- she thinks she'd rather they move early, if those are the only two choices, but she needs to think very carefully, if that's the tradeoff. She thinks that if Keltham is ascending with substantial intent to bargain for much more than Hell, then probably they lose. Her best read of the trope-logic is that in this story, if they can't compromise, they lose everything and everyone dies. The forces arranging this are not, in her read of them, pushing for "Keltham boldly demands, and gets, everything he wanted" - if that would have worked, it would've worked without Carissa carefully engineered to be at his side. The reason she's here has to be because otherwise he asks for too much and loses.

He hardly needs to be reminded that Pharasma might refuse a demand and then he'll need to destroy Creation.  He is always forcing himself to reason as if Pharasma will reject all demands and the question is which universes he then wants to destroy.  If a trope-sign that Pharasma might not yield to him, changes his demands, it means he's fucking that up, and Pharasma would refuse that demand in any case.

And while he knows that Carissa hates it when he thinks like he's in a story, for the record, he does in fact hate being in a story.

Carissa is again too busy not having emotions to bond with Keltham over their common loathing of being in a story but wishes to do the social handshake that would correspond to.

(Correct format for communicating with him, helpful explicit metadata annotation; social handshake acknowledged.)

One of the major factors he's worried about is that the state of the romance between them is trashed in a way that - wouldn't correspond to being on track for the Good Ending of a dath ilani eroLARP, or of a story based on deconstructing one.  Which may nicely mean they're off the story rails, in some important sense, but may non-nicely mean they have no guardrails either.  What he and Carissa were meant to be, together - was probably not this, that they have come to.  Or maybe the tropes governing these events are just not what they would be in dath ilan.  Or they are headed for some upset that lets them be together after all - but he mostly doesn't believe that, the wounds between them look too deep.

Her hypothesis may still be - a valid inference about what Keltham and Carissa were meant to have been.

Well, there could always just not exist the kids he's afraid of.  He mostly thinks they won't be there.  Not least because, if those possible kids are actual, it undoes a lot of what Carissa seems to have accomplished inside the story.  Probably she slays Abrogail Thrune and his one unborn child and that's, enough.

(His body seems to want to cry, about that; he's not sure they have that kind of relationship any more, to cry in front of her, and he is mostly inclined to not let his body do it.  "Tears and hugs don't solve anything," goes a proverb out of dath ilan, "so don't offer them to people who need solutions.")

Carissa observes that if they need to have repaired their romantic relationship to get a good ending, then possibly they should take steps towards doing that, now that they're smart enough they probably won't just emotionally shred each other every few seconds. She is not herself convinced of a framework in which they're - supposed to be in love, supposed to be together, as opposed to just having been cynically engineered into a position where he would listen to her and she would have learned from him how to figure out what she actually wants. There's no reason, she thinks, that the story-writers would engineer a happy ending for the two of them being part of a happy ending for the world; in many stories, they'd have to pick which one they really wanted.

She doesn't mind if he cries in front of her, though she's still not really having emotions and so is unlikely to naturally-rather-than-deliberately respond in the way he might be hoping for. She could scoot over to him, and hold him, and weep with him, but, well, it would be on purpose because maybe tears and hugs do actually solve problems related to being in a story.

Yeah, he's pretty sure that doesn't work tropewise.  Not if the tropes here are anything like dath ilani, and if they're that alien from it then who knows the sign of anything.  Trying to just patch things over, force things over, because the two of them think the story needs it, is not a romantic victory.

He hopes that this all works out to his trusting Carissa; and that she knows how to scan Cheliax, in a way that doesn't give too much away, but shows whether or not they tried to steal children from him and hide them; and that the scan of Cheliax turns up negative, so that Carissa gets to hold on to the small triumph she has, that was all he found himself able to give her, and the meaning she thinks she has in this story.

If the story seizes that from her, it won't be a good sign about the kind of plot arc they're inside now.

Carissa thinks that Keltham is, perhaps, not directing his own intelligence sufficiently at the problem of making things go well for his children, if they exist. She has seen him apply his full creativity to problems, and usually when he does there's a brilliant sideways solution there, not just a well of despair and impossibility.

Would it be sufficient if they just pay Heaven and Nirvana to adopt every Golarion child in the Boneyard and raise them all in ilani-acceptable ways. They can't do it sustainably but they could do it for one cohort.

...he'd probably want his kids going to Elysium, or maybe just delete the souls before they actually have qualia, but - okay, yeah, she has a point, if he can identify his kids from a divine vantage point, or anyone trustworthy can, he can optimize for them specifically.

