"I hadn't actually meant to offer my researchers so much money that they'd commit personality suicide rather than quit the project.  And I - thought the whole point of not being Good, was, not committing personality suicide just because something is wrong elsewhere in the world."

"Or if it's okay to damage them for some other reason - why would it be?"

"- I can't speak for anyone else, on this. But for me - you're right. There is nothing you could pay me to commit personality suicide, since there's nothing I could do with the money anyway. Almost no matter what was happening in the world I wouldn't let anyone take Carissa and replace her with someone else; I am too Evil for that. But - I am an Asmodean. The Church teaches that we are broken in ways it does not know how to fix in life, and can fix only slowly in Hell. I didn't know what that meant, until I met you, but I believed it, because the Church doesn't lie, and I wanted it, very badly. You can refuse to become a devil, if you want, in Hell, everyone's Evil, no one's going to try to get you to for your own good. But Carissa is not - the set of errors I am making now. Carissa is my nature as someone who will do whatever it takes to be smarter, and stronger, and better, someone who heard that becoming some kinds of devil hurts, when she was six or seven, and went and touched a hot coal, just in order to imagine that she was in Hell and being perfected -"

"I"m not in a hurry. I understand your reasons for not wanting us to rush off growing up, and I'm not sure it's the sort of thing where trying to hurry would actually make the important parts happen faster. I'm not trying to do it to myself on purpose. I'm letting go, when I touch anything that might be a hot coal. But if it does happen fast, if I do wake up one day and see through myself with terrible clarity, that's not suicide, that's being born. And babies cry about being born but you can't keep them in the womb forever."

"I'm going to be really fucking pissed with Something if I got landed somewhere I get to fall in love and then watch all of my lovers turn into Keepers and leave me behind."

"I don't know enough about this to promise you that won't happen, but it's not what I want. I want to be yours, and be better at it."

Can Keepers be in love?  Keltham doesn't know, which, now that he reflects on it, seems like the state of affairs that might obtain if Keepers can't.  If restructuring yourself more Law-shaped meant you couldn't let yourself go like that, couldn't believe somebody was righter for you, than she was.  And this was not something you wanted to go around telling people, if they hadn't asked.  Like all the couples that declare their relationship prediction markets closed info, and to not tell them what the numbers are, so long as they stay above 70%.

Well, it's not like they're asking to be Keepers, Pilar and Meritxell excepted.  The Cheliax-rebuilding question is whether they can become, like, 20% of a regular dath ilani without their personalities disintegrating.  That's probably around the level they're actually thinking of, when he talks about Keepers, anyways.

Keltham automatically labels this as a thought originally suggested by optimism and an internal search for consolation in the face of a previous input producing emotional distress, and has the disconcerting experience of realizing that probably nobody else on Golarion knows how to do that.

"Next item on tonight's agenda of awful relationship conversations?  I can keep going."

"No further awful relationship conversations! That is all the awful relationship conversation ideas I had. I have a separate list of kinky relationship conversations which should perhaps be for some other night."

He'll just hold her for a while, then.

The thought occurs to him that among the solutions he could apply here, given infinite time, would be to write a fictional book containing a Civilizational hero as a viewpoint character.  So people could pick up, the rhythm of Civilization's thought processes, have that positive vision inside them as a potential replacement, before they started learning things that might risk doing internal damage.  Not the best use of his time as it stands.  Probably also the result of the well-known Rationalizing Reasons To Write A Book Bias to which he is no more immune than any other dath ilani.  Maybe if he ran out literally all of his better ideas over the course of twenty-six years he'd eventually resort to that one because at least books are fun to write.

"Oh," Keltham says after an interval of quiet.  "Small bit of progress... actually, first, does anything awful happen inside your mind, if Yaisa got something nice from me before you did, and you probably can't have it for a while?  Though Yaisa said she intended to spread the word, so you'll probably hear about it at some point, unless you tell me to tell Yaisa to label the information a Carissa infohazard as it spreads."

"Like a completely typical Golarion woman I have flashes of jealousy about all your other lovers and like a moderately competent one I tell them that I am witnessing the consequences of my strategic decision to go for the most valuable man in the world. I am not sure if that's the kind of anything awful you mean."

"Okay but in terms of policy, does that work out to my labeling infohazardous the details of things my other cuddle-partners got and you can't have yet, because it causes you mental pain that there isn't a sufficiently strong reason for you to take on... I guess the answer is probably 'Carissa, pain, have you met her' but I want to verify it's the kind of pain that qualifies for that."

"I don't want you to avoid telling me things that cause me jealousy."

Keltham describes that thing he did, that Yaisa liked.  For which she later quoted him a price, under Fairness, that was more than an order of magnitude more than any sex that Keltham had to offer in dath ilan was worth to anyone from Civilization.

