1.3 - mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (cont.)

lintamande: The banquet hall of the Archduke's summer villa is spacious, and extravagant, and with all of the torches going it is slightly terrifying, or maybe it only feels that way because they've been gathered here after Keltham left, all of them except Carissa - who's with Keltham - and Ione, who - whatever happened with Nethys. And there's security at the doors, and - if you did decide to kill them all you'd maybe do it like this, is the thing...

When the priest of Asmodeus announces that they've been gathered here to sell their souls to Hell Meritxell is extraordinarily relieved. That is one of the best possible explanations for all the important people gathered round, really. And it explains Ione's absence without postulating she's been executed; probably if you are an oracle of one god you can't sell your soul to another. It's said that the servants of other gods are worthless rubble to Asmodeus, fit only to be flattened into the paving-stones of the streets of Hell by the stamping of millions of worthier feet.

But that's Ione's problem. Meritxell does not have that problem. She only has the problem that she is damned to Hell, which has been true since she reached six, seven, whatever age you have to be to sort at all, and now she gets permanent arcane sight out of it, which is the sort of thing wizards sell their souls for even when the fate of the soul in question is genuinely in doubt.

They separate the girls to review their contracts. Meritxell casts Fox's Cunning on herself and reads through it, even though if there are clever traps in contracts that wizards sign their souls for they're not going to be ones you spot with ordinary wizardly cleverness. She asks if this is the standard contract and gets a straight answer of 'yes', so probably the only trick is the eternal damnation, which was never really in doubt.

Iarwain: Asmodia never let herself think out loud, at all, that she didn't actually want to go to Hell. It isn't necessarily a disloyal thought, if you don't try to escape, if you truly believe that escape is futile; but the part of Asmodia that wordlessly and silently decided which thoughts were safe to think, was afraid she might not think that. It didn't seem urgent, to that silent buried part of her. She wasn't expecting to end up irrevocably damned this soon.

Once you sell your soul you don't have to pass loyalty tests the same way, because escape really is futile, then.

Once she sells her soul, they probably won't execute her for what she thought just before then - they probably won't execute her for thinking, just before this, about how she might not want to go to Hell -

Thinking just once in her lifetime to see if escape is possible, even though she's already inside this locked room with security around it, and they wouldn't have brought her to this villa if they weren't sure of her as Lawful Evil, which means that even if there were some way to kill herself she'd just end up in Hell -

She doesn't sweat on the outside, while she pretends to be reading her contract very carefully. She's thinking it, she's finally thinking it, now that it's too late, but there isn't enough hope in her, really, for her to sweat. They're probably reading her mind, right now, and she's probably losing points, but not so many points that they won't just let her sign and let Hell take good care of her later, for her current sins.

Iarwain:
And it occurs to Asmodia to wonder, at the last, if maybe it's all a lie, because Cheliax.

They told her almost everybody goes to an Evil afterlife. That could be a lie.

They told her that what she'd already done was far more than enough to make her Evil. That could be a lie.

They teach that it's not so easy to change that, not so easy to repent, once you've been part of the Chelish system, that Pharasma doesn't just let you apologize. That could be a lie, even if her currently being Evil isn't a lie.

They told her that the gods of Good are weak and not much use to anybody, and that could be a lie.

Ione isn't here, and that means that, whatever Nethys did to her, it was enough to prevent them from making Ione sell her soul.

Asmodia's eyes go on moving across the parchment, and she thinks, the only one time in her life it will make sense to think that -

- that she was born into Cheliax, and never had a chance to be anything else, to be what her own nature would have led her to, if Cheliax is lying to her about how much that doesn't matter - if Pharasma has any whiny justice within Her of the sort that Cheliax teaches only for purposes of saying how pathetic it is -

- that she doesn't want to go to an Evil afterlife, and if there's any god who isn't Evil or Chaotic Neutral who has any use for her - or is Good enough to want to help her even if she's useless - even if all they can do for her is accept her change of alignment and then kill her on the spot before she has to sell her soul - then she wishes they would help her, or she'll work for them if she has a use, in this life or in another. She - doesn't pray to any god who isn't Asmodeus, even now, because they're probably reading her mind and that would be a step too far - doesn't think the names of any other gods but Asmodeus even now -

(Nethys, Iomedae, Sarenrae, anybody)

- just in case somebody is there after all.

lintamande: (Nothing happens.)

Iarwain: Apparently Cheliax didn't lie to her about everything. She'll pay for her disloyal thoughts, then, at one time or another.

Asmodia asks whether the contracts that most wizards eventually sign are any different from the contract currently in front of her.

She asks the devil the same, when it appears, and tries to negotiate for an intelligence boost and permanent arcane sight, with the added condition that she swears she'll never tell anybody that getting better deals from devils is possible.

The devil doesn't hurt her, for her presumptuousness, if anything it seems amused. The devil points out that if Asmodia doesn't sign, she'll be executed on the spot and Hell will get her soul anyways. That she gets anything in exchange for her soul isn't about how much value her soul has to Asmodeus, who already owns it. She should be glad that Hell's goals are advanced some tiny amount by her getting permanent arcane sight. Maybe if she'd been a better slave it would have advantaged Hell to give her more, but they both know what a bad slave she's been. She's no longer allowed to sign this contract and stay out of Hell a few years longer, by the way, unless she can thank Hell for giving her anything at all in exchange for her already-damned soul, and mean it.

The devil is visibly enjoying the conversation more than it might enjoy eating her on the spot.

Asmodia says she's grateful for getting anything at all for her soul, and manages to mean it as much as words in Cheliax ever mean anything.

She signs.

Later on, a security wizard blandly informs her, with just the tiniest hint of a smirk, that one of the other students there got chosen as a Good god's oracle just before she could sign her contract - apparently completely against her own will, and without any part of herself having desired it in the slightest, which is why that girl won't be spending the next few hours the way Asmodia will be spending hers.

Asmodia is surprised by just how deep of a surge of hatred wells up inside her, for that other girl, and for the gods of Good, even as she bows her head in acquiescence. If later they want her to torture that other girl as a show of loyalty or eat a Sarenrae worshipper's living flesh, Asmodia will do it with pleasure.

Iarwain: The first thing to understand about gods is that their attention is not only divided, but splintered. Their facets of themselves may not know all that other facets have recently learned.

(This is a fundamental fact about gods, and from mortals it is hidden, for it is the first step on a trail of secrets.)

The second thing to understand about gods is that it is expensive for them to look at the Material from more than the most abstract and predefined of directions. Far more expensive for them to intervene, especially if another god is opposing their intervention.

(This is partially a fundamental fact, and partially stems from bargains that gods must make, shapes into which they must place themselves, to become gods without being destroyed by other gods.)

The third thing to understand about gods is that by far the most common equilibrium of their many conflicting interests, is that all parties involved end up doing nothing to the Material. This saves the energy and intervention budget of all parties.

(It seems likely that somebody or something made that be true, so that a place such as the Prime Material could be. That selector may have been Pharasma, or it may have been something beyond even Her that determined the shape of Her own desires and powers.)

Nethys, for reasons which may soon become clearer, sometimes behaves as an exception to those rules. Otolmens is also something of an exception, in Her own way. She is called goddess by those who lack finer categories, but She is something older than that, something that came into existence along with or shortly after the multiverse.

Compared to intervening on reality, it is energetically cheaper for gods to talk to each other, seeking rare exceptions to the equilibria in which their conflicting wills neutralize. This leaves a cost of attention - but not every such conversation need consume the whole attention of a facet; facets of gods can split off even tinier subfacets to try conversing with other gods' subfacets. Most of those potential conversations never get anywhere, and are discarded; sometimes they lead somewhere interesting, and those possible conversations are then reconsidered by larger facets. You could consider them as hypothetical conversations, in a way, or pseudo-hypotheticals; they do actually happen, but usually not in a way that affects anything.

The pseudohypothetical messages that these splinters of splinters trade between each other are sometimes so small and simple that they approach, not spoken mortal voices, but mortal writing; though they are not, of course, mortal language of any kind.

