.

The Queen implied that Asmodeus instructed Cheliax to let Keltham go, when he leaves. Which makes sense of why Contessa Lrilatha was willing to concede that in contract negotiations; it was commanded already. Why did Asmodeus give those instructions? The Queen's right, that Keltham isn't a relative advantage for Cheliax at all if no one can learn his teachings without ending up a heretic. That seems really important to understand. She's not coming up with anything but it's standing out now in her memory as a question, along with 'why isn't Abadar talking to Keltham' and 'is Otolmens right to think Keltham might end the world' and 'how badly do I have to screw up to get turned into a statue' -

Queen's present before she gives the Taldor briefing, or after?  ....Carissa kind of wants to be in a lot of pain right now, so that settles that. 

"Thank you," she says perfunctorily to Maillol, and goes off to the torture chamber.

The priest on duty nods at her as she goes by, apparently unconfused or just uninterested as to why she's going into the torture chamber by herself.

Carissa has been in torture chambers before, on both sides of the restraints.  This one is much smaller than the one you'd find in a larger temple, with stations for only two prisoners and one torturer; and it's fancier and better-decorated with glaring crimson mood lighting, because it's in the temple built into the private summer villa of an archduke.  But aside from that, it looks like a very ordinary and conventional torture chamber in an Asmodean temple.

The bag is quite small, even for a Holding bag.  You could fit your hand into how large it appears to be, if you tried, though the Queen did say it triggered just on being opened, and not with sticking your hand in.

Well, if she gets blood all over her clothes there's magic for that. She sits down and opens her present.

Which hand?

Left, she doesn't need it to write. Though she's going to heal it anyway.

As the bag comes halfway open, it leaps up around Carissa's left hand, over her wrist, snapping tight.

Most sexual masochists prefer a gradual buildup of their pain.  This bag is the opposite of that, as if somebody was trying to make the experience unpleasant even for a masochist, maybe as a challenge.

Carissa screams. Rich people soundproof their torture chambers, usually, and even if they didn't the church while doing a secret operation certainly would, but she wouldn't actually be able to do anything different if this were going to give away everything to Keltham. 

(It is decided: Carissa does NOT want to have sex with the Queen of Cheliax.)

"Good girl," whispers Abrogail Thrune's voice into Carissa's ear, seductiveness backed by vast Splendour.  "Go ahead, scream more.  Let it all out."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH....is Abrogail Thrune somehow personally listening? How? Why? Doesn't she have a country to run? Is this even informative about anything?? ...maybe it's a test about whether Carissa will try to draw her hand out of the bag, but she's not an idiot and that obviously wouldn't work? She's glad it wouldn't work, otherwise she'd in fact find it really hard not to.

The bag goes on treating Carissa's hand to a variety of different extreme unpleasantnesses, switching faster and faster as the bag continues its work, as though trying to deliberately avert someone's ability to lean into the pain and come to any kinds of terms with it.  This is not a bag of pain; this is a bag of suffering.

Thrune's voice continues to whisper seductive encouragement.  Depending on how much spare brainpower Carissa has (admittedly with her intelligence headband) she may note that at no point does the voice address her as 'Sevar' rather than just 'you'.

At the end, Thrune's voice whispers to her that she can claim her reward now - Thrune doesn't want to discourage girls from being good - and that if she would like to try this again, before sending the bag back to the palace at the end of the day, it can be recharged by any sixth-circle wizard.

The bag comes off Carissa's wrist and falls to the floor, now open, to the fading sound of Thrune's seductive laughter.

Carissa spends a couple of minutes on the floor trembling and sobbing and restraining herself from vomiting. That's without looking at her hand, which she's pretty sure will set her off again. 

Well. She's not going to worry anymore about pushing Keltham into being more intense than she can't handle. She is not sure if that's what the Queen was aiming at or if she just thinks it's funny. 

She's pretty sure that asking for the bag to be recharged so she can do it again would be flirting with the Queen, which she should not do. But who turns down a challenge from the Queen of Cheliax to prove yourself intense enough She will definitely regret that. Down that path lies statues, which is a different kind of thought than 'down that path lies horrible pain'. Down her own path lies horrible pain. She knows that. She should expect many days in Hell that are like that, even if she's a very promising student, because there are things you can only learn that way. She...genuinely doesn't think it's the fact that that was the most AWFUL FIVE MINUTES OF HER LIFE - or however long it was - is the reason she's not asking to do it again. 

