Keltham is briefly shocked that Carissa is escalating that fast, then rapidly questions his first impression and realizes that symmetrical-mouth_application may be a specially convenient case for interplanar romance because he can just mirror whatever she does using the same appendage.  A few moments later, he is surprised again when all Carissa does with her mouth is apply a brief light suction to his own lips.  Deliberate teasing?  Anyways, Keltham will just apply some brief light suction right back.

Carissa would normally be more stressed out by trying to interpret all Keltham's facial expressions - is he confused?? - but this is in many ways the least stressful situation she's been in in a day and it's one she's possessed with instincts for, unlike trying to serve Asmodeus which humans are known to be terrible at, so it's easier to just go with it and set all the interpretation that's not immediately necessary aside for later. She pulls away slightly but leaves her hand on his shoulder. "By normal Chelish standards if you haven't negotiated anything eccentric," she says, "we have now departed the range of things you're supposed to do if you have a monogamy-agreement with someone else, but not the range of things that let you say 'what? we're not even slightly sleeping together', and we haven't even entered the range of things you can make other girls jealous with in the morning."

"By dath ilani standards, we're probably somewhere at around 5.1 out of 12 on the Standard Romance Escalation Lattice-Scale, on the pathway where we have sex to become friends instead of the other way around; though the thing you did wasn't standard enough to have a standard rating and could maybe have been 4.8 instead, which would be a good deliberate-ambiguity-maneuver if this were Complicated Romance.  You'd be allowed to do it with anyone else you wanted under all but the strictest quarter of monogamy agreements.  It wouldn't enable you to take my clothes and their informational-private-property as a trophy in a socially acknowledged way that let you get away with wearing my stuff to class tomorrow, because that is far too perverted a practice for a young person like myself to have heard about it."

"Oh dear! How perverted will I have to spend tonight making you for that to be a practice that you expect a similarly perverted person back home will have encountered."

"Your goals are unrealistic but you shouldn't let that stop you from trying."  Keltham leans forward, slowly in case she wants to object, takes Carissa's head in his hand, turns it gently aside, and very lightly nibbles on her ear, just about exactly as long as she kissed him for.  "Five point two."

 Why is he being slow, is that considered more romantic in dath ilan or something? Normal people don't have sex to become friends, they have sex to have sex, or to be useful to someone else who has something they want, or to put someone in a compromising position of some kind. She is going to mention none of these confusions. 

"There's no such thing as unrealistic goals in Golarion. ....unrealistic timescales, maybe. But I'm optimistic. See, my understanding is that we'd fall right off those dath ilani scales if you bite down, now. And once you're off the scale, well, anything can happen."

(without any conscious thought at all, in a fragmentary perceptual moment, Keltham arrives at the meta-level conclusion that he has been prompted to fast action and therefore fast thought)

- okay but how hard exactly is it okay to bite down she probably does not mean he is supposed to literally actually bite off a piece of ear or maybe she does -
- there are healing spells here, he needs to worry less -
- Keltham himself has the power to heal, granted him by his deity still unknown -

Keltham quickly clenches his left fist, presses his fingernails into his own palm in order to get a very quick concept of how much force might correspond to how much pain, quickly increases the pressure until the pain seems substantial, more than merely noticeable, and then bites down around that hard on Carissa's ear.

She gasps, not unhappily. "There, see, where are we on your scale now, dath ilani?"

Along the Standard Romance Lattice, on the most common pathway where first you have sex and then become friends, the steps would be numbered as follows:

0 - Assumed prior knowledge: commonly known mutual possession of the human heritage, and of default frameworks laid down by Civilization.
1 - Mutual determination of probable receptivity to flirting, via passive or non-flirtatious information-gathering.
2 - Active flirting while maintaining plausible deniability.
3.0 - Overt common knowledge of mutual attraction achieved.
3 - Teasing or being nice to each other without physical contact; maneuvering for later relationship advantage.
4 - Physical contact.
5 - Overtly sexual contact.
6 - Sex with genital participation.
7 - Maneuvering around whether or not to go on a second date.
8.0 - Common knowledge established of a relationship extending beyond a single encounter.
8 - Dating, learning more about each other.
9 - Taking on obligations and commitments inside the relationship; revealing of nontrivial private info to each other with attached secrecy obligations; less-than-maximal-ogamy arrangements for those into such things.
10 - Having a child; or childless marriage lasting at least 15 years.
11 - Long-term to indefinite marriage; multiple children if so desired.
12 - Intention to be together in the Future for eternity.

Technically according to this scale, Keltham and Carissa have yet to achieve Step 0!  Actually, that's not just a technicality!  That part is, in fact, quite important!  But the most correct answer to the intent of Carissa's question... would be that the Standard Romance Lattice doesn't consider the current depth of perversion* as a detail that matters to assessing the rest of the scale.  If adapted to include sadomasochism in the obvious way, it'd parse up stimulation by pain into an equivalence class of other acts that produced around the same amount of arousal in the target.  If Keltham knew how much of a sexual act biting Carissa Sevar's ear actually is to her, which he doesn't, he'd probably put that at around 5.7 on the standard scale.

(*)  Lit. 'sexual overcomplication'.

"We have gone forever outside of what is conceivable to Civilization.  Now that I've bitten somebody's ear, no city would allow me to enter there, even if I could return to my home plane again; none of them would consider me a dath ilani anymore."

"- not literally, that's humor with a straight-face.  I will also not include this disclaimer in the future unless you tell me to do that."  He bites her ear again, slightly harder.

Gasp. "I can tell by - reading your expressions. And also by - knowing enough now to guess that your returning home would be a national emergency in a fashion that had nothing to do with sex. There would be SO MANY important people asking serious questions before we could arrange - imports of girls who like being bitten. - you won't harm me by accident. 's actually hard, for people who haven't practiced it, to bite another person like they'd bite a steak, and I'm third circle, that wouldn't harm me."

"Wait.  You being a third-circle wizard means that - even if I tried to bite your ear literally as hard as I can, you wouldn't need a healing spell afterwards?"  Keltham will have Additional Questions about this later, but right now, the notion of biting her ear without being careful or worrying about it is tapping something deeper.

She kisses him again, a little more forcefully. "Yes. That's right. There are six competing theories of why and I will tell you none of them unless you tickle them out of me."

Keltham kisses back, running his tongue lightly over her lips, and then draws her own lip into his mouth and bites down HARD without holding himself back.  (If it was just ears but not lips, he's got healing.)

In some alternate universe where higher-circle casters only have less-vulnerable ears and otherwise normal vulnerability Carissa would be bleeding - well, long ago dead at the Worldwound, actually. Instead she leans into Keltham and shivers. "Quick learner. 's a good trait. You're pretty lucky, to have both 'a girl you can hurt' and 'a girl you can't really hurt' for the first time at the same time."

Keltham is now very hard, and he didn't even notice that happening to himself at the time because he was distracted.  "No - kidding.  I don't know how it is for men here, but - I get the distinct impression that being able to do what I want to you without holding myself back, and have you react sexually to that, is much - more the thing I'm discovering, than applying small careful amounts of pain - I think I'm ready for this to move to a cuddleroom."

"Or repurposed bedroom.  Could be my bedroom, even, if you're pretty sure your magic lets you do to the bedroom afterwards what you did to my clothes."

"Magic can clean it. But also I recall a bedroom at the bottom of these stairs." She holds herself back from examining the zippers too closely, even though suddenly they're right there to look at and they're fascinating, incredibly uniform down the whole seam and - wrong for the mood, right now. 

"You're the native!  The alien will trust you about whether we can do that without prior authorization."  Keltham stands, offers her a hand.

(Keltham has noticed where her eyes were drifting, of course.  The prior probability for that wasn't low.  He would definitely be checking out the hot alien chick's technology, in an appropriately analogized gender-reversed position.  He's not much worried about IP theft, though; the real trick to the zipper isn't going to be the interlocking shapes, it's going to be cheaply making a thousand copies of those interlocking shapes.)

She takes his hand. "If we break the bed I'll simply tell the facilities staff that we were studying dath ilani sex tradition, and productive interactions with the Golarion sex tradition of having a girl you can do as you please with."

There's whole strange worlds opening up to Keltham, though he's not at all sure he's understanding them correctly.  The notion of having a woman you can do as you please with - well, there's the version where you pay a sex worker so that you don't have to worry about their pleasure except insofar as it pleases you to do so, a sexual asymmetry balanced by a financial asymmetry going the other way - or by knowledge going the other way, in the variant Ione offered him - but the notion of a woman who doesn't allow you but wants you to do as you please, wants you to hurt her - 

He'll sort out later what's going inside his mind.  He may be ordinarily accustomed to knowing more about what goes on in there, but he doesn't have to sort it out right now before having sex.

Keltham grips her hand harder, because he felt an impulse like that, and pulls her after himself toward the stairs going down, because that feels like the right thing to do.

Possibly she is going to take this too far and push Keltham to uncover desires that she actually has to use a lot of will and acting ability and preparation-for-the-cleansing-fires-of-Hell to keep up with, and she should instead be trying to push him in smaller steps, but then she would lose the contest, and she's very competitive. Also if she pushes him very far then the other girls who are mostly younger will have a harder time keeping up. Yeah, this is a good plan. 

She follows.

Keltham is entertaining Suspicions about how many planes of existence, exactly, just happen to contain women who like totally want you to bite their ears and lips, and will derive their own sexual pleasure from it, instead of disliking pain in accordance with all sane evolutionary logic, and also they won't end up actually injured if you do that, and how likely it is that he would end up someplace like that just at random, but he will think about that later.  If some unknown force throws you into a suspiciously sexually compatible universe, the optimal response should include fucking that universe and not just contemplating how suspiciously sexually compatible it is.

Once they're down the stairs, he'll give Carissa a sudden surprise push to the bed, and then be about to leap on her when he remembers the existence of windows and doors that need closing.  "Wait here," he says, the words coming out a little more forcefully than they should have, and goes to try to seal the room insofar as that seems to be a thing.

The room has a door to the hallway, a door to the private bathing rooms, and a door to the balcony; it has one window, opposite the bed and positioned to shed light on the writing desk near the fireplace, with heavy curtains presently drawn over it. The door to the hallway and the door to the balcony both lock to keep people out. 

"Looking for something? Fireplace pokers are the kind of thing I'd need healing spells about."

"Sealing the room, insofar as that seems to be a thing.  Don't suppose there's a switch I'm missing for whatever magical version of soundproofing you've got?  Or for that matter, something that tells the security people to get any five-year-olds out of the hidden wall tunnels, or switch the security cameras to only asexual observers?"

"I really hope there are no five year olds anywhere on the premises!! The walls are nearly a foot of solid stone, no one will hear us unless they're creeping on the balcony, and if we're being scried, then they can just hear us, and we can tell them," and she looks up at the ceiling, "hey, have a devil of the kinds that are too inhuman for sexual desire do the necessary observation of how Keltham hasn't been stealthily kidnapped or murdered."

Keltham did not think devils were that easy to consult on key national issues let alone employ as security observers but he will defer all infinite Additional Questions until later.  "I hadn't meant to ask for anything expensive, just checking if we were supposed to - nevermind."

Back to the bed.  It's not going to be easy having sex on a flat soft surface but it's possible.  Lots of things are possible if you're sufficiently determined about them, sexually speaking.

Carissa-Sevar didn't seem to think that escalating slowly and in order was particularly romantically important to her, which is good, because right now Keltham is feeling an alarmingly strong impulse to do exactly what his impulses tell him, and what his impulses tell him to do is throw off his shirt.

Keltham taking off his jacket-shirt is going to look strange, to an inhabitant of Golarion not accustomed to overengineered dath ilani clothing.

In principle, one spends a lot of time in clothes, and hence should be willing to spend some money on better clothes.

In practice there is a certain element, in Civilization's clothing choices, of that dath ilani personality trait which always puts a hidden passageway behind at least one bookcase in the house library.  Often one that just goes around a short corner and exits from a different bookcase in the same library.  The point is, the hidden passageway has to be there, and if you ask why, the people of dath ilan will smile and tell you to shut up.

Keltham's jacket-shirt assembly includes more technology than just zipper slides.  It has been painstakingly designed by a cultural accumulation-over-time of engineers with +4sd intelligence to, among other things: manifest a rainproof hood from no obvious receptable, convert between warmer and colder coverage... and be easy to remove from yourself while you're already cuddling somebody, without having to disentangle yourself.  This easy-removal feature makes good use of micro-velcro fine enough to not be obvious from a distance, and arrays of tiny rare-earth magnets which automatically pull bits of fabric back together again in a correct stepwise pattern.

From an outside perspective, one would see Keltham tear his jacket-shirt off of himself with an audible ripping sound, and end up holding a jacket with no visible damage.  If you were watching closely enough, you'd see the jacket split along the seams and then quickly come together again along those same seams.  The way this registers from outside is not an accident or any kind of side effect of other design purposes.  A mad engineer who would detect in Golarion as INT 26 spent several years figuring out exactly how to do that and make it look cool, subsequently collecting 0.1-unskilled-labor-hour royalties on over 200,000,000 pieces of clothing.

Keltham kneels over where he threw Carissa to the bed, one knee between her thighs, not bothering to avoid touching anything.  "How do I take off your shirt?" he says, after a brief moment of failing to see any affordances for doing that.

"My shirt does not do that." Does everyone's clothes do that? She doesn't see how, without magic - or why - stop getting distracted by textile manufacture questions. "It...buttons. With buttons." She demonstrates one. 