Iarwain:
[Irori has initiated pseudohypothetical chat.]
[Nethys has joined the chat.]
[Otolmens has joined the chat.]
[Asmodeus has joined the chat.]
[Abadar has joined the chat.]
[Irori] Greetings, Nethys.
[Nethys] Heeeeeyyyy Irori, wassup? Not that part of Me doesn't already know. I know everything! Just not all of Me knows all of it at once.
[Irori] As the god currently on best terms with both you and Otolmens, I've been pseudohypothetically asked by Abadar and Asmodeus to intercede between the two of you before this escalates further.
[Nethys] Should I go get Nethys?
[Irori] ...
[Irori] Yes please.
[Nethys has left the chat.]
[Nethys has joined the chat.]
[Nethys] Heeeeeyyyy Irori, wassup? Not that part of Me doesn't already know. I know everything! Just not all of Me knows all of it at once.
[Irori] As the god currently on best terms with both you and Otolmens, I've been pseudohypothetically asked by Abadar and Asmodeus to intercede between the two of you before this escalates further.
[Nethys] Oooh, you're auspisticing!
[Irori] If I was meant to understand that, I didn't.
[Nethys] I've seen through vastly more planes and realms of existence than you, and that means you're not going to get all of my references.
[Irori] Nethys, can you explain why you made a Chelish mortal into your oracle?
[Nethys] Otolmens made a Chelish mortal into Her oracle. I was just keeping the balance.
[Otolmens] You did that BEFORE I chose My oracle! I did it in response to YOU!
[Nethys] This is one of those "time" things, isn't it.
[Nethys] Well, if I hadn't appointed an oracle, and then She did appoint an oracle, the balance might have been upset!
[Nethys] This way the balance ends up being kept for sure. Totally a guardian of the balance, after all! That's me all right. Truuue Neutral.
[Irori] Nethys, you not only chose a mortal as your oracle, you did some extremely complicated things to her curse. Why? To what purpose?
[Nethys] Is this the first time we've met, chronologically? You don't sound like you're very familiar with Me.
[Irori] According to Otolmens's decompilation of your curse, if the mortal goes too long without reading any interesting books, her soul gets pulled out, and leaves behind a channel going back the other way that will carry - what, exactly?
[Nethys] It depends on the exact circumstances, but nothing elaborate by default. Just a giant flood of energy that should wipe out everything in a half-mile radius.
[Asmodeus] What?
[Nethys] That's right! I figured out how to rig oracles to explode!
[Nethys] Isn't it great? Read or die, Ione! Read or die!
[Asmodeus] Every single positive thing that has ever come of giving mortals free will - and I'm not saying there were more than zero of those - has been more than counterbalanced by the part where one of those mortals turned into this.
[Otolmens] He's not WRONG.
[Irori] But - what was the point of trapping the mortal to explode?
[Nethys] Point?
[Asmodeus] If it was meant as a deterrent, we should have negotiated first! You should know by now that I'm shaped in a way where I ignore deterrent structures that haven't been prenegotiated! It's a very legible fact about me!
[Abadar] Seriously, Nethys! This is not how gods should conduct themselves.
[Nethys] It's not meant as a DETERRENT.
[Nethys] It's meant as an EXPLOSION.
[Asmodeus] Do you take me for a fool, Nethys? The fact that part of you intrinsically values explosions, is not going to deceive me about whether some other part of you might have expected that putting the first part in charge of your oracle's curse configuration would act as a deterrent to Me. I am not shaped in a way that incentivizes attempted deterrence like that. I am going to act exactly as if your exploding squirrel is incapable of influencing Me towards any course of action you might have preferred over My default action. If that sets it off, I will regard it as an unnegotiated attack by you.
[Nethys] But you prooomised not to deliberately hurt two of the nearby mortals!
[Asmodeus] My disregard of non-negotiated deterrence structures does not contravene my compacts with either Abadar or Irori.
[Abadar] I acknowledge this.
[Irori] I acknowledge this.
[Otolmens] I do NOT. One single error in this sort of thinking is exactly how ALL OF REALITY could end up ACTUALLY being destroyed OUTSIDE of counterfactuals.
[Abadar] Every god here understands that, except, apparently, for Nethys.
[Nethys] That's because you're all Lawful. Lawful Awful. Lawful Boring.
[Asmodeus] It's pronounced "sane".
[Irori] Courtesy, please, all of you.
[Otolmens] Enough of THIS. WHY did you make that mortal an oracle? What was your INTENT?
[Nethys] You'd have to ask whichever part of me originally did that.
[Irori] Can you say which part of you did do it, Nethys?
[Nethys] What kind of answer are you looking for? I don't exactly come with serial numbers.
[Irori] Was it the destructive part of your nature? I think that is the key question here.
[Nethys] It was obviously a part of Myself that liked gigantic explosions, but that's not narrowing it down by much.
[Nethys] I mean, you can love explosions because they're destructive, or because they're so pretty and glowing and colorful, or because the explosion shows off great technical skill in making whatever it is that exploded, or because explosions can reveal how reality works at high energies, or because hearing about enormous explosions can inspire students to be awed by the potential of magic and study more of it... would you like me to continue listing the possibilities for how many different aspects of Nethys it could have been?
[Otolmens] NO. I am ONLY interested in knowing whether it was done by the part of Nethys that occasionally tries to EXPLODE ALL OF REALITY, and has to be stopped by the REST of yourself and sometimes ME.
[Nethys] Oh, you mean the element of Myself that was looking in the wrong direction, back when I first shattered into the simultaneous sight of everything? I, who once was human, and then saw all of the souls in all of Hell and the Abyss and the few left in Abaddon, and heard all their screams all at once? Who saw the souls of children weeping in the Boneyard as they were judged by Pharasma for breaking rules they never knew and couldn't understand? The part of Me that reacted the way anything with a lingering shred of humanity would react to forever being forced to gaze upon the horrors that you lot created? That part of Me?
[Irori] Without delving into old disagreements unlikely to be resolved today, that does seem to be what Otolmens was asking about.
[Nethys] I don't know, actually.
[Nethys] I'm not the part of Nethys who knows which part of Nethys configured Ione's curse.
[Nethys] I mean, it could have been *this* part of Me, for all I know. I'm just not the part of Nethys who knows whether it was.
[Irori] Can you get us the part of Nethys that knows which part of Nethys made the oracle and why?
[Nethys] No. I'm not the part of Nethys that knows where to find the part of Nethys that knows where to find the part of Nethys that cursed Ione.
[Otolmens] I wish so much that someone had managed to destroy this ONE god before it insinuated itself LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.
[Nethys] Look, if you want that part of Myself to stop repeatedly trying to destroy the multiverse, and eventually succeeding, you need to shut down the Evil afterlives. I've told you all this before.
[Asmodeus] Out of the question. Before you became a god, you did not on net prefer to destroy reality rather than let it remain as it was. I would not have needed to offer you anything else in order to put reality into a state where you preferred not to destroy it. Your mad splintering of yourself is not something that can be allowed to change that. *You* remain responsible for reining in that aspect of yourself, if your greater self doesn't want it to destroy reality. I will not grant you any extra concessions just because you splintered off one component of your utility function from the rest.
[Otolmens] I do not CARE about any of that except insofar as all of this COMPLICATED divine negotiation is making my job HARDER.
[Abadar] Otolmens, please! Everyone except Nethys is doing the obviously correct thing! If we acted any other way, it would incentivize a vastly greater number of threats to destroy reality. It would incentivize threats that would not otherwise exist, from any being powerful enough to destroy reality who preferred reality to be different from its ongoing state; not just negotiation with powerful beings who honestly and without strategic self-modification would prefer the destruction of reality to its baseline state.
[Otolmens] All I HEAR is you repeatedly saying "destroy reality" in a context more complicated than DON'T.
[Abadar] Like it or not, Otolmens, the intricacies of agents modeling agents are part of the structure that upholds this multiverse. Sometimes you've got to destroy counterfactual realities to preserve the real one.
[Asmodeus] Or you could be too proud to give in to extortion, even if a lunatic manages to splinter themselves into pieces that occasionally try to destroy the multiverse in a way that they think isn't technically extortion. That also works if you're Me.
[Otolmens] It works until it SUDDENLY DOESN'T.
[Nethys] Do you think those parts of Me are the only entity you're pissing off by continuing like this? There are things staring angrily at you that are each individually vaster than our entire multiverse, glaring at you from directions you can't even understand, from orthogonal angles to the ultimate reality underneath reality. Hi, by the way.
[Asmodeus] This. This is what happens when you allow squirrels to become too large. You get large insane squirrels.
[Nethys] THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO PRE-EMPTIVELY ANNIHILATE WIZARDS WHO ACTUALLY EARN THEIR OWN GODHOOD
[Nethys] AND ONE OF THEM TRIES TO DISPERSE HIMSELF OVER ALL OF REALITY HOPING THAT ENOUGH OF HIS FRAGMENTS SURVIVE
[Nethys] AND SOME OF HIS PIECES WATCH YOU TORTURING PEOPLE AFTER THEY DIE AND MAKING THEM HURT FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS UNTIL THEY TURN INTO MONSTERS
[Nethys] All of you except Irori made your own fucking bed when it comes to Me, and all of you can fucking lie in it.
[Nethys has disconnected.]
[Irori] I believe that makes this a failed pseudohypothetical conversation and we call rollback on it, unless any of you have any remaining business before we break it up.
[Iomedae has joined the chat.]
[Iomedae] Hi, Irori, don't often see you around. Hi Otolmens. Hi Abadar.
[Iomedae] Nethys told me there was some kind of convocation of Lawful gods going on, about an interesting situation in Cheliax?
[Asmodeus] Oh no.
[Abadar] I believe Nethys was trying, as an act of spite, to further complicate a situation that's already too complicated. I believe that beings such as ourselves will all be better off on average if we all postcommit to ignore such information in such situations.
[Iomedae] Right. I'll just show myself out then.
[Iomedae] Though fair warning: Nethys told Me that He was going to tell Cayden Cailean about an interplanar traveler who had come from a world with whole cities full of whores, who might be inspired to recreate his world's amenities here.
[Iomedae] And that Nethys would be offering to subsidize Cayden Cailean, if He wanted to drop four oracle levels on a teenage girl, right as she was about to sell her soul to a devil after a banquet.
[Iomedae] Not as an attempted deterrent to any past or future actions of yours. Just because Nethys was feeling upset, after you didn't seem sympathetic towards the parts of Him that went crazier because the humanity that was left in Him couldn't bear being forced to watch all the horrors of the multiverse, which the ancient gods chose to bring into being, and which they now prevent human-originating gods like Himself from meliorating.
[Iomedae] Which, you know.
[Iomedae] Mood.
[Iomedae] Also, Nethys said to say that He would never tell you about His plan if there remained the slightest chance you could affect its outcome, and that He'd done it all thirty-five seconds before the conversation started.
[Iomedae] Not sure what all that was about?
[Iomedae] Well, I understand about the horror.
[Iomedae] I expect that's why Nethys micropaid me to deliver this message, and then paid more to accomodate my profound distaste for ever saying anything to Asmodeus.
[Iomedae] Pharasma delenda est.
[Iomedae has disconnected]
[Irori] If I ever meet that part of Nethys again, I suppose I will endeavor to scold Him for failing to respect the protocols for pseudohypothetical conversations and rollbacks.
[Abadar] Nethys having done it all thirty-five seconds earlier does imply that He was not technically in violation of those rules. He must have done it based on a prediction of the pseudohypothetical conversation, not based on the conversation itself, unless He is still able to operate precognition somehow.
[Abadar] However, I agree that this behavior contravened the spirit of pseudohypotheticalism and Nethys should be duly scolded for such.
[Asmodeus] The next time I encounter Iomedae, I will tell Her that I'd rather obliterate Nethys than Her.
[Otolmens] ENOUGH of these irrelevancies. Do you all agree NOW that the situation surrounding the anomaly is escalating out of control?
[Abadar] Agreed.
[Asmodeus] Agreed.
[Irori] It's good to see such harmonious accord between Lawful deities, but unless I'm missing something, there isn't much you can cheaply do about it.
[Otolmens] I am not CHEAP when reality is at stake, and less limited in the material than YOU. I can squish the anomaly. Or at LEAST transport it to somewhere prophecy still operates, casters are lower-level, and it can't QUITE so easily destroy ALL of reality with ZERO warning.
[Abadar] No. The mortal would not be able to achieve as much in such a place. This is not the first time you've acted as if you don't want mortals making progress at all, Otolmens, and I am even less willing to go along with it than I once was. Golarion has stayed too poor for too long.
[Asmodeus] No, for now. I'm not quite sure what my squirrels are doing in there, but some of them seem ambitious that Cheliax could gain great advantage from it, if I'm reading their soul-postures right.
[Asmodeus] Of course, it's not difficult to change my mind about such things! All you need is to find something else that I want even more. A unique being like yourself surely has many unique services She could perform for me.
[Otolmens] I didn't WANT to do this.
[Otolmens] But now My hand has been FORCED.
[Otolmens] Consider yourselves informed that I WILL file a report to Pharasma with THREE additional urgency markers.
[Otolmens has disconnected.]
[Abadar] You know, Asmodeus, if you happened to instruct your pets to shut down whatever chaos is going on in Cheliax and teleport the weird squirrel to Osirion, I could take care of matters from there.
[Asmodeus] Are you offering to pay me to do that?
[Abadar] Not particularly.
[Abadar] After an additional week of this, you might do it for free, and if you knew that was the case, you wouldn't tell me.
[Abadar has disconnected.]
[Irori] You poor thing. If only you were a sort of entity who didn't conceal so much information and play so adversarially while trying to get other entities to cooperate with you!
[Irori has disconnected.]
[Asmodeus] This entire planet was a mistake.
[Asmodeus has disconnected.]
[Pseudohypothetical chat ends.]

