- and then once Keltham has been adequately rewarded she can get her facial expression properly under control, and kneel, and peek up at him with wide incredulous eyes. She doesn't have Abrogail's Splendour, obviously, but she did give herself a little boost before she came in, and she thinks she's a very convincing provincial Taldane wizard girl at court for the first time.

Gorthoklek is relaying Keltham's thoughts to Sevar in real time; Keltham is thinking that, all right, the look on Carissa's face makes even that horrible-ass etiquette lesson completely worth it.

He's still charging the Queen an extra 20% for it, though.

Is that the delay loop they put Keltham in while she napped. A slightly larger share of the bemused delight on Carissa's face is genuine. Poor Keltham. 

Okay, now they can actually do this shit, right?

Yes, according to the personal opinion of Aspexia Rugatonn, which she is making known to Abrogail by appropriate means.

Fine, yes, she may as well get it over with and finish this humiliation.

Keltham has heard that the Queen of Cheliax desires a thing that it is his to give or withhold.

THAT IS NOT WHAT THE ETIQUETTE TEACHER SHOULD HAVE -

Aspexia.  This can only be Aspexia's work.

The Queen of Cheliax desires some part of the time of her subject, Carissa Sevar, in which to dally with her; but this matter, the Queen is given to understand, Carissa Sevar has placed into the hands of Keltham, along with all else that she is.

It - moves him, actually, and it moves him at least in part because all of this formality is speaking to some part of him, in a voice that should ordinarily be reserved for wedding ceremonies and not Governance.

Quick glance to see how Carissa is reacting to that.

So incredibly expressively. Keltham pulling this off would, to naive Carissa, seem like a fairly godlike feat of coincidence-management, and he deserves to feel that he has utterly transformed Carissa's sense of what he's capable of. And also that this is really sexy of him. And also that her wildest fantasies are coming true, which, honestly, they kind of are, aside from how badly this is going to hurt once she's in fact alone with Abrogail fuck when did she get mentally into the habit of calling Her Imperial Majestrix Abrogail.

Even taking into account that you know you have no idea, still, Carissa, you have no idea.

"Blah blah blah blah blah blah six hundred gold pieces blah blah blah various additional terms and conditions apply and the Queen of Cheliax can take them or leave them," Keltham says, almost in the correct etiquette that an incredibly powerful outsider should, in principle, use to say such a thing politely to the Queen of Cheliax when handing her an ultimatum.

His thoughts are clear on the point that this is what the etiquette teacher told him to do and he is obediently doing it.

...it seems possible that Abrogail has, in fact, pissed off Aspexia Rugatonn slightly more than she previously realized, over the last few days.

Speak then your terms, Keltham.

blah blah blah x50 == well, basically, the limits on what can be done to Carissa are going to be in a sealed section laid down on Keltham's behalf by Paracountess Isidre Thrune (no sorry he can't remember all those middle names, who does that to their kid, hopefully this isn't too awful an error).

And also Keltham's worried about Carissa's heart being stolen away from him - not least by her possible delusion that Carissa's own person could possibly be taken away from him, even by the Queen of Cheliax, if Keltham himself had decided to get serious about keeping her - so he now, as indeed the greater part of his compensation for this rental, demands that before he hands over Carissa, the Queen sign such agreements as will duly incentivize her to attempt no such thing and ensure a correct outcome for her if she does.  If by untampered truthspell it is proven that Carissa has come to love the Queen and to love her more than she loves Keltham, then Keltham has the right to walk out on all this shit not withstanding other bargains to be signed later, and haul Carissa's chained-up ass away with him, if he chooses.

Carissa does not even have to pretend that's really hot, because it just objectively is. 

She does have to pretend at being surprised, of course, but she lets the surprise melt off as soon as is reasonable into just that that's really hot. And - she doesn't think Keltham has the subtlety to read this off her face, but -

- but that she wants to know, very badly, if he means it, and she wants him to mean it, she wants to be in the power of someone capable of meaning it.

Gorthoklek informs her that Keltham is continuing to struggle hard with reading the facial expressions of anyone who isn't a dath ilani, and he's managed to pick up that Carissa is currently happy but not that she was trying to ask him a question or that this question had a particular desired answer.

The first part of Keltham's request (she's not dignifying it by calling it a demand) is entirely acceptable.  The second part is a matter for Cheliax, not the Queen's dalliances.  Carissa Sevar is a citizen of this country, and while she might be bargained away in some extremity, she would not be bargained away lightly.

Keltham's doing Cheliax a favor much larger than that.