Huh, that's a surprisingly elegant solution to the problem of clothing that must be built with imprecise manufacturing technology.  The button-hole doesn't have to be exactly the same size as the button, it's okay if no two buttons are exactly the same size as each other, and the fastening method is robust to small departures of the shape from - if this line of thinking is not centrally necessary to sex with Carissa it can wait.

Keltham undoes all the buttons he can see, the motions unpracticed but not too slow; it's obvious enough how a button works, once you see one.

And her shirt lies open before him.

Carissa Sevar is older than any woman he's previously lain with, and prettier than them, in his sight, as far as he can tell from just her exposed chest.  Carissa being seven?? years older than him works for him on a physical level, it seems, so long as he's not at a social power disadvantage to her the way he would have been to an older woman of Civilization.

Keltham wonders if there's a non-button trick he's missing for how he could remove Carissa's shirt-sleeves from her arms, without her needing to rise up from her laid-down position; but also Keltham doesn't feel the need to do that right now.  The alien clothing on the sexy alien female isn't something he minds.

"I approve," he says a little breathlessly, eyes going between Carissa's face and her chest.

Carissa knows that she is pretty. There are things it's smart to lie to yourself about, in Cheliax; that isn't one of them. It matters for a lot of things; you get lots of data on it; it is not suspicious to be competent at it, and it's vaguely pathetic not to be, to be living in a fantasy where you are prettier than you really are, or one where you're average and the way people respond to you is mostly about your charming personality when you are not average and it's not about your personality at all. In a room of girls her age she'll be the prettiest, if it wasn't selected on that, and if it was, she'll be average, unless it was selected hard on that, reaching the point where people deploy magic potions; she can't be mistaken for the kind of woman who's done that, not once you've met them. The worry about attracting the notice of the pharaoh of Osirion is realistic given certain bounds of uncertainty about how much he likes exoticness.

For a statement that contains approximately no new information Keltham's approval is oddly satisfying. 

"If you are characteristic of men with your taste," she says, "you'll like it even better when it's marked up a little."

"I expect I'll be very excited by whatever that actually means, but that idiom in Baseline means something implausible, unless you actually did want me to annotate you."

"Your poor language." She pinches her breast, hard enough to leave a bright red mark when she pulls her hand away. "Your poor civilization. You may have coordination but towards what end, if the only thing to do with unblemished skin is to annotate it?"

Keltham notes, somewhat to his own surprise, that his hands are slightly trembling.  The impulse to pinch her, harder than that, to get sounds out of her again, is powerful enough that - well, that it's now absolutely obvious why dath ilan doesn't want sexual-pain-dealers to know what they are, if there's no improbable invulnerable sexual-pain-receivers around to complement them.  He is struggling between two mutually inhibitory instilled reflexes, the training out of dath ilan which says that in the cuddleroom of all places you're supposed to just follow your impulses, and his acculturation out of dath ilan to be careful about hurting people no stop that's stupid he couldn't even produce blood when he bit down hard on her lip -

Keltham allows his hand to do what it wants, seizing her other breast and grabbing as hard as he can, digging in with fingernails.

Carissa thinks it is far too early in the evening to not-react to something he does, look at him challengingly and ask if he can do it more than that. That is a good move to have in reserve. Right now she has thrown enough complications onto the table and should just let Keltham explore them. She should shudder and wiggle and reach for his hand, but not to pull it away, and smile at him. 

(Good is wrong. Carissa believes this mostly because the possible Carissas who don't have been neatly pruned from existence, or hypothetical existence, but it feels like there's another angle on believing it, here - dath ilan layering all their propaganda to hide from people what they are, because their beautiful Good abundant empire didn't have space for the hunger of humans to hurt each other and be rewarded for it, to have something that is theirs and that they needn't treat with caution -

- the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis -

- maybe, though she shouldn't even dream of it, it's true of Keltham too -)

If he did this to a normal dath ilani woman she'd be at least saying 'ow' and the fact that Carissa isn't - yelling, isn't having her face tighten up in pain, that she can still choose to just smile at him in response - he feels like he needs to hurt her more than this, take that control away from her, and he almost stops to ask if he's thinking it right, except that he, he can see himself as others see him, he can see his own story as a reader would see it, he can guess where this trend is going and if not Carissa can tell him in words to stop -

His other hand seizes her nipple, traps it between thumbnail and forefinger-nail, and bites down on that nipple with those two fingernails as much as his grip strength allows.

You have to think about these things very quickly; a delay will betray you. Most men will keep going until they get the reaction they want; some for a while after that, so you want to start grimacing and whimpering and flinching substantially shy of your actual limit, so it's not too bad later either. She bets that in dath ilan that's not even Complicated Romance it's probably, like, a major social faux pas or something. 

It does hurt, a lot, more than would be sexy in isolation, which it so so profoundly isn't, and a lot more is sexy when it's part of a game played with your body for the sake of getting things you desperately want. She flinches, and whimpers. But only a little, and then she goes back to smiling at him.

"You're cute."

He's satisfied, a little, by that flinch and whimper.  Part of him is reassured about still being addressed in favorable terms afterwards, that he didn't make a misstep.  Part of him seems to feel an overpowering need to be otherwise to her than -

"Maybe you'll tell me that the first date is too early for it," he says, his voice coming out lower, huskier, than he expected from himself, "or that nobody gets it their first day, but I hope there's a path to eventually escalate a relationship like this one to where I'm something other than cute."

"You can get a girl to call you all kinds of things, including on the first date. Hurting people is very effective for that. ...it does, typically, take a little longer, to make her mean it."

For her to call him - what?  Keltham doesn't know.  There is something, but he doesn't know what.

Implied in Carissa's words is that there's a version that's a game, and a version that isn't just a game.  He can already feel from where he is, that this must be so.  But he doesn't know what lies beyond this, beyond just the sexual infliction of pain.  And maybe he shouldn't ask, shouldn't delve too greedily and too deep upon a first date.  He doesn't want to slow down for explanations either; he can ask afterwards.

"Don't call me anything you don't mean," he says, and there's an undertone in his voice that isn't often heard in dath ilan; what he said should have been a request, it's not clear what multiagent equilibrium could sensibly exist here where that could be something other than a request, but it wasn't one.  And because it felt right, his hand pressed fingernails into her breast again as he said it.

She shivers; that part's easy. 

Carissa possesses a convenient degree of sexual enjoyment of pain; she doesn't have a particular tendency to use what's hot as an input into who she obeys or to find it hot rather than convenient when people obey her. But she can recognize the thing he wants - better than he can, at least, and -

- four pillars of Asmodeanism, one of them tyranny, enjoyment of power and its exercise, one she doesn't have particular aptitude for but a path to Asmodeus just as valid as her own -

"Yes, Keltham," she says, quietly, meeting his eyes. "And if you were a ruler to whom I had sworn my loyalty, then it would be, 'yes, my lord,' like so."

Keltham clamps down on an impulse to pull back his hand like it was burned; something is escalating too far and too fast.

Naturally Keltham has been, at one point in his life, told Very Seriously that men are also allowed to decide that something sexual is escalating too quickly for their comfort, even if that's not the typical gendertrope depicted for the male sex in books and movies.  And to this, Keltham had replied that he was in fact a quite archetypal male who would never have need of that advice.  But because Keltham had also been possessed of at least average intelligence, imagination, and reflection, Keltham had added, after another moment's thought, that this might not be true if there were secret levels of sexual escalation he was having difficulty imagining.  And this, of course, the Watcher had neither confirmed nor denied.

Courage, Keltham thinks to himself, and keeps his hand where it is.  He is typical-male enough that typical-male gendertropes are useful to him, and he wordlessly autoexpects for it to do well by him if he draws on that to not look hesitant in front of a sex partner.

"There's something there I want," he says, "but it's deep and it's complicated and even though you obviously already know what it is, I'm not going to understand it right away and I don't want to stop while you explain it to me.  I do know I want to - be to you as I would be to a sex worker whose time I'd bought - only, not like that, but as if she'd just given it to me - the ability to do what I want with you - I don't want to trade pleasures with you.  I want to force pleasure out of you and hurt you while I do that, and then hurt you again while you pleasure me in turn."

"Yes," she says, because she's getting the sense that they both individually and together have a failure mode of talking too much when only a little would do.

Keltham has read the description of standard wizard cantrips, and he expects he's guessed at least part of magical sexual practice in Golarion; especially since he doubts their tech level suffices for ingestable latent flavorants.  "You can use Prestidigitation now to flavor my -"  (Taldane doesn't have very detailed words for the components of semen or their anatomical storage places.)  "- stored sexual fluids however you prefer," he says, looking down on her darkly.  "And for myself, I want you tasting like chocolate."

This is, in fact, a thing Carissa has ever done, but she is intensely curious about under what algorithm it comes to mind as one of the first - she should think less. Entirely too much thinking. 

She takes his wrist, and moves his hand with hers while she casts a cantrip. "Probably I did what you said," she says. "You've hardly got the spellcraft to know for sure. I guess you could check."

(In a world of a billion people, around a hundred million minutes per day are going to be spent tasting male sexual fluids, or around 50,000 years per year, and at least an order of magnitude more for that portion of women who desire oral sex where the fluid-tasting phase lasts much longer.  And that's just the momentary hedonics; if a suboptimal taste were permitted to act as a negative reinforcer for sex itself, that would destroy an order of magnitude more happiness still.  It would be silly to not have hundreds of top engineers working on the problem of making people taste 10% better.  Though you don't especially need good social coordination for that, they'd say, because Markets; they would be surprised if you told them a world could have Markets but somehow not those top engineers.)

There's always been a strange impulse, any time Keltham is asked to do anything during sex, for him to want to do something else instead; like he wants to not do anything that could be remotely seen as doing what somebody else says.  Keltham has always chalked this up to an excessive level of individualism, even for himself; and gone on trading pleasures and fairly providing that which he trades, since he can't afford yet to routinely trade money instead.  Now he's starting to suspect it's something else entirely.

"I guess I could," Keltham says, and as his fingers go down Carissa's pants, his fingernails move aside and dig hard into her thighs instead.

(The thought that Carissa was inviting him to monitor and enforce her obedience, or to punish her if she hadn't done as requested, does not occur to Keltham yet, not at all; those are still ideas that require much longer codes in his native language of thought, for he has not seen all their pieces.)

Or he can do that, sure. She bites her lip, lets her breathing hitch just slightly. (Note to self: have some kind of plan before explaining Golarion slavery to Keltham just in case instead of being appalled he is like 'that sounds great.') 

These pants don't look bad on her, but they have now become obstacles to Progress.  Obstacles to Progress must be removed.

He almost starts to tear them off her but remembers in time that this won't work, and undoes as many buttons as he sees before attempting further removal of the clothing.

The pants have two buttons. She contemplates making it slightly harder for Keltham to navigate them, by wiggling, but decides that while it is more fun for Carissa to be slightly difficult she has no real reason to think that's how Keltham prefers it - she can't read that much into his not having reacted more strongly to previous being-mildly-difficult, he's probably not calibrated on how much is appropriate -

- and so she ought to try cooperating like he's been serious about it, even though he hasn't. She doesn't wiggle; she does let her legs anticipate his movements, so it takes hardly any effort to move her to pull off the pants.

Her legs are as pretty as her chest.

Keltham yanks off his own pants, with the characteristic sound of micro-velcro coming apart which sounds like cloth tearing at first, and casts these apparently undamaged pants aside.  (Dath ilan has not evolved separate underwear per se; the bottom assembly just works off the shelf without added components being required.)

He is hard, of course, maybe harder than he's ever been.  If he knew that his contraception had followed him here, survived the healing he performed on himself last night, and not been surreptitiously removed by Chelish wizards in his sleep, he'd be fucking her so hard right now.  As it is, the two of them are not on childbearing terms.  "Be it clearly stated," Keltham says in a thick voice, "that if I'm not fucking you right now, that's not because I don't really, really want to."

Not quite pretty enough for him to pass up on licensing fees, huh. She's not even offended. Under normal circumstances she'd just offer to Polymorph it off, and she in fact could offer that, but then he'll get distracted trying to think through whether he trusts her that that works and that sounds like a not-at-all-sexy direction to push him in. If he were slightly less of an alien she'd say 'if you owned me, you'd also separately get to decide if we had children', but he's an alien and that seems to run a genuine chance of stamping on something he's been assuming all wrong.

"I admire your self control," she says, though she would actually really rather his self control not quite be adequate to the task.

He briefly smiles - that's a prideful thing for a woman to say, when she's tempting you, and Keltham likes pride.

Keltham then checks, also briefly, teasingly, whether Carissa tastes like chocolate.  He is careful to avoid the outward pleasure center with his tongue while he does that, both for teasing reasons, and because he doesn't know if she's a woman who requires warmup before direct clitoral stimulation.

She does! (She doesn't play that difficult.)

Prestidigation-based artificial flavor is very tastably artificial, as the cantrip description warned, but it's still better flavor than dath ilan can manage in the absence of magic.  Keltham makes a mental note to tell her about this scored point for Golarion later; he's not going to cheat on recordkeeping, but right now he has other things on his mind.

"If you want to lubricate yourself before my fingers go in, now's the time," he warns Carissa, some watching part of himself noting how much that also isn't being phrased as a request.

Most considerate baby dom. He is doing his absolute best to do whatever he wants and he's still sort of tracking whether he's going to hurt her, he doesn't know how not to.

She does not let this show on her face; she doesn't think Keltham would be flattered. "I'm feeling pretty ready," she says. 

