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Hell is truth seen too late.
- Thomas Hobbes
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to-let-you-in
"Do you have an ambition to run a criminal organization. It'd be a bit hard to arrange but we could come up with something."
lawful chaotic
"Not really, their stories weren't really about selfish people, more like - having some totally reasonable Lawful Good reason to end up managing a criminal organization, which turns out to actually be fun for you, and then, you have to come to terms with the fact that you didn't properly hate yourself for doing the Lawful Good thing that didn't look Lawful Good - which is as close as Civilization comes to, even in stories -"
"I’m being unfair because I’m bitter. There are stories about selfish characters too. But none of those characters seemed to me to be at all like myself, the real thing. It was like - they were being selfish in contrast to Lawful Goodness, instead of as just themselves - somebody else's fantasy about being selfish - or if not that, aliens who were selfish, who didn't have any Good in them at all -"
"I preferred to stick with the stories about people who ended up managing criminal organizations for totally reasonable reasons. Further outside the - you don't have the expression. The way that things get creepy as they're almost like reality but still not quite right, instead of just being properly wrong. The Trough of the Unreal. If you actually know what it's like to not be completely Good."
If they successfully make this boy Evil the results are going to be terrifying, Gregoria thinks to herself.
lawful chaotic
"They didn't want to not be Lawful Good, not even a little. They wanted the Lawful Good thing to do to be managing a criminal organization. That was their fantasy. They wanted to have a different kind of fun, not act for reasons that were like my reasons. And who could blame them? I wouldn't want to act for any reasons but my own reasons, either. The thing that puts a valuation on everything is the value function, in Baseline 'utilityfunction', and there's a saying out of dath ilan that you can't argue the utilityfunction."
"All right, I've properly depressed myself for the evening, time for dessert."
lawful chaotic
Keltham did not remain depressed for long. He knew that ahead of him lay a date. A date which was delayed. A delay during which things involving Yaisa were happening.
Yaisa is very happy. She was on solid footing when their initial assignment was 'seduce and keep happy this important alien visitor who is a boy your age from a Lawful Good world'; she was much less happy when the assignment somehow turned into 'learn a lot of complicated math from this important alien visitor while pretending to be from Taldor as recently conquered by a Lawful Neutral version of Asmodeus'. And now it's back to mostly being the first thing, which is great.
It's not that she's bad at math. She is fine at math. She was never in the bottom third of the class and it was only rarely because she was sleeping with the teachers. She is a perfectly qualified wizard who hung second circle spells sooner than half the class and sleeping with the teacher doesn't let you cheat at that. It's just that math kind of sucks, and there's no thrill in it, and there's absolutely a thrill in seducing Lawful Good boys and watching them struggle between doing their important project or having sex with you, and getting orders from the gods about telling them what to do.
Yaisa's lovely time is only interrupted by periodically having to check with herself whether this is the thing she's been instructed by Pilar's oracle curse to explain to Keltham and then pay him for getting right. She's pretty sure it's not 'I'm really into the thing where I distract you from your very important job'; her gut tells her that Keltham would find that adversarial and not in a fun way. She's pretty sure it's not 'I want to bite you when you get distracted and go off on a tangent about probability theory'; an important skill in Yaisa's line of work is reading whether someone is into that at least a little under the right circumstances, and Keltham isn't.
Well. This investigation into what she wants that she'll pay Keltham Cheliax's money to give her will surely bear fruit eventually.
lawful chaotic
It might possibly become clear to her around the time that -
Explicit sexual content.
after Yaisa previously having given Keltham occasional and often mood-breaking feedback about exactly what level of pain is, not even 'too much', but optimal for her arousal - it becomes clear that Keltham also has the ability to just directly read her arousal for purposes of, for example, backing off just before she has an orgasm.(Submission? Masochism? Why would you need either of those in a partner for them to appreciate that? Why would dath ilani require either a desire to serve or a desire to feel pain, in order to prefer that their partners do more work in order to increase the integral of their pleasure over extended time?)
Explicit sexual content.
Yaisa has been warned about this! It's why she's not supposed to act like she's having more fun than she is, even though (she complained to Subirachs at length) 'having fun' is sort of a product of lots of things one of which is acting like you're having fun, and things not being awkward, and really she's pretty sure she'd have more fun if she was allowed to act like she was into things where that felt appropriate.