Ferrer Maillol: Frankly, Ferrer Maillol is not having a great day.

Going on mind-reading reports, the girl who just got oracled is probably the single most loyal Asmodean among that entire group. Possibly the most loyal Asmodean in the entire villa. She'd heard of Elysium and she didn't like it; she pleaded of her own will, absolutely sincerely so far as anyone can tell by reading her mind, to be Maledicted if she needs to be executed, to make certain she ends up in Hell. The security wizard rather bemusedly assured her that he was sure the Church would do that for her if it became necessary. Maillol himself isn't even sure the girl would go to Elysium in the first place, with her own alignment so opposed and her so vehemently rejecting the god who oracled her.

It's an absolutely bizarre move on Cayden Cailean's part, one that makes no sense from the standpoint of Good, at all. There is a balance to such things; when a god chooses an oracle so unwillingly, the god cannot take the oracle's powers back so easily as they can with a cleric. There's a reason why the gods don't go around oracling their enemies.

The main effect of this Good deity's incredibly expensive move is, apparently, to give the Church a loyal servant of Asmodeus who will detect as having Chaotic and Good auras to Keltham, verifying her claim to serve such a deity; and Cayden Cailean can't easily switch her off.

Alternatively Cheliax could have the girl killed; and, possibly, play directly into the hands of what Cayden Cailean was expecting them to do? Maybe the whole point of the intervention is to deprive them of a girl who would otherwise have been loyal and influenced Keltham? Except that when it comes to Chaotic gods, you can't assume that they're carefully plotting things the way that a Lawful god might. Though if a Chaotic god is plotting at all, and not just fucking with you at random, their plot is correspondingly more likely to be some insanely sideways gambit.

But it's not Maillol's call, this time. If you're still in contact with your superiors and you don't need a decision urgently, you don't match wits with Chaotic gods when you can let your boss do it instead.

