"Pilar, I say this with great reluctance, because you may understand this problem much better than I do, to understand why in reality and in practice it couldn't possibly be solved, but you seeing your family again does not necessarily sound like the kind of problem I'd give up on solving if I was the one who had it?"

"That is not something particularly helpful for me to hear right now, Keltham."

"Why?  Pilar, I'm not asking because you need to socially justify that decision to me, I'm asking so I can understand what happens to Golarion people when they start to get Law in them."

"Because I'm fighting a battle where - where the victory is that the hope inside me is destroyed and I can stop thinking about it."

"It is not obvious to me that this constitutes an example of Lawful thinking and something itself that the truth could not again destroy.  If Golarion people need to move in - steps, from greater insanity to lesser insanity - and not straight from insanity to truth - then that sounds like something I might need to know about."

"Hope, where it constitutes the belief that something nice might happen, is a question of fact, Pilar.  If the entanglement is less than one percent, desire to assign probability less than one percent, if greater than one percent, desire to assign greater belief than one percent.  The questions of fact always come first."

"And if you want something, that's just your utilityfunction, and the utilityfunction is not up for grabs.  Maybe you can't get the thing you want, that doesn't change what your utilityfunction is."

"If you want to stop thinking about something, develop the skills to stop thinking about things, don't distort your probability estimates over it.  How would that even work, you'd just notice what you were doing and be like 'oh I'm rationalizing bad word Taldane I'm lying to myself again'.  Or if your verbal part managed to fool itself about the probability without you noticing, deeper parts of you would not be in agreement, and they'd try to steer your brain into thinking about the hope again."

"Truth first.  Accurate probabilities first.  Then rebuild your mind around whatever those are.  If you notice a lie, rebuild around the best estimates you can, don't rebuild around another lie.  That's the obvious Lawful way to proceed, and if Golarion people need to recover from internal catastrophes some other way, that's kind of bad.  Because I have no idea how that could possibly work or why or how the ass I could help."

"Yes, I realize that I'm dumping more Golarion-Keeper aka dath ilani child training on you, at a time when you're already struggling.  But Pilar, unless you're following some very clear and well-tested recipe for putting yourself together after Lawfulness-acquisition catastrophes - which seems improbable, but correct me if I'm wrong about that - you've got to not put yourself back together in a way that's wrong."

"So - according to you - what I've got to do is - figure out what's true, first?"

"Okay so there's actually a whole fragment of the Law here, which in retrospect I should have maybe covered earlier and before hitting you with all that other stuff, yay we've learned an important fact today."

"Probability is separable from Probable Utility; what we want, what we plan, what we should do, none of that changes what is.  What is changes what we ought to plan, but what we ought to plan doesn't change what is.  Is-questions form a smaller separable core inside the set of all the questions we need to ask, because is-questions relate only to other is-questions and not to ought-questions.  So we can carve those out and consider those first and separately, and we usually should."

"If you wish the sky were orange, that doesn't change the sky being blue.  Even if you're plotting how to turn the sky orange later, that doesn't change the sky being blue now.  Even inside your planning process, the question of, 'If I try Prestidigitating the sky orange, will that actually work?' is a question that just runs on the rails of magic and the Law of chemistry and can be evaluated independently of any questions about what you want."

"That's part of the reason and part of the method for trying to get your mind quiet about all the things it wants while you're trying to evaluate a fact-question like 'How do my mother, and my sister, actually feel about me?'  What you've observed from them, simple and statistically-common inferences from that, those are relevant to what is true there; your wants, not so much.  Including even your want for the question to have a definite closed answer that couldn't be updated on any further evidence you gathered, as would lead your mind to stop thinking about it.  Without you having to learn control arts about spending your thought-time where you actually want to spend it.  That's need-for-closure, I told you about it yesterday."

It - rhymes, somehow, with the advice that Sevar tried to give her.  It's not pointing to exactly the same problem or solution as Sevar, but where it does point is crisper, clearer, more Lawful.  When you hear Keltham speak he makes it clear why a Lawful mind must do as he describes.  It's maybe prerequisite to whatever Sevar was trying to say?

The advice is not necessarily pleasant for her, if she ends up unable to dismiss her hopes, walking around with burning coals of 'maybe' pressed into her, until she learns to discipline her own thoughts by force.  But 'pleasant' is hardly what Asmodeanism is about.

"Understood," Pilar says, and then, remembering that she is alterPilar in alterCheliax, "thank you."

"You also mentioned something about your sexuality collapsing."

"It's stupid and less important and not worth your time."  All the details are lies and this seems like a bad time for lies.