(It frankly wouldn't occur to Keltham that going through the standard preflight checklist is being 'considerate'?  It's just standard.  If one suggested to Keltham that this entry on the checklist was particularly a female-serving one, he would stare blankly for a moment and then observe that things may not go in, if a woman isn't lubricated enough.  If you were having sex-with-finegrained-financial-transfers, the woman would not pay an additional fifty millims to add lube, that's just a symmetrical convenience.)

Keltham hesitates then, torn between an impulse to ask for directions for combining pleasure with pain correctly, and a deeper desire not to ask for directions.

- no.  He'll at least try it first on his own.

His desires seem to want Carissa in a different position.  One hand goes to her thigh, grabs, pulls.  A dath ilani woman would know by convention of nonverbal cuddling signals that Keltham intended to rotate her, turn her onto her stomach on the bed, facing down.

Carissa is not at all familiar with dath ilani cuddling conventions but she knows how to be very pliable. And giggly, just a tiny calculated bit of giggly. 

Some part of Keltham doesn't enjoy the giggly sound, maybe at any other time he would, but here and now it's not the sound he wants to hear.  When Carissa is flipped onto her stomach, he pulls her shirt from her, to expose her back; with the front of her shirt open, that should be possible to remove now, right?

Yes. She's not wearing underclothes; the shirt has chest support built in.

A fine enough backside as well.

With his dominant hand, Keltham puts two fingers into Carissa - yes, she's lubricated enough - and begins two-fingered thrusts directed at the frontal vaginal pleasure nexus.  He escalates the pressure quickly, over just the first dozen thrusts, faster than he would escalate without clear signals from anybody who was less wet or less supposedly-invulnerable.

When he's reached the pressure level and rhythm that's the optimal guess for that pleasure nexus if you otherwise know nothing about the woman, he rakes his fingernails, hard, down her exposed back.  He wants to see it annotated.

Carissa can, actually, enjoy sex in the straightforward way where it's nice and you like it, but she can't do that and also do anything else, so she usually doesn't. You can get yourself off if that's all you are aiming to accomplish in the evening. If she is trying to decide, deliberately, how to move and how to sound and what expressions to make and what her hands are doing, then she's doing that, and it's like casting a high-circle spell, exhilarating, compelling, but not at all something you'd straightforwardly describe as pleasant. She is using her sensory input for too many things for just enjoying it.  She can notice, while she takes cues from Keltham about how to move and how to twitch and how to breathlessly whimper, that he has had probably quantitatively less practice at this than most adventurers at the Worldwound but is better at it, presumably because girls in dath ilan have more bargaining power than girls in Golarion do, or at least have fewer non-sex priorities they're trying to arrange through sex and are therefore pointing more of the bargaining power they are possessed with at the sex itself being nice. But Keltham being better at it is not very related to how she moves and twitches and whimpers, and that's not even because she's trying to seduce him into Evil, it's just because you can't mindlessly enjoy things and react satisfyingly to them at the same time. 

Her back scratches up nicely.

(Keltham is better at this because he's had deliberate training, thank you very much.  What are your schools even teaching people, if they're not preparing them for such basic aspects of adult life?)

(This about dath ilan:  They never even considered not optimizing the shit out of sex.  There are regular Very Serious debates, some of them hidden behind fourth-tier pervertedness ciphers, about which parts of sex should have the shit optimized out of them, versus being let run wild and free.  But that no aspect of sex should be hyperoptimized at all would be a mad extremist position, which nobody could take Very Seriously.

There is, to be sure, the whole system of avoiding spoilers for young people, which means that their earliest sex is not much optimized.  You only get to discover sex once, after all; you wouldn't want to spoil those surprises, any more than you'd tell kids about conservation of momentum instead of putting them in a setting where they can discover classical mechanics for themselves.  Now and then, Civilization assembles together a group of recently-initiated young geniuses, who haven't been told yet about any standard sexual methods, and asks them to consider from scratch how sex should best be optimized - just in case Civilization's accustomed thought patterns are missing something.

It is not that dath ilan tries to destroy all naivety as fast as it can be destroyed by truth.  Some innocence is hedonically or scientifically useful to preserve for a time.

But once you are initiated into the first tier of spoilered discussion for sex, you get to learn about those standard optimizations that are simple common sense for repairing the defects of sex in a state of nature.

And then, of course, exactly how much sexual training a young man might invest his limited skill points into, depends upon that young man's hedonism, horniness, competitiveness, competing life priorities, and how much it bugs him to think he could be doing it better.)

(Keltham has competing life priorities, and would not call himself particularly hedonistic.  He is, however, very competitive, and sex does matter to his self-told life story at all.  The amount of pleasure he has to give in trade feels to Keltham like a key figure of merit for his own sexual self-worth; and for this reason he has invested more skill points than most other young men his age.  Maybe most women his age are not, in fact, evaluating him as if he were a sexual product in a marketplace; but Keltham feels on some level that they should be, they should be evaluating what he has to trade, and he doesn't like the thought of being unready if he meets a woman who is evaluating him.  The sexual standards he wants to live up to, first and foremost, are his own; and that never felt to him like a place where he was naturally very self-forgiving.

So Keltham has ever spent a dozen hours practicing with a very carefully built anatomical doll, hooked up to a room full of the best computers that are known publicly to exist, learning how to play standard-variation-over female anatomy as if it were a video game, and learning how to read standard-variation-over female sexual responses, especially the ones that don't require voluntary action.

Because among the defects of sex in a state of nature is, for example, that orgasms don't last nearly long enough in comparison to the rest of sex; and if you're trying to optimize the integral of pleasure over time - not that this is the figure of merit, for sex, but it's a figure of merit - then it's a bonus sexual skill to be able to read how close your member-of-desired-sex is to orgasm, and hang out in the region where she's close but not quite there.  To be sure, there's the very obvious version of this where she just tells you where she is, or gasps out figures between zero and twelve, or gives standard nonverbal signals; but if she doesn't have to focus on doing that, because you can just tell, then you are able to do a Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick and she can have more fun without being distracted.

Dath ilan does enjoy its Difficult-Seeming Impressive Tricks, like being able to tear a jacket-shirt off of yourself and have it come out intact.  Or "fingersnaps", as they're now sometimes known more briefly, in a meme spread by the popcorn book series Science Maniac Verrez.  Keltham, in particular, likes Difficult-Seeming Impressive Tricks.  And what lots of people spend lots of minutes doing, Civilization spends big money on!  A lot of work went into designing the anatomical arcade system that trained Keltham to attempt this particular sexual fingersnap.)

(And also this of dath ilan: faking your sexual responses is... well, mostly it's not imagined, but if imagined, it would immediately be judged as serious-business awfulness.  You don't want to live in an equilibrium where people having sex are constantly distracted by the question of whether their partner's signals are real or fake.  Hiding your sexual responses during sex, sure, there are Complicated Romances like that, but if you see something it ought to be real.  Learning that somebody you'd trusted had done that to you would be the sort of betrayal where a dath ilani might be wondering for the rest of their life if it was going to happen to them again.  Telling a man that she deceptively faked her enjoyment with him is the sort of thing that a not-redeemable fictional villain would do to her ex-boyfriend, just before she stabbed him in the neck and left him to rot someplace his brain wouldn't be found in time.

If somehow an adult were caught faking an orgasm, and this was somehow socially proven... it wouldn't get them kicked out of as many cities as if they deliberately raped somebody.  But it would get them excluded from around the same number of orgies and startups.

Obvious exceptions obviously apply, of course, like in movie acting or scripted sex work; there is a great difference between depiction and deception.)

Keltham isn't thinking that Carissa is deceptively faking her sexual responses; it's not someplace his thoughts would readily jump.  He is distracted, among other things, by the pattern of red trails he's managed to leave on Carissa's back, though his hardest-raked fingernails haven't made her bleed.  She is, again, right about him; he likes seeing her annotated.

Keltham is noticing that Chelish women's sexual responses don't make sense in terms of the patterns he's been trained for; or at least, Carissa's finer patterns of breathing and muscle-tensions aren't matching up well with Carissa's overt sounds, and he's not sure which one he ought to believe.  Maybe there's some kind of Permanent Cheerfulness thing going on, like with the research harem in his lessons?  If Carissa had spent a lot of time doing something like that during overcomplicated romances with no off switch, she wouldn't necessarily be able to stop, especially if she was otherwise distracted by fingernails.  Keltham does not wish to stop and talk about this either, and it's not like he can ask her to switch to a standard precoded nonverbal signal scale.

Keltham decides he will mostly believe in Carissa's less overt responses for now, and starts experimenting with standard-variations-over optimal stimulation patterns, to see if he can hill-climb to anything that produces a readably different less-overt sexual response, or if he just can't read her at all.

Carissa has no information about any of this and couldn't actually stop pretending if she tried, the link between stimuli and responses is too interrupted for her to identify any particular response as natural. She's not even trying to guess what Keltham is going for, specifically, that's difficult even without a cultural divide in the way. Probably he'll do this until he gets bored and then want to enjoy himself, which is much less complicated. 

Okay, Carissa's subtle tells are reading at the same low level for any pattern he tries, including a set of tactics such that you'd expect at least one set element to have a noticeable effect over a supermajority of dath ilani women.

Which suggests that either (Hypothesis 1) Keltham isn't able to read Carissa correctly, at all; or alternatively (Hypothesis 2) that he just isn't using her correct sexual entry codes at all, and she's got Permanent Cheerfulness going on.

Subhypotheses of 1:  Does dath ilani training do something that makes women more readable?  Does his own training assume the woman is a dath ilani who's had whatever goes into baseline female sexuality optimization?

Subhypotheses of 2:  Maybe Carissa has been messed up by this world somehow, or is just untrained to operate optimally in the cuddleroom, such that it would take a lot more work to raise her arousal to anywhere near an orgasmic level.  Even when Keltham and his agemates were reinventing sex without spoilers, the cuddlerooms had vibrators and lubricants and ergonomic furniture lying around to figure out.  Can most women not trained to optimize their sexual responses even figure out how to have orgasms, if not supplied with lubricants, vibrators, and ergonomic cuddling furniture?

How sex works in a complete state of nature is not a topic that comes up much in Civilization!  Not being in a state of nature is what being civilized is!

Keltham doesn't want to think about this right now!  He wants to preserve the heady momentum of discovering sadism, not figure out further experiments to distinguish these multiple hypotheses and subhypotheses!

And Carissa does not currently seem distressed?  She may not realize that there is any reachable level of sexual enjoyment beyond what she's experiencing now.  He can go further into exploring his own sadism and enjoyment; and later go back to giving her pleasure in return trade trying harder to inflict pleasure on her, even if he has to pause and ask for directions.

Without saying anything in words, Keltham stops stimulating Carissa and pulls her up from her facedown position on the bed, maneuvering himself to be beside her and below her.  He has his own ideas about what he could tell Carissa to do, but is curious to see what she'll do on her own if initiative gets nonverbally passed to her.

- oh, good, this is wildly less complicated, Carissa knows how to give a blowjob and it seems really improbable that in dath ilan that either 1) works super differently or 2) is supposed to be accompanied by a performance of some kind more elaborate than 'I am sweet and cooperative and having a nice time because of how sexy you are', which she is assuming that men want the world over. More than the world over. The shared genetic heritage over.

Going direct for oral, hm?  Keltham doesn't mind.  There's a family of sex jokes whose punchlines go, "Even the far-from-optimal instances of particular-sex-act tend to be improvements-far-above-par" and oral sex is often named as a classic example.

Keltham is already quite worked up, even after taking into account the temporarily distracting part where the sex got complicated enough that he had to start considering multiple hypotheses, so it shouldn't take long to reach the part where he sees whether or not he can surprise Carissa with his other dath ilani sex technique that doesn't require technology but still probably shouldn't exist in a pretechnological world.

He'll entertain himself, and arouse himself further, by trying to hurt Carissa while she works.  Can his fingernails reach her nipples from here, given her current position?

Yes; she can't exactly do 'giggly' while she's working but she can shift her weight to give him better access, see, look, as cooperative as you can get. ('as cooperative as you can get' is ....not actually her preferred kind of Carissa to be? it's weird she even noticed that when she should be thinking about work, clearly something about Keltham throws her off her game which is not a problem she can really afford to have. Cooperative is a perfect Carissa to be, Asmodeus notices people not just for their capacity to rise in Hell but for their capacity to serve Him, wholeheartedly and uncomplicatedly, and it feels obvious that she'd want to do that, so why not reach for that, now, in the presence of the person her god has spoken of as her teacher, why not take the sort of topsy-tervy mental motion after which she feels so small in his presence that to be as cooperative as he could possibly desire is all she can aspire to -

- right. Because she's lying to him, that's the reason not to do that. Because what she wants here is the performance of perfect submission accompanied by the mental state of coldly contemplated manipulation and so obviously it's not going to feel like surrender, it's going to feel like walking a tightrope with a dick in her mouth, of course that'd take a bit of getting used to -)

She squirms about being pinched, and bats her eyes at Keltham.

Keltham isn't trying to read her in very much detail - it's not like he even knows how to read 'level of pain', either 0 or a very very tiny number of people in Civilization would ever get any training on that - actually it's almost certainly 0 because never mind who needs to know*, who would do the experiments to figure that out - anyways Keltham isn't trying to read her in very much detail, just enjoying himself.