And is this then to be taken as partial repayment of that favor?

It's to be taken as an unlikely conditional that the Queen needs to set up using her own political capital in order to fuck dally with Carissa.  When and if Keltham feels like formalizing his and Carissa Sevar's relationship in the eyes of Cheliax, maybe he'll negotiate with Cheliax for Cheliax's part in that; but this current thing is not an unconditional outcome requiring an unconditional payment, it's about making it so that the Queen wouldn't be able to yoink her.

(Keltham is starting to stumble over his etiquette, but is still gainfully trying.)

Though these requests be somewhat onerous, the Queen will accede to them, not least in the light of that favor which Keltham is, indeed, doing for Cheliax.

For some reason the etiquette teacher made Keltham memorize this part very carefully.  Keltham does not really understand why he needs to negotiate with Governance like this, but okay.

Blah blah the Queen's the one who insisted on dallying with Carissa Sevar in the first place, knowing another had laid his claim to her, and such suffering as that may incur to Her Infernal Majestrix is hers to own blah blah.

YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT, ASPEXIA.

Has she?  Aspexia Rugatonn is still trying to decide.

So be it then.  Abrogail Thrune does not wish Keltham of dath ilan, outsider and enlightener of Cheliax, to feel at all concerned that his Carissa Sevar would so be taken from him, and indeed, if they cost not Cheliax, she is more than willing to add on other terms meant to ensure that Keltham need never fear any sort of conflict between him and the Queen over Carissa's affection.  At all.  Ever.

Blah blah sounds like a great idea is Contessa Lrilatha willing to do the honors of writing up this compact blah blah.

blah blah Lrilatha is exceedingly willing to do her part to write stringent compact terms to ensure that Cheliax's enlightener, upon his project blessed by Asmodeus Himself, shall not have his delicate affairs further and needlessly complicated by the Queen blah blah

Everyone in the room, including Carissa on relay from Gorthoklek, gets a ringside seat to Keltham's wince and mental wish that Lrilatha would chill.  They're trying to preserve the Queen's pride here!

(Well.  Everyone in the room except the actress playing Isidre, a first-circle cleric of Asmodeus who has long since realized that the reason why somebody as relatively inexperienced as her was called in to serve as an impersonator at this Royal gathering, is not that everyone else is fighting at the Nidal front, but that they're going to kill her when this is over.  She's doing a great job of not showing any visible distress; which would, of course, result in her being almost instantly Dominated and then dying much more painfully.)

Statue, actually!  But obviously not one of the ones that gets warded against detection, just one that gets tossed into her personal collection to stick around until after she dies.  Abrogail does not want this gossip spreading in Hell while she's alive.

Carissa is not what you would call savvy in the nuances of the royal court but it has not escaped her that Keltham has managed to orchestrate an occasion for all of the Queen's advisors to publicly mock her over her handling of the Carissa situation. 

This is definitely bad for Carissa, the only person who any involved party can permissibly torture, which makes it hard to take any real enjoyment from, but she can abstractly appreciate the skill.

She is determinedly not thinking ahead to what Abrogail Her Imperial Majestrix is going to do to her, that seems like the same kind of mistake as thinking about what Hell will be like. She'll endure it when it comes and she won't get anything out of additionally enduring it in advance.

Contract's written up quickly enough.  Yes, Keltham, you have Contessa Lrilatha's word that it says what was discussed and contains no terms meant to be unexpected unpleasant surprises for Keltham.

Keltham reads it carefully anyways, of course.

The Queen reads it much more carefully.

Very standard language; it wouldn't do to include anything hard for Abrogail to check, that she'd have to stop to consider, and give away that such compacts are dangerous in front of Keltham.

What the very standard language says is 'fuck you, stop messing with Asmodeus's pet outsider unless the Church says you can'.  She can't even send him to fake etiquette lessons.  That said the legal language in which that 'fuck you' is written is very standard, for Hell.

But that's pretty much what Abrogail wants, at this point; and you know what, the etiquette thing would maybe not have actually been a good idea, maybe dath ilan also has an idea that there is more than one kind of flirting.

She signs it.

There.

No more fucking 'tropes'.

Keltham signs it, feeling weirdly like he's signing a wedding contract, even though this one does not technically commit him to doing anything at all except for letting Carissa Sevar fuck somebody else.

That... basically did happen without a single trope getting invoked at any point, as near as Keltham can figure it.  He's relieved, honestly.  There aren't even any signs of subversion or deconstruction, the whole thing happened with basically no complications or plot conflicts or unanswered questions or open plot arcs left at the end, unless you count the actual Carissa-Abrogail interaction which the viewpoint character doesn't get to see anyways.

