"I believe so?  On the dramatic principles I know, that should leave the enticing mystery unrevealed."

"I wonder, is it required that there be an audience, somewhere, for all of this theory to operate?  Can we deduce the existence of such an audience, watching us, from such events happening to us at all?"

"That, going on Keltham's earlier thoughts detected by myself and also his more recent transcripts, I would conjecture to be the domain of 'anthropics'."

"But if the answer is ultimately yes - then I do solemnly avow to you who may be watching, that should the victory be mine, I will do my best to make Evil's victory more interesting to you than any triumph of Good could ever be."

PL-timestamp:  Day 8 (7) / Noon
PL-placestamp:  Otolmens Containment Zone / Project Lawful main site

Carissa would honestly be content to just lie here not talking all afternoon, but regrettably she has a job, which is figuring out how well Keltham is taking all of the new things he learned about Asmodean theology. And also being appealingly happy and adorable so he's tempted to keep pushing himself on this front. The two don't obviously go well together, but -

"You are my favorite person," she declares, running a second Prestidigitation on top of the first one so that she can make the sheets trail glitter as she cleans them. "And High Priestess Subirachs is my second favorite person. And Abrogail is my third favorite person, though she'd probably be higher if she hadn't specifically told me to absolutely not go falling in love with her."

"I should probably try to just accept all that and not ask questions.  I'm still not seeing the adorable romance of being stabbed in the stomach with an illusionary knife, but then, I've also never understood what any woman I've dated has ever seen in me at all, or for that matter, seen in men in general.  I would date women.  So my confusion is staying perfectly on trend."

"I actually think I might have half of the explanation for the appeal of being stabbed in the stomach with a fake knife! I was thinking about this while you and Asmodia were flirting. So in dath ilan, a skill people try to display at each other when they're flirting is - intelligence of a very particular type, right - playing on more levels than the other person, making better predictions - and the game itself is appealing in a romantic sense and winning at it is moreso?"

"Pretty much.  Asmodia is supposed to be impressed with me, and then also feel moved that such an impressive person as myself wants to date her."

"Right. So - Golarion is a lot more dangerous than dath ilan. And an extremely impressive trait in a person is their - ability to wield power so that they and the people close to them are safe from that danger. So along with signaling intelligence at each other, we signal dangerousness at each other. A dangerous person is one who, if you are theirs, will be competent to defend you, and ruthless about tracking down anyone who murders you and steals your soul or whatever."

"Yeah, somebody killing you and stealing your soul would not be an especially good idea at this point.  I wouldn't be my usual cautious, hesitant, timid self about that."

"...I suppose if I asked what it proves to stab somebody with an illusionary knife, while they're chained up and can't fight back, you'd tell me it was more of a direct perceptual update than a carefully reasoned argument."

"Mmmhmm. I have my probabilities that you would be dangerous in my defense and those didn't change much but the part of my brain that instinctively tracks every person around me and how scary they are definitely learned something new about how scary you are. It's much better at listening to knives than reasoned arguments."

"That... actually seems fair, I am more dangerous than I would be if I couldn't manage to do that."

"Though I'd then go on to guess that dath ilani women wouldn't find it romantic to be stabbed like that.  At all.  And while it's sexy that your combat potential is so much higher than mine, I think you turning that against me - would grate against something very deep inside myself.  I think a dath ilani woman would probably feel the same about a man showing that he was willing to be dangerous at her, that it would make him less appealing to her."

"And I doubt Civilization is old enough for us to be that much further away from - the original conditions, the early conditions, when our distant ancestors in dath ilan would have also needed to be dangerous to each other.  I'd guess that worlds with masochists have this, and worlds without masochists don't.  And so there's more to it than - the reasoning you just described that should go through anywhere dangerous."

" - so I kind of have a theory that dath ilanism might accidentally crush some things about the way I am, so if you had children with it they wouldn't grow into adults with it. But I'm not very sure, i can just sort of feel it in tension and maybe I'd have found a resolution even in dath ilan.

