"Like this?"

This sure is an earlier point for the plan to fail than the earliest point at which she imagined it failing.

Yeah, okay, he can read that expression, no doubt because Ione is making an effort to be readable to him.

Keltham casts Eagle's Splendour on himself, only thinking when the gesture is half-complete that he's expending a resource for the sake of playing along with a lie, but it's not a key resource and his hands have finished the motion before his worrying cortex can manage to inhibit it.

He's not really at his best.

Keltham had wondered before why Splendour/Charisma was a reasonable characteristic to be one of only three major mental attributes at the center of Golarion's conceptualmagic.  Splendour didn't seem on par with Wisdom, let alone Cunning/Intelligence.  He didn't see what manipulating people, or pretending to be other people, had to do with, like, sorcery casting, or paladin casting.  It seemed like a case of there just being Three Attributes, two of which were in use by wizards and clerics, so the third one got assigned to sorcerers and paladins even if that made no sense.

That, of course, was when Keltham didn't need Splendour.  When his mind wasn't in a posture where increased Splendour would make a difference to anything but play-acting.

Keltham's hesitating will firms itself, his faltering drive moves back into motion -

- his emotions grow stronger, but the spell also increases his ability to crush his emotions down and his ability to continue despite them; and when that's added to dath ilani disciplines, it's enough to go on delaying the pain.

"Better?"

"It'll have to do."

Keltham sticks his head out of the Rope Trick and asks them to send up Carissa, followed by Asmodia one minute later.

"- okay now what's the plan for subduing Carissa."

"Wait until Sevar is far enough in not to fall down, then rip off her headband, it's an artifact headband instead of her usual one.  Losing it should disorient her enough that you can, uh, subdue her, if that story was true, and get the earrings onto her.  And then command her to take no voluntary actions, and then heal her."

A spark of real interest lights in Keltham.  "And then we put the artifact headband on you instead?"

(Getting your hands on the cognitive-enhancement device, even for a few exciting minutes, is not uncommonly a key turning point in dath ilani stories - though with protagonists who have more Carissan and less Kelthamian attitudes towards cognitive enhancement.)

"...too risky," Ione says with great regret in her voice.  "It strikes me as the sort of 'Exception Handling weaponry' that might possibly have safeguards against 'unauthorized users'."

(After a couple of months of Communal Share Language from Keltham, everyone on the Project has started to pick up some phrases in Baseline; and concepts too, of course.  Ione more than most, again of course.)

The spark of interest-hope-curiosity fades.  Is this really worth delaying his primary escape plan?

- maybe it is, if he can haul Carissa with him on his primary escape.  Asmodia - why Asmodia, why is the Conspiracy -

"Ione, why Asmodia?"

"Asmodia is the other one who strikes me as - redeemable is the wrong word, that she doesn't really want to be here - and who I think actually cares about you, which I suspected would matter to you.  Was I wrong?"

"No, that would matter to me, if" it was real "you were right."

A small flow of probability shifts from ConspiracyConspiracy to OrdinaryConspiracy, though not much.  ConspiracyConspiracy he'd expect to try tempting him with keeping Yaisa - or had he actually come to care more about Asmodia, and did they know that?

The sadness hits him like a punch in the gut; with the added Splendour he withstands it more by inner force than by inner fiat.

Here comes Carissa.  Time to play out this next part, he guesses.

And hurt Carissa, not for the sake of their relationship, but for - he's just not going to think about that, or whether he meant anything to her.

"- wow," she says quietly as soon as she sees Keltham's face. " - what - do you want -"

Grab her and haul her in.

Rip off the headband.

- Carissa makes a small horrified sound and then lunges bodily at Ione. She's clumsy; if you had absolutely no context on any of this you might think she was on drugs, or possibly had rabies. 

Without Bull's Strength some of his martial options become more limited, have to be done in particular ways.  Grab Carissa's right arm, bring up his fist in a powerful blow to break her right elbow, to make it harder for her to draw and use her dagger.  Then put Carissa into a chokehold that Security insisted on training Keltham in, as an anti-spellcaster technique.  Were they planning this fake escape that far back?

(...why is he playing along, to this extent... because maybe he can turn it real, or, real enough to take Carissa with him when he actually leaves...)

She doesn't actually fight him, though she does keep trying to maul Ione. 

Somehow that makes it hurt worse.  Some deep part of him doesn't believe in anything that's in words words words, it just sees him beating up Carissa who isn't fighting back.

Dath ilan hopes most of its people don't experience this stress level at any point in their lives.  But always some people do, and when that time comes for them, their ability to continue operating seems like a key figure of merit for whether dath ilan has made its people stronger, or weaker, in the end.

Keltham has been shaped to continue even now; Keltham's society has shaped itself to accomplish that quality of the people within.

"Ione.  Earrings.  Left pocket last time I saw her put them in there."

At some point he's going to find whoever planned out this particular pantomime, and made him do this to Carissa -

- possibly Carissa, now that he thinks about it -

- or were all her lines, everything she was, scripted by that same scriptor -

She'll look for them and not say anything.  Still there?