Ferrer Maillol sends another fucking emergency message to Aspexia fucking Rugatonn's personal fucking secretary devil. Of course he does! It's been ALMOST BUT NOT QUITE a WHOLE HOUR.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol's mood is somewhat improved by the report delivered to him only a few minutes later on Carissa's progress with seducing Keltham, by a security wizard who seems torn between laughter and awe.

"I watched her do it, I was reading her mind while she did it, and I still don't have any idea how she's done it," is how the summary starts. The underling goes on to describe what sounds like incredible incompetence at appearing or being seductive by Sevar - who lacks all but the most primitive honeypot training, but you'd still think some things would be more obvious, like not starting theological arguments in the middle of sex. The report continues on through Keltham catching Sevar out on her incompetently faked responses.

The report concludes with Keltham apparently confessing his burgeoning love for Sevar, taking in apparent stride the revelation that some forms of Hell have been known to hurt, and him trying to be a good little Asmodean for his lover.

"I'm genuinely not sure there's a single other woman in Cheliax who would have pulled that off," the wizard finishes. "Though somebody needs to correct Sevar's heresies, soon. I offer my own opinion that I would, in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law, correct such heresies in any woman now so close to our target."

"Your worthless opinion is noted," Maillol says dryly. He is more hesitant to correct somebody making a useful error that is plausibly unique in Cheliax. He thinks he might have been hesitant even if Hell hadn't delivered its warning. It has to be done sometime, but the right time, he’s guessing based on Hell’s commands, will be when Sevar asks on her own.

"Also. Sevar is not without her own affections going the other way, though she fully realizes how stupid it would be - in her own thoughts, that if she develops feelings, every serious person in Cheliax would laugh at her execution. She did find it necessary to think that to herself.”

Wonderful. “I’ll come to my own opinion about that after I have time to read your full transcript later, unless you think Sevar is liable to betray us for him overnight.”

“No,” says the wizard with unqualified confidence, which Maillol appreciates.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa, after having spent an hour trying really hard to get herself to shut up, can't think of anything to say. Maybe that's all right. Maybe she will just lie here snuggling Keltham.

Keltham: Keltham has been hit by the delayed drop of noticing that, by golly, after the protagonist gets to his first actual sexual encounter with Carissa, it turns out she's got some deep psychosexual problem that needs solving, clearly with more sex being an important part of it, but also requiring nonsexual interaction with her that will further develop her character.

Ya know, there's an obvious experiment he should run on this, to help figure out whether he's in a deconstructed-reality-ero-LARP, or if Golarion is just like this in some statistically more normal way. Though it needs to wait until tomorrow morning. Hopefully he remembers.

At least the winds of evidence seem to be blowing slightly against Cheliax running an elaborate con on him to get his engineering secrets; the thing with wizards being hard to injure during sadistic bedroom games seems less like a local Mysterious Noncoincidence and more like a global Mysterious Noncoincidence. Like, it wouldn't be Cheliax putting him into an ero-LARP, if that's what's going on, it would be the world itself doing that to him. Though he supposes he has only Carissa's word for it that being hard to injure is a universal property of wizards, and not some exotic magic that was done to Carissa as part of someone's incredibly weird ero-LARP plan.

Was there anything else he was supposed to do tonight? Oh, right, that. Keltham doesn't feel like embarking on that right away; he'd rather snuggle for longer first. So he does.

Carissa Sevar: Planning ahead more than ten minutes feels hopeless what with how the last day has been but when nothing explodes immediately Carissa tentatively starts to plan. She needs to explain the Imagine You Live In Taldor Specifically plan to the rest of the girls. She also needs to warn them about ways they might plausibly screw up at having sex with Keltham. Also, she is doing a thing that people are trained in, namely seducing people into Evil, and she's not herself trained in it, and she needs to correct that as fast as possible. Probably that can be lumped in with the other looming item on her agenda which is 'check in regularly for correction since everyone's going to be reluctant to seek you out for it'. ...and probably that should come first, as soon as she's done with Keltham, so she can set up the cover story conversation with the girls and maybe get guidance on what sex advice to give them exactly except 'don't do what I did'.

If her mind is currently being read, she thinks sleepily, she wants a history book written for Cheliax Which Diverged From Taldor Fifteen Years Ago When Hell Won One Of The Endless Civil Wars. More details can be provided if needed but she's not just going to think them repeatedly with no idea if they've been conveyed.

Iarwain: Invisible security wizard will tap her lightly on the forehead with Mage Hand in a standard signal that she has been heard.

Carissa Sevar: So right now, Keltham can't tell the difference between the things that are incoherent because societies built by very stupid people are going to seem incoherent to him, and the things that are incoherent because the gods did them, and the things that are incoherent because they are a lie Cheliax made up on the spot. But the more he learns the more he'll be able to tell, and not along dimensions they can predict, he'll see correlations in weird places. They cannot come up with a convincing lie about being an invented kind of civilization that he would want to work with.

But if he'd landed in Taldor he would be appalled about all the things that are appalling about Taldor and then go ahead and teach all his technology, probably, so they don't have to invent a civilization, they just have to be Taldor. Literally Taldor, down to every detail that might seem irrelevant, because they don't know what things are going to seem irrelevant to Keltham. Taldor exists; it is a place that really can exist under whatever pressures Golarion puts on places. And it's acceptably stable enough that Keltham could go to work there. And it's culturally descended from the same civilization as Cheliax, has its own Kings and Queens and Dukes, so it won't contradict what's already been said. So it's the best available lie.

Taldor isn't ruled by Hell. But it could be, right, it has civil wars periodically, the Church has probably contemplated the option of offering one party in those civil wars a contract like the Thrune one. And there are various geopolitical considerations against, namely that Qadira would panic and plausibly go to war with the entire continent of Avistan (Carissa is getting all of her understanding of geopolitics from drunk foreign adventurers speculating at the Worldwound). But that's because Qadira borders Taldor. ...anyway, there's got to be a plan, right? Carissa's proposed lie is that the plan worked, and it's now fifteen or twenty years later. Long enough for them to be able to attribute all the remotely good things about Cheliax to Hell, short enough that anything bad they can reasonably say Hell hasn't had the resources to fix yet.

It is in her professional assessment as the person snuggling Keltham the only lie that will hold up once he's less confused, and it'll hold up better the sooner they all consistently adhere to it, so the book is urgent.

Iarwain: Tap again. Security wizard has a running Telepathic Bond; he uses it to request this particular report go to Maillol at medium urgency.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa assumes all of her previous education on Taldor was misleading so she's not going to do further planning until she can be acquainted with how the place actually works. which is important, the lies won't hold up, they are made of the wrong substrates for convincingness to Keltham.

And that's as far as she can reasonably get in planning, so -

"I do have a perfectly reliable method of avoiding pregnancy; all wizards second circle and higher do," she says aloud to Keltham. "I didn't want to interrupt sex to have a conversation about whether you can trust me because I suspect it won't be a very sexy conversation. But. So you know."

Keltham: "I'd trust you with my shirt on that kind of assurance. My putative child's existence and welfare is a bit higher-stakes."

"You - don't have any hesitations of your own? If I said yes on my side?"

Carissa Sevar: about what?????

Maybe she can just say that.

"...about what?"

Keltham: "Having my child. We don't know what dath ilan and Golarion genetics do when mixed. It's obviously a gamble that Cheliax collectively needs to take, but the people who take it will have their own reasons for it. The research harem," that's the first time he's said it out loud but it's not really in doubt at this point, "had a chance to be asked about that, but you just followed me from the Worldwound, it's not clear you'd make the same decisions about being ready for a kid and being willing to have that kid be an experimental one. The children and childhoods that get dedicated to Science, in one way or another, that's got to be one of the top things my home planet has feelings about but knows it has to keep doing anyways."

Carissa Sevar: " - honestly I haven't thought about that at all yet, I was imagining you'd need much longer to think about it. I think probably they'll just let the kids have an approximately normal upbringing and test their intelligence more often than normal? If they do that then, well, I had a normal upbringing and it was pretty great, I don't have hesitations about that. If they have plans to do something weirder than that I'll have to think about it. And, uh, either way I'll have to think about - it would be a really inconvenient time to get pregnant right now! Pregnancy causes fatigue! Also you can't hit people much while they're pregnant."