...also at least some of attraction is - in dath ilan even if you had delightfully complicated feelings about your boyfriend being scary towards you, everyone knows that he's not supposed to do that, so it must've been a failure of self-control, and failures of self-control are not generally appealing, and if you told your friends they'd think he was much less valuable and people want lovers they can show off -"

"Even I could analyze a tangle like that, and cut through it simply by describing it out loud to everyone in the room.  It's not a complicated or a difficult tangle.  To say nothing of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, or the Keepers."

"I think, though, that - something like what you're describing - could have happened much much earlier in Civilization, before we'd optimized our heritage as much, when people were less intelligent, and had less knowledge of how tangles like that worked.  Though it wouldn't be exactly what you're describing, because that would've made sadists less appealing, not made masochists less appealing."

"But either some factor present only in Golarion, like gods, produced the Yaisas and Pilars and Carissas - or they would have existed for me in dath ilani, but somehow got differentially-replicated out of existence hundreds of years earlier.  If the latter were true, that'd be awfully sad, but - the former does seem more likely."

Her first instinct is that it seems odd to have people who like hurting others if there was never at any point in history the corresponding thing but it's a stupid thought; historically they'd just have hurt people who didn't like it, and then at some point dath ilan decided to be too Good to allow that .....

...and quite possibly hid all of their history so their enormous population of unhappy sexually unfulfilled sadists wouldn't realize what Good had taken from them. 

She feels cold horror, and anger, like she's only felt when she's heard Good people saying truly sickening things like that Hell should be destroyed and every devil with it.

....not the time to voice any of that aloud, though. 

"I guess the gods might've done it. ....Pilar was talking at dinner about how her curse worked in testing in Egorian and it struck me as seeming suspiciously optimized to let you have her around both your hangups. Maybe Cayden Cailean works very hard to maintain the ratios of various kinks, in general, and no one appreciates His effort."

"Suspiciously optimized around both of my hangups?  You're going to have to unpack a lot there before I can determine whether I owe Cayden Cailean a large favor or not."

"Both her hangups and yours," Carissa clarifies. "Uh, so the specific thing that she said was that they tested under what conditions she could throw a party for someone. Could she - root out corruption by trying to host a 'we caught you being corrupt!' party for everyone in the palace who took bribes to ignore laws, that kind of thing.

And the answer as far as they could tell - you'd have to ask her or Egorian for the whole record of tests" manufactured real-yesterday for this specific ploy "was that she only finds herself somewhere in possession of snacks to hand out if she sincerely wants good for that person and if it's good for her too. People can summon her to their door with snacks by saying 'hey Pilar I want to have fun', but only if they actually want to have fun and only if she will also have fun.

....see where I'm going with this. I didn't say anything to Pilar so as not to ruin the surprise." 

"...I'm gonna have to think about whether that counts as nonconsensual mindreading.  While carefully ignoring any thoughts about whether Cayden would have already predicted my decision about that, because otherwise my decision is just whatever Cayden tells me it is and then Cayden has nothing meaningful to predict."

"Also, do you know offhand which experiments they did to test the distinction between 'person thinks Pilar will have fun' and 'Pilar will actually have fun'?"

"You'd have to ask Egorian for the list of experiments, or ask Pilar. I think sometimes the source of the result was just, uh, the curse straight-up giving her an impression of why it wasn't cooperating? Like it'd outright say to her 'sure, that'll be good for you' or 'no because someone would get hurt'."

"Well, I'll read the report and then figure out my own experiments to test it, I suppose."

"Sounds good. I assume I am not allowed to summon Pilar to my bed with cake and then fuck her even if I am less scrupulous than you and think it'd go fine?"

"I... think I have to know Pilar a little better maybe?  Just so it didn't feel weird that you were having sex with her at all?"

"But no, I'm not imposing my scruples on you, here.  For some reason my brain thinks the Conspiracy is trying to lure me specifically into doing things that Civilization would think are awful, but that model of the Conspiracy isn't particularly chuckling about, like, the Conspiracy telling you and Pilar to get it on one night, if you see what I'm saying."

How would a dath ilani do this. "Presumably if there is a Conspiracy Pilar and I are both gifted top-secret actresses who have collaborated on many similar Conspiracies anyway and our private habits are of no concern to the Conspiracy. ....thought of a way you could check if I'm the person you met at the Worldwound. Should I not tell you?"

"...since it hadn't even occurred to me to worry about that, I'll say sure."