Right then, well, he'll just amuse himself with his non-pattern-recognizing toy as the impulse moves him.  And trust to his own timing instincts to end the flow shortly before he would otherwise start to feel tired or burned about it.  There's a saying out of dath ilan, that if you leave the party once you start feeling tired, you've failed at timing; the ideal time to leave is five minutes before that.

When Keltham is done, he'll let her out -

- cuddle up to Carissa while she's still in chains, closing his own eyes and whispering that she doesn't need to say anything.  If he let Carissa out, or made her talk, she'd probably look less safe or protected or happy and Keltham can't make himself do that, not on purpose, not by his own acts, even if it needs to happen eventually.  At some point she'll need to go to the bathroom, and then she'll have to talk.  Or she'll have feelings to talk about, or something.  Until then Keltham can't make her speak.

The relaxed happy feeling drains away as soon as she starts trying to think what to say. Ah, well. She doesn't actually want to be Keltham's happy safe possession who can't think all the time. 

"'m impressed," she manages after a bit.

He sits up a little in the bed, to look at her, and is able to tell that she is no longer entirely in that protected happy state.  He feels a little sad, then; though he wouldn't want Carissa to always be an unthinking feeling thing.  To own Carissa Sevar is a prideful thing because she is the Spellcraft master building his intelligence-headband assembly line, who could've also had Abrogail Thrune if Keltham hadn't snapped Carissa up first by a matter of three days.  Still, he wishes he could've protected her for longer.

"That was part of the idea there, yes."

"And it was - for you? Because you wanted to?"

"Checked that part really hard, made sure going in that it was all about my ability to force any reaction I wanted out of my possession, and my own pride, and that I was pushing myself along faster only out of my desire to have that from you and be faster about adapting to Golarion."

"That lasted around as long as it took for me to see you looking - safe, in the chains - and then it immediately became all about wanting you to go on looking like that.  But I don't think that's too Good; I think that's just how I want my possession to look."

" - okay. It was - really good. Like all the stakes and all the - being scared - just went away. You can make your possession look like that as often as you want. ...I love you." I'm sorry about everything.

"I love you."  Part of him still believes that this must inevitably end in disaster, but whether it does or not, the statement itself is true.

PL-timestamp:  Day 60

PL-timestamp:  Day 61

Cheliax produces 11 +2 Intelligence headbands for the Project, produced under carefully monitored conditions and definitely safe to wear. 

....they do know there's now more than 11 headbandless researchers. They just couldn't change the number of headbands they were making midstream like that.

"I'm extremely tempted, once we have the spellsilver, to just make everyone all our headbands myself."

"I'll understand if you want to make yourself a +6 one.  But when it comes to +4 headbands - if I was in your position, I'd set myself the rule and challenge that I was going to have all those headbands made, quickly and correctly, by average 3rd-circle wizards working in shifts to fully utilize the headband-constructing magic items you made for them."

(Yes, Keltham has already asked about having wizards specialize in particular aspects of headband manufacture so they can form an assembly line.  The answer was that it wouldn't be easy even by Carissa's standards, given the way item crafting works; just having two people working on the same item is enough of a skill penalty.  So the best current plan is to have wizards trading off the assistive gadgets between each other, as they reach particular manufacturing stages in staggered steps; such that a large factory section only needs one assistive item per manufacturing stage, across many headband-assembly stations.  That's a further advantage of doing it with multiple assistive items instead of one big staff of headband-making.)

"You're of course completely right but also your idea is unappealing because they will do it so slowly."

Carissa has officially brought on her third-circle enchanter assistant to be a third-circle enchanter who can demonstrate bottlenecks in headband-making; she's going with the approach of a series of armillary-amulet like items which make each step of the process easier, and she thinks will amount to two or three times the bonus from an armillary amulet all told; somehow, even with that most third circle wizards are worse than her at enchanting magic items. Probably they'll get there with more practice. 

"Carissa, the Project needs 15 +4 Intelligence headbands to start with.  If you can't get the factory to the point where 15 third-circles can produce 15 +4 headbands faster than 1 Carissa can, you haven't sped up their work enough."

"They should be able to do that, the assistant's actually only a bit slower than me by now on the parts that I have the items complete for. I do want to take a stab at totally changing how we train enchanters, in the long run, though the multiplier won't be as big."

"Yes, yes, everything in Golarion is broken and we have to fix every individual aspect of it, but priorities, Carissa, priorities.  We have to fix things in a particular order, and it'd be nice to do it in a near-optimal one.  Think of how much easier they'll be to retrain once they have +4 intelligence headbands."

"As you command."

PL-timestamp:  Day 62

Peranza ends like a star dies, running out the last of the fuel that makes it possible for it to sustain its current form against the immense pressures of gravity.

This is how Peranza ends:

She's getting her weekly Owl's Wisdom tapping, the one where you sit quietly in your bedroom and think about the Law and yourself.  (Keltham thinks it takes place early in the morning; it actually takes place during the Long Night, in case anything goes wrong then.)

Keltham's theory was that stresses wouldn't accumulate for too long, that way; wouldn't build up in a backlog that causes cascades and massive personality shifts all at once.

...it's a theory that doesn't really work if the person has spent her previous Wisdom minutes on reviewing Law notes, in a frantic effort not to have her own mind come apart from thinking all the thoughts and seeing all the things that are easier not to think and see when not under Owl's Wisdom.

