Almys enters the Rope Trick bearing a late dinner, and somehow manages not to drop it.

"What in the name of dead gods and cute kittens are you doing?"

"Cute kittens???" The feral cats in Cheliax are pretty vicious. "I was just trying to see if I could master acid channeling. - I can't, yet.'

"To an uninformed outsider like myself, it looks like you successfully channeled Acid and melted your feet - do you need help here, should I be finding someone with a Healing Skill -"

"I can heal myself. - I made this Acid the old-fashioned way, I haven't picked up any Tier-2 channeling at all yet." She reluctantly Prestidigitates the acid away from her feet and then gives herself Infernal Healing even though she doesn't deserve it because she hasn't learned anything. Almys is just looking at her funny and it's distracting. 

"Is this... normal, where you come from?"

"- only in places that aren't pathetic?"

"Weeee're gonna need to have a conversation about your home universe and how it differs from what's normal here," he is having so many Second Thoughts and Concerns simultaneously that he is not able to prosecute any single sentence to completion inside his mind.  "Anyways, I brought you a meal.  You seemed to like the last thing that was, the sort of thing I'd imagine might be more specific to our universe, so I tried some more of that, but there's also a dessert of ordinary fruit in case neither of the first two dishes work."

Having decided to go ahead and heal herself and set that endeavor aside for now, Carissa's not going to keep punishing herself for no reason -- that sounds like a great way to end up weaker.  She will happily sit down and eat the food with a Mage Hand helping just so the universe learns she has a Mage Hand.

This is a two-person meal; Almys is also having some.  It doesn't appear to have occurred to him that this would require any prior discussion with his liege.

....sure. Fine. As long as there's enough food. Carissa has been practicing magic nonstop all day and is hungry.

Yeah, he figured.  He wasn't figuring on having to replace blood loss, but he did bring by extra for safety margin.

"To clarify, did you melt your feet on purpose?" he says, whenever it looks like his liege might be slowing down more between bites.

"I made acid on purpose and then tried to channel acid so it wouldn't melt my feet, with the intent that, if I was incompetent to channel acid, then it would melt my feet," she says cheerfully between bites. 

"Okay."

"Um."

He was kind of expecting this to not be what it looked like.

"You might be failing to form Acid mana because you've never had somebody channel it through you and don't know what that feels like.  Much more likely is that you lack the raw Water channeling capacity, the raw Light channeling capacity, or both, in thaums per second.  If that's true, it doesn't mean you're... incompetent... or that you could do it, if you just hurt yourself enough... it means you physically lack the magical capacity."

He does not even know a name for this structure of thinking which some people might call a mental disorder because it is not a STANDARD mental disorder in THIS UNIVERSE.

"Yeah, I thought that was pretty likely, but it's hard to know for sure if it's a motivation problem if you haven't tried being motivated to fix it. I'm also working on the channeling Tier-1 elements."

His CONCERNS are not getting any LESS CONCERNING.

"So, among the thoughts that occur to me is that possibly... having your feet dissolved hurts your species less than people here?  Or maybe pain in general is less painful over there?  Or you've got very high levels of your world's equivalent of Pain Resistance?  This doesn't strike me as spectacularly likely and I don't know how we'd check but I thought I would ask in case that seemed very likely to you."

"...pain is supposed to be painful? Otherwise it wouldn't really be motivating."

"So, around here, most people, if their boss tried to motivate them to do a job like that, they would quit.  And this would also be true if the boss was themselves."

" - yeah, most people are weak."

"Including where you come from?  You'd also say most people there are... weak?"

"Yes. Most people aren't very willing to suffer even to advance goals they consider very important, and most people would rather suffer in the distant future than in the present, and that's weakness."

"I'd hate to bother you with things you've already heard, so - I don't suppose anybody has already said things to you on this topic before?  Like, if other people have talked with you, and you've said things back, it might skip some steps if I knew what all those were."

"Uh, I've heard, 'you poor thing, don't you wish no bad things had ever happened to you', and - no not really."

He can tell from the tone in which she repeats the sentence that it was not said to her kindly.

"Okay.  We've definitely got a fairly major - cultural gap," as is actually the LEAST CONCERNING POSSIBILITY here, "because in this world even people who are very very strong, whose willpower and self-command would not be questioned by any sane person, like Creation mages, or nobles who've held up under torture for months and come out angry and successfully vengeful, will not try to motivate themselves to channel Acid by putting their own feet in acid.  Especially if they're not sure they've even got that channeling capacity."

"Because it reliably doesn't work or because they just don't consider it worth the pain even if it works?"

"In this world, people who become great are usually people who can try very hard and push their limits even when they don't need to do that to counter severe physical pain in the next second.  The pain would just be a distraction, or even if it wasn't a distraction, would be - an extra, something needless."