Time to claim his reward.  Well.  Soon he'll claim his reward.  There's something else to arrange first.  "Contessa Lrilatha, I request that you give myself and my Carissa a moment, and then so long as we're here, if it's a good time, I would like to arrange a very careful and Asmodeus-okay demonstration of the fact that Cheliax could in truth have mind-controlled me had Cheliax been that sort of place."

Gorthoklek thinks faster than nearly any mortal could, and decides that it is worth not wantonly destroying a certain bit of value; he can claim it as a very minor favor from Sevar later.

Keltham's thoughts about his upcoming surprise will not be relayed to Sevar.

"With the leave of Her Majesty," says Contessa Lrilatha, "you and your possession could depart to the adjacent antechamber, where it will be possible for me to join you shortly for a demonstration."

(He doesn't own her yet but Keltham isn't going to object; maybe they do think that he basically owns her once she's given herself, like, presumably they would not have gone along with the whole thing otherwise.)

Blah blah oh you'd better fucking believe that he has leave to get out of her sight blah blah.

Keltham heads over to Carissa.

One more adoring incredulous glance at him and then she'll stand, and curtsey, and depart a step behind him. 

Keltham leads her to the indicated antechamber and then kisses her hard enough to make a non-wizard's lip bleed.

She hopes he feels incredibly rewarded! She hopes that this leaves him itching to do something like this to Carissa again, and noticing, maybe, that power is nice, and he likes wielding it.

Also, wow, kissing someone who has just arranged your rental to the Queen of Cheliax? Really really good. Even if you don't have feelings for him because you outgrew that.

It's more that, from Carissa's perspective, which is the only perspective that matters, Keltham has just pulled off a Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick that Science Maniac Verrez himself would gaze upon with grudging approval.  Any feminine gendertrope that would not swoon at this scarcely deserves to be called a subtype of woman.

But yes he is definitely feeling very rewarded right now!  If they were in a cuddleroom he'd be taking off her clothes already but he is not, in fact, in a cuddleroom.  He has two more things to arrange before they can go there, the second one depending on the outcome of the first.

Carissa will just keep rewarding her Keltham until Contessa Lrilatha shows up. 

It doesn't take her long. She extends her wings to their full fourteen-foot span, casually, as she settles herself in one of the velvet chairs. 

"I request your unambiguous and explicit permission, stabilized by writing that it may be reflected upon and confirmed in further writing, to use an economicmagic of the third standard degree of economicmagic complexity, called 'Suggestion' in Taldane translating to Suggestion in Baseline by this magical means of translation," she says. In Baseline, obviously; it would take too long to say in Taldane, and make Keltham very uncomfortable if spoken in Infernal. "The economicmagic under discussion causes the target's mind to be externally influenced and proceed in such fashion as to end up containing thoughts chosen by the causal originator of the economicmagic, these thoughts being not distinguished to introspection from thoughts arising naturally, morever lending these thoughts a quality by which they seem believable and other thoughts will flow into conformance with them, and if done skillfully and by a powerful caster this may be unnoticed even retrospectively," 

Keltham hopes Carissa has Comprehend Languages prepared, but even if she doesn't, yeah, like hell is he doing this in Taldane.

"This would of course depend on the content and duration of that Suggestion, both as economicmagic proper, and with regards to persistent aftereffects if any."

"In this there is an obvious obstacle, which is that being informed of the exact content of the Suggestion would seem to make it rather harder to work upon me in a fashion that changed thoughts about it would pass through my validity tests and other habitual internal checksums."

"I furthermore remark that the basic purpose of this test is to demonstrate that Cheliax has clearly had powerful options that it properly and deontologically refrained from using on me, to their just credit and credibility.  The more this demonstration would tend to show that I could have been persistently deluded about important matters and great decisions, never triggering in me a moment of reflection and realization sufficient to overcome the spell, the more credit and credibility is thereby due to Cheliax."

"Have you your own suggested resolution to these problem constraints and figures of merit?"

"I propose that you agree to my casting the Suggestion at any point in the ensuing conversation, with the precise nature of the Suggestion not agreed upon in advance, but disclosed to you and dispelled at the conclusion of the conversation, at which point you can introspect on how far you think the Suggestion could have altered your thinking unnoticed. The duration of a Suggestion is, as you should be able to observe from the spell structure, two hours per caster circle. There exist other economicmagics with longer-lasting, or even permanent, effects, but those we do not disclose or demonstrate."