When the pain and nausea have subsided enough she can breathe evenly she looks at her hand.

It's a wreck, but the kind of wreck that can be handled by a medium-strength cleric, not a Regeneration spell.

Okay.

Carissa's just going to - 

- right, her spellsilver! She's going to get her spellsilver out of the bag. Very carefully.

There's spellsilver in the bag, some regular silver, gold foil, tiny rubies, two packets of sapphire dust, and Chelish currency.  Somebody with a great deal of Splendour has very accurately guessed how much of a reward needs to be in this bag for Carissa Sevar to feel, even taking the torture into account, that the Queen was doing her a favor on net and not just in a not-killing-or-petrifying-you way.

....awwww. It's kind of like cuddles. The monetary equivalent of cuddles. You can handle anything if afterwards someone will tell you you're very impressive and give you cuddles, or spellsilver.

She scoops it up and puts it into her breast pocket and then makes herself stand up and stagger to the door by promising herself there will be healing on the other side of it. She looks godawful and she's well aware of it but there's probably time to put herself together before explaining the Taldor plan.

The priest on duty doesn't raise an eyebrow, just taps her hand with healing.

Great! She'll just put the bag in her pocket with the spellsilver for safekeeping, splash some water on her face and fix her hair, then!

She's still walking shakily but that ought to wear off.

Security near her room will appear and deliver the Taldor books and the alt-history outline to her.

Excellent. What has she got to work with.

Taldor has been around for nearly a thousand years, and has a civil war with brutal regularity at nearly every succession, because the next Emperor is appointed, technically by the Senate, a vestigial body in the capital with no real influence except once every few decades when it is called upon to name the next Emperor. The processes the Senate is supposed to follow are stunningly opaque and complex -- the word in Carissa's language for 'excessively complicated' stems from the capital city of Taldor -- and there's no mechanism by which the Senate's rulings are enforced, besides that they lend the named person a lot of credibility. Needless to say, that doesn't really work, and peaceful successions are at this point practically the exception; unfit or young Emperors have a tendency to be elevated only to swiftly die of it, ruthless outsiders sometimes have a go until they misstep in the capital politics they don't understand and die, the army is always cheerfully threatening to proclaim a general as emperor....

Emperors tried in various ways to secure a preferred successor -- naming a co-emperor, say -- but it was common for junior co-emperors to be killed when their senior co-emperor died or lost his foothold. 

Taldor is mostly feudal, but the Emperor appoints the rulers of some provinces directly, and those military governors are supposed to be especially loyal to him and his enforcers, if a fight is necessary. Of course, if you let your military governors accumulate too much power in their own right they might overthrow you. Of course, if you keep the people who concern you most close to home they might assassinate you. 

Despite all this Taldor has remained a major global power, mostly for two reasons: firstly, even its outlying fortresses are a thousand years old and nearly unassailable (including by one another, during civil wars), and secondly, Oppara itself is a magnificently walled and warded city, and it's said those walls will outlast the world. It's lost some ground to Qadira, and some to Galt, but it's still larger than Cheliax. 

Keltham's going to be so offended about all of these things!! But they'll have whatever bizarre correlations they're supposed to, because Taldor is a real place that really exists. Carissa speed-reads some book and makes some notes on the outline and then goes to the library to present to her students. 

As Carissa enters the room, Pilar clears her throat from a lurking corner near the door, and then hands Carissa a very nice-looking piece of cake, on an elaborate plate.  "Surprise!" Pilar says.  "This is your congratulations-on-seducing Keltham party!  Have some cake."

Yeah, that's incredibly weird. Carissa is less than delighted. 

"For all you know, I failed miserably," she says, taking the plate and setting it down on the nearest desk. "Perhaps in dath ilan they have entirely different anatomy and we both got horribly confused."

Pilar says nothing, just scurrying around to the nearest chair and perching there next to Paxti.  She doesn't quite look embarrassed about the whole thing; more like she did it on somebody else's orders that she isn't going to argue with.

All other girls present are giving her exactly as much of a strange look as you'd expect in Cheliax, which is to say, it's not at all dramatic or exaggerated, but it's definitely detectable to another Chelaxian.