"By which you mean:  It's private and embarrassing and you'd rather it not be the case, as it plainly is, that this is a useful piece of data for me, because so long as it isn't important, you won't need to decide whether keeping it private outweighs keeping me ignorant of data I'd find useful."

"Which, to be clear, is your decision, and potentially a valid one.  I'm not telling you to care about what data I want, at all, let alone care about it more than your privacy.  But make the decision consciously, in a way that reflects however much you actually do care, if you want to live up to the standard of an ordinary dath ilani never mind Keepers."

Shit.

Could alterPilar reasonably decide that Keltham shouldn't know - no because alterPilar is also a faithful Asmodean and this is Asmodeus's project -

Nothing for it.

"It's - muddled to where, in retrospect, I don't even know myself what I was thinking - something like, so long as I never talk with anybody about - what I want - then what they believe about me can be whatever I need it to be, for the sex to be right.  So long as I don't talk with myself about what I want, I don't have to admit it to anyone else.  And all the facts about me can be whatever they need to be, for the sex to be right."

"Like, I can believe, they're forcing me into it and don't know or care whether I want it.  And I can not want it, which proves that they don't care, which makes the sex better.  That - sort of thing."

"Okay, and just to check, does your recovery plan here possibly involve convincing yourself of new things that just have to be true."

"I mean - I'll somehow have to find somebody who, actually, I guess, would really be forcing me and would actually not care whether I wanted -"

Now would be a great time for Pilar to be actually honest with Keltham about what kind of sex she'd like best!

Yes this will serve Asmodeus's interests.

Deep breath.  "No.  Wrongthought."

"I need to be - kept in my place.  Not put in my place, I don't leave my place, just, kept there.  To keep me in my place, the person having sex with me needs to be - above me, it can't be something I choose, can't be something I could avoid if I wanted, they can't be doing it because I want it, they can't stop because I say stop, or stop because they think I don't want it anymore."

"I am allowed to make it happen.  Now that I can think about it clearly, I think I'll be able to do things to make it happen, without that ruining everything.  But the thing that I - set up to happen - has to be something that, once it starts, I can't control, and don't get to make decisions about.  That's how to keep me in my place."

"And it's better if they're hurting me, or forcing me to do things, that are clearly what they want, because that way I know - how much what I want doesn't matter, which it shouldn't matter, if I'm in my right place."

"It's better if they're crushing me down.  If they act as if I'm, like a bug to them, that they're stepping on.  Because that keeps me more firmly in my place."

"If I'm feeling bad for any reason, I want to be with someone who thinks I'm some sort of disgusting bug who deserves to be hurt for inconveniencing them by being so disgusting.  Not somebody who acts like that, somebody who actually thinks it.  That's what makes me feel like they're with the real me, and the real me gets to be with someone."

It sure isn't very dath ilani, at all, but Keltham has ever heard of people having complicated sexual utilityfunctions, and one does not dispute that any more than one disputes any other utilityfunction element.

"And the problem with having frank discussions about this, with anyone, is that then you've given them your answer sheet and told them how to fake the passcodes you're looking for."

"Well, I can't promise I'll always be available for it forever.  But if you need a truthspell dropped on somebody who claims to feel that way about you, I'm up for it.  By way of saying thanks for being in the experiment."

"If I'm in my right place, I don't get to make the person keeping me in my place pass truthspell tests."

"I see.  Apologies for implying you had missed an obvious solution which in fact only my own ignorance had permitted me to imagine could possibly work for you.  That would've been a shorter and more standard phrase in Baseline."

"Well, I don't think I'm quite ready for you yet.  But now that you've told me your answer sheet, rest assured that, if I forcibly subdue you and drag you into my cuddleroom at some point, this will, logically, either indicate that I've decided I meet your requirements sheet, or, that I decided I don't give three asscheeks about your requirements.  Either of those possible cases, if I'm understanding this correctly, should work for you." 

"Only the second one, actually.  But if you care which one works, fuck off."

"Makes sense.  I'd ask if I'm allowed to prefer legibility in my relationships, or measure how much political capital I'd be expending with the government of Cheliax, or not want to cause an immense amount of drama on my Project, and single you out for forcible cuddling on that basis, should I discover such a desire.  But I can already tell the correct answer is that if I'm wondering what Pilar thinks I'm allowed to do, it is not time to cuddle Pilar."

"Keltham?  Every word you're saying right now is making me less attracted to you.  People don't talk much to bugs they're stepping on, unless they're doing it to enjoy making the bug feel worse about itself."