Yaisa sits on his lap. "Do you know what I think you are?" she says. "I think you are a nice boy who would love all kinds of things you've somehow failed to realize you can now just have. It's like if you were to half think to yourself that it would be nice, to arrange for a girl some kind of wonderful torment that doesn't require your direct supervision and then walk off and leave her to her fate while you go teach logic classes, you would not particularly have the other half of the thought that you could just do it any minute you wanted to. But maybe I'm wrong and it's just that you never ever even once had the first half of the thought, which is strange, because I don't even top much and I had that almost as soon as I felt desire."

Okay the lap and the questions both simultaneously were a bit much for his brain to handle right away but, he is definitely not asking Yaisa to stop here.  Or slow down.  Or change anything about herself really.

"Yeah, you've got me.  Back in Civilization, I shut thoughts like that down, because, I mean, I could not afford to pay for hiring a full-time sex worker who I wasn't even using full-time and was just, having things happen to her while I wasn't around, for most of the day.  Back in Civilization, that's the territory of, first make your first hundred thousand gold pieces and then dream about that.  It's not particularly healthy to fantasize now about things you can only get later."

"No submissives, see.  Even if somebody was in love with you, they wouldn't particularly want to do that for you."

"I would be so rich if I had gotten dropped on your Civilization," Yaisa says longingly. "....anyway. Now you made your first hundred thousand gold pieces, or have the purchasing power as if you did anyway, so you have some dreaming to catch up on, that's my diagnosis."

"You sure would be rich," if you were real, the thought inevitably comes to him, and gets tossed aside much as he previously tossed aside thoughts about hiring full-time sex workers.  "Though, I mean, possibly even more because of your magic and your otherworldly knowledge.  But yeah, also the Keepers would secretly tell the twenty richest people in the world, who had already found out they were sadists, and who you were predicted to like a lot, that there was one pretty masochist whose time they could bid on; and they would be your harem."

"My brain is still refusing to try and figure out what it wants to do with you, with an offer like that.  It seems to think that whatever it comes up will be something it's not allowed to have and you'll actually say no and then it will hurt.  Do you want to name - one thing?  One of the least perverted ones, so as not to shock me."

Yaisa is pretty sure even alter Yaisa would take a moment to herself to privately boggle at the idea that he believes she could say no to him so deeply that he's refusing to figure out what he wants out of anticipation of how it'd hurt if she did. 

dath ilan would make her very rich and she likes it just for that but what a terrible place it must be for knowing what you want!! 

"You could tell me to stay here while you teach your afternoon lecture and touch myself but not get off until you come back," she says patiently to this tragic abused refugee of Good.

The sudden flood of desire that rushes through him then is strong enough that Keltham feels (falsely) like he is having trouble breathing.

Dath ilani male clothing is by default made to contain and direct erections in such fashion as to not be outwardly visible; if somebody is sitting on your lap, they may be able to tell.  Yaisa can probably tell.

He cannot tell her yes, his brain is still confused and halted by that impossible offer, but such a thing as Yaisa has said, coming from a girl on his lap, has to be answered somehow.

"Carissa thought you were a masochist," Keltham says hoarsely.  "Are you?  If the answer is yes, I'm going to bite you."  He's not sure if he's allowed to ask permission, but this seems like it should serve the same function.

Yaisa feels that Keltham was falsely advertised as requiring advanced technique to seduce. This is not advanced technique. This is extremely beginner technique. Has Carissa Sevar just been reporting to everyone that she seduced Keltham with extremely advanced techniques and no one has checked. Or maybe Carissa Sevar did seduce Keltham with extremely advanced technique and as a result everyone assumed he required it, somehow.

She does not answer Keltham but she slides her hands under his shirt and raises her head to bear her throat to him and whispers "find out". 

That doesn't make any sense, first because you should know if somebody is a masochist before you bite them, and second because even after you've bitten them you're not going to be able to tell from the taste if they were a masochist or not.

...but it's sufficiently obvious that this is actually 'yes' that he only thinks those thoughts momentarily and in a fraction of his mind before the greater part of himself plunges down to Yaisa's neck and bites hard.