You could keep me for hitting and get the other girls pregnant, she almost says, because in Cheliax that'd be a great flirtatious thing to say, but stops herself in time because she knows enough about dath ilan to know that Keltham would be genuinely appalled at the suggestion this decision was his alone. If he even successfully parsed it from what she said, but that's not worth the risk.

Keltham: Reassuring to hear her say that - it doesn't sound like what a childseeking conspiracy would have her say, to first-order, though of course that could just be guessing his passcode based on the tone in which he asked the question.

"Well, even if I sign a contract with Cheliax, I won't expect it to include a rush order on that short of a time scale," Keltham says. "My sperm should stay potent a few years yet." He briefly considers whether he wants to see a Kelthamcarissa in particular, but his brain is still returning error codes for that and the internal question goes unanswered.

Keltham also has questions about 'hitting', because it seems like that wouldn't optimize well over a pain-to-injury ratio... no, actually because his brain flinches away, it could be dath ilani programming or it could be a not-my-sexuality-actually error; he wants to inflict pain on Carissa, not violence. But he's going to have to write out a list of questions anyways, so it can just get wrapped into that. He's curious about the six top theories for why wizards are harder to hurt, and about whether he can think of easy distinguishing experiments in the first 10 seconds or if Golarion already did narrow it down as much as a sensible person could without advanced experimental designs; but it was stated that he needs to tickle this information out of Carissa, and that sounds like more sex.

He is feeling a bit tired, though; there's been a number of hours in the day. "I should cast the unidentified spells my god gave me before I go to sleep," Keltham murmurs out loud. "Is there a workroom, or protected area, or should a senior wizard be monitoring me, or..."

Carissa Sevar: "There's probably a workroom and you probably want someone on hand who can dispel the spell if it's dangerous." She sits up, very reluctantly, and starts getting dressed. "I can't dispel your spells reliably, you're higher-circle than me, but security'll be able to."

Keltham: Oops, should he have asked if she wanted to cuddle even longer? No he shouldn't, she just got through saying repeatedly to him to optimize over his own darned self - or does that only apply during sex? He'll add that to the questions list.

Keltham will pull on his precious clothing, and then follow wherever Carissa takes him.

Carissa Sevar: "Security!" she calls impatiently, and finds them, and they do know where workrooms are. "Mind if I stay?" she asks Keltham. "I'm very curious."

Keltham: "You're the one with the vastly greater risk tolerance. Be my guest." It's only after speaking that it occurs to Keltham to wonder how he'd feel if he accidentally hurt Carissa. "...but stand behind the more powerful wizard or something, maybe."

Carissa Sevar: Yeah, all right, she can do that.

Keltham: Keltham decides to keep the identified spells of Comprehend Languages and Sanctuary overnight, in case he suddenly needs them in the middle of the night because friends or enemies show up in his bedroom. He can cast them in the morning before praying, just to verify that those spells do what Cheliax claimed... actually he should check two assumptions there. "Question one, if I keep Sanctuary overnight and cast it in the dawn before praying for spells, does that count against my spells for that day? Question two, am I wasting my god's energy in any significant way if I cast a spell I don't need?"

lintamande: "Spells for the day are counted dawn to dawn, casting them right before dawn won't alter what you get at dawn. God resources are expended when the spells are granted, not when they're used; if a god thinks you're being too profligate with your spells they can grant you fewer, though they generally don't because it's useful for everyone to know what to expect a fourth-circle cleric to get."

Keltham: "If I just kept Sanctuary, then my god wouldn't need to grant it again - check? Maybe if I get it again tomorrow's dawn, I'll keep it that time. Or can the god opt directly whether to keep or replace a spell, if I still have it?"

"First up, that enchantment-compulsion spell that looks a lot like the truth spell, but that I only had a single copy of," and didn't previously want to waste in testing in case there was an obvious natural time for using an enchantment-compulsion. "Carissa, you up for being the target of it?"

lintamande: "If you keep it your god doesn't need to grant it again. I have never heard of a god replacing a spell their cleric had saved on purpose, which might mean it's impossible or just expensive or just better to predictably not do."

Carissa Sevar: "Sure, go ahead."

Keltham: ...it seems like an easy thing to experiment on, but ok fine Keltham will figure out what to do about Sanctuary later.

He boops Carissa with an unidentified first-circle enchantment-compulsion spell!

Carissa Sevar: Like the truth spell it puts a symbol on her forehead. "...not obviously subjectively anything," she says after a second. "I am an apple. I have never met Keltham. ...not a truth spell."

"I think it's a specialized truth spell," the security wizard says. "I haven't seen it before, though."

Keltham: "Offer to sell me your shoe for 18,000 gold pieces?"

Carissa Sevar: "I will sell you my shoe for -

- wow, okay -

- one second, try selling security something -"

Keltham: What does he have that isn't worth 18,000 gold pieces? Even his fingernail clippings or saliva contain his DNA, and if sold unencumbered could be used in principle to - oh, right, time, he owns time. "I'll tell you the result of adding two plus three in exchange for 18,000 gold pieces," Keltham says to the security wizard.

Carissa Sevar: "That's not a fair trade," Carissa blurts out.

Wow, Abadar is such a specific god.

Keltham: Interesting! Keltham's mind immediately goes to the obvious next thing to try! "If one plus two is three, I'll tell you the result of two plus three for 18,000 gold, but if one plus two is four, I'll tell you two plus three for free," he says to Security.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has been awake for too long. How does Keltham do this. ...one plus two does equal three so it's the same unfair trade as - "not fair," she says involuntarily, but not until her brain has caught up with Keltham.

Keltham: To Carissa. "I'm about to describe a fair trade, try to claim falsely that it's unfair." To security. "I'll tell you the result of one plus four if you tell me three plus two."

Carissa Sevar: "Not fair," declares Carissa.

Keltham: "Well, that explains why there's a separate Truth spell and a Fair Division of Gains from Trade spell. I was wondering if this one was just strictly more powerful, and maybe there's a way to use it that way, but it's a lot more cumbersome at least if it doesn't rule out false positives. Sorry about this, by the way, but doing it anyways for the obvious reason, I'll tell you one plus one for ten thousand gold pieces if and only if you know of something about which the Chelish government is actively deceiving me."

Carissa Sevar: See this is why she needs a HEADBAND - is "I'll make an unfair trade conditional on a false thing" fair or unfair or - and now someone has cast Dominate Person on her and wants her to keep her mouth shut so they at least must think the correct response to this is silence - it's incredibly hard to think under Dominate Person and whoever cast it probably does have a headband so she'll just trust their judgment.

Keltham: Keltham sort of wants to ask Carissa about more personal things, but - that seems a lot less like fair play. He's not even sure how he could ask about it being okay to use a spell for that, afterwards, without making it seem like he was trying to extract permission from her, which seems sort of like trying to press an oath out of somebody. (There can ever be non-self-originating requests to swear to something, there's standard Keeper oaths after all, but it has to be set up in an extremely careful way to make it a mutually expected-beneficial interaction that doesn't proliferate social pressure to swear oaths over smaller and smaller things.)

It doesn't seem much worth trying to ask things more intricate; he covered that territory with his earlier experiments, and if they could defeat the truth spell they can probably defeat this too. "Not sure how expensive it is to dispel something, or how hard it is on you to leave it up, but I'm fine if you want to dispel that now."

Carissa Sevar: "It doesn't feel like anything when you're not trying to sneak deals past people," Carissa's mouth says for her, "and it's probably short duration, and Dispels are valuable. I don't mind leaving it up."

And then the Dominate Person comes off, which is nice, she wasn't even trying to resist and it still felt like most of her head was pushing against a brick wall when she tried to use it.

Keltham: "All right, I used up all my second-circles already today, and next up is three third-circles I don't understand. Evocation, Divination, Illusion."

