PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Night

Keltham repairs to his bedroom, from his cuddleroom, and asks Security to drop Carissa a note to come by if she has a moment.

Only if she's really got a moment, though.  Yes, Keltham understands that he's got the ability to give her orders, if he wants to, he just wants there to be actually in practice a way for him to give her less-than-maximum-priority requests.  It's too nervewracking the other way.

Then she'll make him wait for fifteen minutes while she reviews the Yaisa transcripts and tries to make sure the stuff about godnegotiations doesn't translate to anything new and important. She thinks it doesn't, for once, though they should put it in the report to the Grand High Priestess in case she's wrong.

Then she'll change into sleeping clothes, since Carissa who doesn't have a ring of sustenance was about to go to bed, and go find her boyfriend.

(Keltham possibly looks slightly sleepy.  A healthy teenager who's previously had a lot of dath ilani healthcare can pull a lot of fourteen-hour days, it is a thing that is within the capability of a teenage human body, but he may start to look a little worn at some point.)

Keltham wants to share a thing about Yaisa with Carissa.  Yaisa says yes but wants secret gossip about him and Carissa so that she can look knowing when the newcomers repeat weird rumors.  Yes, no, Keltham should make decisions like this himself but it's fine to ask Carissa if she has input, or Keltham should make all those future decisions unilaterally without asking Carissa for any input at all.

"I won't be hurt if you decide unilaterally but as you decided to ask, yes, that's fine. Though also I copied some spells off Lady Avaricia after dinner in exchange for some interesting tidbits about myself so the gossip may be less valuable than Yaisa hoped."

Keltham will share his sexy Yaisa details, then.

"Sounds like someone's having fun."

"Hopefully two people are having fun, but her price would've gone up if she wasn't, or so I hope... eh, I'll just remember to ask her that explicitly at some point."

He'll also tell Carissa about the Carissa rumors; repeat what he told Yaisa about divine pseudo-negotiations after the fact; and ask why there would be a lot of slaves in other countries and Yaisa wouldn't want to talk about that.  Are they doing this particular form of perversion dreadfully wrong, outside of Cheliax?

(It sure does look like something that could go horribly wrong, as Keltham has thought on multiple occasions.)

"In a lot of places when you conquer a place in war you take the people there as slaves, as payment to the soldiers for their work in fighting the war. In - general this custom replaced the custom of killing them. I wouldn't expect Yaisa to know this but my best guess is that slave, sexy sense, came from people looking at slaves, bad sense, and going 'okay but I'm sorry that's really hot', which is why people who are cautious of their phrasing, like Abrogail, might say 'possession' instead, so as not to mix them up in language.

In more places than that, including parts of Cheliax, slavery can be a status for a person convicted of a serious crime against another person that justly denies them the protection of Civilization and that they don't have the means to make right. Say I burned down your fields, the local temple might award me to you as compensation for the wealth I destroyed."

...okay, what's a slave when it's not a sexy thing?  Or does somebody who burns somebody else's fields get awarded as a sex!slave?

"The word just means 'a person who has forfeited the protection of Civilization and is the property of another'. Usually you figure out with them what they're going to be obliged to do and it's not too horrible because if it is then they'll be like 'well fuck this' and go right to Hell, which you obviously aren't allowed to stop them from doing. Probably if your fields just got burned you want a farmhand! But it's often a sex thing, because, unlike in dath ilan where I'm getting the sense practically everyone would go 'well fuck this' and go straight to Hell, at least half of people in Golarion will go 'sure, beats having to wash all your dishes'."

Do Chaotic Evil, or Chaotic Neutral, people ever get awarded as slaves.  Those afterlives didn't sound so nice.

Do Neutral Evil people ever get awarded as slaves.

Yes. Not in Cheliax, which gets very very close to everyone to Lawful, but yes. 

Like Awaiting Consumption it's kind of something Carissa didn't expect Keltham would benefit from learning about. Also, selfishly, it seems likely to make him run screaming from the entire concept.

Yeah, it's okay.  Dath ilani know how to decouple between Things and Other Things Which Are Not Actually That Thing.

Message:  If there's Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral, or Neutral Evil people who were taken as slaves after their country lost a war, Golarion Civilization and possibly Keltham are going to go in and replace Governance inside the countries holding them at some point.  Is this a fact that needs to not be spoken where Chelish Governance can overhear it, say because it implies that Civilization or Keltham will come into conflict with factions Cheliax considers itself to be friendly with?

Message back: Messaging because - maybe at some point we'll need to do this for real. But not on this. Cheliax hasn't conducted a war of conquest in three hundred years.

Even when we were dysfunctional before the Church came in we weren't like that. 

I don't think any countries that meet that description are our allies at the Worldwound but even if they are, the Worldwound alliance would prohibit us attacking them there, not - for unrelated reasons going to war with them, and certainly not permitting someone else to do that.

Okay.  He should maybe go to sleep now.

...please don't say things like 'forfeiting the protection of Civilization'.  Civilization doesn't exist here, and if it did - it wouldn't think like that.  Probably Golarion Civilization won't think like it either.  Even if it's mostly Kelthams, Lawful Evil instead of Lawful Good, it still won't think like that.

