"Unless that was just a rehearsed screaming pattern, which I'm sort of guessing it's not.  Well done on finding something inside you that wasn't a memory of something else."  He sits closer to her and runs his fingers through her hair.

This causes a flashback!!!!!! She's in Abrogail's bed and nothing was real and nothing is real and she exists exists exists but in pieces she's not allowed to start to pull together -

She starts crying. 

It's like there's a very distant Carissa observing detachedly that this does not seem to achieve her goals and she needs to stop it immediately. 

"Good.  Good Carissa."  He'll keep running his fingers through her hair.

He was probably supposed to do this much more gradually, but unless everyone has been lying to him this entire time she should nonetheless be fine after he did something less than exactly perfectly optimally.

Distant Carissa declares that she QUITS and DON'T EXPECT HER TO COME BACK TO WORK ANY TIME SOON. 

Carissa lies there crying and wonders distantly why everyone wants her to cry. She is pretty sure she's much less cool when she's crying. 

Because she's one step closer to reality when she cries, obviously.  Both of the two people who've ever held any place in Carissa Sevar's heart hold that belief about her.

Keltham decides to snuggle up to her while she cries still in her chains.  No, he hasn't forgotten about the illusory stab wound, he just expects it's okay if he does it anyways.

She's going to need a while, apparently. She wouldn't have expected that. Is Security freaking out. Don't freak out, Security, this is all according to plan. (It is not). 

She makes an appreciative noise about snuggles even though they put pressure on the stab wound.

She can totally have a while!

Keltham murmurs that she's good, she did great, Keltham feels better now that he's not scared deep down that he's forever separated from Carissa by an uncrossable gap of being too Civilized to do anything that ever reaches her.

"'m - sorry you felt like that. Didn't myself feel like that. Figured it was just time. Not even much time, turned out. You okay?"

He'll be okay so long as it doesn't turn out that everybody was lying to him this entire time about Carissa being okay.  He doesn't say that; it's not a pressure he wants to put on her.

"It's too early to resolve the prediction-market but prices have gone quite high."

(Does she look/sound/feel like she's past whatever that was, or does she look like she needs more time?)

She does not look totally back to normal, though she looks a lot better than she did a minute ago. She's stopped crying. 

He does not, necessarily, want her all the way back to normal.  Not if he's as totally safe to go on pushing as everybody keeps telling him.

Keltham sits back up, so he can see her, watch her, and digs his fingernails into her unprotected breast as hard as he can.

Well he sure does have a Carissa who is too emotionally wrung out to overthink things and will just whimper about them!

...that's really all he wanted, here.

He will make Carissa whimper for a while, or until her brain starts locking up again.

Her brain doesn't lock up again. She can feel it trying to but it's easy to just tell it that she doesn't need a brain right now. The only important strategic consideration here is rewarding Keltham and her brain actively gets in the way of that.

It's time for sex.  Has her stab wound wore off or does he need to do that again?

It wore off at some point while she was whimpering. She noticed but did not comment because she will probably be stabbed again if she points it out. 

(She's not even that opposed to being stabbed again. But she doesn't have an impulse to cause it when she hasn't been told to.)

(And these games are more fun when they're at least a little adversarial.)

He briefly considers, and discards, an impulse to give her two stab wounds for not telling him that.  He is not pushing himself that far today.

Actually, Keltham finds himself not particularly impelled to re-stab her in the first place. He wants to have sex that hurts her but - maybe not that particular form of hurt, right now?

"I foolishly told you earlier that I would have sex with you with the stab wound later, and should not have bound my future self to that course which my present self wanted.  That was something you might have relied on, though.  So I need to hear from you the consequence if I now find some other way to hurt you during sex that feels righter to me in this moment - whether some deep part of you will take that as meaning that you can't trust me, when I say you'll get something you want later, instead of now.  Don't answer from habit; look to the deeper sources in yourself and answer from there."

"Didn't take it as -" Headshake. "I really think you can do what you want and I'm not going to be sad afterwards." Was that a strategic answer? It's hard to think. 

He doesn't know either, but it's fine if she's not perfect now.

