"You're a lot of fun," Yaisa murmurs tiredly, and caresses him back. "Are you - looking for extradimensional invaders? Now? I guess it'd be smart of them to attack while we're tired?"

He wasn't particularly trying to hide the Glimpse of Beyond cast from Yaisa, of course; that would be futile with her arcane sight.

"Checking you hadn't been replaced with a much more experienced actress, or the one-in-a-billion person on this planet of actually a trillion people who would enjoy that."

"On a totally different note, is this when I find out that you actually have some incredibly fascinating backstory or maybe that you've got some huge problem I need to solve?"

"- because I was so perfect and sexy that it is hard to believe I'm just a student your own age?" asks Yaisa, sounding incredibly pleased about this. "Uh, I don't think I have any huge problems you need to solve? Or an interesting backstory? I do have this boyfriend who wants me to be able to figure out on the fly what a reasonable price for really great sex is as a share of my daily income which just quintupled, maybe you could go fight him or something."

"Oh, good.  Because you matched one of my previously undiscovered sexual needs perfectly enough that, if you don't have anything at all unusual going on with you, it's ten-to-one evidence against the whole 'EroLARP' Hypothesis.  And I do not actually want to be inside one of those."

He feels a strong impulse to just buy Yaisa out from her current job, right there on the bed where she lies beside him, but that is not an impulse buying decision.

It totally has an impulsive-purchase subset though!  "Tomorrow morning while you're under the Fairness, if you're okay with it, I'd like to also ask you for a cheerful price on your next week for sex work.  Just buy it all out from you and have you do whatever I want during those days, if I get around to wanting anything, or ordering you to do anything fun, and otherwise you can study wizardry or do whatever else you would've done.  Because I am now rich, and can possibly afford nice things like hiring a full-time sex worker just to be around me being on call."

"To be clear, there's no rule saying you actually have to accept whatever price you name under the Fairness spell, you're allowed to try negotiating upwards from that, but I might make you a probabilistic final offer about it."

"I don't think you're in an 'EroLARP'," Yaisa says. "I think you have a bunch of pretty girls trying to seduce you for totally normal reasons. And you'll have more once I tell everyone you're really good in bed." 

And then she wiggles happily. "I'll - think about my price for that."

"Because of course you liking all of that is totally normal and several other girls here will like it too, they just won't be able to even try to name prices for anything going in either direction."

"They'll probably try if you tell them they have to or they won't get to sleep with you at all," says Yaisa, ignoring the first part of that because alter Yaisa hasn't specifically picked up on Keltham's hypothesis that masochists are fake. (Why does he even have that hypothesis.)

"It'll be fine.  I can do it with them, I think, now that I've done it with you first."

"My brain's a little tired from it, though.  Quiet snuggles?"

"Mmmm," says Yaisa, and shuts up, and cuddles Keltham, and prepares her dissertation in defense of her not knowing how much to charge Keltham.

Keltham snuggles quietly.  It's actually just dawning on him that this is a lot of evidence that - why doesn't his System 1 believe it's a lot of evidence that masochists are real?  Because his System 1 was expecting the Conspiracy to have faked this successfully, by the time he got around to actually checking it this much later?  Clearly so, which is why his System 1 doesn't want to update and claims this is just what was already predicted.

Keltham can't back his brain on this!  It didn't have to be that way, probabilistically speaking, there could've been some weird obstacle to Yaisa enjoying herself, Carissa could have said they needed to import a masochist from offsite instead of pointing to one of the existing students, Carissa could have claimed masochists were rarer, Carissa could have not suggested this particular evidence.

The Conspiracy world where masochists don't exist is now smaller and narrower, and has more of its probability mass concentrated into modes where the Conspiracy's capabilities are high enough that Yaisa doesn't really exist or was reprogrammed to actually be a masochist.  Either way she's not a threatened innocent whom Keltham is hurting.

This is just like the thing where he forgot why he originally started to suspect a hidden cleric, that the original evidence was that the attack's timing suggested eyes on Ione but not on Keltham, and he worried that the hidden cleric was Carissa.  There's the evolutionary logic that says masochists shouldn't particularly exist, sure, but probably a lot of the real reason his brain became worried was that Carissa wasn't able to go above low arousal with him.  Her having just come off seven years of emergency response fighting demons is a plausible reason for her having difficulty relaxing.  Fine, the Conspiracy had somewhat more ability to select Yaisa before bringing the twelve researcher-candidates to meet Keltham in the villa library, but if the Conspiracy can find masochists at all it means masochists exist, if the Conspiracy can make masochists they could have applied the same procedure to Carissa.  If they can find or produce Yaisa, why have Carissa merely pretend to be the same thing and then get caught.  They’re not pretending everyone is a masochist, Meritxell isn’t.

There are still stories where it's all fake and masochists don't exist but they're now less plausible and his brain needs to recognize that the flaming probability went down okay.  Literally update at all, here.  The probability of masochists being fake did not just go up, it did not just stay the same, therefore it went down.