"Clarification, I am not able to deduce full coverage of all dangerous-appearing edgecases from the state of affairs you describe.  Is the primary support against safety edgecases here meant to be the innocuousness of the suggestion, or the thoroughness by which you expect me to be able to notice and rethink those influenced thoughts once the spell is dispelled, or both with each independently sufficient, or both with the two only together sufficient?  And is the means by which my knowledge of this coverage is obtained to be simply your assurance that these are your own expectations with respect to innocuousness, thoroughness of rethinkability, or both?"

(He'll do so well in Hell, if they can get him there.)

"My intent is to use a Suggestion with no far-reaching implications, such that its innocuousness is a sufficient safety precaution, and one that will be notable when pointed out, such that your ability to rethink should be sufficient," says Lrilatha evenly. "I don't know of a method, beyond my assurance with respect to my own expectations, by which you could arrive at satisfaction with the coverage of our approach, but I can enable one if you have one in mind."

Acceptable with appropriate further assurances about these compulsions having no further intended consequences, except those which arise from Keltham's own meta-level reasoning about the demonstration and its effects; and that Lrilatha cannot think of anything which she knows about this spell and its possibilities, which Keltham probably does not, which would probably be an unpleasant surprise to him relevant to the particular casting of it which she will make.

Keltham will remain accepting of all this if it's written down so he can write his acquiescence.

She can offer those assurances! 

"And now, if I may change the subject for the purpose of obscuring when precisely I will cast the Suggestion -- and assuring you, so that this conversation can actually be productive, that I don't intend to cast it to alter your thinking on the actual topic under deliberation, but on a random incidental - I reviewed your proposal for a mouse project to develop male contraception. There are two things that affect uptake in the general population of a new option: how expensive it is, and how much it requires basic capacity to function in the world. For example, a contraceptive option that requires a person to go in once a week for an appointment, even if the appointment is free, will be effective only for the approximately thirty percent of humans who can do something once a week in order to achieve their long term goals."

...Keltham is not actually an Unreasonably Smart Person and can't think about two things at once like that, unless, of course, his belief that he can't think about two things at once is - no any skill like that would've needed to have been developed by practice - is his thought correct that maybe this degree of meta-level distraction is itself what he was suggested into and is going to result in him ignoring something much more obvious -

"I'm sorry, I can try to simul-listen if you keep talking, but you'll probably need to repeat everything after I'm out of my retrospectively inevitable mind control meta-level panic thrashing."

"Of course. There is no rush, and you have a great deal to think about and pay attention to right now," Contessa Lrilatha says evenly in the same tone she's been negotiating in. "Other things are much more important to pay attention to than the person who is going to walk into the room in a moment. I said," and she repeats herself. While she does, the door appears to open, and a gnome appears to enter, trot up to Carissa, and start nibbling on her fingers. 

(This is a higher save DC than it'd be for something easier to overlook, but Contessa Lrilatha is very good at enchantments.)

Yeah, no kidding, he's got to figure out where the mind control is!  Keltham does manage to say back in a distracted way that people need to eat at least once a week so he's not seeing how those people aren't already dead.

(He wouldn't actually say this if not meta-level thrashing, wait, is saying stupid things without internally editing them better maybe what he was suggested into -)

Well, you know, if you don't eat you get hungry, if you forget your contraception appointment all the consequences are longer-term than that. She thinks that in order to actually improve Cheliax's heredity situation, which they already thought was kind of an emergency and have now based on Keltham's description of dath ilan concluded is even more of an emergency than that, they need something simple enough that people with INT 5 can't mess it up and cheap enough the government can afford to pay for it for them. 

The gnome leaves. 

His meta-level thrashing is starting to calm slightly, as it turns out that most of the burst of things he tries panickedly to do get marked as unproductive (unless of course that was the Suggestion) but still it's quieting down.  He feels like he can respond to this on sheer reflex if he can talk in Baseline.

"Civilization had that, too high on tech ladder, obviously I've been thinking about how to jump it with magic but I know too little magic.  Need to make a material with persistent strange properties, teleport it into an exact part of male anatomy."  Wait was he not supposed to reveal that without being paid - no it shouldn't be that, that has persistent consequences beyond the meta-level -

She nods. "I'm going to cast Dispel Magic now." And she does so. "The Suggestion that I made to you was to consider it uninteresting that, while we were having a very important conversation, a gnome appeared to enter the room and nibble Carissa's fingers."

"SHIT!" Keltham yells in Baseline.

He quickly calms himself.