(Keltham is not, at this point in time, thinking that second-circle wizard students are any easier to injure than third-circle Worldwound veterans; he's just thinking he's in a universe of absurd masochists who happen to be absurdly resilient because anthropic selection that's why.)

That is definitely harder than people who wanted her to enjoy it have ever bitten Yaisa.

Yaisa doesn't particularly mind this, and she does not at all want it to interrupt her flow of seducing Keltham here, but Carissa was incredibly insistent about this point: do not pretend to enjoy it. Even if it's really easy, even if for you the line between pretending to enjoy sex and actually enjoying sex is very thin, even if it's going to ruin the mood. It might be a test by Keltham; it's definitely a test by me. 

This was followed by training from Subirachs on this skill, which felt and still feels completely ridiculous but Yaisa is, actually, a fast learner, and very smart, even if 'smart' is not the angle from which she prefers to be perceived. 

She whimpers, and looks at Keltham.  "Bite me less hard than that, if me being a masochist is the point."

Her skin is lightly broken, bleeding, as never happened with him and Carissa.

Go away, inner horror and panic, this is obviously not actually an inner-horror-and-panic situation.

"I am both - sorry for having hurt you more than I intended, I thought everyone would be as damage-resistant as Carissa, and also - I don't know if you'll understand this part - I am very grateful that this is something that people in Cheliax and in this universe will ever say to me."

"You're bleeding a bit.  Should I heal the area?  Fourth-circle cleric, I've got a lot of it on tap."

"Probably? I'm not not down for you to hurt me more than I know I can handle but if you are trying to do something not very perverted, today, then - probably." See, this is much less sexy than just rolling with it.

He lays a hand lightly on the area, and channels positive energy, much more than the wound seems it should require, not so much that the flash will extend beyond the confines of the room.

The emergency, which, in fact, was never an emergency in the first place, is now over, got that, brain?

"See? Completely fine," Yaisa says reassuringly. She feels extremely weird about this interaction but hopefully soon they'll get back to territory she's familiar with.

"That's what I figured.  Just a second while I reboot my libido."

...Thinking back to Yaisa's earlier offer to stay here and touch herself is almost instantly enough to return his libido to nearly-full power, and also fully replicates the resulting brain crash.

"So.  Yaisa.  My brain just crashed again from trying again to process the idea of ordering you to," wow he is actually embarrassed to say this, which isn't going to stop him because dignity, "stay here and masturbate all afternoon, without orgasm, until I got back, it's -"

"Part of me is turned on to the point of wanting to fuck you right here and never mind being visible through the window or that there's an important contract you have to sign first.  Part of me is saying things like 'Wouldn't Yaisa get bored if she literally had to do that all afternoon, wouldn't she need at least a book of erotica or something.'  Part of me just doesn't believe I can have this until it knows the price, and won't believe it, can't believe it, refuses to reach out for it, until it knows that the price is something it can pay -"

"I had this problem with Carissa too, it's not about something you did wrong to make it happen.  It's just some part of me that thinks this must cost ten thousand gold pieces or you're entitled under Chelish law to demand a child from me afterwards."

"Can I solve this by saying, sure, twenty gold, ten more if you don't let me get off this evening?"

"Well, and now some other part of my brain is skeptical about how that is either two or three weeks of wages for a second-circle wizard, and is complaining that - well, I guess I could afford to hire you on a daily basis but it'd be enough of my current income that I wouldn't feel comfortable."

"You know, I have this strange and beautiful spell that prevents unfair trades?  I don't know if you were joking or not, but I could tap you with that and you could name a non-joking price, and I think maybe then my brain would actually believe whatever figure you gave.  But that's a variety of truth-compulsion so you can obviously say no."

" - sure, go ahead. I didn't even know there was a spell like that." Shoot, now she has to figure out what she thinks a fair price is for something Keltham is entitled to have for free. 

Boop!

"I'd charge someone else five silver. I have no idea if that's a fair price for you because I'd in fact do it for free," she says truthfully.

