"I thought that didn't contain anything yet and also wasn't safe for me to open, which now that I think about it is not an especially coherent belief state..."

Keltham goes to check.

There's not very much in the closet but it does, yes, contain a blindfold, also earplugs if he's of a mind; and some objects that Keltham will completely fail to recognize on sight as spanking paddles or tickling implements.

He comes back bearing the blindfold and attaches it to Carissa, and then sits there, breathing deeply.

He cuts his forearm with the illusionary knife, just to make sure the blade isn't real.  It hurts like a real cut (and will for ten minutes supposedly).  The skin is unbroken.  There's no blood.

Abrogail literally tortured Carissa to death and subjected her to a nightmare of her worst fear, and Carissa came back visibly brighter and happier, and maybe even persistently better though it's hard to tell because Chelish people.  And if that maybe required some skill that Keltham doesn't have, and wouldn't work for everyone who isn't Abrogail or on everyone who isn't Carissa, it at least illustrates that he really really is not in dath ilan anymore.  Adaptation is a virtue, one should not go on living in a world that no longer contains you.

Carissa has not in fact been told what all is in the box, and didn't ask; the pleasant frission of expectation is probably good for their objectives here and anyway whether or not it's good for their objectives here it's fun. She wiggles, and then if Keltham doesn't object to wiggling sets herself to trying to break the chains, not that it's going to work but one ought to try.

Her trying to get loose is not actually helping under these exact circumstances, as attractive as it might be under other ones.

Keltham is pretty sure that his gendertrope is not going to get anything out of this, and worries that he's about to make a drastically wrong move for himself and damage something, but - if she's all right, after this - then some part of himself will have learned something it needs to learn.

He'd tell her to stab him with an illusionary blade, if that was what it took for them to stay together, or if it might fix something inside himself that was broken.

Probably.

...delaying this is doing nothing but causing him pain.

Keltham stabs Carissa through the stomach with an illusionary dagger.

She was not expecting that, and cries out in pain and shock for a whole several seconds before thinking to be pleased with herself for having an unfiltered reaction and then realizing now she's ruined it and then wondering if she's allowed to try to retrace to - 

- did he actually stab her, would he actually stab her -

- she thinks he wouldn't, it feels like he did -

- and it's not letting up -

" - oh," she says, her voice more than a little trembly. "I - apologize if - you have to literally stab me to get me to do what you asked -"

The flood of relief that goes through him is almost as great as the horror, and he just clamps down on both because he knows there is a thing that the Keltham of a Carissa must say now.  "You don't owe me any apologies while you're in chains any more than I can do anything wrong while you're in chains," it feels like the correct extension of this alien logic, "and if that was a real reaction, just there, good Carissa.  Was it?"

Happy wiggle, which disrupts her stab wound, ouch, no more happy wiggle. "Mmmhmm."

Keltham is paying closer attention to Carissa And Nothing Else than when he usually fails at reading Chelish people.  He catches the start of the happy wiggle, the wince and abort.

...the illusionary blade causes illusionary wounds that feel real enough to hurt when you move, which, Keltham guesses, goes along with the same mindset as having a command word for illusionary blood.  He tries pressing around his own fake forearm cut, to verify that theory, and winces accordingly.  (She's blindfolded.)

"Your aborting the movement when it hurt you was also a natural reaction," Keltham states.  "Good Carissa for that too."

"May I have an opinion about what you should do now?"

"I'll not only allow you to have an opinion, I'll even allow you to say what it is."

"I think you should fuck me." Assuming the stab wound's not bleeding everywhere, but she bets the High Priestess gave him something for illusory stab wounds. 

"Not yet, I think," Keltham says gently, and pets her breasts approvingly.  "I very much liked hearing you say that.  But right now I'm still feeling driven to do what I came here to do.  I'll either succeed or fail - not you, me, you're in chains, and therefore not the one person with project responsibility, aside from following orders.  Afterwards I'll fuck you, stab wound included."