...it continues to feel to him that this would be wrong, if he did that, that you can't ask special treatment for your own kids and leave everyone else's kids to rot in Golarion's misery.  That the point of throwing Suddenly Kids into the story would be to force him to realize that everyone in Creation is somebody's child, that everyone in Creation deserves better than the negotiating-equilibrium of Pharasma plus the ancient gods deemed fit to leave them.

But she has proven a point that he's obviously not thinking about this clearly, that he's still running the wrong adaptive-pattern-shapes for directing his thoughts.  Scanning through everything and rewiring himself is not going to be instantaneous, especially when he's got to juggle not being extortionate through a modified self as proxy.

The instinct, in him, that it'd be wrong if he did that, feels like a recognizable parallel of Carissa's feelings, earlier, that there was no point in putting her family on an ark in Elysium. She thinks he was right about that one.

Oh, he'd absolutely have his putative kids sent to Elysium, the question is just how he ought to feel about everyone else's kids after that.

Carissa doesn't herself have children. She wanted to, but it wasn't quite time -

- no, that's not it. She was worried she'd care about them, and that seemed like a liability, so she was going to wait until she got monetary incentives, and was then doing it for totally mercenary reasons.

She wasn't accustomed to thinking about - doing other people kindnesses you can't call in on them - so it didn't occur to her to think about whether by having the kids she would be doing them a favor. If she had she'd have had them sooner, because - because obviously getting to be born into Golarion is a favor? A whole glorious shining world, with dirt and water and sky and gossip and magic and impossible dreams -

It's not perfect, not yet, but they're working on it, and not everyone wants to be born somewhere perfect, some people want to be part of the work of getting there -

- if Keltham is right, they'll have all of eternity to live in universes which are in fixed states, ruled by vast entities that make sure nothing goes too awfully wrong. And they'll have only this brief beautiful instant, to live in a universe that needs fixing.

She is sad, that she was too scared of caring about other people to give some children that.

Well, to be exact, he'll have his kids sent to Elysium if he can't otherwise negotiate a Golarion where they'd be okay living, with a sufficiently high probability of being fixable if they try...

This unfortunately feels a lot like his emotions-rather-than-abstractions were going along with Carissa's suggestions because the people in Creation were aliens and maybe not all that real, whereas his kids would be real and have actual feelings and ought not to be condemned to a Carissa-acceptable world... he will have to track down the difference between his Sys1 and Sys2 here, it is not something he can do in an instant.

There is something here that his emotions are not easily willing to let go.  He will have to think about what it means.  And whether it ought to be extended beyond his own children to Golarion-variant humanity or if it's specifically about heritable dath ilani emotional makeup, and whether he is willing to destroy Creation about whatever this is.

He should learn more of other species, if their psychologies are different enough to notice.  Maybe he'd demand that humanity be removed from Creation, but dwarves would be fine to go on having children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization.  Does Carissa have a take on that?

Carissa does think that it's the kind of thing where the average answer might vary by species. Though also she thinks it might not. Presumably, if people resented that their parents bore them, they wouldn't go on having their own children. Then all the species where such resentments were common would have dwindled and died out.

...it occurs to her, thinking about it from this angle, that elves famously have few children. She had always heard it attributed to this planet not being as suitable for childbearing as their original planet, but it does seem to function as evidence that species might just by collective decision wipe themselves out. (This hasn't occurred with elves because they are immortal, so even though their rare births don't replace the rate of their rare deaths they die out only slowly, as she was told it.)

She does think that humans obviously should be permitted to be born on Golarion. If there is one species where she can say this with confidence, it is humans, because she does not really know what it is like to be a nonhuman born on Golarion and she does know that to be a human is to have something precious and glorious and good that she would trade infinite suffering to have experienced even briefly.

She also thinks that 'children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization' is - obviously irrelevant, on Keltham's assumption that eventually everyone ends up in Greater Reality? Everyone will, if he's right about that, spend subjective eternity in a true Civilization, and the only question is whether it's a horrendous wrong that some of them will spend a while first in Golarion and its afterlives. 'they never get Civilization' is if Keltham's right not at all a possibility on the table. The only possibility is that they get something else first.

And if Keltham is wrong and what waits for those annihilated here is not some glorious Civilization, well, that seems like a wholly sufficient argument against annihilating this place, once you've dealt with Hell.

There is, from his own perspective, the question of whether gods ought to be allowed to keep temporary pets.