This policy is in no sense the result of a conscious plan.  It's just that some past Peranza, who didn't want to be an outcast heretic even if somebody claimed she would survive that, nor wish to suffer horribly in Hell after that - no matter how totally infeasible that life goal was starting to look for her - conditioned herself with pain and horror against the possibility of thinking thoughts that Hell or Security might not like.  That past Peranza made flinchy the sense of maybe being about to see, because you have to stop yourself before you think the thought, if your mind is being read.

And Keltham went on lecturing, day after day, from Civilizational attitudes and techniques that were, if not designed to turn him into a Keeper, at least designed to exclude every possibility of any dath ilani ever turning into anything remotely like Peranza.

Three days ago, now, Keltham talked to the mad-experimental lecture section about the principle of Despair in the Futility of Madness, as a pathway towards sanity:

How, if you notice yourself trying to convince yourself of something, you should then think that it's obviously too late for you to pull that trick on yourself.  Once you know what you're trying to do to yourself, there, the Law of Filtered Evidence should apply to whatever biased search for arguments your mind tries to run.

How, if you find yourself trying to talk yourself out of knowing, you should think then with despair that it's already too late.

How, if you try to talk yourself into defying the Law, you should look to the part of yourself that knows deep down that the Law governs and your defiance does not.

Keltham said to remember then that you've already been trained to know the difference between wishing you believed something, versus wanting to believe something, versus hoping that you believe something, versus anticipating seeing it, the feeling of knowing what happens if you bet.  You should despair then that it's too late and you already know what you don't really believe.  Give up, lose hope, and know what it is that you already know.

It could be considered something akin to an attempted hypnotic instruction to believe you can't deceive yourself anymore.

Peranza tried very hard not to think about any of it.

And at the end of that lecture, Keltham said, smiling, that, if anybody here had managed, somehow, not to process all of that, they should know with dread in their hearts that it'll probably come to visit them during their next Owl's Wisdom.  And every time that thought occurs to them, while waiting for their next Owl's Wisdom, even if they see themselves looking away from that thought, they should know then that it's definitely coming for them.

That's how Peranza ends, at Keltham's hands, who thought he was joking.

In Keltham's defense, one might note that everybody in his class sure did claim very seriously to him that they wanted to learn and needed to learn and that Golarion had different attitudes towards risk tolerance; that he should press ahead by the swiftest path unless and until something actually bad happened; and that Keltham was pretty sure that the almost-certainly-existent backlog of crazy past thought had to be reprocessed by his students at some point unless they outright quit.

The attitude that Civilization taught Keltham towards this sort of thing inevitably happening to you eventually, when you're ready, is a lot like the attitude that Carissa Sevar has towards pain.  And when his class told him to hurry that up, well, he does know the techniques you use on children to make sure they don't spend too long stuck.

It still left a long time for Peranza to be afraid, and to try not to look in that direction, and to hear in the back of her mind, Keltham's voice saying what he said, and become more and more aware of herself not looking, and to start to fear that everything he said was just true and the next time she got her Owl's Wisdom it would all fall apart.

She thought of begging Sevar to spare her from the Wisdom, but she knew, very well, that not only would Sevar say, that they shouldn't lie to Keltham, but also that Sevar wanted to see Peranza break, because what was left might be more useful to Sevar, and if not, there would just be the sad event of Peranza getting fired from the Project and Sevar learning more about which people not to hire next time.

In the end, all Peranza did was count the remaining days, and not think about what was awaiting her; except as a series of fleeting dreading thoughts, too buried for Security to catch during any times she was being mind-read.  That's what happens when decisions are made locally and for local considerations, to reduce the next bit of pain and immediate loss.

It wasn't pleasant for her, how Peranza ended.

Peranza gets her mandatory weekly Owl's Wisdom and, just like Keltham had told her to be afraid of happening, she starts to see everywhere that she was lying to herself, she tries so hard to look away and every time she does her thoughts go helplessly into highlighting and making explicit what it is she's trying not to see -

That she's always been repeating back what she was told, trying hard not to think at all about whether it was true, only, is this the safe thing to say, the thing that evades punishment -

(You know now that's not Law, you know that it's not what you believe deep down -)

That there's no way Sevar's plan can command the assent of Hell -

That all Sevar's precious ilani are going to be shattered into whatever valuable new shapes Hell wants from them, bought with their vast prices in Dis that no ilani ever gets paid themselves, and even if they keep their knowledge and their Law they'll still be tortured out of remembering their own names because Asmodeus likes it more that way -

That there maybe isn't very much difference between being tortured a standard amount in Hell, and being tortured an extra amount because you were bad during your mortal life or useless, which is the whole incentive that gets held out in front of you, and they try to convince you that if you're on course for just the standard unimaginably horrible torture that turns useful people into devils, you're making progress and winning at life, but she doesn't want doesn't want doesn't want that either -

That she doesn't want Abaddon doesn't want to stop existing but even if that was better than Hell there's no way it would really be allowed to her when a Count of Hell paid so much to repurchase her soul from some devil now rich, they'll lie to Sevar about it and deliver Peranza to Hell anyways -

That she hates this hates this hates her life hates the Church hates Cheliax hates Asmodeus is full of helpless screaming at everything that's ever been done to her, no no no don't look don't see it she'll die she'll die -

(This, right here, this is the direction you're not looking -)