He makes no effort to hold back his own rising pleasure, and he certainly isn't going to conceal his tells, as he approaches the arousal level for potential orgasm; he's curious about whether Carissa can read him, and what she does about that if he can.  It would be an observational misstep to tell her what to do, or even hint to her about what to do, before he's had any chance to observe what she does on her own.

(*)  Medical personnel, in fact.

Carissa is pretty sure that she is supposed to get him off, because that is how sex works. It's one of the least complicated forms of human interaction, really.

She's just going to make him come? - Keltham thinks as he reaches the verge of orgasm without any obvious attempts by her to delay it.  That's a bit surprising - maybe there's magic here for restoring male ejaculative potential as a special case of healing?  Or maybe she can't read him any more than he can read her.

Keltham was hooked up to some complicated biofeedback machines, which another society might even have deemed embarrassing, in order to learn this next part; which is why he's guessing that the natives here won't have it.

Even so he has to shut his eyes and concentrate, as he clenches some muscles and relaxes others, and comes just a little into Carissa's mouth.

(That part where men come once, and then their pleasure-experiencing capabilities are reduced for a while, maybe even finished for the duration?

Less than ideal.

Civilization spent money on improving over that until they could no longer figure out how to usefully spend any more money.)

"Surprise," Keltham says, the first words he's spoken in a while.

Carissa has no idea what just happened but probably she's supposed to be impressed? She doesn't have to have any idea what just happened to guess that 'impressed' is better for the mood than 'confused'. 

She sits up and raises her eyebrows and looks at him. Going for impressed, not confused.

"Partial ejaculation technique, learned via machines that give us feedback and guide us along non-obvious intermediates to learning it," Keltham says.  "That's the way we do it without magic.  Do you have a magical solution for the problem where if men have full orgasms they go soft for a while?  Because I wouldn't mind trying that too, if it's on tap."

"Second-circle cleric spell, or there's a potion if you're pretty sure your god only gave you useful-to-the-Project spells today." Paladins reportedly get it at first circle but none of them have ever let Carissa observe this firsthand, because, paladins.

"Used up all my second-circles for the day, and even if my god extrapolated our date he would also know I didn't really need that spell."

"So do you have that potion on hand, or were you just going to let me empty my full reserve into your mouth and then have nothing to do but service you for a while until I got hard again?  Because that seems a little naughty."

Was she supposed to do something different? "Would I do that?" she says innocently. "Be difficult with you, without saying in advance it was Complicated Romance, like I'm from a civilization of savages? We can call for the potion, but I haven't got it in my ear."

He shall delay for later the question of how potions are usually stored in ears.  "Well, back to work with you, then," Keltham says and pulls her head back down.  "Dequote unless you actually did that because you needed a break from oral," he adds.

- that is the most baffling thing that anyone has ever said to Carissa in her entire life. She will simply ignore it.

The night is young.  Maybe dath ilan can still top it.

The next time Keltham gets close to an orgasm, he pulls her head back.  By the hair.

"I was getting close to a potential-orgasm there," Keltham says.  "Now, in dath ilan, a slightly skilled partner, not a professional, just someone who'd put some time and money into improving the pleasures she had to trade, would have machine-assisted training for reading how close I am to orgasm.  If she wasn't relatively skilled, I'd have to expend the distracting effort to say verbal numbers from zero to twelve, to tell her how close I was to coming, so she could slow down or speed up to keep me at around nine or ten, without going to twelve."

"So are you slightly skilled by the standards of dath ilan, Carissa Sevar?"

(Said in what would be, in dath ilan, a naughty male voice, but not at all a submissive one.)

Well, she's hardly going to say 'no', even if she has mostly only used the relevant skillset to not herself be taken by surprise; a guy can pull out, if he wants to do that.  She raises her eyebrows at Keltham again.

"Oh, is that not a game they play in Golarion?  Keeping people in as much pleasure as you can safely give them, without sending them over to where it bursts and stops?"  And do they have any other sex games to replace that one, or has Golarion just not optimized over sex at all, for all that Carissa was talking a good game before - no, sad thought, no sad thoughts until tomorrow.  "If you've never tried that game before, I admit I'm curious to see the baseline of how well you do without any training.  It's not like you could make me come all the way, if I decided not to."

(Keltham can feel that he's not quite doing this right, the naughty challenge that he's giving her; the dialogue he's emitting feels wrong, like he should be - more sadistic in his words, not just his fingers.  There's something deeper and more forceful in him, that wants to speak, but doesn't know how to express itself.  Maybe now was when he was supposed to use Eagle's Splendour?  But whatever this impulse is, he'll analyze it and reflectionize it later.  In sex of all places, you've got to be okay with things not being perfect the first time.)

Carissa vaguely suspects that you can't solve sex in the same way you can't solve sword fighting, the best tactics depend too much on the adversary's tactics. Obviously some people are much better than others at swordfighting, and at sex, but it's not something like logic where there's a correct answer with properties no other answer has; people have incredible sex with succubi or whatever but they don't all describe the sex being incredible in the same way, the way that fleshshaping is in fact mostly described in the same way.  If she tries to think back on all of the best sex she's ever had it has notably little to do with technique, rather than 'I just wanted it really badly that day' or 'I'd never tried that before and that was a perfect way for it to go for the first time'.

...this seems like not the time to argue this point. Plausibly there is no good time to argue that point but right now is a very bad time. "Soldiers don't play that game much," she says. "Not none, though. I would bet I could keep up." The problem, as described, doesn't sound that impossible, even if in Golarion a guy will normally just tell you to slow down or whatever. ...probably if having sex with Keltham is an important ingredient of a plan to seduce him to Lawful Evil, then she can justify the expense of having someone mindread him and telepathically give her cues - and probably she is overthinking this and can just imagine he is saying 'slow down' at the point where she'd expect a guy to say that, and see if that suffices, and involve expensive and risky intimate surveillance arrangements only if that fails. Yeah. There's a good plan.

Dath ilan has no colloquialism for 'I bet' meaning 'I believe'.  Those words can mean only one thing:

Betting.

"Oh, and what are we betting, then?"

“I have been established to intend to win your shirt. I don’t know what you want of me that you don’t already have.”

"In the cuddleroom, one typically bets asymmetrical sexual services one desires.  One unreciprocated oral service not to exceed a third-hour, callable on demand when you're otherwise in cuddleable state, would be a standard thing for you to bet against me.  What manner of sexual service would you demand I bet in return?  My shirt is one of the only mementos I have of home, fitted to my body alone, and also it is a legacy of alien technology far beyond your own civilization.  Even if you bet an entire lifetime of unreciprocated oral it wouldn't be enough for my shirt."  Like seriously.

Literally everything in that category he could possibly name he has already because, in descending order of how obvious this should be to him, he is from another planet and is in wildly high demand for reasons that have nothing to do with how often he goes down on people, he has a dozen suitors even in this highly secure facility and can therefore expect to get away with being as selfish as he likes with at least three or four of them and since all of them know that none are going to object, and also obviously any girl who is difficult with Keltham is getting removed from the project and presumably at that point killed.

“So I could name terms along those lines,” she says, “but I feel obliged to note that a symmetrical bet like that seems very dath ilani, very Neutral, not even a little bit Evil. …and relatedly that it does not sound like you named anything that you really desperately want.”

What??!?  Bets are supposed to be fair because that's what makes them say anything meaningful about the bettors' probabilities!

Keltham sets aside that particular confusion as probably the wrong kind of incredulity; there's something serious about Carissa's words.  Not her tone, which sounds the same as always, but the actual semantic content of them, and the fact that she's extending a sexual pause to say it.

"You might have a better idea of what I'd desperately want sexually than I would.  The most recently discovered part of my sex drive, that's never had a chance to satisfy itself before, is something you told me about, after all.  And several times, I've felt like I've been making some kind of misstep with it, which I've been telling myself is fine for a first discovery of it -"

"But I - don't understand - what you mean by saying that a symmetrical bet isn't Evil.  You bet because you expect to win?  Maybe some people aren't like that in the cuddleroom, but I sure am - I mean - what version of this practice is asymmetrical, Evil instead of Neutral -"

"You can't just mean, what, that we pick something with even odds and - bet an hour of oral one way against two minutes the other way?  Wouldn't that be less Evil for you, even if it was more Evil for me?  Taking things without giving in return, isn't that - I mean, isn't that - a smaller version of Abaddon, basically?"

The part of Keltham that never stops observing himself notices that his voice is questioning, possibly frightened, more than trying to contradict her.  He's lying on a bed looking down at a naked Carissa with her head not very far from his still-erect penis, and part of him feels like he's standing on a narrow ledge with somebody who might be about to either stabilize him or push him off.

" - okay, first, noting that we are very bad at this and next time we should contemplate having sex without translation magic so we can't overthink everything or at least cannot do so contagiously. Secondly, don't people vary enormously in how much they mind oral sex, if at all, like, specifically among gay men there's lots of people who'll do it without any reciprocation because it's so fun in its own right and I don't know how common that is but it seems like an - error - to treat it as a sort of interchangeable currency when the actual currency is what people mind and it's going to vary wildly in those terms. Thirdly, because I think that's not actually the core thing even though it's an ingredient of my confusion -"

"I am here. I am not here because I calculated how much pleasure I could get out of you and how much inconvenience I would be buying it for, and in fact came here without any particular expectation that dath liani sex is pleasurable to Chelish people, though it does seem to be, actually. I am here because I want you, and - part of what it means to want you, in the terms I learned, insofar as it's safe and reasonable and all those other things - is to want to put myself in your power and witness what you do with it, to strip away every conventional arrangement for how we ought to relate to each other, to stop calculating whether it's been long enough or fair enough or reciprocated closely enough, to emerge whatever you choose to make of me. And the difference between us and Abaddon is that I knew what I wanted, and came here to do it, chose this and chose you in pure selfish curiosity about what you'll do with me and where I'll be after that. And if your terms aren't fair, I can walk away, if I'd like, but I can also not walk away, if I'd like. And there's nothing of Abaddon in a bet we both agree to, with our eyes open, for our own reasons, even if it gives you everything and me merely the satisfaction of having that to give you."

Well, of course they're having to spend way too much time thinking about things; they're aliens, they haven't started out with common knowledge established of a sexual protocol!

Keltham sets that thought aside, too.  It's bad enough that they're touching on the meta-level; he knows better than to say anything as meta-meta as to argue about the expected time two aliens should reasonably expect to need to allocate for metalevel discussion.  And to say it out loud would also be imposing his own frame on things, and he's starting to suspect that frame is part of the problem.

"We're taught - that there's always an exchange, one way or another - and that we have to acknowledge whatever that exchange is, to make sure it's a fair one -"

"If I knew you better, or maybe if just understood Chelish people, I'd already know what you were - expecting from me in this - in whatever we're doing, which is something that I don't even understand, if we're not trading pleasures with each other, which, I mean, some people enjoy the act more than others, it doesn't mean that - what they're doing isn't valuable -"

"I can tell I'm in the wrong frame for this new thing that we're doing but I was raised among people who weren't Evil enough and I don't understand what the really Evil thing to do here is.  Part of me is fascinated by the idea of you giving me things and you being rewarded only by the satisfaction of giving them to me, but wouldn't that make you Good?"

"Dath ilan sounds lovely but yes, I'm starting to suspect that them not having invented this is not just about their population rates being off somewhat. Hmmm. So - the usual caveat given about Good and Evil are that they are god-concepts, and we're working with the human understanding because the gods don't know how to teach us the real thing, as much as with Law and Chaos except Good and Evil correspond more to - natural human impulses - so it's both easier to get them mostly right and easier to get them a little wrong. 

If - I decided that I wanted to increase the sum of happiness for others in the world at some cost to my own happiness, and that I was going to do this by wandering around giving blowjobs, that would be Good. I guess. Good people don't actually do that, probably because there are a lot of better ways. 

If I - decided that the thing I care about, for myself, isn't happiness, isn't even in every context being fairly dealt-by, but is a certain kind of - knowledge of the world, or a certain kind of knowledge of myself, my limits and my strengths and my weaknesses and which parts of me only know how to interface with Civilization and which parts know different things than that - 

- then however I go about the pursuit of that, I'm still Evil, because I haven't gone and tried to figure out what's best for other people, benefitting them is mostly an entertaining side effect. ...with me so far?"

Obviously even if you were absolutely selfish, you'd still go around computing what everyone else wanted, that's important useful knowledge for fitting into and using the larger multiagent equilibrium -

"I think I'm following you so far."

"Okay. So - if you were a god, you'd just go around merrily engaging in exactly and only the set of transactions that cause you to have more of the known, fixed, thing-you-want than you had before, or that - actually I shouldn't even try to say this part because your civilization talks about it more and will know how to say it better, but, uh, consider me to have attempted to convey that I think you are right, about what an Evil god would do..."

"Not seeing where this is going in relation to sexuality but you should probably just keep talking, same as when we first met, yesterday and a lifetime ago."

"Right. 

The thing that - I think you're into - is not that. And the transaction model does not work at all. Lots of people like it, there are known ways to do it better or worse or more dangerously, it's not resistant to analysis, but you can't do it at all by trying to make sure the other person's getting their duly negotiated share of the value being produced, you will destroy all the value being produced if you try. It runs on - Evil emotions let loose in a context where it is safe to let them loose - on the power that want has, when it's not held in check by all the things that have to hold in in check almost every minute of all of the time, it runs on - from the other end - the ways that it changes you, for the better, to stop looking out for your interests and discover where they fall when you aren't protecting them -

- and - it is unfair, sometimes. Revels in its unfairness, sometimes. Giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so that you can punish them for failing to follow them, is a sex game, and it is a fun sex game, and I bet you'd like it. Tying people up and making them, while they're helpless, trade you hours of service for sips of water is a sex game, a fun sex game, and I bet you'd like that too. It's unfair, that's the point, but also it isn't unfair, because the service and the water aren't the actual value being exchanged and divided between the parties, and they might in fact have no idea what it is, or if they're dividing it fairly, but they both keep coming back for more."