Dath ilani humans would not wish to enter into this place to be kept as pets even temporarily.  He worries this will also be true of his own children; fine, they can go to Elysium and they will be relatively few.  But it also seems to him a reasonable and natural way to think.  If lots of humans here would feel that way on reflection, then more of them shouldn't be brought into this pet-cage - as he would not bring his own children there, since they'd actually be real and not be aliens.

Conversely, if he already believed that most humans of Golarion thought as Carissa did, that they were all like her deep down, he would not even have argued.  He does want to be clear that he accepts that as a locally-valid-step of her argument:  If a supermajority of Creation's citizens are like Carissa, then nothing except Hell is worth annihilating Creation, if that.

Carissa isn't an average person of Golarion.  She's somebody who will become the Goddess of a better Hell.  As that Lawful Evil goddess, a better Lawful Evil goddess, it is - something that makes sense - that she would think that every sort of person and sentience and sapience has a right to exist as themselves, to be treasured as something that exists, even if others would call them Evil.  That somebody who tortures others, would not be seen by Her as somebody beyond the pale and unforgiveable.  That She would, not just morally, but emotionally, go on really caring about that one who inflicted hurt, when She welcomed them into Her Hell, maybe to be forcibly reformed over time and maybe not entirely in a comfortable way, but doing so in the way of Somebody who genuinely cares about that person and thinks they have a right to be themselves and be Evil.  That Her only truly unforgiveable sin would be feeding someone to daemons, which almost all entrants to Hell have not done; and that Her petitioners who hurt other people or exercised ill power over them, without depriving them of existence, have not, to Her, done something she emotionally feels is unforgiveable.

It is, maybe, better that Carissa be goddess over Hell, than Iomedae.  Iomedae would not be vengeful, of course - he is certain of that, he knows very well how entities think when they go that deep into Lawful Good.  Iomedae would calculate that the petitioners of Hell ought not to be hurt much, now that they can no longer hurt others, that there wouldn't be a point.  But the universal love that Heaven might give to Evil souls that fell into its power, is not the same as those petitioners entering into the embrace of a Goddess who truly believes Herself that those petitioners, while in need perhaps of correction, even forcible correction, are not aliens to Her, not so distant from Her, that most entrants into Hell have not done anything that is to Her true anathema.

The point being, Carissa is kind of a special person.

He is reasonably sure that most people aren't exactly like Carissa.

As for exactly how much they are like or unlike past-Carissa, like or unlike past-Keltham, it is the sort of thing that they can experiment on later with Detect Thoughts.

Carissa would not want to go to a place where she was Iomedae's, that much she's sure of. She wouldn't rather be Asmodeus's, now that she really understands Him, but...she'd rather be Abrogail's. She would want those who go to Hell to fear that they will be treated with by the rules they know very well, and know how to use, but by which they are presently powerless, not that they will be subject to alien whims.

She thinks she can do Hell right, if it's hers. She thinks she can make people better and stronger and also possible to usefully have as part of something with a purpose other than suffering.

(It really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried, but Carissa is wise enough to know by now that the reflex 'it really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried', is a reflex installed when it was not in her interests to think that she was valuable or unusual, a reflex installed probably-deliberately by other people who did not want her to think she was valuable or unusual.)

She thinks that Greater Reality might be a bit like Iomedae, that way, and that people getting to come to her might be better.

...Carissa thinks that it would not seem outrageous to her, not abhorrent, if Keltham made a condition of his negotiations with the other gods that it be possible in their afterlives to learn the truth of Greater Reality and go there. She still feels sick at the thought of Keltham destroying a Hell-less Creation over that condition, but it doesn't seem to her to be an incomprehensible crime; it would be him thinking that they ought to have the choice between this thing and a thing he thinks is better, and making the choice for them only if he is not allowed to give them a choice.

She does not feel that way about him making other demands for Golarion and Creation to be changed to his liking, but if he were to insist on a choice - she could understand that. She could imagine eventually coming to forgive someone who had murdered a Carissa because he was not allowed to give her a choice about whether to live or not.

He might want to try to talk her out of - no.

Carissa should talk to Carmin, not him, about what She plans to make of Hell.  Or run Carmin inside her mind, if she's confident of her model and the real Carmin would be too slow.  But maybe give Good a chance to talk to her about what exactly people going to Hell should fear; he did flinch, a little, when Carissa said it like that.  He's not saying that it's his decision and his answer is no, but - please give some Good person born of Golarion a chance to talk to her about it, while she's still mortal, because he worries that gods have a harder time changing Their minds.