(Subirachs was not persuaded.)
....anyway Yaisa suspects 'let me act like I'm having more fun than I am' is definitely not the thing she's supposed to pay Keltham for even though she would pay Keltham for it.
....though. This does give her an idea.
"So," Yaisa says to Keltham. "you know what a very clever boy who is good at telling how he's aroused his partner could do."
lawful chaotic
Continued spoilers.
He's listening attentively, though with some amount of new gendertrope saying to apply more pain until she speaks more respectfully which what why how would that even work.
Continued.
(That would work great, if Yaisa knew he was doing it.)
"Instead of asking a very distracted girl to report on whether he is hurting her the right amount, he could figure it out, himself, from her body, from how she's responding to him. This is of course him doing more work and her doing less, so I suppose she ought to pay him, for the favor."
.
lawful chaotic
Continued.
Any qualms Keltham might have otherwise had, about whether Yaisa really enjoys this or is trying to lure him into Conspiracy grimdarkness of unfathomable long-term purpose, fail entirely to materialize when faced with Yaisa expressing a financially legible amount of actual desire for something. It also makes his new gendertrope feel better about whether he's being respected. "Price?" he says.
Continued
She bites her lip. In a sexy way. "Five silver? You can do that fairness spell, if you want."
lawful chaotic
Continued.
...that's weirdly high. Is Yaisa sure that she'd be able to name that amount under a Fairness spell - is it somewhere around half of the absolute most she'd pay an arbitrary person for this service? Ten silver seems kinda high for that quantity given her financial circumstances. She's not supposed to be paying more to motivate Keltham, she's supposed to propose a fair price to herself and then Keltham can decide whether to take it or not.
Continued
- why is he like this.
"Keltham, the thing that is fun - not the whole thing that is fun, but at least half of the thing that is fun - about sleeping with someone who wants to hurt you, is that you can - turn off all the parts of your mind that are looking out for your interests and making sure that you're safe and that everything is fine, that you can stop trying to steer your life like a neurotic horse-rider obsessing over which cobblestones the horse steps on - that probably doesn't translate at all - that, instead of making a decision every five seconds, you can not do that, and still have things happen that are interesting and not boring. I think most rich people - and I'm a rich person, now - would pay a lot more than ten silver for that, if paying for it were actually a way to get it, but the thing is that it's pretty hard to pay for. Can you, for one minute, stop nitpicking my prices, and decide whether to take it or not, because the figuring out exactly what I want is not the fun part.
lawful chaotic
Continued.
He could just take that, to avoid the awkwardness - haha just kidding Keltham is an Abadar cleric.He could say he'll only take one silver and proceed, but then he'd feel bad about not being sure it was actually worth even one silver to her, and Keltham does have any ability to notice when he's about to perform a sex act he'll feel bad about.
"Yaisa, ten silver is half of your daily salary, that's really high as a true value on one sub-act of sex where we do things slightly differently for a couple of dozen minutes. I really wish I had another Fairness loaded but I don't and an actual transfer of five silver was what you named under Fairness for a whole day masturbating without coming -"
"...which is fun, and something I do sometimes anyway without anyone telling me to, though it's hotter if someone told me to. Keltham -" she's feeling insulted and upset, and letting both show on her face, she doesn't think they'd be different in alter-Cheliax - "I haven't ever bought sex, there isn't a normal market in it I can refer to because girls don't do that in Cheliax and because buying it from someone else would be really different anyway, I'm used to thinking with numbers the other way around but not this way, I told you a number where if you'd said 'yes' I would've felt happy and pleased with myself and had a good time, and it's about the same size of favor the other way as spending the day teasing myself ....I don't actually understand what your objections are to the number but I can't - I can't - I don't see how I'm supposed to come up with numbers if instead of just thinking 'will I feel happy' I have to also think about whether the numbers are the right percentage of my daily salary given the amount of time where your behavior will be different! That's insane! I'm not good at math like that, if I was I'd still be one of your researchers! You can say 'deal', you can say 'no deal', but there's no part of me I can listen to and get numbers, if you're going to say 'no see the numbers are wrong!'
lawful chaotic
Continued.
