Civilization does in fact train its children not to lose track, in the complexities of decision theory, of such ultimate and grounding scenarios as 'Okay but what if future Carissa would actually rather not have sex with you.'

This is continuing to produce failures in Keltham's case-checking on the more complicated arguments too.

They may have not literally considered exactly Cheliax, but some very smart people have ever asked themselves, 'Well, what if somebody tried to corrupt a dath ilani?'

Of course, the flip side of this caution - as Keltham himself thinks of it - is that these very smart people were almost certainly not considering the case of a dathi ilani sadist dying in an airplane crash and materializing alone into a generally unLawful economicmagic world where he's incredibly valuable to a government, and there isn't anyone else around like that, and also submissive masochists are actually a thing.

This is true.  They weren't considering that.

But only because that was a needlessly detailed particular case of a sort that they knew they needed to cover more abstractly.

"I think - Golarion is a hard place to live in, if you can't trust yourself to follow through, to handle herself in whatever situation you've put her in. Worldwound deployments are three years, and you can't quit, no matter how much you hate it. Indentures to study to become a wizard are even longer, places other than Cheliax - if the Church hadn't taken power I would have had to pledge ten years of service for my training, probably....I've never actually set myself on a course and then gone, wait, no, I wish I had the option of escape, because - because I value it about myself, that I can make promises like to serve at the Worldwound for three years. When I - when I asked to join this project - I didn't know anything about you, but I wasn't assuming you weren't the-Keltham-who-doesn't-care-about-other-people, or that if you were I'd be able to leave, and - it's not that I didn't care, it's also not that I was taking a calculated risk that might not have paid off, it's that - I was pretty sure I could live in all the worlds I was stepping into, and - and be someone I'm proud of in all those worlds, and go to Hell stronger and cleverer, in all those worlds..."

"And the obvious question to me, is, how do you know that won't change about yourself, and maybe you do know, but it's harder for me to know..."

"There's also the inconvenient part where what I want is Carissa chained into my bed feeling a particular way about me, and feeling particular things when I hurt her, and that seems so much harder to guarantee by brute-forcing it than the part where I can be sure I could have Carissa chained in my bed if I found myself wanting it enough."

"Not totally a bad thing for you.  It means Meritxell can't compete for your place in my heart, nor Asmodia for that matter."

A bad thing for your eternal soul, though, Keltham. "Oh good. I'd be tempted to keep you away from all other masochists except then I'm seriously concerned you'd decide there aren't really any. And then you'd stop hurting me, which would be terrible."

He hugs her hard.

"I really appreciate the thing with Yaisa.  I mean, what I should've done, was think of that check myself, given alleged commonness, and asked Subirachs myself, and picked somebody at random from among those who seemed attracted to me, and run some other checks I won't speak out loud - but - if I don't think of that myself, fast enough, you shouldn't suffer for that."

"And it's important not to lose track of - just optimizing the world the way it appears to be, whatever else you're thinking and whatever complications are going on.  Because very often, reality is what appears to be reality.  Or to paraphrase a famous fictional story character out of dath ilan:  While appearances can be deceiving, they usually aren't."

Now he just needs to remember that part and hold to that thought while hurting Carissa, who appears to be a masochist.

"Well, by all appearances you have a naked girl at your mercy, what are you going to do about that?"

"Empirically, snuggle her and keep talking so I don't get scared while waiting for Subirachs to drop off her stuff.  I guess it's good news if she's taking a little longer, it implies probably she found more interesting options to collect for us.  Either that, or she's having trouble finding any.  One of those two."

"I'd be surprised if she doesn't have any. Obviously you can be a priest of Asmodeus in different ways, studied in different aspects of him, but I get the sense that this - power and submission - is hers, and so it'd be - important, for her to have lots of interesting ways to make people vulnerable. You don't need to be scared. I can't - be mad at you - tied up like this, it's like it makes whatever you do correct automatically."

What is he supposed to do with that?  How can that possibly be a thing?

There's a very obvious thing to think out of dath ilan and Law and every pattern Civilization ever taught him, which is that putting Carissa into chains causes her to think anything Keltham does is correct, but obviously that can't actually make it correct, thereby removing Carissa as a potential source of error correction and putting all responsibility on himself.

But Keltham knows on a deep level that's not what she meant, and that there's something going on here that he doesn't understand; and while feelings that feel deeply true are often mistaken, at least sometimes they are not.