"Thank you.  You've just made that part of me very happy."  Then he pokes her in the ribs, hard (but not Carissa hard, not as hard as possible).  "That said, your prices make no sense, your earning power is at least twelve gold per week, and that's more like two gold per day than half a gold per day... I guess as a wizard you could potentially use up all your magic in the morning and then be available for naughtiness in the afternoon and evening, so maybe it doesn't trade off against your magic job.  But still, that can't possibly be a fair price for you, even if you believe it is."

"I could earn twelve gold a week if I, you know, set up a laundromat and copied papers and sold rich people Endure Elements on hot days and nabbed people coming off the boats to offer them Comprehend Languages, which is a lot more work than fucking guys I already like and saving my spells for myself to have fun with."

“You earn twelve gold a week here, unless someone modified that after I told it to you, and didn’t tell me.”

"No, they told us that. I don't see what it has to do with my fair price, I guess unless this starts interfering with that? But I got the sense it was kind of compensation for your trouble money, not tied to how fast we're learning magic."

"I would’ve expected masturbating all afternoon without coming to interfere with work... is it the case that you're not working yet, and the price would change once they got a tutor here and you started learning to craft items?"

"It's going to be a couple weeks, probably, since the tutor has to be cleared to be around the secret project and we're in the middle of a war. At that point if you want me to skip work you'll have to pay me like work does, sure."

The Fairness is still up, and hasn't flickered.

"Thank you so much for - having such legible answers, that make sense, in a form I can understand them."  Actually that's just three different ways of saying 'legible', isn't it.  "I'm not sure I can properly convey - people keep offering me sex things and nothing has a price or can have a price put on it apparently and my brain just doesn't know how to handle it and is terrified that everything actually costs a billion trillion gold pieces and that's how much social debt I'm actually incurring."

He is already sort of tempted about just buying Yaisa out of her job, at this rate, but that is getting way ahead of themselves when they haven't even had sex.

"They don't want to think of themselves as girls who trade sex for money because no one'll think of them as anything else, if they do that, and anyway someone like Carissa or Meritxell's got as much money as she's going to be reasonably be able to spend. I am a girl who trades sex for money, and don't much care what people think about it, so you can trade me money, if it makes you happy.

You're not - running up favors, though, with any of them.. If I met someone and she said, "I had sex with this very powerful rich man and told him I didn't want anything, and then he had sex with me and left and never talked to me again", I'd say, well, sounds like exactly the thing literally anyone would expect to happen, are you expecting to find someone who thinks he thereby behaved badly? You're going to have to search all of Cheliax and find, I dunno, some mournful monk who thinks that denial is the path to enlightenment."

"You know, it's only slightly less weird to a dath ilani that the one girl who'll quote you a legible price on anything is, like, self-identifying as A Girl Who Trades Sex For Money.  I am a Boy Who Traded Sex For Money Twice, admittedly not a lot of money on either occasion but then why would it have been.  But that's not... a defining feature of my life, it just says that there's ever been a girl who got curious about what I was like in a cuddleroom and didn't want to spend a lot of time flirting about that."

"Sometime I will try to explain but not right now because I don't want you to get distracted again."

Looking in the direction of how much his brain wants what Yaisa is offering, if it's only a five-silver matter of social capital, feels legitimately scary.  It's not like the sense of attachment he feels to Carissa or the terror of her being taken away, this is straightforward sexual desire burning fierce and uncomplicated, just, too much of it.

"Flirting with you at lunch was a mistake.  I have work to do today and if I leave you up here masturbating with no orgasms I am going to be repeatedly incredibly distracted."

"You could take the afternoon off. Tell Asmodia to teach."

"Did basically that yesterday, not doin' it twice in a row, and today I need to review new candidates with Carissa and also check whatever feedback I got from Governance about an interim contract for the Project, both of which are timeline blockers, things you have to start moving to set other things in motion that are blocked on them... that's definitely got to happen, the question is, am I going to be repeatedly incredibly distracted while I'm doing that, or not.  Which is clearly a terrible idea and you should persuade me not to do it."