He still hasn't gotten around to meeting any Intelligence 10 people at this point, but - when he does - he strongly suspects that -

He should actually just not do that.  Shouldn't actually meet anybody with Intelligence 10, not for a while.  It's probably not good for his mental health if he starts thinking of the rest of Golarion as being inhabited by children, some of whom are being taken as slaves.  Kelthams were children too, at some point, and needed protection themselves, even from themselves.

(The concept that actual literal children would be taken or held as slaves has obviously not occurred to him at all.)

I don't think they're much like children. And - I wouldn't say they never need protection from themselves but I think it's mostly a kind of protection you give them by making all the afterlives a soft place to land, not by trying to blunt all the edges of the world.

But - yeah, I do think they might seem like children to a dath ilani, so maybe you shouldn't meet them. And Civilization here's going to have to be different here, to be something that functions with them, if we don't just headband everybody. 

They'll just headband everybody.  Spellsilver doesn't look to be a kind of thing that Civilization couldn't produce by the millions of tons if it felt like it.

Goodnight, Carissa.

Goodnight.

Carissa is very curious what Keltham will do once they headband all the people who are way below 10 intelligence and only get to 12 with the most expensive headband in the world, but now doesn't seem like the time for that conversation, and hopefully by the time that situation actually arises Keltham will be eviller and think that enslaving all the stupid people is perfectly reasonable. 

They can shift all the planning around 'we have avoided telling Keltham around slavery and that could explode' to reflect that it'll only explode if he learns about Chelish slavery, or maybe slavery of children.

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Long Night

Carissa Sevar would really really like to spend this night making glibness swords but she should be responsible first. 

"I'm here to request correction, if you have any."

"If I'd found myself foolishly thinking clever-sounding thoughts about Hell's instructions to the Chosen - rather than Hell's instructions to myself, a slave of the Church - what are your thoughts about whether I should, in general, dare to speak to you of such?  Hell's instructions to Church and Crown are suggestive that it may be Asmodeus's will, that you come to comprehend His instructions to you for yourself, without such as myself presuming to instruct you on them.  But perhaps my thoughts are foolish, and you will know them for such, and think something valuable in the process of refusing them..."

Well that sounds like a serious and important question of the kind Carissa can sense she's mostly been dodging for more immediate ones, lately.

She is doing a good job at her duties. The project is making interesting and valuable progress; Keltham does not seem suspicious; he's been corrupted a thoroughly respectable degree; morale is high and the markets on who will collapse aren't too pessimistic.

She is not doing a particularly good job at the duty that Hell actually set her, to find in herself desires that have no place in Axis. She's definitely gotten Eviller. She's pretty sure that running the project is about as Lawful Evil as an action can be. She is exercising power over other people to see the will of Asmodeus done, and trying to awaken in Keltham that which will let Hell claim him; she's being very Evil. But the instruction wasn't just to be more Evil. And it seems likely that the traits that make you rise in Hell are not just 'having done tons of Evil things unhesitatingly as ordered', that she is not yet the right shape for the greatest of her ambitions. 

It does seem that Asmodeus intended her to find that path without steering by the Church, or their instructions would have emphasized less not being proactive. But -

"It seems to me that my current efforts to obey Hell's instructions to me are inadequate," she says carefully. "So I would desire your thoughts, on the principle that - when I seem to be making little progress is a good time to seek out perspectives that might help me find my way."

"Your efforts are incomplete.  It's been less than three weeks since Hell instructed you.  You are serving Asmodeus well in this world and being raised high within it.  Keltham must be contained now, he must be corrupted on a time limit.  If I thought you were wrong to prioritize the first line of your instructions, I would have advised you to take some time off your long nights and find somebody you hated enough to enjoy experimenting on, keeping in mind that you could name nearly anyone short of a Count and the Crown would wrap them up and hand them over.  But if you're really a good Asmodean, and I'm starting to think that you are, then you have relatively more time in which to do such things - is my own possibly foolish thought.  You should not pass up obvious opportunities to make progress, for you should not dally on any of Hell's instructions, but you are allowed to prioritize."

"Your efforts may possibly be inadequate as well as incomplete, but it's not obvious to me that they are.  They're clearly imperfect, but then, you're not Irori, and won't succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid.  You are, apparently, the sort of slave that needs to remember that and not think otherwise."

"There's a difference between knowing that you're falling short of perfection, as is worthy of some punishment even in a good slave, and failing to recognize the progress you've made as possibly making you not a bad slave, who might not be judged worthy of severe punishment.  That judgment lies in the hand of your superior, to be clear, it is not your place to decide that you are doing not too badly.  But you didn't leave that judgment to me, you called yourself inadequate.  That was wrong of you, by the way."

Jacint slaps the Chosen hard enough to hurt, but not very much compared to being lit on fire; slaps don't do that.  "There.  You've been punished."

"I understand." Mostly; there's always a small discombobulation, a sense that there's something there Keltham would have questions about she couldn't answer. She tends to listen to that instinct but she does not need to listen to it about this, because they are not going to tell Keltham anything like this, not for a long time, and when they do he actually might have better instincts for it than she does.