Keltham speaks carefully, then; he has no cached response to something like that, but it seems he has a deep one.  "There is a thing that dath ilani are trained to see themselves doing, to have the option of not doing, which is that thing a person does when they fill in their thoughts and words and behaviors from pattern and memory, from an image in their mind of how they usually are, or how they are supposed to be.  Contrasted to filling in those thoughts, words, choices, from those original sources that made the memory of the original thoughts, the first sources that came before you remembered any answer to fill in from memory.  I know that when it comes to the broken sexuality inside you, that you've been filling in the pattern to hold it all in place."

"When I'm hurting you this time, I want you to not do that.  I don't want to hear the sounds you remember yourself making, I want to hear the sounds from the same place they came from when you formed those memories.  I don't know if it's something you can do, only because I ask it of you, when you don't have any training in making that a kind of internal choice that's available to you, and I definitely do not mean that you should remember your usual reactions and suppress any reaction that matches your memory."

"But if I'm causing you pain with whatever Subirachs brings, that should be enough, I hope, that you can let go of the pattern and the memory and let natural reactions come back in; and that will be enough for me, I hope, if I know that it's real.  And whether or not it's enough for me, it's the best idea I have for how to make any progress on your sexuality.  If I'm going to be remaking you with this pain at all, and not just arousing myself with it, that's the obvious thing to try, and it is something that I want."

"And maybe need, because I am so lost, right now, in Golarion, and in this moment I need there to not be any surface appearances that aren't real, even if it means that nothing in Subirachs's collection can force a sound or a flinch from you.  If in this world you don't naturally react as much as you might wish, I ask of you that you react naturally anyways, to protect the happiness of all the Kelthams in all the other worlds where your natural reaction is something different from that, so that they know the reality they are seeing is reality.  Even if it's not the nicest reality that could be, I need to touch reality whatever reality is."

That might be progress? She's tired of trying to think what's progress and what isn't, actually. Keltham wants to hurt her, wants to learn that hurting her is right and glorious, and she wants to give that to him, because it is the essence of Hell.

" - that makes sense. I'll try. ...I think I'll be better, at trying, if you hurt me quite badly. It interferes with the - sense of what usually happens."

"So 43 units of pain, then?  Sorry, that was too flippant.  You'll have to tell me in words when I'm hurting you quite badly, unless there's some other visible and reliable sign.  I have no reference points for how much anything hurts, how much pain is required to get past your memory, or what any particular level of pain looks like in any natural reactions it produces."

"If I'm telling you things in words then I'm not in very much pain. But I'll - try to communicate."

"Carissa, darling, there is an obvious problem if I'm escalating while relying on a verbal signal to tell me when I've gone far enough, and the escalation removes your ability to verbally signal things.  It potentially causes me to go further than I want, which is a problem even on your terms because it is not what I want."

"Maybe Subirachs has an extremely secret spell for outright mindreading. In the absence of that I will do my best to communicate with you but I don't actually have a clever solution here aside from observing that I don't think you'll go further than you want because I think you'll get bored after like three minutes if I'm just screaming in agony."

"Now seriously wondering whether my stupid idea to ask Jacint about a somewhat asymmetrical threesome was possibly not as stupid as I thought.  It would be very convenient if I could ask her to just stick around in a corner of the cuddleroom and fill out her reports while we had sex and occasionally I could ask her questions, without my finding that at all bothersome, but in fact I would find it bothersome."

"Just to check my Carissamodel here, according to your own model of how reality works, if I actually went further than I planned or warned you about and failed to get bored at the time you currently anticipate, afterwards you would be like 'Yay Keltham!', and when I stepped outside I'd find Pilar holding a cookie for me.  Correct?  Don't say that's correct if it's not actually correct; and, to avoid that failure mode, stop and think about it."

"If you went a lot further than you planned, then when you were done I'd be crying uncontrollably and you'd panic tremendously about that and call for Subirachs to demand help and I would, while still crying uncontrollably, put my head in your lap and cling, and Subirachs would say 'pet her, and tell her you're not mad at her', and then I would calm down and Pilar would show up with cookies for you to feed me, and I'd be fine aside from worrying that you managed to hurt yourself and that it was my fault for not bouncing back instantly."