"...yeah, okay, if you can do that for hours at a time, indefinitely renewed, you could've fucked with me impressively and without needing to be elaborate about it.  Good deontology.  Well.  At least one of Cheliax and Asmodeus has good deontology."

"Asmodeus comprehends how agents ought to make interaction among one another possible and has dedicated Himself for the last fifteen years to attempting to bring that knowledge to Cheliax. It is our dearly held hope that, now, He has found a way to say it that mortals can understand. I understand your permission to cast Suggestion, conditional for this experiment, to have been withdrawn, and will not attempt it again without again negotiating your express agreement."

...he should have caught that too.  Yeah, it was fairly implicit in the scope, fairly implicit is not good enough.

Point made.

"May I have your assurance that, to the best of your own knowledge, no spells with a remotely similar function have been cast on me with the exception of the Nidal spell that I resisted during their attack."

"To the best of my knowledge, no spells with a remotely similar function have been cast on you with the exception of the Nidal spell that you resisted during the attack. The number of people who know such spells, and could cast them on you undetected, is not large in Cheliax; I believe that it would be known to me if any of them had cast this spell or any similar one on you, and all of them know that it has been expressly prohibited by Asmodeus, beyond such prohibitions as apply ordinarily in the ordinary course of Chelish law, which are not trivial."

"To say the implicit explicitly, it is not the case that any third-circle wizard can do this to me, they need to be substantially more powerful to beat whatever resistance I have and do that undetected?"

"That is correct. A third circle wizard attempting this against a fourth-circle cleric would be detected instantaneously, not even retroactively, in more than half of cases, and my best guess is that they would certainly be detected retroactively in virtually all of the rest; detecting the spell retroactively isn't usually considered hard, unless the caster's skill is unparalleled. The degree of skill necessary to cast the spell undetectably with decent reliability is possessed only by myself, the Queen herself, and perhaps a handful of other casters in Cheliax, all of whom are deployed elsewhere. If you would like, your Carissa can be taught the spell so you can experience having it cast on you by a third-circle caster, even a skilled one."

"If that decision isn't urgent I will hold off on it, I try to avoid making impulse decisions about mind control."

"Nor is this next decision an impulsive one.  Carissa Sevar, are you understanding these words?"

What.

"Yes."

"I have, on my understanding of the understanding between myself and Cheliax, some informal credit with the Chelish government in exchange for that not-intended-to-be-proprietary information I have already been providing to you; I call due some small part of that informal credit now, if any such credit is needed."

"I have not yet come to decisions regarding my having children here.  But it has been represented to me by Carissa Sevar that use of the spell 'Alter Self' to male is sufficient to reliably prevent and terminate female pregnancy; I ask you to affirm whether this is so."

"In dath ilan, were a child between us developing within her, either the mother or the father would independently have the legal right to terminate that pregnancy up to half the standard pregnancy-duration, after which it requires consent of both parties."

"I know not what standard legal protections exist here, but I would have a contract negotiated between myself, Carissa, Cheliax, and potentially other female parties to become signatory; which says that, if a pregnancy is not past half the standard duration of pregnancy, I have the right to demand that Carissa Sevar, or other parties to be added, cast 'Alter Self' as needed in my opinion to prevent pregnancies that might have come from me."

"Being a party to this contract may be terminated at will by myself, but by them only after casting 'Alter Self' in a fashion sufficient to prevent any pregnancy that might exist, including latent pregnancies requiring casting after a delay, if those are a thing.  Moreover should the other parties simply refuse to cast that spell, the Chelish government will at my demand terminate that pregnancy at once, by such forcible external means as may be standard, up to and including their death and resurrection if there are no simpler means.  Nor may a party to this contract leave the reach of Chelish Governance without either my consent or having terminated this contract first, including any castings of 'Alter Self' required to terminate that contract."

"If there's anything I missed there in order to have sex safely and without worrying about a child that only one of us wanted, please say so."

"Carissa, if there's anything I'm missing from your own perspective, please say so too."

"It seems also to me that you, Contessa Lrilatha, write these contracts easily and that it is not very much of an informal favor at all, to ask you to write this one in Taldane; but if I am wrong about that and it requires a greater informal favor than I realize, please say so."

The amount of additional anti-child security he can get through any precautions weirder than that does not seem worth mentioning, given both what they can do with Suggestions and haven't, and that if they were being really clever they could've gotten his precious bodily fluids via the oral sex he already had.  You can be more paranoid anywhere, but not all marginal paranoia is marginally useful.

