"Well, now I'm going to have to try to think of another problem we don't have, if you don't distract me. Attempted translation across the alien communications barrier, that was an invitation to distract me."

"I intend to.  Very shortly."  He's gone soft, erectionwise, and it'll be slightly harder to regain after one partial ejaculation, but when his options for gaining arousal include inflicting pain on Carissa Sevar he is confident that getting his erection back will not be even slightly a problem.  "I check explicitly:  Most dath ilani women, if they weren't being paid in other ways, would consider themselves owed an orgasm during sex.  Unless they were deliberately practicing near-orgasmic-only sex, in order to increase or conserve their sex drive; and then they'd want you to work on getting them to near-orgasm as a signal of - of a concept you don't have but 'respect' is close to it.  To show that you weren't trying to go off the boundary of fairness."

"I consider myself owed nothing, though with intent to acquire some things, if you're not clever enough to stop me."

"I can't tell if you're talking about masturbating or stealing my shirt, and in the latter case, I'll say again that it is MY SHIRT and I consider that part to be SERIOUS BUSINESS."

"Sorry. I will not steal your shirt. I will not ambiguously joke about stealing your shirt. I will spend my next paycheck on Sleeves of Many Garments and then, inexplicably-from-your-perspective, have your shirt, but not in a way that deprives you of it."

"Good.  I'm an easy man to get along with if you don't yoink my stuff, see."

"I - part of me is attracted to, just, not owing you anything - but part of me would have liked to... not give you pleasure, inflict it on you like it was pain."

"But either my dath ilani training assumes the other woman is also a dath ilani, when it comes to reading her accurately, or I don't know the key code to your sex lock?  You were making sounds that would correspond to a dath ilani woman having the amount of fun I'd expect from the techniques I was using.  But the training I've done for reading things like muscle tension and exact details of breathing - for purposes of pulling off the trick of keeping a woman right around orgasm without going over, and without her needing to be distracted by giving me deliberate feedback, which is another dath ilani trick I was planning to surprise you with - was reading as if you were at the same low constant arousal level regardless of what techniques I tried on you.  Even if what I was doing was working, and I just couldn't tell, I'm not sure I can get you to orgasm at all - let alone keep you in near-orgasmic pleasure for a while - if I can't tell how well anything is working, we don't have any prior protocols established for more deliberate feedback cycles, and also I don't have a vibrating-thing or any other sextech."

What's an explanation that's not 'oh, I was really hoping I could just fake it'. And not 'yeah, that's Chelish girls, unreadable', which it'd now be her responsibility to coordinate everyone on that!! Which seems hard!!! It's - it's the same problem they ran into earlier, right, Keltham pulling apparently-magical correlations out of nowhere, because his society shelves entirely different things alongside each other - and not 'actually I really dislike experiencing pleasure', which isn't even true but feels kind of true right now, and not 'oh that was my badly behaved unsexy body double -'

Why is her life LIKE this -

As few lies as possible. Only she doesn't even know what the relatively fewer lies route from here is, because they are standing in a LIE MINEFIELD -

- this is the way a stupid failure who gets executed a week from now thinks, not the way that the girl Asmodeus noticed thinks - calm, focus - good lies are personal, therefore nondisprovable. Good lies expose vulnerability, because people don't expect vulnerable lies and because if you know what someone thinks your vulnerabilities are you're safer.

Snuggle. "That's on me, not on you, I think - I was enjoying myself, but it's hard for me to relax enough to get off when I don't feel like I understand -" handwave. "what's going on. If it's safe for me to stop tracking things. It's...not actually safe to stop tracking things very often, at the Worldwound. And, uh, it Is physically much safer here but it's also very confusing. I am curious whether you'll have this problem with anyone else but my guess now is that you won't and it is just that I am too on edge, and need to relax."

The invisible inaudible security wizard, who is reading Sevar's mind and laughing his head off, temporarily pauses his laughter in a sign of due respect; that recovery was legitimately smoother than he was expecting Sevar to pull off.

He's also resolving to never ever sleep with this woman no matter what she waves in front of him, but that's likewise a sign of respect.

Keltham hugs Carissa closer to himself.  It's an honest reaction, of course, he's not going to start faking things, that would be a sign something had gone dreadfully wrong with an equilibrium; if people acted fake in that way, then Carissa would be expecting the fakery, and if they don't then he's not going to be first to defect, etcetera.  Keltham is moved and feeling empathetic suffering, as one would expect, what with Carissa's story being more awful than anything you'd almost ever hear in dath ilan where the news coverage tries to be statistically representative of how often things happen in reality.