"I'm sorry. This would be a much more awful problem if the Fairness spell didn't exist and I'm suddenly very very glad it does.""Your max payment is capped at five silver, and you don't actually pay me anything until I can tap you tomorrow with a Fairness, so the spell does the work for you of knowing how to put feelings into numbers? The amount that came out from you earlier today under Fairness made perfect sense, even if the number you made up just before then didn't."
"Also, I'm sorry for being like this, I genuinely am, it's just, I do have any ability to notice when I'm about to do a sex thing that makes me feel very uncomfortable, and accepting five silver for that sex act would definitely have been that."
Continued.
"You're a ridiculous alien," says Yaisa, though with less heat. "Ridiculous and alien and sure, I'm not going to complain if you want me to pay you less. If I wanted to have sex with someone who wasn't a ridiculous alien I'd be doing that. It's not every day you get to have sex with ridiculous aliens. ....so are you going to do it? Even if you don't know yet how much you want for it?"
lawful chaotic
Continued.
"Even five full silver isn't enough to really buy sex from the ridiculous alien at his current salary, if he turns out to enjoy it less that way, and you want him to do it again in the future.""But right now when I don't know how it will feel - and it does seem sort of hot, given that I know you want it enough to pay for it and my brain actually believes it when you put it that way - I wouldn't mind running the experiment."
"Oh good. Then let's leave the payment stuff for tomorrow and try it. Because I do want it, and I will pay you for it, and you just might find you like it too."
lawful chaotic
Explicit sexual content.
Keltham goes back to what he was doing, namely: Fucking Yaisa using dath ilani biofeedback training to hold back his own orgasm or ejaculate only partially. He hurts her only lightly, at first. Once his attempted reading of Yaisa's signs says she's aroused again, he hurts her more than that. Just watching, now, to see what level of pain raises her arousal, what level of pain decreases it.It's a whole new control lever to play with, and so much hotter than he realized it would be. Keltham barely retains enough control of himself to say thickly that, if at some point Yaisa feels like she's no longer getting what she paid for, she should speak up. Then Keltham starts trying to bring Yaisa dangerously close to orgasm, and using, as a control rod to keep her there, more pain than is optimal for arousal; decrease it a bit to bring her back up, increase it to take her back down.
It feels powerful, a word that Carissa has kept on using with him, that she wants him to feel that way, and which he maybe now understands for the first time.
Yaisa is delighted, mostly too delighted to think in much detail about how much she's in trouble for having apparently quoted Keltham the wrong price. When she does happen to think about it she thinks determinedly that this is, in fact, worth five silver, that this is worth more than that, that once you decide you're willing to pay for sex this is obviously the thing you should pay for, the experience of endless pleasure and torment at the hands of an alien who is clearly realizing for the first time that this is something he can have.
She does not complain that she's not getting what she paid for.
lawful chaotic
Explicit sexual content.
Eventually, of course, he flies too close to the sun and it's clear that Yaisa is starting to come, so Keltham hurts her harder and comes with her.That was fun and also exhausting, given how much focus it required. It takes an actual if minor effort for Keltham to stay active long enough to touch Yaisa's cuffs and speak the release words, before he half-collapses onto the cuddleroom bed beside her.
Part of his brain suggests that Carissa is in the Conspiracy and steered him to Yaisa who was brought in because she's a much better faker than Carissa. Keltham tells his brain to take a rest, if there's actually a Conspiracy he's not going to figure it out during sex where everybody appears to be having an uncomplicated good time. It does remind Keltham to cast the Glimpse of Beyond spell he got for today, he'd meant to do that just before coming inside her but he got distracted.
Yaisa has not been replaced by somebody else he could impregnate, who hadn't signed the contract; or, if she was, they replaced her really quickly after that, and Keltham thinks he maintained physical contact with her the whole time.
Just to be sure again, Keltham reaches out his hand and traces over Yaisa's cheeks, nose, eyebrows, making sure the facial features he sees are not illusionary, in case Glimpse of Beyond only catches transformations and not illusions. It is also a lover's caress. No reason you can't have both at once.