Carissa has the most ROMANTIC boyfriend he does things like request the Queen's personal erinyes write a contract guaranteeing his right to force her to terminate a pregnancy how is he so WONDERFUL damnit that's a feelings-deadening duration of, like, three hours, maybe this is why Hell takes a thousand years to get anywhere with mortal souls

What delightful progress, especially since abortion is Evil past twelve weeks and 'half' is farther than that!

"I affirm what Sevar told you, and would be willing, as only a small informal favor, to write such for you."

Hug of Carissa.  "Please do; and then, if it doesn't take more than informally 2% of the informal credit I already have with Cheliax as an upper bound rather than the price per se, I would have you sign the agreement on behalf of Cheliax, if that is something you can do without other authorization."

"I mostly do not expect that Chelish Governance will ever end up needing to enforce any part of this, to be clear, given that the fallback exists in the first place; and so the expected actual cost to you is, I hope, quite low."

"I expect so," Contessa Lrilatha agrees. "So you are aware, in Cheliax in the context of a relationship such as yours with Sevar, the decision to terminate a pregnancy would typically be yours up to the moment of birth; I am going to write in the contract that this agreement should not be interpreted so as to abrogate rights you would otherwise have."

"Thank you for so informing me, and so writing."

"Oh, and please afterwards assure me that there are meant to be no unexpected unpleasant consequences for myself or for the other parties, as seen from our respective individual perspectives.  I mean, I probably didn't have to say that, but why trust what you can verify."

"Of course." And she passes him the contract and says, "I do not expect any of the terms of this contract to have any unexpected unpleasant consequences for yourself, and I do not expect it to have any unexpected unpleasant consequences for Sevar. You should be aware, if you are not, that abortion is under most circumstances judged as an Evil act by the goddess who judges such things, Pharasma. She has Her own convictions about whether it is a moral good to a person to bring them into existence; as She created this whole system, you might predict She is broadly in favor, and tends not to find it credible that an abortion is an act for the benefit of the person thereby prevented from being, and also tends to weight it as an act of high consequence. So expect, if you do it a lot, to count as Evil eventually; I don't think that's an unpleasant consequence, but now it's also not unexpected."

"I've been expecting Keltham to get tagged Good sooner or later just with all the building Civilization," says Carissa before Keltham can parse that all out and see if he objects to any of it. "- for most people an abortion ends up being one of the more consequential person-affecting decisions they make but, well, not for Keltham."

Contessa Lrilatha shrugs her wings, spectacularly. "Pharasma's heart is known to none. The Queen has built a lot of schools and remains as Evil as the day she claimed her office."

"I... am confused by many things but should not waste your own valuable time with that.  Does any term in this agreement strike you as being liable to be an unpleasant surprise for future women who sign it with me, if not for Sevar?"

"No term in this agreement strikes me as liable to be an unpleasant surprise for any Chelish woman, I can't speak to women elsewhere. A Chelish woman who has never terminated a pregnancy before might find herself unexpectedly sad about it."

Makes sense.  Glad she's actually being cautious.

Keltham reads, then signs.

He considers ordering Carissa to sign, but decides against it; he is not sure how it affects legal contractual capacity and Carissa's own sense of which agreements she should honor, doesn't want to slow down to ask.  And also it continues to matter to him that Carissa chooses him.

He hands the contract to Carissa instead, wordlessly.

Carissa beams at him. 

...and looks at the contract, somewhat unhappily. It's just incredibly stupid, on principle, to sign something a devil wrote for you, after an amount of review that can plausibly happen now without destroying the mood. The fact she can't see anything wrong with it doesn't mean that much and the fact that there's the clause about no unpleasant surprises means - more, but not enough. However, they don't want to get Keltham the impression that one should treat Lrilatha's contracts as even potentially adversarial.

Well, what's going to happen to her is already only bounded by Asmodeus's unknowable will and the fact that apparently being tortured enough makes her short-term worse at her job.

She signs without any visible hesitation, after a respectable amount of time reading it which nonetheless would not be enough to catch a clever trap.

Contessa Lrilatha takes the contract back from her and signs it herself.

"Thank you very much for all your time, Contessa Lrilatha.  If there is nothing else from your own agenda, I would depart, with my Carissa, now."

"Enjoy."

He's feeling in something of a hurry to get back to their mutual bedroom, now.  How about if he and Carissa go there.

What a fantastic idea.

(Telling Keltham you are sad about something is apparently a very powerful weapon to be deployed only sparingly.)
 

A man's pride is his ability to successfully solve his woman's Problems, if they're extreme enough that she has to bring them to him at all, knowing full well the consequences if she does.