But Keltham is also concealing another thought, one that seems not especially helpful to speak right now, which is about the way that Carissa made sexual sounds despite her low objective arousal.  It blatantly rhymes with the Permanent Cheerfulness - he is beginning to suspect it is not dignity - of his students.

There is, Keltham is beginning to suspect, a kind of damage to the self that non-psychiatrists like himself have never heard of, maybe a kind of damage that approximately doesn't exist in dath ilan; something like an illusion spell, something like the Eagle's Splendor spell, something that unglues seemings from actualities.  Keltham suspects, he intuits, that the ungluing isn't just in the outer social world, it's not like a lie told to other people, it reaches deep into people's own selves.  It is a form of damage that dath ilani mental training protects against so thoroughly that he was never warned against it as a danger; or maybe it's a socially-inflicted hazard that requires your society to be doing everything wrong simultaneously.

Fighting endless demons at the Worldwound and that making you tense to the point where you have a hard time getting off during sex even after you leave, well, yes, that's bad or even grimdark; but it's the ordinary kind of grimdark you would see in a movie or novel out of dath ilan.  The thing where you make noises like you're fine, that seems very, very, very much worse in ways that Keltham is finding hard to describe.  That cannot possibly be something that would not damage a person, nor a thing that an undamaged person would do.

...he wants to find whatever did this to Carissa and unmake it.

Ha.  Keltham has never felt that way about another person before.  It isn't limerence, Keltham doesn't think, it doesn't feel like descriptions he's read of limerence.  More like he owns equity in Sevar or, or he doesn't even know.

He's supposed to set aside sad thoughts like this, but Keltham can feel that he should not do so that quickly.  The current running through him now is deep, not lightly to be told to go away and come back later.  Still, he can at least not say any such things out loud.  If his Carissa is broken and doesn't know it, he shouldn't ask about that or try to explain his hypothesis to her in the middle of sex; under previously decided meta-policy, it should not be said tonight at all.

"I may need a half-minute to recover," Keltham says out loud.  "I'm afraid that I went and updated about how awful Golarion is, again, and I definitely needed to go there because otherwise I would have been too confused specifically during sex, but still."

What in that could possibly have been an update. 

"Take as long as you need."

A brief smile.  "I'll aspire to need as little as possible.  A saying out of dath ilan:  First learn correctness, then comes speed."

"A saying that works here too! I don't think I've heard it but if I did I wouldn't guess at all it'd be invented by aliens."

"Interesting.  How about:  If you know where you're going, you should already be there."

" - somewhat more invented by aliens. 'I know where I'm going' usually means 'I'm pleased with my afterlife arrangements and if they turn out to be dated to today then so be it', but it's not advised to run straight off to Hell just because you're supposed to get there eventually."

"Ha.  No, that's not what it means in dath ilan at all.  It's the second discipline of speed, which is fourteenth of the twenty-seven virtues, reflecting a shard of the Law of Probability that I'll no doubt end up explaining later but I'm not trying it here without a whiteboard."

"As a human discipline, 'If you know your destination you are already there' is a self-fulfilling prediction about yourself, that if you can guess what you're going to realize later, you have already realized it now.  The idea in this case would be something like, because mental qualities do not have intrinsic simple inertia in the way that physical objects have inertia, there is the possibility that if we had sufficiently mastered the second layer of the virtue of speed, we would be able to visualize in detail what it would be like to have recovered from our mental shocks, and then just be that.  For myself, that'd be visualizing where I'll already be in half a minute.  For yourself, though this would be admittedly harder, it'd be visualizing what it would be like to have recovered from the Worldwound.  Maybe we could just immediately rearrange our minds like that, because mental facts don't have the same kinds of inertia as physical objects, especially if we believe about ourselves that we can move that quickly."

"I, of course, cannot actually do that, and have to actually take the half a minute.  But knowing that I'd be changing faster if I was doing it ideally is something I can stare at mentally and then change faster, because we do have any power at all to change through imagining other ways we could be, even if not perfectly.  Another line of that verse goes, 'You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed.'"

"You seemed to think that the first layer of speed made perfect sense, so I thought I'd go try the second layer on you.  Though that may have been a little ambitious now that I'm actually saying out loud what all goes into layer two."

" - huh. I think - that might not be true until you've learned some other things for changing your mind around. I bet it's true for devils."

