Meritxell is actually hoping to master Eschew Materials before she next sleeps with Keltham so she can pretend to have known it all along, so she's not going to make the requisite effort to keep the topic sexy. 

Tonia is honestly kind of scared of sleeping with Keltham entirely because there exists a person who has slept with both Keltham and the Queen and so by the transitive theory of kinkiness it'll be way too much for her. 

"Are those meant to be a complete account of the kinds of magic?" she asks instead.

"Baseline doesn't have a word that means 'magic'.  It's just got the words economic-magic and conceptual-magic, 'economicmagic' and 'conceptualmagic', of which Golarion magic is both."  There's audibly no syllables shared between the two.  "A superconcept is 'alternatephysics' meaning laws that differ within another world, but that would also include, like, fire working differently."

"I think some of the known planes have that. Like, I don't think fire works on the astral plane. But I'm not sure if the laws are comprehensively different or if there are specific things that don't work in a sort of - large-scale way -"

"Can people, like, breathe, on the Astral plane?  Because fire and breathing work off the same principle, that's why they both need air - there's controlled chemical changes happening inside you, that release energy in a more organized way than chaotic heat, to power your movement and thinking."

"You can project your soul to the Astral Plane which does not involve your physical body leaving Golarion. You cannot Plane Shift to the Astral Plane and fly around there, your body would dissolve on you."

"I'll chalk that up as an encouraging successful prediction about everything running on the same underlying mechanics here.  From my perspective as an outsider, the first time you thought of someplace fire didn't work, breathing in fact didn't work there either."

"I don't know of anywhere where one of fire or breathing works but I'm not a planar specialist."

"Can't you not breathe on the Elemental Plane of Fire?" says Gregoria. 

"Well, you'd have to bring air with you, but the air would work in your lungs normally, the basic principle that makes lungs work still works, even if there isn't any air. Similarly there isn't any air among the stars and that makes both breathing and fire not work but the principles of natural law aren't different among the stars."

"Yep, same in dath ilan.  No air among the stars, but underlying Laws of motion and chemistry and matter all exactly the same.  If you take air into space and burn something it burns exactly the same way."

Discussion continues for a bit, and then Keltham queries Carissa about retiring to bedroom/cuddleroom/nevermind.  He doesn't find within himself a strong preference to draw upon, and his meta-desire is to see if Carissa has a preference before he spends any more effort on unearthing his own.

"The mood I am in if I don't do some steering to be in a different mood is 'cuddle and have some of the conversations we keep putting off for killing the mood'."

"Sounds terrifying, but it has to happen sometime and today seems like one of the better days.  I've got an Early Judgment queued if necessary, and if my mood gets killed far enough, I'll maybe try that Security test with the heating stone attached to my wrist, so long as I'm in a killed mood anyways."

"See, that's how I know you're an alien, that you don't think it's at least a little bit sexy to do magic while in pain."

"Not while I'm in pain, but your hint has been noted."

Off they go to the bedroom, then, with a stop along the way to collect that heating stone.  Keltham does think he should try that and see what happens - dip his toe in the waters of 'damage isn't permanent, how are you at psychologically adjusting to that fact' - and it's something he would only try with Carissa.

"Congratulations on the contract, by the way. It feels like everything is finally really happening. I know that probably the first thing won't work out and the mountains of spellsilver are still a ways off, but - still."

"Great time to not be Good, so I can be all like, 'I have somebody I love and a full-time sex worker' and not 'oh no what if this project gets delayed an additional day by anything'.  I think a lot of other dath ilani in my shoes would be going fairly insane about now and requesting artifact headbands and trying to turn themselves into half-assed Keepers."

" - I'm really glad you're not doing that. We'll get around to fixing all the bad things, if only because they're really personally annoying, but I don't want a half-assed Keeper, I want Keltham, and I want him to get rich."

"Yeah."

Bedroom ahoy.  What's up?  Carissa has the agenda.

"Keep thinking it might be useful to try to explain - the world my mother grew up in, the world she thought she was raising me to live in, until I was twelve."

He's mentally braced.  Go ahead.

"Cheliax wasn't an unusually terrible place. From how people at the Worldwound from other countries describe their countries I think it was a mostly typical place. No one's described anything that sounded significantly better; many people have described places that sounded significantly worse. It was illegal to address a noble with insufficient deference, but that was illegal everywhere else, too. It was illegal to claim that a noble had committed a crime, but that's illegal everywhere else, too."

"There are no Lawful Good countries?  Or - what goes wrong inside them?"

"There are. Mendev and Lastwall conscript everyone to serve in the armies fighting against Evil, unless you're pregnant or breastfeeding. They'll tell you that their nobles don't abuse their power, and I don't know how true it is - probably truer than most other places - but you aren't allowed to -" Shrug. "I mean, I was fighting at the Worldwound anyway. But Cheliax asked, and they pay me."

"Do you know how Lawful Good squares up the thing with 'It's illegal to claim a noble committed a crime?'  I can't parse that as any form of Good or Lawfulness."

"I mean, that's not how those laws are written, how they write them is that it's illegal to slander nobles by claiming falsely that they committed a crime, and then they ask the noble who says 'no, I certainly did not commit a crime', and then they determine the claim was false and arrest you for slander."