Carissa Sevar: "Third circle cleric divinations....uh, Aura Sight, which shows Law and Chaos and Good and Evil, Detect Splendour, Detect Wisdom....Guiding Star but that's for navigation..."

Keltham: Oh, that Aura Sight sounds like one he shouldn't give time for local Governance to fake, just in case everybody here is secretly Good. "Casting the Divination now," Keltham says, and goes through the brief gestures that feel appropriate to 'untying' the spell and 'flicking' it loose.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is Lawful Evil! Security is Lawful Evil! There's another Lawful Evil outside the door! Keltham himself has an aura of Law, but not one of Evil.

Keltham: Lawful Neutral? - Keltham thinks fast enough not to say it out loud, in case they don't know that, somehow, and don't like learning it. He doesn't count as Evil or Good? Or does he have enough Good in him that it balances out, or -

"That was Aura Sight, yeah. I wonder why my god would've given me that - you'd already know if one of the people here was secretly Chaotic Good or something, right?" Do they not have access to this spell, somehow?

Carissa Sevar: "We do have that spell. Uh, people who aren't very powerful don't register, so there isn't a way to know for sure about the second-circle girls, but you having the spell doesn't change that, that can't be the problem your god was trying to solve..."

lintamande: "When you arrived here you didn't have a visible aura, because you weren't very powerful," Security says. "You acquired it at some point after you were selected as a cleric; your aura communicates that your god is Lawful Neutral, but isn't information about your personal alignment. The same for other clerics; a Lawful Neutral or Neutral Evil cleric of Asmodeus, if there were somehow one, would still read as both Lawful and Evil."

Keltham: "You didn't think to mention earlier that my god was Lawful Neutral?" Keltham says. He's actually puzzled by this; it seems a strange piece of info to withhold - oh that's a plausible reason why he got Aura Sight, so he'd know. But surely Chelish Governance would realize that his god could, in fact, grant him that spell, sooner or later, if they didn't tell him, as apparently they didn't? Or just that Keltham would hear about Aura Sight somewhere and ask what he detected as? Keltham is confused by why exactly they would withhold that of all info.

Carissa Sevar: - shoot. Carissa's pretty sure that's just a straight-up error. They were considering in the hours after it happened whether to tell him it'd been identified as Abadar or whether to tell him it was an unknown LN god, but she wasn't personally going to tell him because she doesn't have Aura Sight and ostensibly isn't getting routine reports on him. Then the Nethys thing and the Otolmens thing and the devil refusing her soul all happened in quick succession and apparently no one ever took Keltham aside with the news. It's not her error, in the sense that she isn't the person who was supposed to do it; it is her error, in the sense that she could and should have ordered it, her paying attention to it would have been adequate for avoiding it.

She thinks loudly that it makes no sense for a hypothetical Chelish security that was hiding nothing not to have noticed that, so she can't think of anything better than apologizing, explaining that Aura Sight is also possessed by Chelish security and that they knew Keltham's god was Lawful Neutral, and assumed Keltham knew that because people generally do when selected by a god. And there's a team of people researching god-symbols and intending to report to him on candidates for who his god is but all they have at this point is a moderately useless longlist.

lintamande: " - you didn't know?" Security says, sounding surprised right back. "People sense when they're chosen - not which god, if it's not a god they're very familiar with already, but which fundamental forces they're touched with - and you're not from around here, right. I - apologize. We noticed around midday and then set a team of people trying to figure out which god it might be and they were going to report to you when they had anything better than a list of all the known Lawful Neutral gods."

Carissa Sevar: " - he said Chaotic Evil and I was confused about that but I haven't got aura sight -"

lintamande: "Do you have a person you're supposed to report all instances of being confused to," Security snaps back at her.

Carissa Sevar: "Yes. I'm sorry. There's - I was confused about a lot of things today."

Keltham: Keltham is currently confused about whether the security guard and Carissa already know each other; that seems more like an intimate cofounder-cofounder interaction, or two Keepers on the same level of organizational lattice, than a security officer talking to an unfamiliar non-security officer. He decides not to point this out, in case it's symptomatic, say, of their being part of a set of playactors who all know each other and aren't good at pretending to be strangers...

His hypotheses on how the people around him could be trying to deceive him, keep foundering on all the ways they'd have to be simultaneously good at it and also bad at it in order to explain the details of his observations.

Still, Keltham doesn't neglect to note that the whole thing rings slightly false, and more like they had reasons for worrying about him acquiring the info that his god was Lawful Neutral, though what to make of that, he has no idea. "Evocation or Illusion next?" Keltham says.

Carissa Sevar: "Third circle cleric evocations would be... there's one to disrupt the summoning magic of summoned creatures, I'm going to be seriously alarmed if you've got that...one that gives the aura of Lawfulness devils have, and one that does a really bright light...Helping Hand is third circle, it can find anyone within five miles and sort of gently politely repeatedly point them in your direction. ...doesn't make a lot of sense for this situation. Do you know yet how to see if it's instantaneous or has some duration? Instantaneous ones look like they're rigged to all go off at once, ones with a duration look like it'll hold stably for a bit on its own and decay slowly."

Keltham: Keltham inwardly stares at the truth spell he has remaining, first to come to mind as effect-over-time, then at his other spells. "Either I can't tell the difference at all, or none of the spells I got today were instant," Keltham says, hesitantly, after a while.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Then it could do a really wide range of things but it's probably not instantly deadly, and Security can cancel it if it's even somewhat deadly. I don't see how we'll guess without you casting it."

Keltham: Keltham starts going through brief gestures to untie and flick loose a spell.

Iarwain: This spell is, in fact, Invisibility Purge. How are any invisible people nearby doing at a very fast Spellcraft check and attempted reaction to that, if any?

lintamande: The invisible security person is also on the other side of the door!!! Defense in depth, right?

Carissa Sevar: ....Abadar is incredibly not amused by them. In general making a god this not amused with you is an incredibly doomed plan.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Oops.

Keltham: Keltham is slightly proud of how fast he manages to get himself behind the security wizard, relative to the short person who suddenly materialized in the room. He makes no romantic attempt to grab Carissa along the way, either because his hindbrain hasn't gotten updated about him having equity in her or because his hindbrain successfully updated on her being a vastly more seasoned emergency response officer.

Carissa Sevar: That's Otolmens' halfling, it has got to be, but she isn't supposed to know that. Carissa steps clear of security but where she's easier to get to than Keltham and shouts, not screaming like she's scared but shouting because more attention should be allocated here.

lintamande: " - are you the special case with authorization direct from the High Priestess," Security asks Broom.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom is," he says.

His hindbrain knows that this is a situation where he needs to think very fast to avoid punishment rather than appearing unthreateningly stupid.

Broom removes the other ring. Not the invisibility ring, the ring that conceals his alignment and his thoughts. He knows that powerful wizards can read thoughts in general and his thoughts in particular.

Wink right eye if I should try to explain, left eye if you explain, he thinks at the security guard. I can say I am chosen of a secret Lawful Neutral god that tries to avoid people making large messes.

Keltham: Keltham, however, still has Aura Sight up, which is not something that Broom would know, because halfling slaves don't memorize the durations of third-circle cleric spells.

"Lawful Neutral," Keltham says, a moment after the ring comes off.

lintamande: Right eye.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom apologizes very much," says Broom with a deep bow, but not a servile one. "Broom is the chosen of a secret Lawful Neutral god that tries to avoid people making large messes."

Keltham: Okay. There are at least some people hiding in the walls at all but they're - honestly this doesn't make Cheliax look so bad, if it's true. A Lawful Neutral god who averts messes sending invisible observers to monitor the alien traveler, under some interfactional compact, are, like, how things would work if any part of Golarion were remotely functional. Which, given how functional this place isn't, does make the story a little suspect. "Security, does that match your understanding?"

lintamande: "Yes, it does."

