"Because he was simultaneously learning that I betrayed him in every conceivable way!"

"When people hurt one another, they quite often both get hurt, you know. What you did to him was much much worse than what he did to you. But it is not surprising at all that your relationship hurt you too, even that it hurt you very badly.

And no matter who you were, no matter what you'd done, no one should have raped you."

"Or Tonia."

"Or Tonia. Or anyone. It ....seems possible to me that some of what Keltham is going through is harm related to his having been tricked into having sex under conditions he didn't agree to and didn't want, with people he wrongly trusted cared about what he'd agreed to and what he wanted."

"I know. I didn't - mean to do that. I wanted to be someone he could trust. I - tried to keep his trust, that's - why the stupid Abarco thing even bothered me -

I would fix it for him, if I could. ....I in fact am probably more attached to my tentative plan where I stab Abrogail for him than makes any goddamned sense."

"If I had a plan to stab Abrogail Thrune that had a good chance of working I'd be attached to it too."

When it's been two hours and she has a plan and a long list of questions and is done crying and feels like she's not going to have a panic attack if Keltham gets frustrated and proposes statuing her again, she leaves her tent.

Outside her tent is a note.  Weirdly, it looks like a printed page from a book, though with slightly uneven letters on the line, even though it was clearly written just for Carissa.

The note says that the Entity Formerly Known As Keltham had previously promised himself he would take a day off, possibly two days, once he got time-dilation up.  He has not actually had a day off since he left Cheliax, because time previous to establishment of time dilation was too valuable.  You can keep going for quite a while with a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution.

Mister Doomlord thinks he may, in fact, actually need to take a day off, now.  Right now.  Even though Carissa is here and has all sorts of important questions.

The note continues to say that some of the others here can answer some of those questions.  Carissa does in fact know the key elements of his basic Doom Plan.  Others in 'core' will have more details if she asks.

The critical-path item on the Doom Plan is (1) Wishcrafting the three explosions he needs, 1x Rovagug 2x Absalom, which INT 27 is hopefully enough to start doing; and (2) getting three Wish scrolls with which to do it.  That Person does not expect Carissa to help with (2), but thinks (1) should plausibly count as 'harm reduction' here.

Carissa hopefully has lots she can get up to speed on productively?

Or Carissa could take a day off inside time dilation.  Ex-Keltham does not think he made the wrong decision about not taking time to recover immediately after he left Cheliax, there was too much that needed doing immediately.  But it sure was what everybody in Osirion was telling him to do.  Possibly the same advice may apply to Carissa.  Well, not the part where they wanted him to spend a month in a monastery, that would've just been wrong.

Keltham's successor entity does not know of anything that Carissa needs to do immediately the way he needed to do things immediately.  So far as he knows, nothing terrible will happen if she takes an entire day off.

Carissa's ex-boyfriend has no idea if she considers herself still bound by any promises she made him, about that sort of thing, but if so, she's free to have sex with people here, as Carissa once told him a long time ago was helpful for recovering from violence.  She can also get a relaxing massage from the woman calling herself Minor Character, though she also answers to anything else you want to call her; this massage, on some viewpoints, would reasonably count as sex, hence the specification.  He'd say more but - it's cheating, to do anything with emotional implications, while you're hiding in your time-dilated adventurer's-tent.

He's pretty sure that Minor Character is not Nocticula, he checked.  She now answers to 'Noticula' too.

He really needs to stop thinking now.  Good night for a while.

Well, all...right, then? 

Carissa has zero interest in sex with anyone here. They're not as pretty as Abrogail. She'll....get some books from the library, and read, if not the truth, at least the lies the rest of the world tells, and take notes for her argument with Keltham tomorrow. Or the day after. As soon as he's ready. 

A couple hours into that she will concede that possibly she in fact needed a day off too. 

has she actually ruled out that Minor Character is Abrogail, most people are

After about ten hours of reading books and eating chocolate Carissa determines that she is not, as a person, temperamentally suited to taking days off when there might not be very many days left. 

She gives herself Permanent Dancing Lights just so she can have more than the maximum number of Dancing Lights, and puts a Permanent Alarm on her bag of holding just for practice with Permanency and a Permanent Invisibility Alarm on her headband because why not. Then she copies a bunch of fifth-circle spells off Keltham's scroll library and also any staff who'll let her. Carmin has Overland Flight which means Carissa will be practically able to swoop around never touching the ground again though 'objectively' this is 'not a good use of a fifth circle spell slot' or something. 

She's not going to work on Wish wordings until she's talked with Keltham; if any of her ideas are good ideas, they'll have several additional months to work on Wish wordings, and any work done before she Wishes herself up as smart as a person can be will be wasted. 