- well, maybe the gods should consider being less incompetent, then. But she does mean to talk to Carmin, and to everyone else who is allowed to know what she knows. She is still, after all, looking for a way out.

They'll have a lot more things to think at each other later, about Greater Reality and negotiations with Pharasma; but they have some idea, now, of the differences between themselves.

Having discussed things at the object level, it seems like it might be time to have a conversation that might end up even more stressful (if they don't deliberately deploy Wisdom to shut down their own emotional responses as might be a bad idea) but they probably need to talk about this, particularly because it might affect downstream whether oaths between them are trustworthy.

He's been putting off all the conversation with Carissa that hasn't been about technical things or very short-term goals, waiting for her to have another 5 Wisdom and himself to have 2 more Intelligence, because their first attempt at having conversations with emotions in it went incredibly badly and he did not then understand what had gone wrong; at the time it seemed to him like Carissa was lashing out at him in a way that - just didn't make any sense in dath ilani terms, or anything that she'd been willing to show him back in Cheliax either.  He could map it onto characters in Golarion stories but those characters seemed to have no knowledge that they were inside stories or think of how they might look from the outside, and it seemed - possibly not true, that Carissa was like that, in the grips of unreflective hate; and if it was true then it would damage their relationship, if he dwelled on that rather than waiting for both of them to be smarter.

But he did not know how to deal with it, how she was to him, it wasn't a way that dath ilani are to other dath ilani, nor could he parse it as an Alien communications protocol that had been designed in any way where the goal was good outcomes if both people behaved like that to each other.  He was confused and he feared it and it hurt and there didn't seem to be any safe way to talk to Carissa or even try to discuss relationship meta-protocols with her, she just felt to him like a bundle of sharp edges and violence and hate directed at him; and moreover like she felt those sharp edges and hatred were right and proper to direct at him, like that was part of a mature comms protocol they were both supposed to be using, and would have been sad if he'd argued against it.

At this level of Intelligence he can look back and begin to parse some of what might have been happening.  He can suspect, now, that when Carissa refused to follow him down the hallway she was being a Chelish person in a dangerous situation testing out visible dissent to see what happened, not being a dath ilani shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans; and that when, from mid-Keltham's perspective, this triggered an inevitable discussion that should've been had before he invited her into his doombase at all, 'please promise not to use your superior intelligence to destroy my doombase, or I might have to put you on hold until we're equally intelligent', it looked to mid-Carissa like her defiance had been met by threatening to turn her into a statue.  He can guess, now, that Carissa has probably been making more subtle overtures to him, that he didn't respond to in the very narrow way that would tell a Chelish person that they were safe to continue talking to somebody who could have her hauled off to a torture chamber at any moment; but even if he'd guessed this earlier, mid-Keltham wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

Carissa had been assuming that Keltham was in fact not a safe person to show any of her internal processing, not a safe person to ask to change how he interfaces with her in any way, that it was somewhere between undesirable and impossible for him to change how he interacted with her. This is of course not a very strong claim, in Golarion terms; overwhelmingly, a person who has power over you is not a person it is safe to make requests of, or safe to contradict, or safe to show how you work; when you expose your internals to someone, or tell them what you need, you are giving them more ways to hurt you. She did try, sometimes, but it didn't work, and - yes, that interaction in the hallway was important, in shaping all of Carissa's strategies for surviving in Keltham's fortress.

It is a natural sort of thing to do, when you are a prisoner or a slave or otherwise in a precarious situation, to test the smallest possible disobedience, something for which the punishment will almost certainly be survivable (and if it's not, well, you weren't going to survive anyway, in that case). Then you learn how quickly your captors are moved to anger, what warning signs you can see in them, how badly they hurt you, what finally satisfies them.

So Keltham said, "Carissa, with me", and he had just told her that she no longer belonged to him, and so she didn't obey. She thought at the time it was probably stupid of her, but - she wanted to know, very badly, what Keltham had meant when he said she no longer belonged to him.

It did not occur to her until this very moment that Keltham might have been parsing her as 'shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans'. If she'd been planning to betray him she'd have been scrupulously obedient, given every impression he was talking her around!

That's what people who are going to betray you do! .....apparently not in dath ilan, even though traitors who don't telegraph it survive better than traitors who do?

In dath ilan there is a notion that, even when things have gotten problematic between two parties, they don't immediately shift all the way towards throwing out all - what Golarion would call honor, dignity - in their relationships between each other.  Even if somebody's going to destroy your planet and you need to stop them, even if there's children being Maledicted to Hell, you don't - corrupt all of the potential for real friendship that exists everywhere - by pretending to be somebody's friend, or even their friendly trading partner, and then betraying them.