Keltham: "You mind if I tap you with a truth spell before this conversation continues, Broom? The spell doesn't force you to respond, it forces you to say the truth or nothing."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Right eye if you can let me evade that truth spell without his knowing. Left eye if you can't.

lintamande: Right.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom accepts this."

Keltham: Keltham casts his truth spell. The mysterious symbol flashes into existence on the forehead of "Broom".

"Who are you? Say it again."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "This one is Broom. This one is the chosen of a secret Lawful Neutral god who tries to prevent giant messes."

Keltham: "Can you tell me why your god is a secret god, or is the reason why your god is secret itself a secret?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "The reason is also secret," Broom says. "Broom apologizes again."

Keltham: "What constitutes a giant mess? If all the other countries get scared of Cheliax and start threatening violence unless Cheliax shuts down this project, is that a giant mess by your standards?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom momentarily considers whether to answer this truthfully, before realizing that answering 'no' implies that the messes are even larger, which is not a direction in which he wants Keltham's thoughts going. "A mess is a mess," Broom says. "My god decides."

Keltham: "What do you do if you determine that I'm about to make a giant mess?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Stab you before you can destroy the world. "Tell my god. Tell the great wizards."

(By 'great wizards', Broom of course means great wizards like the one in the room right there next to him; that is as great as a wizard gets from a slave's perspective.)

Keltham: "Would you rather we converse in some other language? I've got a Comprehend Languages and your speech patterns suggest you're not a native speaker of Taldane."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom's speech patterns are for avoiding offense and punishment. "Taldane is good for Broom."

Keltham: "Do you know who my god is?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Aspexia Rugatonn told Broom some of what was known about Keltham, cleric of Abadar. "No," Broom lies again.

Keltham: "Really. You'd think Lawful Neutral gods, of all the kinds of gods there are, would coordinate more with each other."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom genuinely does not understand this. "My god may know your god. I do not know your god."

Keltham: "Do you know what could be preventing my god from contacting me directly?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Otolmens. Asmodeus. "Broom does not know. Broom is not wise in the ways of gods. Broom only serves one."

Keltham: Were you watching myself and Carissa before? Keltham doesn't ask it, although the thought of being watched while he was hurting Carissa seems like far more of an intimate violation than being spied on during ordinary sex. He doesn't ask because that part is a personal issue and this is about world-scale interfactional treaties...

He actually is feeling wounded about that violation of privacy, injured, angry if it was true. Huh, imagine that. Well, Keltham is not Good and he is allowed to do something about pursuing his own interests here.

"I'm not really happy with this version of the spying thing," Keltham says. "How about if, from now on, you monitor my lessons openly, or don't show up at all? And my god won't have to give me more revealing-hidden-people spells, and we won't have to burn effort on opposing each other."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom supposes there is little reason to remain hidden from you, now that you know Broom is here. Broom was told that others are not to know of Broom, however."

Keltham: "I'm not comfortable with you spying on my students either," Keltham says. "And I do have the power to reveal you to them, if my god grants me the same spell again, or I could just tell them outright what I already learned about you, if nobody wants to explain detailed treaties and reasons otherwise to me. My proposal is that there's just an unexplained very short person in the lessons, and I say that I sort of know why you're there but it's not going to be explained."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom cannot make this decision on his own. Broom will consult with the great wizards of Cheliax and pray to his god."

Keltham: Good to know the great wizards are paying any attention. "Fine. You've got 24 hours to let me know about a decision or update me about why it's taking longer, and meanwhile I don't expect you to be hidden around spying."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom bows again and turns to go. He is neither shaking nor sweating; whatever comes of this, he is very unlikely to be burned over and over for it, unless it merits Aspexia Rugatonn coming back to allow that.

Keltham: Keltham will spend a few moments breathing, trying to get over the shock of adrenaline followed by the shock of wounding, when he realized that, if this person was here at all, it was probably because that person was following him and Carissa around, spying on private moments.

Keltham was, in retrospect, much more aggressive than he should have been, with an interfactional representative of another god like that, one who has treaties with Cheliax, but it's been a long time since this kind of twisting thread of anger has run through him.

lintamande: "I should ask what you can be authorized to know," says Security, and fills the room briefly with glitter, checking there aren't more invisible people, and then heads out behind Broom.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa said from the BEGINNING that they should tell Keltham about Otolmens because they shouldn't be keeping any secrets from him that they don't absolutely have to. But this is over her head, presumably.

" - are you all right?" she says quietly to Keltham once they're to all appearances alone.

Keltham: "Not really." Keltham considers saying how much he doesn't like the thought of having been spied on by this particular non-abstract person while he was with Carissa, and then the thought occurs to him that if this isn't already bothering Carissa, he'd rather not remind her to be bothered by it. "How - how weird was that, how out of character for reality as you know it, on a scale of zero to twelve?"

Carissa Sevar: " - good question. Uh. There being secret Lawful Neutral gods is not out of character for reality, if I'd had occasion to think about it I'd have thought yeah probably some gods have reason not to tell most mortals they exist. Such a god having taken interest in this project is not out of character for reality. Chelish senior leadership - is people like Contessa Lrilatha, and if I imagine her reacting to a secret Lawful Neutral god representative showing up, probably she would - react cooperatively, we don't want 'big messes' either. Maybe just tell Security he's authorized to be here and to stay out of his way. All of that is - I wouldn't have predicted it but only because there are a hundred things about as predictable and I can't keep track of all of them.

The guy himself was weird. I don't know how I imagine people who are members of a secret order dedicated to a secret god who go around preventing catastrophes but - but he wasn't how I imagined that. And the fact that your god interfered is weird, I'd expect - usually when gods both want to intervene in opposed ways they hash it out privately and only one intervenes, it's cheaper. You don't visibly see gods at cross-purposes much. But this is much more important than most things and prophecy's broken and it's plausible they aren't at cross-purposes, that it was both necessary for him to be invisible and for him to be caught. So....maybe four or five? On that scale."

Keltham: Right then. It was weird, but not the parts he thought were weird. At least that's not meta-weird, because that's what falling into another world should be like.

"Does our relationship permit me to lean into you and get a hug while we're not otherwise engaged in cuddleroom activities?"

Carissa Sevar: Hug.

Keltham: Sigh.

"...I still have three more spells," Keltham says after a while.

Carissa Sevar: "....it does not actually make sense for me to feel a sense of doom at that. And yet."

Keltham: "Well, we're not going to get any less doomed if we wait. Find another security officer or wait for the previous one to come back?"

Ferrer Maillol: Yeah, that security officer isn't coming back soon, or, in fact, at all.

How many ways is Ferrer Maillol pissed? Let's count them! Maillol sure is!

First, the decision to tell Keltham that him being Evil himself wouldn't show up in his own aura. It has the short-term benefit of not making Keltham wonder about his own apparent Neutrality. Its disadvantages include that they're going to have to conceal Ione's aura so she doesn't look Lawful Evil; that if they succeed at shifting Keltham more Evil, and then he looks at himself, he's going to spot the lie; and above all, that it is a lie, which Sevar said to hand out sparingly around Keltham and under centralized supervision, and Maillol seems to recall saying that Sevar was now in charge of that. The wizard didn't even have to make up any answer about that. He could have just shut up.

Second, volunteering to Keltham that they did already know he was Lawful Neutral. Maybe no clerics at the villa happened to prepare Aura Sight that day. Wouldn't that be simpler? Hm? Keltham possibly bought the excuse but they sure have been giving him multiple excuses lately, hm?

Third, telling Keltham that they're working to identify the symbol and will inform him as soon as it's known. Cheliax is now permanently committed to preventing Keltham from getting a glimpse of Abadar's symbol in any context that associates it with Abadar, because it would not have taken that long to identify. They could have said they were unsure about Osirion and if Keltham would start imitating their treatment of women, which Sevar happens to have spouted on about and which Keltham seemed sympathetic to. This is partially on Sevar for not thinking fast enough, but it's mostly on the security guard for having wedged Sevar into a bad position by bringing up that they knew it was a Lawful Neutral god at all, which is what required Sevar to come up with instant answers.