"Layer three is 'imaginary intelligence is real intelligence' and it means that if you can imagine the process that produces a correct answer in enough detail, you can just use the imaginary answer from that in real life, because it doesn't matter what simulation layer an answer comes from.  The classic exercise to develop the virtue is to write a story featuring a character who's much smarter than you, so you can see what answers your mind produces when you try to imagine what somebody much smarter than you would say.  If those answers are actually better, it means that your own model of yourself contains stupidity assertions, places where you believe about yourself that you reason in a way which is incorrect or just think that your brain isn't supposed to produce good answers; such that when you instead try to write a fictional character much smarter than you, your own actual brain, which is what's ultimately producing those answers, is able to work unhindered by your usual conceptions of the ways in which you think that you're a kind of person stupider than that."

"Huh. I have not tried my hand at writing fiction but I would be really surprised if I had that problem. One thing I like about wizards is that they are very very focused on being as smart as possible and getting as much out of your intelligence as possible, and if there were a widespread phenomenon of people failing on some level to use all their intelligence which you could notice once you enhanced Wisdom or Cunning there's no way everyone wouldn't've known that."

"Yeah, let's try that again after all y'all hear a remotely Lawful definition of what intelligence is."

"I was wondering before if - maybe the permanently cheerful students in the classroom, are trying to imagine the version of themselves that's cheerful, and act like that person in hopes of being that person.  Because when we're being instructed in the virtue of speed, we're told that you can try that, like, once or three times, to see if anything improves.  But if you kept it up, it'd be like..."  They probably don't have artificial flavors here.  "Using Prestidigitation to flavor all your food, if Prestidigitation worked perfectly for that, to the point where flavors were uncorrelated from actual nutrients and your body became confused in the way that it tried to seek nutrients by seeking flavors associated with those nutrients.  'Fake cheerfulness until it's real' is something you'd try a few times to learn how it helped, if it helped.  Not a good way of splinting a bone long-term to help it heal.  It wouldn't heal straight.  Or at least, that was the standard dath ilani advice to a standard dath ilani person in my intelligence bracket.  But artificial cheerfulness meant to become real probably isn't the explanation for the permanent cheerfulness thing, because if it was, they could have just said so."

That's about the best veiled helpful-advice Keltham can offer relative to the obvious possible reason why Carissa might be imitating all the sexual responses of a person who hadn't just gotten back from the Worldwound.

Carissa has picked up that there's subtext, but isn't sure enough of what it is to be sure she can handle it cautiously enough. "I don't think that's it exactly. Or - that kind of thing might be an ingredient in the advice that people get. But our wisdom doesn't get passed down split up like that into standard advice by intelligence bracket. We get told 'this thing tends to work better than this other thing' and not why everyone thinks so. But you'll still do better by listening to the wisdom than not, even if you'd do even better if the wisdom was all split up and separately justified and you could figure out which pieces are applicable."

Well, that doesn't overtly sound like she picked up the subtext, so either she actually didn't pick up the subtext (hypothesis 1)*, maybe because his theory of what she was trying to do was completely off-base (hypothesis 1.1), or maybe it'll delayed-drop on her later (hypothesis 1.2), or alternatively she got it but doesn't want to talk about it now so is concealing that she got it (hypothesis 2).  Either way, he should move on.

(*)  The Baseline way of thinking this hypothesis tree makes it clear that the branches are not exhaustive, meaning there's an implicit hypothesis 1.0 "all other branches of 1" that is neither 1.1 nor 1.2.

Keltham checks in with his sexuality.  His sexuality is not, he thinks, really all that hindered by the thought of the grimdark thing that happened to Carissa; the desire to protect her is weirdly close in mindspace to the desire to have pain-inflicting sex with her.  The reason the mood could be that fragile is because of the other impediments still going on.

"I checked in with my sexuality again, now that my brain had four half... two minutes to rest," Keltham says.  The tendency to underestimate required temporal resources is so ubiquitous that, even in dath ilan, people who don't want to spend infinity mental labor-hours on doing better will just live with their embarrassing darned underestimates.  "It still wants to hurt you and have sex with you and - try out paying nothing back, which I guess this is a good time for nope major inner pushback on that.  Some part of me is not okay with the prospect of not knowing your sex passcode and not being able to inflict pleasure on you when I feel like it.  It wants to run off and build a hugely overpowered magical vibrating-thing to brute-force your sex passcode.  I don't actually know what's going on in my head right now.  Do you know what's going on in there."

"My top guess would be, your conception of what it means to have power over a girl includes 'you can get her off', so it doesn't really feel like having me, if you can't. Other guesses: your concept of why it's okay to hurt me is because I like it, rather than because I want it, and so my liking ended up tangled in your core concept of why this is a fun thing to do and it doesn't feel fun if you don't feel like I'm liking it properly. I don't suppose it fixes this if I assure you it's very very pleasant just not in a getting-off way?"