"I'm Evil, Keltham, I do what I want, even if it's a terrible idea."

"I think the question here is whether I do what you want."

...if that doesn't work he'll have to say 'Meta, a dath ilani girl would know I was daring her to persuade me to do the thing that's a terrible idea via further temptations, but I apparently don't know how to encode that in Golarion Subtext.'

"I heard you were Evil too. Is that not so? I have to confess, I like my men Evil. I might have to charge extra if you're going to be a Good-y goody who doesn't do things just because they're a terrible idea."

"Meta, a dath ilani girl would know I was daring her to persuade me to do the thing that's a terrible idea via further temptations, but I apparently don't know how to encode that in Golarion Subtext."

- well, all right, then. Yaisa takes off her shirt. She's wearing a very well fitted lace bra, which other Golarion girls Keltham has seen undress had bands in their uniform for chest support. "I think you should go ahead and distract yourself," she says. "Really I think you'll be distracted either way."

Without his having particularly made a decision about how much of a terrible idea it possibly is, he's trying to get his hands underneath that lace bra, if possible, to get his finger and thumb around a nipple.  Is that possible without his testing the strength of the fabric?

Yaisa is so skeptical of claims that this boy is hard to seduce. This boy is seduction difficulty level teenage boy. 

Her extremely expensive lace bra was a sensible purchase and is not one that'll take damage from excited teenage boys. 

The drive in him is to hurt her correctly, at least a little, Keltham does not know why this is a necessary thing to him but something in him is desperate to know that it really is allowed him.

"I'm going to pinch your nipple.  Tell me as soon as it's more pain than - than is best for turning you on."

"Yes, sir."

He begins squeezing, ramping up the pressure, listening for the first reactions and aware for the signal to hold at that level, focused on just that with the rest of his brain more silent than usual.

Yaisa has had training on this from a seventh circle cleric and also it's really not that hard. She can tell Keltham how she actually likes it, which is actually (by Chelish standards) just a little pain, just enough to capture her attention. 

...what does that translate into by non-Chelish standards though, did he end up squeezing fairly hard by non-Chelish standards?

Yes, yes, he does.

There's still something in him that's - not quite disappointed - it would be a different kind of disappointing if the hardest he could hurt her like this wasn't enough to be the right amount - but that backs off from some deep plunge it would have made, if this person had possessed Carissa levels of pain tolerance.

It's not most of his thoughts, most of it is on maintaining that pressure of his fingers, at the level that would have been, by the time she called out, slightly more than the optimal amount to arouse her most.  He does not just want her arousal, he also wants her pain, and between those two utility functions is that a compromise.

They are back clear of baffling dath ilani talk about exactly what you want to be getting out of sex until you're far too bored to have it territory and back in normal person territory, where Yaisa does in fact know what she's doing, and what she's doing is twitching and making satisfying noises and sliding her hands under Keltham's shirt so she can cling to him and hypothesizing in the back of her head that Carissa Sevar's entire secret is that she's as neurotic as Keltham and equally impaired in actually just enjoying herself. Which doesn't seem like a qualification to sleep with the Queen, to Yaisa, but no one asked Yaisa.

He breaks it off eventually, feeling shaken by the intensity with which that just happened, but also knowing that this is the way he must follow to not be helplessly mentally stuck in dath ilan for the rest of his second life.

"I," says Keltham in something of a growl, "need to actually go do my work.  My brain apparently is not willing to believe, not in the way of doubting your honesty, but in the way of being unable to visualize it, that you could actually stay up here masturbating for hours and not get bored.  So what you're actually going to do is masturbate for ten minutes out of every hour, and you are allowed to do it other places than here.  I will come and take you when my work is done."

"I'm paying you two gold pieces for a day's sex work, that I elect to use so, and I might pay you that again in the future if I ask you to do anything that takes up a day, not because I want to have no bond of friendship otherwise between us, but to see if I can successfully make that part of my brain shut up."

"If you're worried about that slow start to things, go ask Carissa how fast I can escalate."

"I wouldn't describe myself as worried," Yaisa says, but she doesn't stand up.