"I want to make jokes about, okay but if instead you shattered forever that would prove I was in the Conspiracy universe, except that I'm not sure to what extent I'm clear to joke about that even with you.  And also if you were like 'Keltham dear why would the Conspiracy hypothesis predict that outcome specifically' I would have no answer except 'Well obviously just because they're the Conspiracy they try to arrange the outcome to be whatever I'm most scared of, because that is totally how carefully maintained conspiracies work.'"

Is there actually any hypothesis, plain or exotic, which reasonably predicts a bad outcome here?  Keltham isn't seeing it.  Just, you know, a lot of internal screaming, and a sense of guardrails being shattered.

There is a knocking upon the door which somehow manages to be gentle, and yet very firm at the same time, and this obviously must be Subirachs.

Keltham goes to collect his borrowed goodies.

"Abrogail tortured me to death over the course of - an hour, two hours, maybe a bit more, I'm not sure. I did beg her to stop, and it didn't matter. And it was the second-best thing that ever happened to me. Maybe some people shatter forever if you hurt them, I don't know. I have good reason to think I don't. ....also, you've just named a test of Conspiracy versus not, so in the name of making things harder for the Carissa in a Conspiracy we've got to do the test now, that's the rules."

Keltham returns, bearing something like a doompunk picnic basket.  He sits down beside Carissa on the bed and begins examining the basket's contents, at an angle where Carissa can see him, but not see what he's examining, hopefully.

"I'm going to assume that there was some way to do that safely despite your lack of afterlife arrangements at the time, because, you know, Abrogail seems like a pretty sensible person.  Also you have not quite grasped how these rules work, but, later."

"She learned somehow that my deepest terror was being turned into a statue and buried underground or dropped into the ocean so I never got an afterlife, and arranged a situation where I thought I had betrayed everyone in a fashion that warranted that, and so she slowly petrified me. And then after she undid it she swore to me that that she would never do that." Carissa's feelings about this are in fact all over the place but she manages to keep her voice content, contemplative, enamored. She cranes her neck to try to see the picnic basket.

"Showed up on your Detect Anxieties actually, and I didn't mention that to anyone.  Would that have been on your Security reports and is that - considered an okay thing for the Queen of Cheliax to do?  Or would she have some other way of -"

"And how would she arrange for you to think that without - outright mind control, I don't see how you could arrange that even with a Suggestion -"

"Suggestion's not the most powerful kind of mind control, it's the least powerful kind that was necessary to persuade you that Conspiracy Cheliax would win. I don't know the spell she used. There's a procedure for approving uses for bed-games, if you can afford it, but it's 'ask the Queen'. Her pact with Asmodeus requires her to conduct herself in a way He approves of. Same with divining for my greatest terror, which is not the kind of thing that's on my Security reports. 

If you want to learn how to do that I think it'll be - a while, those spells are secret for good reasons -"

"...allllll right then."

"We should go ahead and stop talking about this, actually, I think Isidre was right to label this all dangerous-information to me for now.  You've successfully impressed me with how hard you are to damage."

"But Golarion Civilization would've found you eventually, you know.  Even if they had to build magitech to search the entire planet point by point.  You and everyone else that's ever happened to.  And if not, I do suspect you'd have ended up somewhere else just like me."

The thing in the basket labeled #1, presumably the least terrifying thing in it, is a nonmagical extract of a foreign plant that's used to make food taste like fire, which Jacint's note says she's guessing wouldn't exist or wouldn't be used for flavoring in dath ilan.  There's a list of places to potentially apply the extract to Carissa, essentially a list of body parts with mucous membranes.  The burning this produces can be moderated or neutralized by Prestidigitation, if you imagine changing the taste to be less like fire.  This, Jacint notes and underlines, is not a good thing to forget to do before bringing any mucous membranes of your own into contact with some part of Carissa where the spiciness-extract has already been applied.  (Capsaicin, one guesses; contrary to what some people seem to think, dath ilan is not badly off to the point where they literally don't have spicy food.)

Jacint doesn't think this is likely to do much to Carissa, but if Keltham wants to start off without any magic, it's there for him.  She included it mainly as an intermediate step along the way to #3, a magical-ointment version of the same, which requires a separate magical liquid to neutralize and causes much more pain.  A few droplets of which could also be mixed and diluted with the nonmagical stuff.

Gloves have been included in this basket, for multiple reasons.