Or at least, that's how that particular masculine gendertrope goes.  There are obviously others, but it's one you'd worry by default might be lurking, if you were a woman and hadn't been otherwise advised of a different gendertrope.

Decades before Civilization took its current form, this is how Seasonal Affective Disorder got cured in dath ilan.

Right, bedroom, good.  Carissa, out of your clothes, wrists into chains.

She cooperates with this. "You're unbelievable. I mean that. Unbelievable. I mostly can't believe it. I keep trying to figure out how it could be an elaborate prank but you wouldn't in a million years have guessed how throne rooms look, so -"
 

Even in an authoritarian country answering to Hell, it's not easy to prevent rumors, at their tech level and social level.  There are too many people, especially in the Imperial Palace, with enough self-considered impunity that they'd whisper a few words among each other, or ask questions of another.  Security may stamp out rumors elsewhere, but they've got to be able to exchange whispered rumors among themselves to do their job correctly; or at least, that's what Security wizards sure seem to think.  Or Asmodean nobles.  Or priests of Asmodeus.  They're members of the Inner Ring, and privileged to be the ones who trade rumors if they want, while stamping down hard on all loose talk among the Outers who don't need to think, just be told.

And Cheliax doesn't think about informational security the same way dath ilan does.  They don't have an explicit concept of information theory and probabilistic entanglement and improbable observations narrowing down probable worlds.  If a top-secret Civilization project requests two hundred mice, and most other projects don't do that, then the mouse order is also obviously top secret, period, your job isn't to figure out what an adversary could deduce from a piece of unusual information but to deny your adversaries as much information as possible.  Even if you're at +3sd they may perhaps be at +5sd, and you won't see all the connections that they'll see.

Dath ilani children's fiction is replete with cautionary tales of fools who assumed that some fact could not possibly be deduced from the scanty, unreliable information that some slightly less foolish person possessed.  Adults, of course, read about more sophisticated and plausible errors than that.

Not that every dath ilani has the deep information-theoretic security mindset either, to be clear.  Any real information-theoretic-security expert of dath ilan - as opposed to some random punk kid on an airplane - would've told Keltham, during the Nidal attack on the villa, that as soon as his life was no longer in immediate danger, he needed to get the shit out of those Obviously Strange Clothes before he went into the villa and anyone project-uncleared got a close or extended look at him.  No, not because an ideal agent could use a mere glance at the zipper to deduce precise manufacturing technology not currently known to Golarion.  Because the clothes are incredibly abnormal and therefore a highly improbable rare signal and therefore represent a potentially massive update for any adversary who is smarter than you and making unknown deductions; seriously what the shit is Keltham thinking.

A dath ilani proverb runs, "The most important part of any secret is the meta-secret that the secret exists."  (Not literally always true, of course, e.g., consider public-key cryptography.)  Cheliax has this concept deeply and instinctively for private interactions, hiding the very existence of secrets from adversaries who'd want to pry them out of you.  It doesn't think in quite the same way about most secret government projects, unless there's a specific and obvious reason why a secret also needs to be meta-secret.  Tyrannies are not based on a deep respect and worry for what your lessers could do with the information they have, if they were secretly master criminals opposed to you.  In an Asmodean tyranny, if you order someone not to think about something or ask any further questions, they don't ask any further questions and make a sincere try not to think about it.  That, and not hiding the very existence of the secret itself from anyone, is the first line of defense around secret government projects in Cheliax.

So if a top-secret Chelish project asks for a budget estimate on two hundred mice, the project manager will think about whether they believe anything top-secret seems obviously deducible from the mouse request; and if there's an obvious way to deduce something genuinely ultra-top-secret, they'll mark the mouse order as being also genuinely ultra-top-secret.  Otherwise, it will soon be widely rumored within the Inner Ring - this being something that would make dath ilani informational security experts spit out their drinks - that a top-secret Chelish project ordered two hundred mice, no, nobody's allowed to ask for what.  When Abrogail Thrune issues an order, it's put forth under Crown authority so everybody knows how important it is and what happens to them if they fuck up; rather than being issued anonymously with a quantitative priority that isn't any higher than it has to be to get that job done, rounded up to make the exact quantity less revealing.

Even Hell thinks that it's fine for random contract devils in Dis to know everything their owned souls know; they won't repeat it, right, who cares if their behavior changes in externally observable ways given their knowledge.  Hell is playing their informational security game against mortals in Golarion, not gods or dath ilani.

Small stones can start an avalanche, a single added uranium brick can put a pile over criticality.