If his System 1 wants to claim that it already mostly expected this result, then it should admit that it earlier narrowed down the set of possibilities to the Conspiracy either having the power to make Yaisas, in which case why not remake Carissa, or Yaisa was already real, in which case why have Carissa merely pretend to be the same way.  Keltham is repeating himself here, yes, but he's repeating himself because if his System 1 already expected this result, it needs to respect the probable reason why that result would be expected, or else reveal that it secretly suspects some different story.

...his brain yields.  A little.  Grudgingly.

...Keltham's deliberative process will take it, he guesses.

In time, feeling a little awkward about it because Civilization has protocols for dates ending and Yaisa knows none of them, Keltham tells Yaisa that he'll see her tomorrow.

(Pilar's curse has already submitted an after-action report noting that Yaisa didn't follow her instructions exactly and offered an amount that Keltham thought was obviously too high, which nearly caused a disaster, but Keltham figured out a recovery before he got suspicious.  Today all the Asmodeans have learned a heartwarming lesson about the importance of precise obedience!  Which, for obvious reasons of Chaotic Goodness, is not going to involve Yaisa getting tortured.  Pilar's curse shouldn't even have needed to spell that out.  It'll turn out fine after Yaisa answers under Fairness.)

Also in other business, Rugatonn's brief commentary on Asmodia's analysis of tropes has now arrived with the return-Teleported evening mail.  Rugatonn notes that this general scenario seems to her to imply that it would be possible to bargain with the tropes by trying to bring about events that they would favor, but Asmodia is correct that this should be left to the Most High, who in turn is probably going to leave it up to Asmodeus, who is a lot better placed to do this sort of thing than Rugatonn.

They should, indeed, be wary of disrupting tropes, but this wariness should be restricted to the realm of not deliberately trying to do that for the sake of doing that; rather than treading carefully around anything that might be a trope, and foregoing their own interests from fear of that.  The tropes so far seem to have had little trouble manifesting themselves without any such caution, and indeed, often manifested in the face of efforts to avert them.  Keltham didn't seem to think it was dangerous to try to avert tropes out of his own interest; if anything he seemed to behave like the tropes expected it of him.

Rugatonn is pleased that Asmodia stopped when she could go no further, instead of making up a wrong answer; that she tried to simplify her thoughts sometimes, and not just complicate them; that she knew when it was time to leave the remaining decision to the Most High, but reasoned as far as she could herself before deciding so.

(Aspexia is starting to feel a strange feeling of hope that Asmodia is real.)

"You're still on the low-punishment regime though I cannot in your case say it's been salutary."

           "I think you're jealous," says Yaisa.

"See, that's the sort of thing that makes me say I don't think the low-punishment regime has been salutary. I am not jealous. I am concerned that your inability to follow orders was nearly very dangerous to us, and I hope that in the future you will follow orders, precisely."

           "I still don't have the slightest idea what number I should have named. I don't even know how to think about it. I have a ton of money, sure, I'd in fact give him a gold to have an incredible evening, why not? I'm not going around comparison shopping because I don't want to try that with random losers who'll be bad at it!"

"Yaisa, do you have the capacity to conduct yourself as a Worldwound-cleared soldier which you're choosing not to exercise for your own reasons, or do you in fact not possess it but you got cleared anyway by fucking somebody."

         "I can display no personality and obey orders, sir."

"It's appreciated. So, you don't have a felt sense of how much money really good sex is worth to you, since you don't buy sex, and would tend to find the fact you had to pay for it to be a negative indicator about how good it'd be. Yes?"

        "Yes."

"How much of a discount would you be inclined to give Keltham, on his price to have you for a week or a year, if you knew he'd do that."

        " - depends what I could get away with? The entire concept of a fair price is just - I'm glad it's not Asmodean. I don't like it."

"So you'd quote Keltham the exact same number as you'd quote alt-Keltham who won't do that specific thing?"

      "In both cases I'd be trying to come up with the highest number they wouldn't turn down, not the - number that's fairest."

"Say that you could either have sex like that with Keltham, or have normal sex with him and also get a gold piece."

      "Sex like that."

"Say that you could either have sex like that with Keltham, or have normal sex with him and also get ten gold pieces."

      "Sex like that."

" - really?"

      "It was really great sex! And I have a lot of money right now."

"Aren't you saving for - magic items, fancy clothes, beauty treatments -"

     " - yeah but I'm not in a hurry about saving for those things. If the project doesn't turn into a disaster I'll get them all sooner or later and if it does I'll get executed."

"I think I'm genuinely fascinated by how much her thought processes just do not want to be guided into Lawful patterns.  My mind is trying to convince me that alterYaisa will claim all of this stuff out loud to Keltham tomorrow morning, where Keltham can try to argue her out of it, and we can overhear how he does.  I'm not even sure my mind is wrong about that."

