Some further lesser-snuggling occurs.  Keltham tries to instruct Carissa on reacting naturally to the pain he's going to try on her, in hopes he can break through cached patterns that way.

"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 and could fill in answers 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."

Carissa says that getting past her cached patterns may take a lot of pain.  Keltham inquires into if there's some way he should know when to stop.  Carissa says she'll just be fine.

Carissa tells Keltham a little about what Abrogail did to her, torturing her to death over the course of two hours, and how she came back great from that.

Keltham:

"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."

Carissa:

"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. 

Keltham:

"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 -"

Carissa:

"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."

Keltham:

"...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."

Carissa:

Carissa has literally no idea what to do with the assertion that she'd probably just end up somewhere else like Keltham. That....seems false? There was reason for the gods to grab Keltham. Obviously he means something more complicated, but the thing her brain keeps returning is his assertion that if the Abyss was infinite then they'd be demons. And if it's not infinite then it doesn't follow that she'd turn up somewhere?

dath ilan:

(It's more that the Abyss can't be infinite while everything else is finite.  The question is not whether you imagine those quantities to be infinite or maybe zero, but just, what are the ratios between them either way; for those ratios in the very final end are all that there ever is.)

Keltham:

"And now I've just realized that our cuddleroom conversation literally went to 'anthropics'.  There are sad jokes about that out of dath ilan."

Subirachs's items arrive; Keltham starts trying them out on Carissa in order.

Carissa seems to have two categories of reaction: involuntary flinches, and freezing up while she tries to figure out what her reaction would be if it'd had minimal intervention from her brain.

Keltham applies #3 to himself, successfully doesn't flinch, and remarks that this would be annoying if it kept up but he can see how this isn't going to be breaking past any jumbles inside Carissa Sevar.

He's not trying #4 right now, but wants to try it on himself later, if he doesn't end up using all his healing; it's a self-heating disc, usually for making food, that could also be applied to somebody's arm to actually burn it.  To become a Security wizard you need to be able to keep Detect Magic running for 10 minutes while that's going on.  Carissa says she wants to try it too.  Keltham says he's going first because he doesn't want to go in with the mindset of beating Carissa's time.

Trying #5 on Carissa by surprise after blindfolding her, gets her to cry out for several whole seconds before she notices that she had an unfiltered reaction and then she's thinking about it again.

Keltham moves on to #6 and starts out overly strongly because what he intuitively assumes would of course be a logarithmic scale is actually a linear one.

This does get a strong reaction from Carissa, which turns into a crying fit after Keltham says "Good Carissa" and runs his fingers through her hair, triggering a flashback to her Abrogail experiences.

Keltham:

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.

Carissa:

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. 

Keltham:

(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 that about her.)

Carissa:

She's going to need a while, apparently.

Keltham:

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.

Without letting Carissa have enough time to recover fully, because everybody keeps telling Keltham he's fine if he pushes things a little or even more than a little, he starts to hurt her in lesser ways and Carissa reacts without her brain getting too much in the way.

Sex is had; Keltham uses some of the items on her during that, but lightly.

Keltham unchains her afterwards.

"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."

Carissa:

" - 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."

Keltham:

"I'm glad there's literally anything I can and will do, that can scare my cute future-archdevil girlfriend literally at all.  Even just scare her temporarily.  Something about the 'gendertrope' wouldn't feel right otherwise, but she's way too powerful herself and you've got to cheat the shit out of everything to even have a hope there."

Carissa:

"I think you might be underestimating how powerful you are, Keltham."

Keltham:

"Fair.  Rephrase: she's way too powerful herself, so you've got to cheat the shit out of everything if you want to scare her within the next hour instead of two weeks later."

Carissa:

"Luckily you're good at cheating. And you haven't thought of most of the things a Chelish person would think of immediately but you think of things we never would. So it all evens out."

Keltham:

He can't actually handle that level of compliments without feeling uncomfortable, as it turns out.  Something about all the power that he holds in Golarion continues to feel like it isn't really his.

He doesn't say anything in reply to her last statement, just snuggles into her.

(Story continues after this tag in Project Lawful and Their Oblivious Boyfriend.)