He has now learned the Golarion custom of kissing, so he will kiss her fiercely a bit, and bite her lip some, before he goes.

(Earlier in the Conspiracy planning room:)

Carissa:  ...problem is that it didn't happen that way in alterCheliax. You don't need astuteness or connections to get through school; average performers are just average, and wouldn't sleep with anyone to stay out of the bottom third, because why would they? No one's going to even punish them! 

Asmodia:  We don't want to give alterYaisa a background where she isn't slutty, though, because she is, and that's both visible to Keltham and useful to us.

Asmodia:  Can alterYaisa have just made a lot of friends at the academy by fucking around, and that's why she did it?  Non-Asmodeans end up friendlier after they do that, right?

Yaisa:  I was going to suggest 'I like nice stuff so I have sex with people for nice stuff.'  I think if I have sex with people so they'll be my friends I come across as incredibly gullible? 

Carissa:  Keltham won't cheat you, even if he is entirely sure he could get away with it and entirely sure you wouldn't notice and entirely sure if you noticed you'd think it was fair.

Asmodia:  Keltham is at some point going to figure out how it works in alterCheliax for people who aren't him, or who have to deal with non-Kelthams.  Do Yaisas in Taldor have sex for nice stuff, or sex for friends?

Yaisa:  I have literally no idea how I would even begin answering that question.

Yaisa:  It depends on whether having sex for friends is a thing that even works!

Yaisa:  And how nice the stuff is!

Yaisa:  And how nice the sex is!

Asmodia:  I was asking Sevar.

Carissa:   I think if they have sex at all their parents beat them and kick them out?

Asmodia:  That doesn't happen in post-Asmodean alterCheliax.

Asmodia:  Does it?

Carissa:  No, definitely not, but it means there's nowhere in the world to use as a reference.

Asmodia:  The Queen did say it was different for Elves.  And dragons.

Carissa:  Elves don't share a lot about their sex lives, I don't know what Elf teenagers get up to.  No one talks about Dwarf sex.

Asmodia:  Keltham seems to have respect for - sex workers, he called them - and no disgust at all, based on transcripts?  Arguendo:  We don't know whether alterCheliax could have contained a Yaisa who had sex to become friends with people, because we don't know if that's something that would have been a rewarding behavior for her.  AlterCheliax could definitely have had a Yaisa who was selling herself around while studying to be a wizard student.

Carissa:  - yeah, I'll authorize that.

Yaisa:  In that case I should be richer than the other girls.

Yaisa:  Because of all the money I made off selling myself.

Asmodia:  Depends on how good you were at it.

Asmodia:  And probably several other things too.  Whether you were selling to wizard students or teachers, I think students because teachers can get all the sex they want.  Whether you had to pay for a Remove Disease now and then.  Did you ever, by the way?

Yaisa:  No! 

Yaisa:  I don't think it's a very good story if I was a whore and bad at it.

Asmodia:  ...okay, we're at least running a Remove Disease on you before you fuck Keltham.

Asmodia:  And you wouldn't have offered anyone intercourse until you could perform Alter Self, so not until second-circle.  So you're not that experienced and you weren't that expensive.

Yaisa:  If we say I'm not that experienced and then I'm really good at sex, it'll be suspicious.

Asmodia:  ...I will trust you on that, keeping in mind that even on a low-punishment regimen I don't expect it to go well for you if you're exaggerating your competence.  Sevar, do you have any idea what Yaisa's price would have been and how wealthy she'd be now?

Carissa:  At the Worldwound she'd be rich.  In school, I dunno, she can start 80 gold ahead of the others.

Yaisa:  ...okay.

Asmodia:  She probably spent any of that money and now has any nice things.

Yaisa:  I will settle for having a lot more nice clothes than the rest of you.

Asmodia:  At least until the rest of us go shopping in a few days and buy even nicer clothes.

Asmodia:  How are we actually on it being safe to rush Yaisa off to Ostenso for shopping?  Do we think she gets scried, do we have somebody grab Yaisa's hair for Alter Self and go shopping in her place...

