"I always want you." Also Carissa's slightly concerned what with how alter Ione probably didn't offer herself to Keltham for protection; that's still in red on the wall, something not entirely satisfactory. "I admit to also wanting to learn the results of all your adventures with Golarion sexualities but less urgently."

Then Ione's route can wait.  Keltham is trying to give his existing relationships as much time as they seem to need, before assuming that he has available item-equipping-slots for new ones.

Carissa does not really understand the stories Keltham is drawing on in how he conceptualizes romance, and she'd like to, but - not a priority for right this minute, probably. 

He shall see her of an evening, then.  Wishes she also Keltham's dinnertime exclusively?  If not he's going to try sitting with Meritxell and Tonia for reasons of cognitive diversity.

Normally she would roll her eyes at this degree of solicitousness but right now it's sort of soothing. "Predict my answer."

20% she wants just him for dinnertime, 80% go sit with Meritxell and Tonia.

70% she thinks Keltham is asking her too much for decisions instead of him just making those on the basis of what he prefers more, but Keltham disagrees with Hypothetical Carissa about this because they are aliens and any time Carissa enters a possibly not-previously-explored state Keltham needs to re-ask annoying questions to figure out what is going on inside people.  If she were a dath ilani or Yaisa, Keltham would be offering to pay her a copper per annoying question.

"What is going on inside your Carissa is that I am slightly morose about the fact we can't finish the whole project and build Civilization tomorrow, and indignant about how the world is just going to go on being stupid until we personally fix it, and I am not interested in trying to run your dinner decisions through that filter, that doesn't sound - like a policy you can follow for the whole deployment without going crazy. Which suggests you should make dinner decisions using some other process."

Meritxell and Tonia it is, then.

Keltham can't promise that he'll only ask his too-many-questions once, any more than people can get chemistry from hearing it summarized once.  But he is learning and orienting and the constant questions will diminish over time.

Meritxell and Tonia are debating who the hottest person in the world is. Meritxell feels that it is the Queen, and Tonia thinks that this just seems kind of unlikely on principle even though she has heard that the Queen is very hot. 

(This conversation is from the brainstormed list of alter-Cheliax conversation topics.)

Assuming they seem okay with Keltham joining this conversation:

Keltham will register that the Queen is the hottest person he's seen in Golarion; and dath ilan tries to avoid exposing people who can't afford them to professional incredibly hot people so he doesn't know what the dath ilani peak of that would be.  But the Queen is also relatively young, and people have occasionally mentioned the existence of, like, very old ninth-circle-wizards, who if they get to go on optimizing their appearance would probably look hotter...?

- well, wizards don't tend to invest in headbands for Splendour, because if you're a wizard Intelligence is more useful, so you wouldn't expect any of the ancient wizards to have +6 to Splendour like the Queen does, Meritxell objects. 

Does a Splendour headband... make people prettier?

....it doesn't literally affect, like, their bone structure, but a lot of prettiness is - presentation, subtleties in how you incline your head and hold your shoulders and move your body, and Splendour absolutely affects those things. 

Gosh.  Keltham has never looked into Hotness Theory before.  It must certainly be a science out of dath ilan, somewhere in Civilization's vast knowledge, but it's probably classified above his own sexual-jadedness level.

Should he try running an Eagle's Splendour himself during sex?  But maybe he should save that for when he's not already maxed out on interesting things to try.

Meritxell has occasionally tried that and been satisfied with the results but she isn't sure Chelish people have the running out of interesting things to try problem. Maybe they would if they couldn't hurt people or tie them up or anything.

If you can convert Splendour into hotness, does that mean that Nocticula can be, like... a giant clawed thingydingy like he saw at the Worldwound, and yet, by virtue of sheer presentation and subtleties, incredibly hot.

Yes, definitely. Most succubi have fangs and wings and horns in a way that manages to not detract at all from their hotness. The mind is accustomed to getting its hotness-cues from humans but that doesn't mean humans are the thing that actually pushes those buttons the hardest, is how Meritxell guesses a dath ilani would think about it.

...would an illusion of a succubus still look hot?  Keltham is having trouble visualizing how this Splendour thing works.

Yes but probably less so, unless it was a moving illusion? - they do mostly look like hot winged horned women, even if you just saw a picture you'd say 'that's a hot winged horned woman', though you'd be missing some of the appeal.

Keltham is now less confused.

Nobody had previously mentioned to Keltham at any point that 'succubi' looked at all human.  People need to tell the alien these things.

He was visualizing a giant tentacled clawed fangy thing that was extremely persuasive and presented itself in a way that was super hot.

No! Mostly he would see a girl who was super hot, and did have fangs and wings and horns, in a hot way, and mannerisms that were exceptionally compelling, and a voice and scent and way of reacting to him that was very hot. 

...and people just sort of wrap all this up as 'Splendour', even though the kind of Splendour that a headband enhances must be very different - well, it could be doing a similar sort of work, by different methods, and Splendour could be quantifying the work.

The fact that people put numbers on it suggests that they have some way of measuring it, though?

There's a divination that gives Splendour! Meritxell doesn't know it because it's an invasive divination - works on objecting targets if they don't have the skill to resist, also gives other information - and the use of those is of course tightly restricted, but it exists. The Splendour scale is like the Intelligence one defined so 10 is the human average and 2 is a useful measure of variance the details of the definition of which she does not know.

...huh.

It is really legitimately actually weird that divinations do that.

Keltham has been focusing a lot on the 'economicmagic' aspects of Golarion magic but maybe he should be looking more into the 'conceptualmagic' aspects.  Where 'economicmagic' is magic that lets you do neat things personally without a huge supply network, and 'conceptualmagic' is magic where it apparently just takes a simple spell to augment incredibly complicated things like Cunning, Wisdom, Splendour.  Those indeed are the subspecies 'mentalisticmagic' of 'conceptualmagic' in which mental quantities are treated as if they were ontologically simple.

In dath ilani serious literature these two are rarely coupled, because they both have Enormous Implications and you usually want to consider the implications Separately.  In Less Serious Literature there is sometimes magic that is both 'economicmagic' and 'conceptualmagic', because both of these things are Cool to many readers, and the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature says that a story can be considered as a framework on which to hang the maximum amount of cool stuff.  So, if he's inside a story, it's not a very serious one, but frankly you could already guess that based on numerous other signs and indicators.

Reminder:  It is possible to keep a dath ilani conversation focused on relatively sexy topics but somebody in that conversation is gonna have to do some steering labor.