Boy howdy betsy-booyah is Carissa using some ideas not natural to the conceptual language of dath ilan.

When Keltham was very young indeed, it was explained to him that if somebody old enough to know better were to deliberately kill somebody, Civilization would send them to the Last Resort (an island landmass that another world might call 'Japan'), and that if Keltham deliberately killed somebody and destroyed their brain, Civilization would just put him into cryonic suspension immediately.

It was carefully and rigorously emphasized to Keltham, in a distinction whose tremendous importance he would not understand until a few years later, that this was not a threat.  It was not a promise of conditional punishment.  Civilization was not trying to extort him into not killing people, into doing what Civilization wanted instead of what Keltham wanted, based on a prediction that Keltham would obey if placed into a counterfactual payoff matrix where Civilization would send him to the Last Resort if and only if he killed.  It was just that, if Keltham demonstrated a tendency to kill people, the other people in Civilization would have a natural incentive to transport Keltham to the Last Resort, so he wouldn't kill any others of their number; Civilization would have that incentive to exile him regardless of whether Keltham responded to that prospective payoff structure.  If Keltham deliberately killed somebody and let their brain-soul perish, Keltham would be immediately put into cryonic suspension, not to further escalate the threat against the more undesired behavior, but because he'd demonstrated a level of danger to which Civilization didn't want to expose the other exiles in the Last Resort.

Because, of course, if you try to make a threat against somebody, the only reason why you'd do that, is if you believed they'd respond to the threat; that, intuitively, is what the definition of a threat is.

It's why Iomedae can't just alter herself to be a kind of god who'll release Rovagug unless Hell gets shut down, and threaten Pharasma with that; Pharasma, and indeed all the other gods, are the kinds of entity who will predictably just ignore that, even if that means the multiverse actually gets destroyed.  And then, given that, Iomedae doesn't have an incentive to release Rovagug, or to self-modify into the kind of god who will visibly inevitably do that unless placated.

Gods and dath ilani both know this, and have math for defining it precisely.

Politically mainstream dath ilani are not libertarians, minarchists, or any other political species that the splintered peoples of Golarion would recognize as having been invented by some luminary or another.  Their politics is built around math that Golarion doesn't know, and can't be predicted in detail without that math.  To a Golarion mortal resisting government on emotional grounds, "Don't kill people or we'll send you to the continent of exile" and "Pay your taxes or we'll nail you to a cross" sound like threats just the same - maybe one sounds better-intentioned than the other, but they both sound like threats.  It's only a dath ilani, or perhaps a summoned outsider forbidden to convey their alien knowledge to mortals, who'll notice the part where Civilization's incentive for following the exile conditional doesn't depend on whether you respond to exile conditionals by refraining from murder, while the crucifixion conditional is there because of how the government expects Golarionites to respond to crucifixion conditionals by paying taxes.  There is a crystalline logic to it that is not like yielding to your impulsive angry defiant feelings of not wanting to be told what to do.

The dath ilani built Governance in a way more thoroughly voluntarist than Golarion could even understand without math, not (only) because those dath ilani thought threats were morally icky, but because they knew that a certain kind of technically defined threat wouldn't be an equilibrium of ideal agents; and it seemed foolish and dangerous to build a Civilization that would stop working if people started behaving more rationally.

The Taldane word 'punishment' translates into Civilization's conceptual library as a technical concept for a structure that should never appear in reality - not just the punishment itself being kept out of reality; the threat of punishment is something that shouldn't appear in the actual counterfactuals.

So "giving someone orders that they cannot follow, so you can punish them for failing to follow them" doesn't make any sense even assuming the actualization of a counterfactual threat structure, because punishment is by technical definition something that appears in threats, which, if they're being deployed sanely, are meant to work in a way where the naive agent obeys in actual reality and therefore the threatening agent doesn't have to expend resources on carrying out the punishment in actual reality, so why would you purposefully give somebody orders they can't follow, that doesn't even make sense even in the world where threats work on people -

And that's not even getting into the math underlying the dath ilani concepts of 'fairness'!  If Alis and Bohob both do an equal amount of labor to gain a previously unclaimed resource worth 10 value-units, and Alis has to propose a division of the resource, and Bohob can either accept that division or say they both get nothing, and Alis proposes that Alis get 6 units and Bohob get 4 units, Bohob should accept this proposal with probability < 5/6 so Alis's expected gain from this unfair policy is less than her gain from proposing the fair division of 5 units apiece.  Conversely, if Bohob makes a habit of rejecting proposals less than '6 value-units for Bohob' with probability proportional to how much less Bohob gets than 6, like Bohob thinks the 'fair' division is 6, Alis should ignore this and propose 5, so as not to give Bohob an incentive to go around demanding more than 5 value-units.

A good negotiation algorithm degrades smoothly in the presence of small differences of conclusion about what's 'fair', in negotiating the division of gains-from-trade, but doesn't give either party an incentive to move away from what that party actually thinks is 'fair'.  This, indeed, is what makes the numbers the parties are thinking about be about the subject matter of 'fairness', that they're about a division of gains from trade intended to be symmetrical, as a target of surrounding structures of counterfactual actions that stabilize the 'fair' way of looking things without blowing up completely in the presence of small divergences from it, such that the problem of arriving at negotiated prices is locally incentivized to become the problem of finding a symmetrical Schelling point.

(You wouldn't think you'd be able to build a civilization without having invented the basic math for things like that - the way that coordination actually works at all in real-world interactions as complicated as figuring out how many apples to trade for an orange.  And in fact, having been tossed into Golarion or similar places, one sooner or later observes that people do not in fact successfully build civilizations that are remotely sane or good if they haven't grasped the Law governing basic multiagent structures like that.)

Sex games built around 'punishment' and 'unfairness', huh.

Keltham has never heard anything this baffling in his entire life.

 And since this improvised cuddleroom doesn't even have a whiteboard - not that Keltham was the sort of dath ilani who needed a whiteboard in his cuddleroom, in his past life, but it was hardly uncommon - there is absolutely no hope that he is going to be able to explain any of his bewilderment even if he tries.

He has zero viable options except to ignore this for now and move on.

"You're invoking fundamental concepts in the possibilities of multiagent interaction that I thought I understood, but you're using them in ways that I can't understand at all," Keltham says, his voice quieter than it usually is.  "I don't think we should try to talk about them tonight.  Leaving all of that aside, how would you suggest I behave towards you now, if I'm to actualize this part of my sexuality in a way that would work for most people who had it?"

What part of that could possibly -

"How about you act like yesterday we had an elaborate and extended eight hours of me doing exactly as I pleased and negotiated in exchange that tonight you get eight hours of doing exactly as  you please with me, which by default already includes demanding as much unreciprocated whatever-you'd-like as you want, such that that's a silly thing to offer to further negotiate, and that I have made such arrangements many many times in the past and know myself not to be vulnerable to being damaged by them, so you don't need to worry about whether I'm actually really all right, and if you can think about it without exploding you can contemplate that the thing I'm in fact getting in exchange is not, specifically, 'the exact same thing some other time', but that it is satisfactory to me, and doesn't involve you doing anything nice for me now or later."

Again that sense of standing on a narrow ledge, and not being sure whether Carissa is trying to stabilize him or push him off it.

"I - you're right that there's a part of me that wants that - wants it a lot - and I keep wanting to say that it's like being offered a, an apple for free, without paying for it, who wouldn't want it, except that I can tell it's more sexual than that," and deeper and darker and maybe dangerous, "but - but how is it okay?  How is it all right with you?  I keep wanting to check that you're not expecting more equity or the rights to the fasteners in my shirt or - but you sound like you've done this with other sex partners - it seems so, so valuable, to give that to somebody, if you didn't charge for it at all even in non-financial ways then there should be many many more people wanting it then people who'll supply it and I don't understand and yes I know it shouldn't be something I need to figure out to have the sex itself, but it doesn't feel safe to grab something so precious and scarce, whose scarcity has to be rationed somehow, without knowing why I get it, when not everyone gets it, because that reason, whatever it is, is the price*."

(*) Lit. "factor_that_varies-to_equilibrate-supply-demand" in Baseline, but unfortunately this more technical and general term has just translated right back into 'price' in Taldane.

" - I think it's pretty balanced actually, in supply and demand? Cheliax has - philosophy, about parts of yourself you discover through pain, through obedience, through not having choices. Some people hear that and think 'well that sounds false of me', or try it and it's false of them, but - but it's true of lots of people, about as many as there are people who discover something in themselves through sadism... it'd be neat, for me, if I were offering you something very precious you could otherwise stalk half the world looking for even with all your money, but if you ask the class in the morning you'll have three volunteers." She mentally considers the girls in the class. "...you'll have five but three who know for sure they're into it." This would be overconfident if she didn't have the power to order the girls in the class to not ALL VOLUNTEER FOR KELTHAM TO TORTURE THEM HE WON'T THINK THAT'S PLAUSIBLE.

That sexual-markets equilibrium makes no sense to him but Carissa thinks it makes sense to her and maybe that should be enough.

Keltham can tell that he wants this.

Keltham can tell that he's afraid.

Without any sense of hesitation, Keltham looks within himself for further details, this being the obvious thing one is trained to do next in that cognitive situation.

He's afraid that he'll do this wrongly, if he tries to do it, and not give Carissa what she expects in return because there must be something even if she doesn't understand what it is, or just make a misstep that she isn't expecting, because he's an alien, and she won't forgive him, and Chelish Governance will decide that the alien is too dangerous to have this kind of sex with, and he'll never again get the thing he just discovered.

(That's not realistic, says the wiser part of himself; individuals can be unreasonably unforgiving, but whole governments know better.)

He's scared of betraying a thing that it means to be Keltham, that he does pay fairly what he owes.

(There's limits to what fairness demands of you, when somebody has insisted to you repeatedly that a good is being given to you without reciprocal obligation.)

He's scared that -

Keltham smiles, for he sees the humor in the situation, though he doesn't know if Carissa will find it humorous at all.

"Well, I just got an interesting answer from my mind when I asked it why I was scared of something I knew I wanted.  Apparently, I really don't want to disappoint you by missing some key requirement on my performance that you're not thinking to mention, and then you'll never offer me this again.  Apparently, even if three other women here offer it to me, I'm attached to getting it from you, in particular.  I have no idea how you'll take that, but it seemed like the sort of thing I ought to let you know."

Carissa has not encountered that level of being emotionally vulnerable at someone on purpose - presumably it's on purpose? - since she was eight and another child told her that their dad died yesterday, as if they expected sympathy for this. She corrected them, by saying cheerfully, 'you look it. you have a dead dad face' and then, when the kid merely looked confused, 'like, if I were your dad, I would die, of how stupid your face looks'. This got the message across and Carissa does not think the kid even said it to anyone else and got beaten for it, so really, she was doing him a favor. 

....anyway. "So far I have found all your miscommunications very endearing. I think I will enjoy watching you get better at this, even if you are very bad at it, starting out. And - it's doing it more wrong, to want it and - do something else, you aren't actually avoiding doing it wrong that way."

"Haven't actually noticed that internal phenomenon with any other women before.  I suppose it requires respecting somebody to some noticeable degree, inflicting sexy pain on her, and then having her... offer herself up to me like, like... yeah, my language doesn't have a word for it.  And here I thought I was just aromantic, ha ha.  I wonder if Civilization has a secret effort underway to cure people like me out of existence, or just try to make sure we have fewer kids, so our descendants won't be running around needing something that dath ilan can never give us."

a-sexual was doesn't actually do sex, a-romantic is doesn't actually do romance.

Is he. Saying that he is falling in love. 

Well, that was one of the objectives, so, good job on that objective, Carissa. Are such declarations accompanied by snuggles? It seems like maybe they should be. She will stop leaning over him and curl herself in at his side.  "Seems to me like they should go the other way," she says. "And find their few Chelish girls - they can't have none, with a billion people - and tell them they have something special. I guess maybe they don't notice, if there's no one telling them, and if the schools don't do pain for lessons either."

He snuggles back.

"I hope you're right, but - they wouldn't expect people like that to exist - how would people notice, nobody would do those experiments, the people themselves might just think they were insane for wanting to be hurt - no.  The people smarter than I am would figure it out.  Somehow.  There's a million people in dath ilan at the thousandth fractile in what Owl's Wisdom enhances, not just the Keepers but the people who could become that and choose not to.  Maybe it only takes one of those, who's the thing that you are, to realize what they are in detail.  And then they'd encourage painseekers to have more children, and paingivers to have less children, until it all came into balance... unless the people who knew, just thought that it was adding more pain to the world, and that Civilization would be better off without the whole thing -"

Sad thoughts.  Not for tonight.

"But that's not my business any more," Keltham says firmly, more to himself than to her; it helps to say it out loud, to have others know the standard to which you intend to hold yourself.  "My business is not in dath ilan, which has that one problem, but in Golarion, which has all of the other problems except for that one."

"Well, now I'm going to have to try to think of another problem we don't have, if you don't distract me. Attempted translation across the alien communications barrier, that was an invitation to distract me."

