Carissa is kneeling at the side of the bed, praying to Asmodeus because it seemed like the thing to do. She hopes to serve him and be perfect and her understanding is that it is pleasing to Asmodeus that this will be very painful. 

He is correctly able to decode from her posture that she's praying, though he isn't sure how, except that it's a posture that obviously goes with a relationship like she has to Keltham and Asmodeus is the only other person she could be trying to talk to like that, though if she's not a hidden cleric of Asmodeus (and that would not make a lot of sense) then Asmodeus won't talk back, and apparently won't talk back even then with very high probability.

Is Asmodeus the sort of entity that Keltham should be jealous of?  He doesn't know; he doesn't understand 'faith' except as the opposite of some other thing that seems like it should itself be common sense when dealing with gods.  But he remembers praying to his own god, during the godwar; and if Carissa is thinking something like that towards Asmodeus then he is not jealous, though Keltham doesn't really know why not.

...he wants to talk with Carissa about what he intends to do, in case it's the wrong time, somehow, or the wrong entire theory of how to proceed, unknown to Subirachs.  He doesn't know how to ask without it seeming to her like he's asking permission... well, he has one idea, which is better than zero ideas, so he will pursue that one.

"Carissa."

She opens her eyes. "Keltham."

"Detect Magic shows the cuffs as magical, so they hopefully got us what I requested.  Walk me through binding them."

It almost feels like his gendertrope is talking through him, which wouldn't be too surprising, since he's at 10 of 12 on the gendertrope identification scale, but it's still a strange feeling.

" - oh, these are cool," says Carissa the instant she touches one. "I think it's just a variant of an arcane lock but it adds a lot of complexity, making it bloodbound, and then someone went slightly overkill on the protection against being dispelled. ...not overkill, actually, if you're trying to hold a fourth circle wizard - touch here -"

He does so.

She sets the spell. "There you go, then - test it out -"

Each cuff has two distinct command words engraved on it in Taldane, one that locks and unlocks the cuff from the person wearing it, one that locks and unlocks from the chains that it attaches to.  The command words, now, will only work for Keltham.

He'll first try out telling the cuff to lock to one of the nonmagical chains, pull on it to test that connection, then make sure it releases when he speaks the command word again.

He'll then clasp that cuff around her left wrist, tell it to lock, try to remove it by strength, test out unlocking and removing it by repeating the command word, and then re-bind it on Carissa's left wrist and leave it there.

Keltham doesn't otherwise speak himself; it doesn't feel necessary.  There's a strangely focused feeling to his thoughts - though not so focused that he's not checking all execution paths through his cuff-testing procedure, to make sure that no previously-untested malfunction during the tests themselves would allow Carissa to end up bound to the bed with no way to remove her.

One cuff down, three to go.

Carissa is very sure that the thing to do here is be alter Carissa, as thoroughly and completely as she can, except - she can't actually imagine alter Carissa very clearly when it comes to this. Who Carissa would be in a Cheliax that different feels like a dangerous question. 

Well, Keltham likes the Carissa he has fine. And there are advantages to not lying. 

She doesn't speak either. (That's one way to not lie.) She just cooperates, and watches him, and tugs on the chains a little just to show she can't break them.

He doesn't speak while stripping away her clothes, to ask permission or otherwise.

When Carissa is naked and bound to the bed at four points, he snuggles up to her.  Speaking feels strangely hard, he wishes he could stay in the wordless mood and do everything by telepathy.  He's not sure if he can get it back once he leaves.

But there are things that need to be said.

"I've asked Subirachs for magical assistance in hurting you more, since I am apparently not ready to do or even hear about any of the less magical ways of doing that," Keltham says.  "She'll drop off what she can find from her collection in a few minutes, along with directions.  I - feel a desire to do that to you, maybe even a need, after feeling scared about losing you."

"If you want to try to convince me about anything related to that, you have temporary permission to say what you want, including things I might potentially interpret as you objecting in words, up until the moment I first hurt you."

It's okay to talk about if he binds her to the bed first, is his hope.

"Oh," she says quietly. "....I love you or something. I hope I'm exactly what you're looking for." And to push him on the 'not allowed to object later' thing or not...not yet.

She's not going to comment on the part where he's going to hurt her, apparently, and that's fine.

"It's a funny, and strange, and beautiful thing, that you being exactly what I'm looking for is even remotely a possibility.  In Civilization they'd warn you about that being the sort of open purchase order that never, ever gets filled."

And if a Keltham is exactly what a Carissa is looking for, somehow, then she's going to have some very strange implied utility function he doesn't understand; though, to be fair, like a lot of male dath ilani, he's never understood the exact details of how some women are apparently able to find men attractive in the first place.

"It's probably fair to say that I'm in love with you.  And scared this is going to turn out terribly, for reasons including Conspiracies, and tropes, and you somehow still being a hidden cleric no matter how absolutely little sense that has now been revealed as making, and you getting tired of me in two more weeks.  I'm having to continually shut down a self-protective impulse to try not to fall in love with you any more than this, to decrease the pain later when this somehow explodes."