"We do have Cayden Cailean's assurance that it'll turn out fine," says Carissa in the tone of one who puts little weight on Cayden Cailean's assurance that it'll turn out fine. 

     "Alter Yaisa would absolutely be confused about this too," says Yaisa. 

"Silence for two minutes while I try to think of a better option."

If someone has to argue Yaisa out of this she'd really rather it be Keltham. Obviously she's going to need to learn, if Yaisa's going to be a devil eventually, but - it'd be interesting if it can in fact be done just through argument. 

Asmodia silently thinks that she is going to want to check that with Snack Service, before assuming that Snack Service meant "it'll turn out fine no matter what you do after trying to rely on this guarantee" as opposed to "it'll turn out fine if you don't do anything dumb".

This has crossed Carissa's mind too. "Okay, someone ask Snack Service if it's okay for Yaisa to explain all her inability to produce a Lawful ordering of her preferences to Keltham and see what he does about it. If it is, then we go with that. If it's not, we need to know now so we can call in another petrification. I'd prefer not to, though, if it can be avoided."

Things won't go wrong between Yaisa and Keltham that morning - from the standpoint of Asmodeus's interests, that is - so long as Yaisa is honest in everything she says, and doesn't pretend to feel differently about anything than she actually feels.  She'll leave things out, obviously; but if she says something at all, it shouldn't be a lie; if she shows an emotion at all, it should be what she really feels.

"Are you sure that you can do that."

        "Yes."

"Fine. We'll go with that."

PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Morning

Keltham listens to Yaisa's presentation of how much she doesn't actually know any way to arrive at the fair value with the fascinated look of somebody who's suddenly, actually appreciating that huge amounts of childhood training he went through were there for an important reason and accomplished anything.

Keltham says that he will, if you ask him about any price that isn't a large fraction of his overall wealth and reliable expected future income, give the same answer to 'how much would you pay to get this extra' and 'how much additional payment would you forgo to get this extra' and 'how much would you pay to avoid losing this' and 'how much additional payment would you demand if you were losing this'.  Because, like, if you didn't, your trade patterns would go in exploitable circles, depending on how much money you had and how people asked you various questions.

It leads to really large differences that matter in everyday financial life, so everybody, not just Keepers, trains until the asymmetries between financial gains and financial losses mostly go away.  If you have time to think, you can just consider all four questions and average the result, for example, to guarantee that you'll give the same answer no matter the form of the question.

There's all sorts of mental exercises for figuring out where to start pricing things, if you don't know where to start!  Find something that seems about equally valuable to you, equally exciting or happiness-making to you, which already has a legible price, and ask, not how much you pay for that, but how much you would pay for that.

Some amount of words later, he'll get around to asking Yaisa her Fair price for Keltham doing what he did last night, and her Fair cheerful price to be his for a week, including his control of certain matters.  Well, Keltham will ask that after he's quickly, before the spell wears off, explained to Yaisa the notion of the least price that makes her feel positively cheerful about the transaction, and not just that the transaction was fair - hopefully this spell enables that part too, but if the spell-price doesn't sound cheerful to her, she should say so, obviously.

Yaisa is worried that Cheliax is going to start teaching that rule and then, look, more math. She does not say that. She does say 'last night was great and I would pass up ten gold to be sure I got to experience it once, but if it were going to be a regular thing it'd probably be more like the difference between being happy with two gold per day and being happy with three gold per day to be yours full time. ...plus healing if it's needed and if it gets to the point where Regenerate is needed I might want to renegotiate prices."

Keltham finds, rather to his surprise, that he's choked up and can't actually answer that in words.

Nobody's ever told him that they enjoyed sex from him that much.  Ever.  Not even close.  But it makes sense if he imagines that, first of all, everything you can in Civilization pay to learn how to do using careful biofeedback-based training would, in fact, be an elite sex worker service or maybe flatly not exist in Golarion.  And, second, that masochists do exist there, and people who don't want to be in control, who want things to happen to them without them having to be in control, who want others to be powerful over them in the way that Keltham enjoyed being powerful over Yaisa, that he is sent now by higher forces to an impossible world in which impossible complements to his own sexuality exist and are common enough to be unremarkable -

He can't talk, so he just folds Yaisa into a hug.

- hug. "Is that - did the spell work right?"

When he can speak again, Keltham will tell Yaisa that she gets twenty-five gold for the week, slightly more than three and a half gold per day; and how often Keltham feels like doing that to her, will be up to him.  But she won't have to miss any payments for it, when it happens, because it is also something he'd pay her for, if that was how it went.

He does still expect the five silver from her, of course.  (There is a ritual and a sacredness to these things, people should not be led astray into thinking that perhaps some offered price will be refused as payment later, and Yaisa is the one who offered to pay.)

...he's sorry for questioning her about the price, last night.  He, he just - it was hard for him to imagine that it was really something she wanted that much.  He's sorry.