That's why past-Keltham stopped trading with Osirion, and refusing the equivalent of friendly hugs.  He needed to destroy their planet; that wasn't worth tarnishing the possibility of friendship by making them always worry that apparent friends might be out to destroy their planet.

Carissa can model this about dath ilani, sort of, now, though she thinks it only works if everyone else is doing it; Osirion does have to worry their apparent friends might be out to destroy the planet, whether Keltham in particular is their friend or not. The state where one need not fear the betrayal of their friends just isn't attainable; in Golarion it's all just a matter of slightly altered probabilities of betrayal.

If she'd realized greater-Carissa's plans while in bed with Abrogail and seen a way to pull it off she might have slit Abrogail's throat so she could run off with the crown, and Abrogail would not, she thinks, have felt betrayed by the lack of warning; indeed Abrogail would probably be disappointed in Carissa if Carissa tried to be honorable and warn her.

The Carissa in that hallway who inferred Keltham's full plans and decided to betray him would have followed obediently while fervently praying to Dispater and Otolmens and Irori and Abadar, to warn them of Keltham's plans, and then attempted either suicide or assassination without warning. She...had rather assumed this was common knowledge. She should have pointed it out, later.

It's something that Osirion doesn't need to fear from past-Keltham modeled accurately, or other Osirion-like agencies accurately modeling other Keltham-like beings around Greater Reality.  That property and the knowledge of it will have been preserved when all this dust settles, that the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend.

It's not surprising that in Cheliax everyone needs to fear betrayal from everyone; Cheliax isn't trying to preserve the possibility of honor, friendship, or warm feelings between anybody and anybody.

Carissa does not really think that if Keltham destroys the world observers in other universes will think that the possibility of honor or friendship with dath ilani has been preserved. ...maybe, if they're being very careful about what they believe and have full and accurate information, that the apparent friendliness of a dath ilani is unlikely to be feigned; but mostly, they would be correct to fear dath ilani and incorrect to befriend them, if their world is anything like Golarion, and if Keltham in the end sees fit to destroy Golarion; especially if he doesn't destroy it over Hell but over it being not to his liking in one of a thousand other ways. 

But she can now imagine the smaller, stupider Keltham, reading Carissa as a dath ilani, reading Carissa's hesitation in that hallway as a dramatic declaration of war as it would be in the home world he clearly misses dearly, and make sense of it, even if she doesn't think the dynamics that produce it really do reach across worlds. 

Carissa will try, then, reluctantly because it always feels very dangerous to roll back an update about how dangerous someone is, to peel loose the inferences she made in that moment in the hallway: that when Keltham said he no longer owned her, he did not mean that he no longer demanded her obedience, but that he no longer promised, in exchange, his consideration. That there was no disobedience so small and trivial and petty that she could expect to survive the punishment for it. That those impulses in her to test things he said, to check if they were true, were incredibly hazardous and should be squelched instantly, that she had no affordance to want to know such things and he would be furious with her for wondering.

It didn't seem like a very Kelthamish way to be, but then, he'd told her that he wasn't Keltham anymore and she should stop modeling him based on what Keltham was like.

And it does feel to her like there's some kind of - strange attitude, in new-Keltham's thinking, a sense that he had the right not just to kill you but not to face your defiance and fury about it -

- not the pragmatic thing, she understands the pragmatic argument that as a practical matter someone successfully concealing defiance and fury will be more likely to persuade someone not to kill them than someone letting it slip. But - it felt, at times, like she was observing a sort of underlying conviction that anyone full of defiance and fury and loathing at their executioner was being badly behaved even if the pragmatic considerations didn't apply. She doesn't fully understand it. Maybe she's wrong to infer it's there. But she thought it was there, and that made it seem more plausible, that new-Keltham was also someone who was incredibly dangerous to ever test or disobey; there was just a whole consistent explanation of him where he perceived many ways for his prisoners to misbehave and anger him, where he perceived himself entitled to their apparently eager and grateful cooperation with their execution...and she wasn't ever sure of it, but it seemed likely enough to make it obviously not worth testing again.

Does she still think, now, of him as 'executioner'?

(A need in him, sadness, fear, horror, wishing that things had not turned out like this he is suppressing thoughts of a 'correct' answer for her to give, doesn't want her to just see his answer sheet and read it off.)