All right, what else is in here, is it just all too ludicrously overpowered or is there anything that dials down...

There's a hilt protruding an illusionary rod of white-hot metal, which runs on the same principle as the illusionary knife.

There's earrings that increase fear - why isn't that illegal mind control? - and wouldn't you think that would come earlier in this whole sequence?

There's a collar you clasp around somebody and then it makes them feel like they're getting colder and colder and colder, far past the point where any mortal would freeze to death.  (This has to be illusionary pain because actually doing this to somebody will send them hypothermic and unconscious long before they get to experience the full ordeal, as Subirachs's note does not particularly say.)

There's a potion you can force somebody to drink, and then they'll feel like they're inflating and inflating and stretching and finally exploding.  Subirachs's note says that, first of all, he should only try this if he's been forced to pretty serious lengths to try to get a reaction out of Carissa, and second, no Keltham does not get to ask Subirachs why she has this lying around her personal bedroom collection.  (This has to be illusionary pain, because actually inflating a victim until they explode will cost a Raise Dead diamond, which is more expensive.)

At the final extremity is a tool for channeling elemental energies connected to the quasi-elemental Negative planes, producing a slow trickle of aspected Negative energies.  It's not actually a sex toy, doesn't do healing and isn't illusionary, but neither will it cause any external damage that might squick Keltham out.  In this case he does need to watch if Carissa stops struggling and goes unconscious, and remove the device and channel positive energy after that to heal her; this tool can kill her and Raise Dead is expensive.  He may also need to request and use a 4th-circle cleric spell called Restoration tomorrow if there's lingering aftereffects.  Subirachs notes that she's including this item only because she is genuinely not sure what it will take to get Keltham's desired reaction out of Carissa Sevar.  She'd be scared of it.

(There are more extreme torture devices, in the great central temple of Asmodeus in Egorian in the center of His power on Golarion.  But they have command words like "Nessus" which Keltham might recognize and sort of wonder about, or are carved with devil imagery as again Keltham might wonder about, or are too large to move, or seem visibly like something you would just not do in a bedroom game and don't plausibly look like actually-a-wizard-tool either, and Jacint ran out of time.)

Everyone in Cheliax is insane and he would ask who needs this stuff but apparently the answer is "You, Keltham."

He's... just going to go with the illusionary white-hot metal rod, which seems like something he could use in very light taps to be scary and painful but not completely take Carissa's mind away from the sex part.  Actually he's going to try the illusionary knife before he goes to the illusionary rod, maybe that just works.

Keltham unchains Carissa's leg cuffs, then, though not her wrist cuffs, and has sex with her.  He's forceful about it and lasts for a while, which is something that Civilization did try to optimize for her pleasure.  Now and then he hurts her, mostly with a knife that isn't real, sometimes with a searing burn if he feels like it.

Carissa is cooperative and reactive and whimpers and doesn't start crying again, and one time when he cuts her she gasps and looks at him just like she did the day of Abrogail, like he's her whole world and she is totally helpless in his arms. Her brain has decided to start doing things again, but off in a corner where it won't interrupt. (The thing it's doing is mostly wondering what Security thinks of her.)

Keltham sees, and is happy.

(How much of the part that isn't pain is real?  Is the pleasure-reaction more real than before?  Keltham isn't reading her too hard to try to figure it out.  They've made enough progress for one day and he'd be shocked to find that it solved everything.  He's not going to try to stimulate her deliberately and seem to be demanding her response to that.)

He finishes inside her, touches her handcuffs and murmurs the command words to unchain her if not uncuff her (he likes the look of the cuffs), and then snuggles up to Carissa and her lingering illusionary light knife-wounds and surface burns.

"I can't remember having been this happy before," Keltham murmurs to her.  "It's not just the sex, it's the sense of progress, for you and for myself, and things I was afraid of that didn't happen, and obstacles that weren't impossible after all.  Maybe everything here is just solvable if I try."

" - oh. Good. 'm really glad. Want - want you to be happy, want you to feel like you're allowed to try things, want you to not be scared. Want you to know how powerful you are, and be glad....love you."