...he may possibly require a few additional minutes to come to terms with this Letter and fully process it.

PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Night

Yo, Carissa.  Good time for Keltham to try that Security test with the heating-stone and keeping Detect Magic running?

Works for her!

Carissa is intensely curious how Keltham will handle pain. Optimistically, maybe dath ilan has been lying to him and he'll realize there's a place for it. Pessimistically....maybe dath ilani are different and pain is actually just bad for them? In which case she's going to need to figure out how to use them in Hell. It would be incredibly wasteful to just have all resentful dath ilani turn into paving stones because no one can figure out anything better, and she's not optimistic anyone else is going to figure out something better.

Keltham would be so confused if he knew what Carissa was thinking!  What is there to be curious about?  Pain is ouch and bad.  If it's severe pain you use mental disciplines to dissociate from it as much as possible.  Masochists apparently get sexually aroused by it and submissives feel dominated by it, both facts entirely irrelevant to Keltham who is neither.

Dath ilani try to keep themselves simple, so that their theories of themselves can be simple without being false.  "All self-models are potential traps but complicated self-models are actual traps," goes the proverb out of dath ilan.  If dath ilani seem complex to the eyes of another world, it's perhaps because they are using some unfamiliar simplicities, shorter words in Baseline.  'Pain is bad and I don't like it' is a perfectly reasonable way for a mind to be, and correspondingly a helpfully simple thing for a theory of the self to accurately say.

Keltham notices that part of him is less than cheerful about the fact that Carissa was available, since now an ouch badthing will happen to him.  Keltham notices that part of him is scared he's going to perform so unimpressively that Carissa will fall out of love with him.

Keltham proceeds to the cuddleroom anyways.  (It's not that this is a sexy thing per se, but that the cuddleroom is in fact where the heating-stone from Subirarchs's collection happens to be.)

"Carissa, I notice that I'm more scared of performing poorly on this test and you thinking I'm unworthy than I am wincing about the upcoming pain.  Any strictly truthful remarks that come to mind about that?"

"...dath ilani answer,  I expect you won't be very good at it so if you're in fact not very good at it then that won't shift what I think of you, because I could just go ahead and think it now. And you'd properly be compared to other people who just learned cantrips, anyway, not combat wizards with years of training, and even if you do badly by that comparison it's not like I picked you for your security wizarding ability."

He notices himself wanting to say lots of things to Carissa, asking her if this is something he really needs to do, telling her about the letter from Abrogail, and what he thought about that, and how that's why he decided he needed to do this...

Explain in detail his theory of how, in fact, he has to do this tonight, because otherwise it's just going to go on nagging at him with the anticipation making it worse...

While Keltham is noticing himself wanting to do all these things, he has gone ahead and touched the heating stone to his left arm, spoken the command word once to attach it and again to turn on the heating effect, and cast and caught Detect Magic.

Of this there is also a discipline out of dath ilan, which is to just go do the thing.

At first it doesn't even hurt too badly; it's like touching a hot plate of food, not like touching an open burner. At first. But when you touch a hot thing like that, you put it down, and if you don't, then it does start hurting. 

Every round Keltham needs to make a concentration check with a steadily increasing DC. He rolls surprisingly well, actually; it's a full minute before he loses the spell, and even then it's a close thing. 

It's about twenty seconds after that that he rips the awful thing off his arm.

If by that you mean that Keltham speaks the command word to detach it.  Ripping it off is a mistake he won't make; he visualized that process in advance.

Before Keltham channels positive energy to heal himself, he'll see whether he can still cast and catch Light under his present circumstances.

It takes a lot more deliberate effort to concentrate than usual, but yes!

Keltham will give himself a further minute to experiment with trying out the disciplines that are supposedly supposed to help with dissociating from pain.

(There are lessons you can sign up for, in dath ilan, to get actual practice with that in advance; they are considered Ill-Advised Consumerism for most normal people who probably won't need them, because, like, you will remember that pain.  Had Keltham known of his future trip to Golarion, obviously, he would have taken those lessons and a lot of other lessons too.)

...has Carissa been reacting to any of this, at all.

She's pretty sure she should NOT look like she's taking detailed notes for future reorganization of Hell purposes. That would raise questions she is not planning on answering right now. 

So she will just be patiently adorably attentive. And have a healing spell of her own ready in case he forgets how in a panic or something. He's not handling it that badly, but, still.

At least Carissa doesn't look openly horrified at his performance.  Not that she would... yeah, it's not actually much in the way of likelihood-ratio.

Channel Positive-aspected healing energy and done.

Snuggle. "I am very curious what you thought of that," she says truthfully.

"Tell you in a moment.  Part of me is a lot more worried about what you thought of that.  I'm being nice to that part, so you first."

"It's longer than I expected, to the extent I was forming expectations, which I was trying not to because it'd stress you out? Also I really really want to problem solve you being nervous what I'll think of you but probably this is not the time."

"I'm aware.  My guess is that it gets resolved by time, by success at mining spellsilver, by sufficient deep-down confidence in not-Conspiracy that I start actually trusting truthspells, and by some advice I recently got from Abrogail.  Advice that made me think again about whether I'd been holding back and delaying on flinchy-feeling things I should do to adapt to Golarion."

"This was part of that, and -"

"I don't know what I was expecting.  It was an ouchy badthing, very ouchy, very bad, it made it hard to concentrate.  I would probably need more practice to dissociate from it per standard disciplines, well enough to even leave it on my arm for ten minutes, never mind maintaining Detect Magic through it."

"I'm not... really feeling like more of a native to Golarion as a result.  Maybe I should have taken more time to focus on the injury, and experience the fear that healing wasn't real or wouldn't work.  So I'd have updated more on injuries being temporary and pain being less of an important signal, after I healed myself."

"Huh. 

A thing I get out of pain is a sense of - myself, as something distinct from all the inputs I'm getting, as something stronger than those, and it's a - not a nice feeling exactly but an important one, one I seek out - I don't know if that's what you mean by 'dissociate from it' -"

"Nnnnooooo, that's sort of - denying the pain's meaning, denying it as something that's a part of you as opposed to just being there, severing the feelings and thoughts downstream of it?"