"I don't suppose I can actually solve your problem at all by saying that if I get tired of you in two weeks you could always just chain me up here until I change my mind."

"...my first impulse is to say no, but it's possible that I'm missing something.  Is it, for example, an inevitable and understood part of these relationships that you get tired of me every two weeks but this is a problem which can be totally and cheerfully solved by chaining you up and carrying out some procedure on you?  If so, I'm not sure I could go along with it, unless there's some corresponding - expectation, potential, clear inner state of your mind - that can be shown by some spell akin to Detect Desires.  Maybe not even then, but it wouldn't be a flat no, that way."

WHY can't he just BE EVIL. "That's what I figured. No, it's not - I'm not expecting to get tired of you in two weeks, and if I did you probably could change my mind but not in some established-procedure kind of way, and not with the assurance you need to get to - feel like you don't deserve to be shunned by Civilization - and that's all right, really. I was just going to feel very silly if in fact that did solve your problem and just hadn't occurred to you."

"We're pretty thoroughly trained not to care about being shunned by Civilization except insofar as Civilization has a good reason for its opinions - which, to be clear, it always does in practice, but if we weren't constantly checking the reasons, there'd be a possible equilibrium where it didn't.  Children's training is to occasionally try to justify things to kids by talking like something is true because an opinion poll of Civilization showed a huge majority agreed, see how old they first are when they catch on.  I was six."

"My point here is, the reason my Civilization model is giving this current state of argument a quizzical look is that they don't understand how everyone acting that way turns out well for everyone, and neither, in fact, do I.  And I'm guessing that's probably not something you could or should try to explain in the next five minutes, but I'd feel pretty silly if it had a thirty-second explanation instead."

Have you considered CARING LESS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. "- not a thirty second explanation, I think. Sorry."

"And if your next line is that it's actually just interworld travelers like me who can get away with that, there's just the one of me, and I should only be considering the results of my own actions rather than hypothetical other people who could've ended up in my same situation but didn't, then the reason why Civilization gives that reasoning a quizzical look is definitely not a thirty-second conversation."

"Unless it's already intuitively obvious to you why, for example, a bunch of dath ilani kids told about my Conspiracy doubts would immediately start engaging in all kinds of complicated mind-games like the one I played with Asmodia.  Or why a dath ilani suspected of murder would immediately and truthfully tell the police all about how they think they would've planned that murder if they'd wanted to."

"That is not obvious to me though also not the explanation I was going to give. ....it helps Ordinary win over Conspiracy, and non-murderers win over murderers, if they engage the hypothetical? But I don't see the connection, really -"

"We probably shouldn't go into it too far.  The thirty-second version is that the Ordinary dath ilani kids are playing an adversarial game against their alternate Conspiracy selves, and the predictable decisions they make inside their branch of reality make the lives of the Conspiracy kids more difficult, because the me inside the Conspiracy knows how Ordinary kids should obviously act, by trying things that would be hard for the Conspiracy to imitate or navigate."

"There's games of correlated decisions played out across real and unreal realities, and in those games it's not only the real Keltham who's standing here that I have to consider."

"To be clear, I get that in a world with a generally unLawful appearance, in the subworlds where that appearance is real, the locals legit aren't going to intuit right away how that game gets played."

"So you won't kidnap me as an adversarial ploy against hypothetical Worse Keltham who doesn't care about other people and so would kidnap me if he thought he could get away with it? - sorry, you said you didn't want to get into this."

"Something like that.  But that's the more finely detailed version of what Civilization in the person of myself wants to check, rather than 'how would that work out great for everyone if everyone did that'.  They want to know the downstream effect of everything correlated with that decision across all the probable realities, and not just the place where one Keltham thinks he's most probably standing."

"It's the most complicated shard of all the shards of Law that everyone is supposed to learn.  One of the subshards is the one that underlies real oaths.  It's the only part of the fundamental Law underpinning Civilization whose math is actually, like, difficult at all as math."

Part of Keltham seems to think on some deep level that he needs to keep talking, to prevent the chained and naked Carissa from being scared about what is going to happen to her, because that would be needlessly cruel...

Or maybe the frightened person he's trying not to be needlessly cruel to is himself.

Well, Carissa appreciates the guide to how to run a Conspiracy against Keltham and is content to keep him talking about Law. "So, the way I reason, a Keltham who doesn't care about other people at all already does that to his Carissa, he doesn't need me to point it out - the Kelthams I'm talking to are the ones who would feel freer and safer and more allowed to fall in love, if they could expect that would work if they had to do it, and whether it would work is just a fact about Carissa, not a fact about the universe in general."

"You're an awfully fast learner.  That's something like the correct format for an argument to Civilization, or, yes, to Keltham.  Okay, I'll have to think about that."

"Where most of what I have to think about, I think, is whether my going along with that somehow disadvantages Carissas or Kelthams in other branches of reality, but I'm not going to figure that out in thirty seconds."

"Though I think there's some - implicit crux here, about how you can be justifiably certain that almost every future Carissa feels the same way, or would want to remain signatory to some contract across times and possibilities even if she didn't - where if I knew why you believe that, maybe I wouldn't feel worried about losing you in the first place..."