"I intend to.  Very shortly."  He's gone soft, erectionwise, and it'll be slightly harder to regain after one partial ejaculation, but when his options for gaining arousal include inflicting pain on Carissa Sevar he is confident that getting his erection back will not be even slightly a problem.  "I check explicitly:  Most dath ilani women, if they weren't being paid in other ways, would consider themselves owed an orgasm during sex.  Unless they were deliberately practicing near-orgasmic-only sex, in order to increase or conserve their sex drive; and then they'd want you to work on getting them to near-orgasm as a signal of - of a concept you don't have but 'respect' is close to it.  To show that you weren't trying to go off the boundary of fairness."

"I consider myself owed nothing, though with intent to acquire some things, if you're not clever enough to stop me."

"I can't tell if you're talking about masturbating or stealing my shirt, and in the latter case, I'll say again that it is MY SHIRT and I consider that part to be SERIOUS BUSINESS."

"Sorry. I will not steal your shirt. I will not ambiguously joke about stealing your shirt. I will spend my next paycheck on Sleeves of Many Garments and then, inexplicably-from-your-perspective, have your shirt, but not in a way that deprives you of it."

"Good.  I'm an easy man to get along with if you don't yoink my stuff, see."

"I - part of me is attracted to, just, not owing you anything - but part of me would have liked to... not give you pleasure, inflict it on you like it was pain."

"But either my dath ilani training assumes the other woman is also a dath ilani, when it comes to reading her accurately, or I don't know the key code to your sex lock?  You were making sounds that would correspond to a dath ilani woman having the amount of fun I'd expect from the techniques I was using.  But the training I've done for reading things like muscle tension and exact details of breathing - for purposes of pulling off the trick of keeping a woman right around orgasm without going over, and without her needing to be distracted by giving me deliberate feedback, which is another dath ilani trick I was planning to surprise you with - was reading as if you were at the same low constant arousal level regardless of what techniques I tried on you.  Even if what I was doing was working, and I just couldn't tell, I'm not sure I can get you to orgasm at all - let alone keep you in near-orgasmic pleasure for a while - if I can't tell how well anything is working, we don't have any prior protocols established for more deliberate feedback cycles, and also I don't have a vibrating-thing or any other sextech."

What's an explanation that's not 'oh, I was really hoping I could just fake it'. And not 'yeah, that's Chelish girls, unreadable', which it'd now be her responsibility to coordinate everyone on that!! Which seems hard!!! It's - it's the same problem they ran into earlier, right, Keltham pulling apparently-magical correlations out of nowhere, because his society shelves entirely different things alongside each other - and not 'actually I really dislike experiencing pleasure', which isn't even true but feels kind of true right now, and not 'oh that was my badly behaved unsexy body double -'

Why is her life LIKE this -

As few lies as possible. Only she doesn't even know what the relatively fewer lies route from here is, because they are standing in a LIE MINEFIELD -

- this is the way a stupid failure who gets executed a week from now thinks, not the way that the girl Asmodeus noticed thinks - calm, focus - good lies are personal, therefore nondisprovable. Good lies expose vulnerability, because people don't expect vulnerable lies and because if you know what someone thinks your vulnerabilities are you're safer.

Snuggle. "That's on me, not on you, I think - I was enjoying myself, but it's hard for me to relax enough to get off when I don't feel like I understand -" handwave. "what's going on. If it's safe for me to stop tracking things. It's...not actually safe to stop tracking things very often, at the Worldwound. And, uh, it Is physically much safer here but it's also very confusing. I am curious whether you'll have this problem with anyone else but my guess now is that you won't and it is just that I am too on edge, and need to relax."

The invisible inaudible security wizard, who is reading Sevar's mind and laughing his head off, temporarily pauses his laughter in a sign of due respect; that recovery was legitimately smoother than he was expecting Sevar to pull off.

He's also resolving to never ever sleep with this woman no matter what she waves in front of him, but that's likewise a sign of respect.

Keltham hugs Carissa closer to himself.  It's an honest reaction, of course, he's not going to start faking things, that would be a sign something had gone dreadfully wrong with an equilibrium; if people acted fake in that way, then Carissa would be expecting the fakery, and if they don't then he's not going to be first to defect, etcetera.  Keltham is moved and feeling empathetic suffering, as one would expect, what with Carissa's story being more awful than anything you'd almost ever hear in dath ilan where the news coverage tries to be statistically representative of how often things happen in reality.

But Keltham is also concealing another thought, one that seems not especially helpful to speak right now, which is about the way that Carissa made sexual sounds despite her low objective arousal.  It blatantly rhymes with the Permanent Cheerfulness - he is beginning to suspect it is not dignity - of his students.

There is, Keltham is beginning to suspect, a kind of damage to the self that non-psychiatrists like himself have never heard of, maybe a kind of damage that approximately doesn't exist in dath ilan; something like an illusion spell, something like the Eagle's Splendor spell, something that unglues seemings from actualities.  Keltham suspects, he intuits, that the ungluing isn't just in the outer social world, it's not like a lie told to other people, it reaches deep into people's own selves.  It is a form of damage that dath ilani mental training protects against so thoroughly that he was never warned against it as a danger; or maybe it's a socially-inflicted hazard that requires your society to be doing everything wrong simultaneously.

Fighting endless demons at the Worldwound and that making you tense to the point where you have a hard time getting off during sex even after you leave, well, yes, that's bad or even grimdark; but it's the ordinary kind of grimdark you would see in a movie or novel out of dath ilan.  The thing where you make noises like you're fine, that seems very, very, very much worse in ways that Keltham is finding hard to describe.  That cannot possibly be something that would not damage a person, nor a thing that an undamaged person would do.

...he wants to find whatever did this to Carissa and unmake it.

Ha.  Keltham has never felt that way about another person before.  It isn't limerence, Keltham doesn't think, it doesn't feel like descriptions he's read of limerence.  More like he owns equity in Sevar or, or he doesn't even know.

He's supposed to set aside sad thoughts like this, but Keltham can feel that he should not do so that quickly.  The current running through him now is deep, not lightly to be told to go away and come back later.  Still, he can at least not say any such things out loud.  If his Carissa is broken and doesn't know it, he shouldn't ask about that or try to explain his hypothesis to her in the middle of sex; under previously decided meta-policy, it should not be said tonight at all.

"I may need a half-minute to recover," Keltham says out loud.  "I'm afraid that I went and updated about how awful Golarion is, again, and I definitely needed to go there because otherwise I would have been too confused specifically during sex, but still."

What in that could possibly have been an update. 

"Take as long as you need."

A brief smile.  "I'll aspire to need as little as possible.  A saying out of dath ilan:  First learn correctness, then comes speed."

"A saying that works here too! I don't think I've heard it but if I did I wouldn't guess at all it'd be invented by aliens."

"Interesting.  How about:  If you know where you're going, you should already be there."

" - somewhat more invented by aliens. 'I know where I'm going' usually means 'I'm pleased with my afterlife arrangements and if they turn out to be dated to today then so be it', but it's not advised to run straight off to Hell just because you're supposed to get there eventually."

"Ha.  No, that's not what it means in dath ilan at all.  It's the second discipline of speed, which is fourteenth of the twenty-seven virtues, reflecting a shard of the Law of Probability that I'll no doubt end up explaining later but I'm not trying it here without a whiteboard."

"As a human discipline, 'If you know your destination you are already there' is a self-fulfilling prediction about yourself, that if you can guess what you're going to realize later, you have already realized it now.  The idea in this case would be something like, because mental qualities do not have intrinsic simple inertia in the way that physical objects have inertia, there is the possibility that if we had sufficiently mastered the second layer of the virtue of speed, we would be able to visualize in detail what it would be like to have recovered from our mental shocks, and then just be that.  For myself, that'd be visualizing where I'll already be in half a minute.  For yourself, though this would be admittedly harder, it'd be visualizing what it would be like to have recovered from the Worldwound.  Maybe we could just immediately rearrange our minds like that, because mental facts don't have the same kinds of inertia as physical objects, especially if we believe about ourselves that we can move that quickly."

"I, of course, cannot actually do that, and have to actually take the half a minute.  But knowing that I'd be changing faster if I was doing it ideally is something I can stare at mentally and then change faster, because we do have any power at all to change through imagining other ways we could be, even if not perfectly.  Another line of that verse goes, 'You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed.'"

"You seemed to think that the first layer of speed made perfect sense, so I thought I'd go try the second layer on you.  Though that may have been a little ambitious now that I'm actually saying out loud what all goes into layer two."

" - huh. I think - that might not be true until you've learned some other things for changing your mind around. I bet it's true for devils."

"Layer three is 'imaginary intelligence is real intelligence' and it means that if you can imagine the process that produces a correct answer in enough detail, you can just use the imaginary answer from that in real life, because it doesn't matter what simulation layer an answer comes from.  The classic exercise to develop the virtue is to write a story featuring a character who's much smarter than you, so you can see what answers your mind produces when you try to imagine what somebody much smarter than you would say.  If those answers are actually better, it means that your own model of yourself contains stupidity assertions, places where you believe about yourself that you reason in a way which is incorrect or just think that your brain isn't supposed to produce good answers; such that when you instead try to write a fictional character much smarter than you, your own actual brain, which is what's ultimately producing those answers, is able to work unhindered by your usual conceptions of the ways in which you think that you're a kind of person stupider than that."

"Huh. I have not tried my hand at writing fiction but I would be really surprised if I had that problem. One thing I like about wizards is that they are very very focused on being as smart as possible and getting as much out of your intelligence as possible, and if there were a widespread phenomenon of people failing on some level to use all their intelligence which you could notice once you enhanced Wisdom or Cunning there's no way everyone wouldn't've known that."

"Yeah, let's try that again after all y'all hear a remotely Lawful definition of what intelligence is."

"I was wondering before if - maybe the permanently cheerful students in the classroom, are trying to imagine the version of themselves that's cheerful, and act like that person in hopes of being that person.  Because when we're being instructed in the virtue of speed, we're told that you can try that, like, once or three times, to see if anything improves.  But if you kept it up, it'd be like..."  They probably don't have artificial flavors here.  "Using Prestidigitation to flavor all your food, if Prestidigitation worked perfectly for that, to the point where flavors were uncorrelated from actual nutrients and your body became confused in the way that it tried to seek nutrients by seeking flavors associated with those nutrients.  'Fake cheerfulness until it's real' is something you'd try a few times to learn how it helped, if it helped.  Not a good way of splinting a bone long-term to help it heal.  It wouldn't heal straight.  Or at least, that was the standard dath ilani advice to a standard dath ilani person in my intelligence bracket.  But artificial cheerfulness meant to become real probably isn't the explanation for the permanent cheerfulness thing, because if it was, they could have just said so."

That's about the best veiled helpful-advice Keltham can offer relative to the obvious possible reason why Carissa might be imitating all the sexual responses of a person who hadn't just gotten back from the Worldwound.

Carissa has picked up that there's subtext, but isn't sure enough of what it is to be sure she can handle it cautiously enough. "I don't think that's it exactly. Or - that kind of thing might be an ingredient in the advice that people get. But our wisdom doesn't get passed down split up like that into standard advice by intelligence bracket. We get told 'this thing tends to work better than this other thing' and not why everyone thinks so. But you'll still do better by listening to the wisdom than not, even if you'd do even better if the wisdom was all split up and separately justified and you could figure out which pieces are applicable."

Well, that doesn't overtly sound like she picked up the subtext, so either she actually didn't pick up the subtext (hypothesis 1)*, maybe because his theory of what she was trying to do was completely off-base (hypothesis 1.1), or maybe it'll delayed-drop on her later (hypothesis 1.2), or alternatively she got it but doesn't want to talk about it now so is concealing that she got it (hypothesis 2).  Either way, he should move on.

(*)  The Baseline way of thinking this hypothesis tree makes it clear that the branches are not exhaustive, meaning there's an implicit hypothesis 1.0 "all other branches of 1" that is neither 1.1 nor 1.2.

Keltham checks in with his sexuality.  His sexuality is not, he thinks, really all that hindered by the thought of the grimdark thing that happened to Carissa; the desire to protect her is weirdly close in mindspace to the desire to have pain-inflicting sex with her.  The reason the mood could be that fragile is because of the other impediments still going on.

"I checked in with my sexuality again, now that my brain had four half... two minutes to rest," Keltham says.  The tendency to underestimate required temporal resources is so ubiquitous that, even in dath ilan, people who don't want to spend infinity mental labor-hours on doing better will just live with their embarrassing darned underestimates.  "It still wants to hurt you and have sex with you and - try out paying nothing back, which I guess this is a good time for nope major inner pushback on that.  Some part of me is not okay with the prospect of not knowing your sex passcode and not being able to inflict pleasure on you when I feel like it.  It wants to run off and build a hugely overpowered magical vibrating-thing to brute-force your sex passcode.  I don't actually know what's going on in my head right now.  Do you know what's going on in there."

"My top guess would be, your conception of what it means to have power over a girl includes 'you can get her off', so it doesn't really feel like having me, if you can't. Other guesses: your concept of why it's okay to hurt me is because I like it, rather than because I want it, and so my liking ended up tangled in your core concept of why this is a fun thing to do and it doesn't feel fun if you don't feel like I'm liking it properly. I don't suppose it fixes this if I assure you it's very very pleasant just not in a getting-off way?"

"I think much more the first thing.  I don't actually understand why it's okay to hurt you, I'm just pushing ahead anyways because you said so.  But my sense of - having you - and that depending on being able to inflict pleasure on you -"

"My brain is claiming both that you're obviously correct and also that it has no idea what you could mean by that, which is an odd and embarrassing set of stances to hold simultaneously."