He realized while doing that, this was probably the feeling of power that Carissa had talked about wanting him to feel, that he felt while controlling Yaisa that way.

So he'll be able to feel it with Carissa, once he... is actually capable of making her respond the way he wants.  Which is sort of a key ingredient in that feeling of being powerful.

He does not say this to add pressure from his side.  Keltham has that with Yaisa; he is not himself starving for it, if Carissa cannot give it to him, for a time.

" - I'm in fact not jealous. Just - glad for you, glad you got a chance to have it. 

I have not been putting any mental effort into working out why it's so hard for me to relax in bed. I meant to, but then a lot of things happened. Does the prohibition on me having sex with other people extend to me seeing someone in the Church who specializes in sexual hangups for the purpose of getting advice about it? - where by seeing someone I mean doing sex things with the expert in order to see if they can figure anything out. It is fine if that is not allowed, and fine if you want to achieve this yourself, but if it's allowed I might try it."

"Well, the correct answer is, sure, go ahead, but my actual answer is, I would prefer to know them first.  And maybe I'd prefer to hear out what they want to do to you, if it's not much more awful than what we've done so far, in case I do want to do that myself."

"If you're open to consulting outside experts, I'm sort of tempted to write Isidre and ask.  I'm sort of tempted to write Abrogail and ask."

" - Abrogail might be a great person to ask, actually. I -

- she has more expertise in this than I knew it was possible to have. She didn't fix that thing, she wasn't trying to, but I would absolutely predict she knows how. And I know she's curious how I've been doing because Subirachs asked if she could pass along what I told her. - I said yes."

"Verify even if you trust:  I trust my personal details weren't in there, just yours?"

"Yes, correct, I have been telling Subirachs only my personal details. You can ask me to stop that too, of course, if you'd like; it was strongly recommended when I first got back from Egorian but I don't think it's nearly as important now."

"I'm fine with it."

"Though amused with my brain over how probably at least 30% of this fineness is powered by Subirachs and Abrogail being hot."

"Aren't they???? I had never seen anyone that attractive before I joined this project. I don't know how Abrogail isn't constantly sexually distracted by looking in the mirror, or catching glimpses of her reflection on her dinnerware, or bathing...."

"Thought two:  To whatever extent this is powered by Splendour, its reverse can also probably be powered by Splendour, to present yourself as less sexy.  In fact, I'm guessing that Abrogail sexied you a looooot harder than she sexied me, by the sound of things."

"Thought one:  Why discard this prediction of what seems like a perfectly good hypothesis?  Perhaps Abrogail is, in fact, constantly sexually distracted by herself while bathing."

Sometimes, no matter how much heresy you think you've already heard on Project Lawful, you still have to tamp down a reflexive impulse to incinerate somebody.

PL-timestamp:  Day 13 (10) / Night

Everyone's Rings have kicked tonight!  Ione is pumped about this.  She's gonna have 3 hours a night of personal time.  She's gonna get to read books and not explode.

Buuut, before Personal Hours begin, Ione needs to have a much more dreaded conversation with Carissa, about how to successfully retcon a personal confession to Keltham that... is not entirely conformant with the alterCheliax canon that currently seems to be developing.

(It's not her fault.  It's not.  If the Asmodeans didn't want Ione Sala to sound so much more terrified, back then, they shouldn't have fucking terrified her.)

"I honestly don't have a good idea what to do with this. You could claim to think you were worried you'd be removed from the project over being a Nethysian? I am not sure if he'll remember things that contradict that; he well might."

"Keltham requesting all of his transcripts, or worse, somehow finding out about magical memory aids and demanding one of those, is one of my enduring nightmares about how this Project ends.  It should probably be in black on the wall, that we were too visibly making up alterCheliax as we went along, if Keltham could actually review all the dialogue from then and compare it to the more complete-sounding world from now."

"Sala's transcript is one of the worst ones from that perspective.  We are purely hoping that Keltham doesn't remember it well enough.  Keltham asks how much trouble she's in, if the Chelish government finds out about her.  She doesn't say she got truthspelled by Security already.  She says she doesn't know.  It's halfway between red and black, we can maybe gloss that, even if Keltham remembers.  But Ione is just not acting like someone from alterCheliax there, and that overall impression is one that he may be able to notice in retrospect."

"And Keltham is going to remember that Sala was too scared to tell anyone she was a Nethysian, because that was central to her confession.  That - has to be a mistake, Sala made, somehow, because here she is now in alterCheliax doing great about that, so why was she so scared before then -"

"If Keltham wasn't already asking to check in on Ione, I'd tell Sala to fuck off.  If she hadn't already pledged herself to Keltham, I'd tell her to tell Keltham to fuck off.  Failing both of those, I'm not sure what our good options are here.  I hope Sala has thought about this for longer and has something amazing to propose."