Maybe she can just figure out how to make a 6/6/4 and then she and Keltham won't have to fight over it. 

He finishes more or less blacking out in his bedroll just being tired.  He finishes being curled up in a ball internally screaming and feeling emotions that he thinks he can now survive feeling at Splendour 25, which isn't actually all of the emotions.

He does not leave his tent in time dilation; instead, he starts trying to think.

This thinking process uses his Incredibly Fake Computer, technically an unusually complicated permanent reactive illusion hooked up to a Baseline-language version of the keyboard his typewriter uses.  It is literally just a text editor, but it allows for nested outlining and to edit things already written.  (His aligned item-creator has not figured out any equivalent of 'print this screen'; if he wants to save or share anything from the Incredibly Fake Computer his aligned taskmonkey has to manually translate it to Taldane and enter it into the typewriter.)

The real person running this entire show is not somebody who can think in realtime, especially at only +3 Intelligence.  He thinks slowly and using a fake computer for external memory anchoring, processing lists of possibilities too large and arguments too intricate to be held in memory all at once.

To be clear, the simple aspect of "making lists" or "writing down complicated arguments" is not the key thing and would not have gotten previous!Keltham all that far; the key point is more like "thought processes that successfully scale to considering more possibilities, because it's not always the case that everything after possibility #3 on your list never happens, and what does happen usually isn't on the list anyways" or "arguments whose local steps hold together well enough that their productivity scales intact to larger argument structures, rather than arguments too complicated to hold in your head just never working".

Nobody tries to design an entire liquid-phase nuclear reactor in their heads, even before their society invents outline editors.  But then, you can have nice things like nuclear reactors only because your society has designed some method of thinking about such engineering problems which is precise enough that it scales to a nuclear reactor design, and actually goes on working.  If all of your society's political arguments fit into a paragraph, it doesn't necessarily mean you've discovered a kind of thinking about politics that scales well to longer than a paragraph, or that people with longer arguments have better arguments; but still, that's the kind of politics you'll get.

Carissa's just writing pages and pages of notes, whenever something comes to mind while she's item-crafting. 

Thoughts related to alternatives to releasing Rovagug, thoughts related to alternatives to bargaining with Pharasma, thoughts related to Achaekek, thoughts related to the plausible state of information of various gods, thoughts related to entities to contact, thoughts related to making it unnecessary to avoid Cheliax, thoughts related to influencing Asmodeus's perspective on how well the ilani project is going, thoughts related to what Cayden and Nethys are angling for, thoughts related to her cult and how to encourage it if that seems useful, thoughts related to world conquest if they end up going down one of the unlikely-looking branches where that seems like a good idea, thoughts related to assassinating Abrogail in a way that doesn't discredit Carissa with the Church of Asmodeus, thoughts related to whether they're 'in a story', and whether there are any worlds in the overlap of 'in a story' and 'should not just act like everyone and everything matters exactly as much as you'd expect'....

"Hey, this might be a slightly absurd question, but do you think Osirion would agree to let Cheliax conquer them if we swore to them them it was for complicated reasons in their long term interests?"

" - is it in their long-term interests? It seems about as not in their long-term interests as a thing could reasonably be!"

"Under some sets of assumptions, one of the things Cayden and Nethys have been trying to influence is how much Asmodeus cares about Golarion, the planet, either so that He won't release Rovagug even if He loses or so that if Keltham releases Rovagug Asmodeus will commit the resources to stop Him before the planet is eaten. If even Asmodeus is strong enough to do that, which I consider unlikely but not so unlikely this isn't worth thinking about."

"Hmmm, most of the gods that saved Golarion the first time are still around, right?"

"Also unsure but I think no. A lot of the gods that were around then died. I bothered a couple of the historians for estimates of how many and they were like 'between three and twenty'. We have more than three but fewer than twenty new gods, but new gods are also much weaker than ancient ones. On the other hand, some of the ancient gods fought on the side of Rovagug, and maybe no one will do that this time? Or maybe Asmodeus will, in which case I think we're completely fucked."

"Keltham's much more optimistic than you about that, I don't know his reasoning."

"Do you trust his reasoning?"

"Hmmm. He reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger, really. I would absolutely have murdered trillions of people to spite Pharasma. Luckily I didn't have the opportunity."

" - okay not that I haven't myself been a bad person in the past but I actually have trouble imagining what it's like to be the kind of person who'd murder trillions of people to spite Pharasma! You don't even get to stick around enjoying having spited Pharasma! You're dead!!"

"If it's not intuitively obvious I don't know how to explain it. She thinks She owns us; She doesn't own us, we own us; fuck her, we'll do this without Her."