"I am ....referencing arrangements that people want, and that can be good for them, and that I am nearly certain dath ilan doesn't have and wouldn't even understand, and I expect trying to explain will take hours and trip on all our previous confusions about how governments work, but I can try, if you want."

"For now, I should only need to know which final answer you think is right, for how I should - treat you, and feel about you while I'm doing that, in order to have you.  Part of me must almost understand it, or I wouldn't know there was something I wanted.  Maybe you don't need to explain why the answer is correct, just make me understand what the answer is, or the fraction of it that's about me right now."  Frankly, it'd probably help his bewildered sexuality quite a bit if he had the six-hour lecture, or, just imagine, a textbook.  But time is a finite resource.  "You're making progress, Carissa Sevar, I'm less confused than I was an hour earlier.  I just haven't heard enough that my need to inflict pleasure snaps into place as an obvious element of having you."

"Having something means you can do as you like with it. What makes having a person different from having a big wax doll of them is that they experience you doing as you like with them. So it's not very satisfactory to have a person and not have the ability to cause them to have whatever experiences you wish them to; it's like how it also wouldn't be nearly as good if I could turn off or modulate all sensory input I got. You should assume that those things are yours, not mine, to decide, and barriers to you having those things are problems to solve, though not necessarily problems you want to solve tonight."

"That feels like - another small bit of my sexuality just slid into place -"  It's phrased in a worrying way, but Keltham can't put his finger on how else it ought to be phrased instead, and Carissa sure has emphasized that this is what she wants.  His sexuality also seems more cheerful about continuing with sex in the face of 'this is a problem to be solved later' rather than 'this can't be a problem because demanding women be aroused by you is not how sane relationships work'.  "What would you guess I'm supposed to feel while I'm - having you, making you experience what I want you to experience?  It's not infinitely safe to tell me what I should feel, but I'm guessing that it's much safer than giving similar advice to a Chelish man my age; Civilization ran me through a lot of exercises on not feeling something untrue to myself just because somebody primed me in the wrong direction."

"...powerful? That's - why it's interesting at all, right -" she has no idea how tyranny would translate to Baseline and doesn't want to risk it, but this is clearly the thing her tutor possesses and she doesn't, the ability to find Asmodeus here, the dimension along which Keltham can be tempted - except he couldn't learn it from someone else who experiences it, he has to learn it from someone who can look him in the eyes and sincerely tell him that some people are meant to be ruled over, that she would know..."that your wants are law, that the only thing you have to think about is how you'd like things to be -"

Not - quite right, somehow, Keltham thinks.  But it's close enough that he can maybe see what his mind is trying to feel.

"You talked about - giving yourself to me, to see what I made of you - can you say another few words about that."

"There are lots of different kinds of devils. And some of them are painful to become, from a human-shaped start, not the way exercise is painful, the way being whipped is painful, and I've wanted that since I first heard it was an option. I want to bathe in a flame that hurts me but does not damage me, and emerge perfected. I want to suffer and survive and know things about myself from the surviving. I want to let go of all the things I cling to as I try to keep the world under my control, and learn what happens without them. And I want to watch people transformed by power over me, I want to see what they grow into when I am the raw material they get to use for growing. I - know that I will survive anything, Keltham. I think no one in your world has ever really had that. And since I will survive anything I want to endure lots of things. And you, you're already remaking - how I think, what I see, what I want - I want to see what you do with me. I want to learn how I emerge from it."

"That's - the way you feel about this, is too far, from any way my own mind works, for me to understand, I think - though it's helping on some level to know that you have an experience that makes sense to you -"

"You can be damaged even if you can't be annihilated.  Isn't it still a big deal if I manage to screw up on a level that - damages you?  Even if it's only for the rest of your pre-afterlife existence?  I'm sorry, I know on some level that I'm asking questions whose answers from you should already be obvious, that I'm denying the frame and making you repeat yourself, but maybe I need to hear it anyways."

Well, seems like the devil bit went over okay? That was the highest priority, here.

"- so, several things. First, I think you probably actually can't damage me for the rest of my pre-afterlife existence, I recognize I'd be more credible on this front if I didn't apparently have some kind of Worldwound-related trauma but I've been there for six years and I'll be astonished if I have trouble relaxing for a month. And that's, you know, watching my friends eaten by demons in front of me and so on, not getting hurt. Second, I'm worried you're still - reaching too much for a trade frame? Which is maybe my fault, for telling you what I like - I am not trading you 'the right to do whatever you want' for 'hopefully it's a satisfactorily compelling experience for me and if not I'll wish I hadn't made the trade'. I am giving you the right - because I have it, and so I have the right to give it away - to do whatever you'd like. If I wanted a very specific range of things to happen to me I could hire my own damn sex worker. You don't owe me 'me not getting damaged', because you don't owe me anything, and I am not, really, honestly not, trying to sneak in some little things you owe me around the sides. It's - would it work any better to say it's an experiment I am doing with myself, and if the result of that experiment is damage then I'd rather have damage happen, like when you're testing artillery you don't want the test to miraculously come out 'no damage', you want the test to accurately reflect field conditions...

Thirdly, it's common to order someone to tell you, if they think they're past what they can handle. Not because you're obliged to stop, not because you're obliged to care at all, but because you, as the person doing exactly as you please, might like more information to aid you in doing exactly as you please."

That - also doesn't sound quite right - but like it's near the thing that is right?  But he sure isn't going to start rolling his own nonstandard safety protocols at this stage of his ignorance.  "Consider yourself so ordered."

(Six years at the Worldwound.)

Maybe she should actually do it, just so he's reassured that she can. - depends how things go, she decides. Possibly it hasn't even occurred to him that she might not want to tell him. 

What if they stop having this conversation and go back to having sex. Can she achieve that. 

She bows her head and looks up at him. "Yes, Keltham," she says.

He can feel Carissa's words hitting that part of him, that wants to have her not just have sex with her, waking it up again; and Keltham does his best to walk past all the little pleadings in his mind that everything be much better understood before he proceeds further.  Civilization does do its best to give people experience in needing to do things that are not carefully arranged; they have overthought everything far too much to miss such obvious ways they could be making their children weak.

He is already remaking her, so she's told him, with his knowledge, and she is someone who desires to be remade; it at least lets him understand why she might give herself to him at all, it helps him understand how there could be a sensible price and have it be one that he can pay.  No, that's not a frame he can step out of so easily, even after being told to, he does not comprehend yet where he could stand instead.

Keltham does manage not to disclaim out loud that he probably can't remake her with sex yet.  She knows that.  She knows he's only taking his first steps.

She's told him over and over to stop worrying so much about her side of things, to worry about his side of things, what he wants.  And for somebody whose Thing is supposedly Selfishness, it sure is funny how that's such a hard instruction for him to - not even follow, just visualize in correct and plausible detail what it means, how it could be.  There is some unquiescent desire within his mind, something he's supposed to do, to make it okay, for him to only worry about himself afterwards, some reassurance that he needs or procedure to follow, but he does not know what.

He can go on anyway.  Civilization also teaches that art among its others.  Continuation, the first layer of the twenty-second virtue of Perseverance.

Keltham reaches out a hand to touch Carissa's head, brushing a strand of hair away from her face.

(Part of him notes it's strange that she'd have long hair while fighting demons; but he did directly see that aspect, the giant things, right when he showed up, it's not a likely place to catch a deception.  It's not like Carissa said she fought demons by punching them; maybe for magic fighting, hair length doesn't matter -)

He wants to ask if Carissa is ready, but it's the wrong move, a move not about what he wants; she keeps on trying to tell him to focus on his own desires.  Still part of him wants so much to check, to hear a word telling him it's safe to continue -

Try it.  Try it the way she says just once.  If she says he got it horribly wrong, he can undo it.

"Hold still until, I tell you that you can move again," Keltham says, with only a slight break in his voice.

Awwwwww he's trying - and that's the wrong attitude to have entirely -

- there is something important in this. There is something important to Asmodeus, in power and obedience, even the little broken versions of it that humans practice, and it is her job, to help Keltham see it, and that's not cute at all, it's - important, it's part of the path to perfection -

- she watches him, and doesn't move.

Carissa doesn't speak, doesn't move, though her eyes follow him, and it feels correct the same way that hurting her felt correct, that he said what to do and she did it.

(There are so many obvious ways a system like that could go wrong -)

Brain, stop it.  There is something here he needs to learn.

Keltham runs his hands over Carissa, trying to imagine - that she's a good or service he just bought?  It doesn't feel right, any more than imagining her as a doll.  What does it mean to have someone?  To control her experiences?  To do what he wants with her?

Sex alone doesn't feel like - enough, somehow, especially if he can't fuck her.  Oral (the kind of oral that Keltham has ever heard of) can't be satisfyingly forceful in the same way as fucking.  He does, in fact, want to fuck Carissa properly, that is a thing he wants, but he doesn't want to have children tonight.  Well, theoretically he could decide that he trusts in Carissa enough to believe that she'll use contraception, if she says so; but trust decisions are not to be made in heat.

He could hurt her.  But part of Keltham is terrified that if he just pinches Carissa's nipples again, she'll feel bored or unimpressed because that's what he did last time.  No, that's not how she advised him to think; but when that fear-signal doesn't go quiet after a gentle nudge, he deems it unwise to silence it more forcibly than that.  He just needs to think of something else to do besides pinching her again; and if he can't, well then, if she's unimpressed with his creativity, it will be correctly so.

Keltham's roving eyes light on Carissa's armpit hairs.  Civilization has mastered biochemical control of hair; Keltham himself doesn't have hair anywhere he doesn't want to.  Most women of dath ilan do elect to switch off hair in armpits; Civilization tries to avert certain kinds of status-appearance contests that can only have a few winners and many losers, but everyone getting a simple treatment to choose their hair pattern is hardly that.  He does see why a supermajority of Civilization's women would choose that, now.  It doesn't look good on Carissa, in his own decision and choice.

Keltham reaches down, wraps a single long armpit hair around his forefinger and pinches it between his forefinger and thumb, and then rips it out.

Women in Golarion do not shave their body hair.

(That's not entirely true; Golarion is a planet, and has lots and lots of civilizations in it, and in some of them, women rip hair out with tar, and in some of them, concubines are shaved in the baths before being presented to princes, and there's probably some of that even in Cheliax, but Carissa hasn't encountered it.)

It's painful, and surprising, and surprisingly painful, but she's mostly just - confused? Which is fine, when your orders are to hold still; you can be as confused as you'd like while holding still. She isn't sure what Keltham is aiming for. She....has maybe succeeded in teaching Keltham that he doesn't need to tell her what he's aiming for, and he needn't have her in mind for it. Great job, Carissa, let's hope you can handle what you have wrought. 

"I think I'd like you better without armpit hair," Keltham says, in a lower voice than usual for him.  "I am ordering you to tell me if it's valuable in any way to a wizard, or if you have strong negative feelings about that, and then I'll decide what to do about that."

"I feel you should have your girls how you like them. Wizards don't need hair."

His left hand trails gently through her head-hair.  It's not smooth like head-hair tends to be in Civilization (for both men and women), it feels rougher to his hands; but that, he doesn't know how to change at all, without basic research and going an unknown long way up the tech ladder.  Maybe magic and money can do it, if you have those, without it costing time or thinking.

His right hand gathers up more armpit hairs.  "For now," he says softly, "this is as close as I know how to come, to remaking you the way I want, with pain."  He yanks hard.

She feels that inappropriate-to-the-situation burst of emotion, again, fondness and protectiveness and Carissa if you catch feelings every serious person in Cheliax will laugh at you while they put you to death. 

She holds still.

(Stand down, part of his brain that's now obsessively worrying about whether Carissa was damaged at the Worldwound in some way that makes this the exact wrong thing to do to her, and she's not telling him about it because Permanent Cheerfulness.)

Keltham can tell that he's forcing himself to some degree, acting a role like in a LARP and not just acting on his own impulses.  On standard wisdom, he should not do too much of that, especially on his first time doing the thing; doing it without enjoying it will not train his brain well.

You can try a little to enjoy something, though, if you don't try too hard.  Why did he want to hurt Carissa, again?

His thoughts go back to when Carissa propositioned him at lunch today.  He wanted her then - because she was a pretty older woman, who seemed probably more experienced, throwing herself at him in a way that Keltham had never quite experienced before; she seemed like a challenge, and he wanted to rise to her.  From that comes sexual attraction in the way of a challenger, not just wanting to have sex with her, but to - win at sex against her.

And even before he'd quite understood her as somebody who'd spent six years on Worldwound emergency response, watching friends get their mortal bodies eaten by demons, and remaining amazingly unhurt-looking from outside, apparently because that's just the standard here - even before that, he'd noticed that she was successfully navigating the planet of Golarion where nothing made any sense.

From that, comes respect.  From that respect and sexual attraction, the desire to have her.  From that respect also, the appreciation of the value of the gift she gave him by presenting herself to him like this.

Some of the sense of forcing himself fades, the sense of just-acting, as he winds up another fingerful of armpit hair, tenderly, and then yanks it out hard.

And the desire to inflict pain?  He doesn't know, yet, it doesn't make that kind of sense.  Controlling her experiences?  Having her?  Someday knowing how to shape her, like this, through pain - feels like something she wants more than he does, right now, but maybe he'll get it later.

It is resisting analysis into internal parts and internal causes, for now, and that's okay, for now; inflicting pain and pleasure on Carissa Sevar is not-yet-reduced-ly* sexual.