Carissa:  We should assume that foreign agents know all the girls by now, and might be scrying them.

Carissa:  We can send someone with her hair, though.

Asmodia:  Right then.  Does Yaisa have any other facts true about her that would be false in alterCheliax, and need to be altered to new facts of equivalent rarity there?

Yaisa:  Did I have sex with Elias Abarco earlier this week for a ride to Absalom or not?

Carissa:  You did not.

Carissa:  ....why did you do that.

Carissa:  He obviously wasn't going to take you to Absalom.

Yaisa:  Yeah but he's scary.

Carissa:  ......

Yaisa:  So how does the making Keltham Evil thing work?

Yaisa:  Do I just try to convince him to hurt me?

Carissa:  No, he's already suspicious that the conspiracy wants to make him Evil.  We're just lucky he doesn't see why the Conspiracy would do that.

Asmodia:  How does it work, then?  For Yaisa in particular, if not the whole plan.

Carissa:  Have sex with him and have fun with it.

Carissa:  The thing I want from Yaisa is for Keltham to become convinced masochists are definitely real.

Asmodia:  Why is everybody else's job so much easier than my job?

Carissa:  It's not trivial.  Keltham can read sexual reactions in particular much better than you'd expect, he's been trained in that.  Yaisa is being required to not fake reactions that she'd usually and habitually try to fake.  I sent her to Subirachs to get retrained in not doing that.

Asmodia:  Understood.

Yaisa:  Alter-Yaisa definitely tries to get Keltham to keep her as a slave-consort or whatever.

Carissa:  Don't use the word slave, but fine.

Asmodia:  ...didn't you say earlier, Yaisa, that you'd tell your slaves to lick your feet if you were in Keltham's position?

Yaisa:  Yeah, sorry, were we pretending slaves aren't a thing?  I thought we were just pretending they were mostly a kink thing.

Carissa:  Right. ....hmmm.  Slaves are a thing but the afterlives are nice so your slaves can always just check out for one of those if they'd rather.  Keltham will still be upset, but alterCheliax would both know slavery exists and have no real reason to hide it from Keltham.

Asmodia:  Does alterCheliax have slavery or just neighboring countries?

Carissa:  I think Osirion has slavery.  We could check what they do.

Carissa:  Since Lawful Neutral is a lot of what Lawful Evil is pretending to be, here.

Asmodia:  If Osirion does anything we think Keltham would accept, I'm a lot more comfortable with Cheliax doing that than trying to make it look like slaves don't exist here at all.  I don't know how much else that affects.

Carissa:  Agree.

Asmodia:  Summarizing, the plan is as follows.  We figure out what alterYaisa charged per fuck, how many times per week she did that, who with, with that matching around the range of people realYaisa actually had sex with.  Be ready to answer Keltham if he asks that straight out, it's the sort of thing he asks.

Asmodia:  That all goes up on the wall in orange.

Asmodia:  Then we figure how much alterYaisa earned, and how much she spent on clothes.  Also orange.  We send a body double to shop for her - secondhand things, so they don't look new and unused; but if alterYaisa would've originally bought them new, they should be costed against her current wealth as new.  We decide on a reason alterYaisa didn't already dress in those clothes, maybe she wants to surprise Keltham, maybe she's waiting for him to ask.

Asmodia:  'Slave' is a word with two meanings, one of which is a Keltham-acceptable sex thing, one of which is whatever Lawful Neutral thing they do in Osirion.  Orange.

Asmodia:  Yaisa is a real masochist who as alterYaisa shows Keltham her real reactions and only her real reactions, with us trusting in Keltham to perceive reality as reality.  Green, in a sense, though orange in that realYaisa would fake it more.

Asmodia:  Yaisa is cleared for AlterYaisa to get Keltham to try to keep her as a slave-consort.

Asmodia:  Did I miss anything?

Yaisa:  I can be wearing something nice under my uniform -

Carissa:  You didn't miss anything.  Let's send the shopper out today, Keltham indicated he was thinking of trying Yaisa next.

(Return to main thread.)