"Here is the standard advice that would be given out of dath ilan: congratulate yourself each time you have a natural response, do not expect yourself to succeed the next time after you succeed once, do not try to force yourself to repeat that exact motion, do not punish yourself for failures, do not punish yourself for meta-failure to follow this advice.  Is this advice understood?"

How do you come up with the Asmodean version of that advice. It's about as anti-Asmodean as advice can get, seemingly premised on the idea that punishment is an error you'll fall into by default. What do you even do with that. 

"Understood."

Keltham braces himself, because some part of himself is not updating very quickly, and again without warning punches Carissa hard on her illusionary wound.

Questions to think about later?

- is this Evil? Would Axis not permit it?

- what is Keltham getting out of it, or is he just determined to teach her to be more accessible to him - reasonable of him -

- would she just be better, more perfect, if she mastered the skill Keltham wants to teach her - yes -

Unfortunately her contemplation of these questions is getting in the way of succeeding at her task.

...right then.

Let's go look at what constitutes #6 in this series.

Two probes, with metal teeth to bite on if you want to attach them, connected by a wire; deals lightning-aspected damage that mainly goes between the two probe points, and heals that damage with a lag.  Do not use on head, do not use near heart, do not attach to nipples.  Use a healing surge if Carissa seems to be having problems, such as an irregular or absent pulse, after the torment stops.  Has only 12 charges remaining, each charge lasts one minute.  It'd be appreciated if Keltham can return it with at least 3 charges remaining.

(Healing items are not cheap, nor torturer tools that incorporate healing.  There was a brief argument at the central temple which involved Subirachs saying that they were literally never going to find a more important use-case for this ridiculously impractical object irrespective of how expensive it was to produce originally, and then a lesser cleric getting all of their limbs twisted into bone-splintered wreckage after Subirachs ran out all six seconds of her remaining patience.)

(The obstacle past this point is that one is now dealing with the basic question of 'Why are you not just injuring this person and then healing them, as is vastly less complicated and expensive than somehow not really injuring them while still causing the pain?'  And while there are some sensible answers like 'Well because if you don't heal this area continuously the nerves will be damaged by the lightning and then stop reporting pain properly', one is at some point going to get into the realm of answers that sound a lot like 'Because a powerful sadistic enchanter got bored'.  And the problem is that most of those items are not suitable to Keltham; and might also be difficult to excuse as something Subirachs just happened to have lying around her bedroom, if she apparently had a lot of them.)

This better not be the only thing on this planet that produces electricity, with only 12 charges remaining on it?  But calling it 'lightning-aspected damage' suggests that it's better-known than that.

All right, let's try this with probe one clamped to sensitive Carissa area one, probe two clamped to sensitive Carissa area two, spend one charge, and immediately with no warmup turn up the slide control from zero to two-thirds of its range.

Obviously any linear slide like this one will control output logarithmically, so that the just-noticeable-difference corresponds to the same interval at all points on the scale, as Keltham knows and does not think to question; he's not thinking that he's setting the output to two-thirds of maximum output.

Which, in fact, he is.

When she is done screaming, which takes a long time, it occurs to Carissa that probably she should have been more helpful to High Priestess Subirachs even if she genuinely didn't know very much about the space of options. Being helpful to people while they're arranging to torture you is a good idea. 

Is Keltham okay. "Are you okay?" she asks in what she doesn't mean to be a whisper but comes out as one. It's the wrong line, but - Keltham might not be okay -

Um.  Sort of.  He actually dropped the control when Carissa screamed, which is making him feel incredibly stupid, and then fumbled it the first time he tried to switch it off before it occurred to him that maybe he was not supposed to do that, and then he switched it to low, sort of not wanting to waste the charge, and then he switched it off, but Carissa kept screaming for a bit after that.

He has been repeatedly told not to worry too much about the consequences if this sort of thing happens, and if everybody was just lying to him about that the entire time, Keltham can always just exit this universe by a sheer act of will, right.

"I'm okay if you're okay.  Good Carissa."  He undoes the blindfold, so she can see he's not looking too terrible.

"Figures that the first thing on this list which actually works is one with charges and which now has only 11 charges remaining."

"Actually works?" she says out loud and then realizes she did not at all have a strategic reason to say that.