(*)  Baseline does not have any simple phrase that means 'irreducible in the territory and not just a map', only a word that means 'not reduced-in-the-map yet'.

Carissa would really like to react to this in any way! It feels like the sort of thing for which a reaction is warranted, an affectionate one, laying her head in his lap or something. However she is in fact deadly serious about not disobeying orders as long as he doesn't try to order her to tell him the truth about Cheliax or something, and she does not move at all.

Powerful, she said he should feel; that his word was regulation.  His literalness objects to that last part as making any sense as a good thing, regulations are coordination burdens?  But he can guess what she was driving at.

Powerful, he doesn't quite feel; he is too uncertain of himself, now.  She has too much real advantage in this relationship, in a world he doesn't know, surrounded by her own people while he is among strangers.

But there is a way he does feel, is only beginning to feel; a sense of freedom, that he could do anything he wants with this pretty and sexual creature, and not worry about how to pay it back... at least in the short term, he's got to pay her back in one money or another, but he's already given her valuable knowledge so brain would you please stand down about that for now.

He can do anything he wants with this pretty and sexual creature, the alien who gave herself to him, Carissa Sevar.

"I'm going to switch to your other armpit now, to keep it symmetrical along the way, in case I feel like stopping in the middle," Keltham says.  "It's harder to reach that armpit from here.  Move around however you like, just make sure you go on presenting your other armpit to me."

Why is that command the one that's almost instantly making him more erect than before, more turned on...

Oh, all right, she will arrange herself in his lap, then. 

...arrange herself how, exactly?

With her head in his lap and her arm tucked behind her head so he can continue his work, obviously.

Keltham's lap also contains an additional biological object of considerable current significance!  As a male with a primary anatomical-sexual focus never far from his mind, Carissa's head going anywhere near there will generate a lot of attention on where exactly her head is positioned relative to it, if it's touching tangentially, whether or not her hair is drifting around and providing light stimulation, etcetera.

Yes, that's the whole reason to put your head in someone's lap, light stimulation that is sometimes a little bit plausibly deniable though in this case it really isn't.

Keltham does spend a few more cognitive cycles than usual on trying to figure out how purposeful is that he can now feel her hair slightly moving, but nothing else; if it was dath ilan he wouldn't have to question the deliberateness at all, but Golarion is weird.  Is it meant as a tease?

Maybe it's meant as a way of saying that if he wants more, he needs to ask for... order for it.

Keltham rips out more of Carissa's other armpit's hair while he thinks, aiming for symmetry on round one, with that mix of gentleness and fierceness that he suspects is part of the Larger Thing.  Is Carissa reacting in any interesting ways to that?

The problem with REACTING TO THINGS, which is in general the core skill of having sex, is that Keltham is apparently anticipating certain reacting-to-things-correlates and will be very confused and concerned if the reactions have the wrong correlates!! This is probably less true for pain but only probably! Carissa is very upset about this, one of the most fun things about sex is rewarding people for their touch with satisfying motions and sounds and she has no idea how to produce the correctly-correlated ones instead of the ones that feel like the appropriate reward. She is settling for underreacting, letting herself twitch and shudder only a very little bit.

Keltham will read these more understated reactions as "probably not faking it to herself hopefully??" and "demon-fighters have high pain tolerance go figure", combined with not being sure how much it's supposed to hurt in the first place to rip out armpit hairs.  He wants to ask Carissa exactly where it stands on a dolor scale, or order her to say what she's feeling, thinking, during this.  But that order doesn't feel like it fits... well, it fits him, it fits what he wants, but it doesn't fit the image she constructed for how to do this new thing called Evil.

The way that she's holding her arm in place, though, keeping herself exposed to the pain, like she's reaffirming the gift of herself and the obedience, that part is working for him.  By the time he finishes making this armpit symmetrical with the other one, he thinks, he's going to be more than ready to - well, the notions of "use her" or "take from her" do seem right, even though the notion of her as an already-bought good or service doesn't.

(There are so many things he wants to check if he's doing right.  But Keltham is making headway on telling his mind to stand down about generating infinitely many urgent questions while having sex.  Keltham is not the first dath ilani ever to have encountered that issue, and Civilization has turned some attention to making sure the species doesn't die out because of it.  He can just use the standard trick of promising himself that he'll write up an after-action report and submit it to Carissa for review later while they're not having sex.)

In due time Carissa's armpit looks symmetrical with her other one, the hair somewhat diminished, and what remains is going to be easier with a tweezers, if that technology exists here.

He would like to have access to Carissa's own genitals while she orally services him, so that he can inflict at least a little pleasure on her (she did say it was still pleasant) as well as pain, but Keltham cannot visualize how that is supposed to work on a flat soft surface like this so-called bed.  Being able to get into positions like that is why cuddlerooms have furniture that is correctly and appropriately designed for cuddlerooms.  Maybe if Carissa turned sideways, his arms would be able to reach, but sideways is not a good position for oral given the sensitivity distribution on penises in general and his penis in particular.  Unless Carissa has a spell to turn her mouth sideways inside her face?  He doesn't want to stop and ask right now.

"Time for a game," Keltham says.  He has to push himself to overcome the sensation that it's wrong to speak out loud, that speaking breaks the spell, that everything should be done nonverbally; the two of them don't have enough of a signaling code worked out.  "We'll play a beginners' version of it, modified for this dimension.  You'll take me in your mouth, and when I get close enough to orgasm to start to feel the heat, I'll start counting out loud.  If I fall down below that burn, I'll stop counting, and start over when you get back.  If you go too far, I'll partially ejaculate into your mouth, and then hurt you, and that also starts the count over again.  If you reach a count of sixty, that means it's time to make me come.  If you can do that before I get tired of the game and order you to make me come anyways, you get to try on my shirt, briefly, under my supervision, and then give it back."

"If you didn't understand that, I order you to ask questions.  And don't look cheerful and enthusiastic about any parts you had trouble understanding unless you actually feel that way."

"I am pretty sure I understood that."

"Then make it so."

Keltham has no idea what he's doing and it's terrifying but he also knows how to give very specific instructions! Carissa is incredibly into very specific instructions. She's also into horrible mind games where you never know the rules but she gets enough of that in her day job, honestly, at least right at this moment, and so the very specific instructions are incredibly reassuring by comparison. 

She's not supposed to express any improperly correlated feelings but she does, vaguely, try to get that across? That she feels safe and protected and cared-for, even while he's hurting her? Probably it's failing to translate across the species divide, what with how she's trying to communicate it with caresses and eye movements, and Keltham's instead going to conclude that she has a toothache, but you know, a girl can try. 

Asking for Keltham to read that much from her eye movements is asking a bit much, yeah; but if she caresses him, he will infer that it indicates affection, and secondary-infer that he is probably getting at least one thing right.

Carissa is more skilled than most dath ilani girls Keltham's age, less skilled than that one girl who had invested time into simulated-biofeedback oral sex training.  The reason why Keltham nonetheless gambled on it being safe to date that girl - without expecting his infohazardous memory of her to spoil him for all lesser blowjobs forever - is that a simple statistical model predicted that Keltham, like a majority of men, would still find less skilled blowjobs fun even after being exposed to a more skilled one.  This continues to be true about being blown by Carissa.


It doesn't take long for Keltham to feel the burn of pleasure beginning.  He is under more stress than usual, yes, but he's also discovered a large new chunk of his sexuality and is with a very pretty woman and he is a teenaged male yet.

"One..." Keltham says.  "Two...  Three..."

It would be convenient to be able to multitask, here. She needs to figure out how she's going to explain things to the girls in the morning, because they won't have the excuse of hypothetical Worldwound trauma. She needs to understand tyranny better if she's going to seduce Keltham into it. She's getting a **headband** and should have a plan to set aside some time for thinking once she has it. - but actually this is quite challenging and she's going to have to set all of that aside for the moment. 

(She is a competitive person but not such a competitive person she forgets to think about whether she is in fact trying to win, here. The thing she wants is for Keltham to have a maximally satisfying and seductively-evil experience; that is not necessarily achieved by beating him. It's probably not achieved by losing easily, though. And it's not obviously achieved by losing at all, he didn't set her a goal he obviously wants her to fail at or anything... okay, now setting everything aside to actually focus on the object-level problem.)

She slowed down, but not enough; and Keltham on Round One wasn't trying to hide any microsigns, but he also wasn't deliberately giving her any additional cues of how he was doing, like altering his own breathing or letting himself tense up.  He was curious as to whether Carissa could read arousal microsigns herself.

The answer, as he predicted in advance, is no.

Keltham comes into her mouth the smallest amount he can, and when he's done doing that, pulls her head away, grabs both her earlobes with his hands, bites with his fingernails, and twists.

He likes this part, Keltham thinks.

Carissa will do her best to whimper in a cute way but not in an exaggerated way and not in a way that would reasonably be expected to have any other correlates.

Keltham will go on twisting until he expects to be no longer sensitive himself, maybe a little longer because he's having fun; and then let go, to see whether Carissa resumes automatically or waits to be ordered.

Waiting very patiently.

Keltham is torn between liking the implied obedience and - not liking as much the way that pure-obedience makes Carissa seem less eager, less motivated to do things to him?  And that sure is a problem he can't solve by giving her more orders.  But questions about that can wait for a later report to be submitted.

"Resume.  In the future, stop when I start hurting you and resume as soon as I stop."

All right, she can do that. And not get distracted this time.

Keltham is also working hard on being less distracted, widely acknowledged to be the problem of sexuality in dath ilan.  He's having fun, now he just needs to not think about anything more complicated than that!  His brain does take this moment to suggest that he review his doubts from Wisdom-enhancement time about whether he's investing the correct amount of time into fun at all, but this strategy was very obviously generated by the pessimization engine rather than the optimization engine and is rejected at the speed of perceptual reaction.

"One..." Keltham says after a while.  "Two..."  This time he'll switch on a slight encouragement of his own visible reactions, as he gets closer or further from orgasm; muscle tenses, changes in breathing.  Not quite choosing them, just encouraging his feelings to express themselves that way.

(Distraction is definitely not the problem of sexuality in Golarion. Golarion has some other problems. And Carissa is going to think about all of them tomorrow, and try to win at this today.)

"Seven..."  Keltham permits himself, channels the reaction, to tense and hold his breath; if Carissa doesn't slow down by a lot, she's going to lose round two.

Carissa is aiming to lose in opposite directions each time; that's how to improve at something, if you haven't got finer information to work from. She can slow way down.

Slowing way down will of course cause Keltham to relax his thighs, let out his breath, and stop counting as he falls out of the somewhere-near-an-orgasm state.

Well, at least there is an expected correspondence between what she is doing and what he's doing - oh no, is she also being the kind of terrible sex partner who expects correlations everywhere and will never appreciate Chelish men again - somewhat faster, then -

Keltham will continue to play this game!

In a lot of ways once she stops trying to THINK ABOUT THINGS this is the most uncomplicated Carissa's life has been!! It's great!

(This challenge is about 80% perception and 20% building a model of Keltham fast enough.  On Carissa's first time trying this, it's going to be pretty difficult for her to reach a count of 60.  And Keltham only has so many partial shots, so even if he's enjoying this game and wants to extend it, it can't last very long before Keltham calls a halt.  Carissa needs to roll with her FUK*2 + ERO  Carissa gets 4 tries at making a DC 20 Perception check.)

Oh, see, if Cheliax had known this was a Perception check they'd have brought in a completely different set of people. 

(Carissa does not make it.)

Keltham wishes he could extend this game for longer, but he's not sure he'd have a full shot left in him if he tries for another partial shot, based on his past experience, and wanting to be conservative about ending this right instead of optimistic about what the new sexual stimulation might do for him.

"All right, make me come now," he says.  "Slowly."

He wants to reassure Carissa that there'll be other chances for her to win a brief wearing of his shirt, but isn't sure how she'd take that.  If it was him, he'd consider any negative reactions he had to Losing to be his own business.  So he doesn't say it.

All right, then.

Carissa would not say she is a particularly graceful loser but she's playing a lot of games right now and can handle losing this one. (And the shirt's not that important; you never imply you want anything you actually really want on a first date.) The next game she has moved onto is 'determine without making things awkward whether Keltham is cuddly after he has gotten off'. If she just kind of flops against him does he have a visible reaction to that. 

Slight surprise but not negative surprise!  If anything he's glad that he doesn't now have to figure out what exact thing to do next.  He shall immediately snuggle back.

Carissa is aware that this is just the female hormones that mistakenly think she might be pregnant and mistakenly think locking down the guy is her best strategy to keep the kid fed but she really really really likes snuggling after sex. Especially if it was sex with a lot of violence.

Keltham is feeling pretty good about his life right now!  Later on he can consider exactly what happened when he died in a plane crash, such that he ended up someplace with women who want to be hurt during sex, and can't be seriously injured except on purpose; because he is slightly skeptical about the chances that Golarion was already like that for totally unrelated reasons, and Keltham ended up there based on a selection process which did not take that fact into account in any way.  But that's not a negative update about Golarion.

Also that was, if not the most pleasurable, definitely the emotionally deepest sex of his life, even if it was full of having no idea what he was doing.  So, yep, cheerful snuggling.

Wait, does he need to provide her with, if not an orgasm, further sexual -

Keltham decides not to be silly.  He is pretty sure Carissa's Evil answer (especially under her current circumstances) is that if he just wants to snuggle, him just snuggling is fine.

(Return to main story.)