While 'Project Pet Outsider' was called 'Project Pet Outsider', even the name of the project obviously-to-a-Chelish-person needed to be secret, since the fact that Cheliax had a pet outsider was explicitly secret.

A dath ilani would've never renamed it 'Project Lawful'; even Keltham would know better than that.  That means the name of the project is entangled with its contents in any way whatsoever!  If the name needs to be readable at all, call it Project Artichoke or something else generated true-randomly.  And then deploy single-use disposable pseudonyms whenever possible, if the person doesn't need to know the project name to enable a persistent conversational subject, which they usually don't.

From a Chelish standpoint?  You can't figure out what Project Lawful is really doing from hearing that it's called Project Lawful.  Why, it probably even gives Cheliax's enemies the wrong idea, if the name leaks somehow!  Nobody's going to figure out the existence of Keltham or deduce a prospect of revolutionary military advances from that.  So the name 'Project Lawful' is fine to tell to people who are not allowed to know what Project Lawful is about.

And let's face it, 'Project Lawful' is a really cool name.  'Lawful' is a powerful but standard concept that could potentially mean all sorts of specific things.  Very evocative, while also very mysterious.  Slightly ominous.  You could say it's a tease.

As for whether it is in fact a good idea to assign a top-secret project a really cool name, well, that is something of a separate issue.

When military teams responded to the Nidal attack, they had been very quickly informed that there was a Lawful-Neutral detecting boy there wearing strange clothing who must be (a) protected at all costs (b) not told or shown that Cheliax is evil; but they were also told that this instruction was never to be repeated to literally anyone or asked about further, and that is an instruction you follow in Cheliax.  If the boy in strange clothing then channels positive energy to heal some of the response teams (dath ilani actual security expert: AAAAAAAAAAIIIIEEEE), you're obviously likewise not supposed to ever ask anything about that, or repeat it as gossip.

But the response team also, for example, found a burned-out archduke's villa in which most of the Security were dead and a handful of pretty female wizard students had mostly survived.

They saw a literal actual godwar start shortly after this mysterious attack by Nidal.

They hear rumored, even - and again, here dath ilani informational-security experts spit out their drinks - that the attack had somehow been foretold a half-minute in advance.  Why wouldn't that be something you could gossip about, if you were a privileged member of the Inner Ring?  You haven't been told it's really seriously absolutely secret; and you haven't been told that because nobody sees how that information leaks the secret of Keltham.  There's no particular, known government secret of Cheliax that the prophetic warning reveals; why would it be absolutely classified?  Obviously, as a Security, you would not gossip about this with non-Security, unless it was really amusing somehow, because part of being in the Inner Ring is that you get to know and other people don't.  But it's not attached onto something classified ultra-secret by a visible secret-leaking line of reasoning, so it's not so secret that even Security isn't allowed to talk about it.

Originally, all of the Inner Ring people among the combat response teams who dared ask at all, were told, at the time, only that the villa was part of a top-secret project into which they couldn't inquire further.  And so they inquired no further.  On paper it was still called Project Pet Outsider, then, so they obviously couldn't be told the project's name.  It was clearly one of those things you're just supposed to not think about; and it was given no mental handle with which to persist it as a concept over time or compare it to other things known.

Now, however, a Security directive has been issued that, to avoid accidental leakage of info in case the project name gets overheard, the project is to be renamed to 'Project Lawful'.

And, as a result, it is also now known that the burned-out archduke's villa was being used by a 'Project Lawful', into which you are not to inquire further.  This fact itself is not forbidden to be gossiped about within the Inner Ring, to be clear, it's just that you're not allowed to inquire further.

That double handful of pretty female wizard students who survived inside a small villa library while most of the Security were dead?  They are part of 'Project Lawful'.  Do not inquire further.

They somehow got advance warning a half-minute before the attack?  Yeah, that's 'Project Lawful'.  Don't inquire further.

The unconscious young girl dressed like all the other supposedly wizard students, who shows to Aura Sight as projecting a Lawful Evil aura strong enough to go with a fourth-circle wizard?  Shut up.  Don't ask any further questions.  She's part of 'Project Lawful'.

A remarkable number of these apparently young girls who are supposedly unproven second-circle wizards seem to have acquired permanent arcane sight somehow, despite no illusions or shapechanges showing up on them?  It's 'Project Lawful', you don't ask why or what's really going on.

(The young man in strange clothes channeling positive energy?  Him you don't talk about period.  Not even a whisper to your best friend.  You don't ask if he's part of 'Project Lawful' or not; you don't think any more questions.)