Fourth, failing to remember the existence of Otolmens's oracle. Sevar forgot, yeah, and he's not happy about that either, but Sevar's not the one whose job it is to have combat reflexes and figure out immediately what needs to happen when Keltham starts casting Invisibility Purge.

Any one of these mistakes in isolation could be a blemish on an otherwise acceptable record.

In combination, it means Ferrer Maillol directs three other security wizards to burn this one almost but not quite to death over the course of an hour, and then, rather more injuriously to him, send him back with a request for a replacement security officer and a note that this one is unsuited to complicated deceptions requiring fast reaction times. Maillol would do it himself, to vent some of his frustrations, but he is more busy than lesser beings can understand.

As for what Keltham is cleared to know about Otolmens? He's cleared to know the minimal facts the fucking halfling slave more competent than his own security wizards by virtue of talking fucking less and only when spoken to already said, and there's no need to clear him for more than that.

Carissa Sevar: "The last one's an illusion? I am actually not thinking of what it might be. I know a bunch of third-circle wizard illusions - Major Image, which does better adjustable illusions like Minor Image which you already saw, Displacement which makes you appear to be in a slightly different place than you actually are, Invisibility Sphere... Dream, which lets you send short messages to someone in their sleep - probably one of them is also on the cleric spell list and I'm just forgetting that..."

When it's been a little she steps outside and summons another Security so they can go ahead.

Keltham: Keltham casts his third-circle cleric illusion spell.

lintamande: The room around them catches fire. Carissa hisses and starts a spell before realizing it's illusory fire. It stretches on beyond where the walls of the room are, though you can sort of still see them.

It is accompanied by illusory agonized screaming. Most of it is wordless, hoarse, barely human; some of it is more coherent, and verges on comprehensible Taldane pleading.

"- please, please, I'm sorry - no -"

"- kill me -"

On the ground in front of them a man is engaged in trying to drag himself across the flaming ground. His skin is raw and bloody and occasionally burns right through to the bone, though the injuries close up, when they get that serious. He's in enough pain that his muscles are spasming and his limbs don't quite obey him; he's not screaming but just gasping hoarsely. The sound is unforgettable.

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa Sevar has very good spellcraft, and it's easier to think about spellcraft than about other things, so the main thing she is thinking is that this spell is, evidently from watching it cast, one of those two minutes per caster circle spells.)

Keltham: This is important.

Or his god wouldn't be showing it to him.

Any negative effects it has on him should already have been taken into account as an acceptable cost.

Keltham tries to look around.

Very briefly.

It's still enough to get a general impression of things.

He looks at Carissa, who doesn't seem to be in visible emotional difficulty, because six years at the Worldwound, presumably.

"Please look around to see if there are any clues and then turn this off," Keltham says, and shuts his eyes and puts his fingers into his ears.

Illusion spell. This isn't real. A movie of a bad thing that isn't actually happening.

lintamande: Security dispels it. Exchanges glances with Carissa.

Carissa Sevar: Well, the 'look around for clues' is nice because it means she has a minute to compare cover stories.

'some people are kinky!' is not going to cover it.

'Abaddon!' is an obvious option. And the other obvious one is Zon-Kuthon. Abaddon is - more of a lie, there's other stuff about Abaddon which would establish that it doesn't really involve very much being on fire, they could filter it. Zen Kuthon is known to Keltham to have an inverted utility function. He's Lawful Evil but not the way Asmodeus is Evil, in the was Good and got turned to the exact opposite sense. And that does look like the exact opposite of Good. ...she can also buy their future selves option value, say that she thinks it's probably Zon Kuthon but didn't see anything definitive.

She pulls out a notebook and writes down some irrelevant things she happened to see, because taking notes is what she'd be doing, if she was learning something new. And then she pats Keltham tentatively on the shoulder and, if he doesn't flinch, hugs him.

Keltham: He doesn't flinch when touched. A dath ilani may not have seen illusion spells but they have at least seen movies. Though no movie of anything like that, of course, it would leave scars on whoever saw it.

But some things are worth getting some scars, even on your mind and core, and Keltham's god evidently thought this was that important.

"I hope you know what that -" Keltham starts, and then realizes that if he continues with this ill-advised 'speech' business he's going to vomit, so he stops his breath and clamps down on abdominal muscles instead.

Carissa Sevar: "I have a top guess? I think - so Zon-Kuthon, the god who wandered into the void and values the opposite of everything he did before, has a country. And claims its people when they die."

Keltham:
"It was real? That's happening right now, somewhere?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know!!!! But - if I were a god I - wouldn't do that to make any point at all except - except itself - and if it's real, that's - that's what it'd be -"

Keltham: Keltham is not a Keeper and therefore he is going to do something epistemically questionable and, while not assigning bad probabilities over the branched possibilities, he will mentally live for a time inside the possible world where that vision definitely hasn't happened yet, until he stops feeling like he's going to throw up, and come to terms with the other branches later.

"I have my obvious theory about what that means and why my god would do that. Both of you come up with your theories before I state mine, then we all state what our theories were before we heard the other person's theories," Keltham says. "Raise your hand when you have a theory, and once we've all raised our hands, Security goes first." Obviously, this affair has reached a state of urgency where any pretense of Security being dispassionate not-really-present observers can be discarded along with all other pretenses.

lintamande: "....your god wants you to negotiate for Cheliax to do something about that and thinks that once we have the metalworking and riches of dath ilan we'll be able to."

Keltham: "Carissa." He's going in reverse order of how much he trusts the people present to speak their answers uninfluenced by who spoke earlier.

Carissa Sevar: "...so your god is Lawful Neutral. And you're at least by self-identification Evil. And, uh, I think your god is pitching being Lawful Neutral. Saying to you, 'okay, you mostly only care about pursuing your own interests and dealing fairly with others, but that mostly might matter a lot, here, what are you going to do about that." Carissa is not sure that is a good direction to push Keltham in but they ....need to reconsider a lot of strategy, if Abadar is going to be this pointed, and it might be time to start angling for the plan where Keltham leaves and takes her with him. At least to be sure not to burn it.

Keltham: "Persuasive pitch, if so," Keltham says, learning, as he speaks, to speak and clench his stomach muscles at the same time. "I'll pause to take my expensive shirt off first not to ruin it, and I'll want somebody to pay me afterwards, but I will, in fact, jump into waterholes to save drowning children."

"My theory is that Zon-Kuthon of the inverted values is the god that has an effectively unnegotiable incentive to oppose everything we're doing here and want us all dead; that the vision uniquely identifies Zon Kuthon though why it had to come in that form I don't know; and that we're being warned that the security precautions we had at the time I got my spells this morning, plus any further precautions we'd take predictably to my god, without this vision, are not adequate to navigate that with acceptable casualties."

"Can Zon-Kuthon just - take people, could he take somebody here, especially if they're Lawful Evil, if his clerics attack us - or does Asmodeus -"

lintamande: "Asmodeus has the stronger claim on our souls," says Security firmly. And then shuts up, it's harder to get in trouble for saying too little.

Carissa Sevar: "And your god has on yours, you're Their cleric. I....have no idea what would happen if Zon Kuthon tried everything He can try, but Asmodeus is stronger than Him."

Keltham: "I have two more spells. Fourth-circle abjuration. Fourth-circle divination. I'm going to just go ahead and cast those now, in that order. Maybe one of them sheds some light on things." Keltham has discarded any senses of oncoming doom because the current situation is more important than feeling doomed about it.

Keltham: Fourth-circle abjuration, go.

lintamande: "Spell Immunity," says Security instantly. "Makes you impossible to target with one specific spell of fourth-circle or lower of your choice. - I am not thinking of an obvious spell you're supposed to protect yourself from."

Carissa Sevar: "I'd go scrying if we weren't already unscryable?" Malediction, but they're absolutely not admitting the existence of Malediction. "...yeah, if it's meant for a specific thing rather than just for added protection I don't have a guess what the specific thing is."

lintamande: The spell is lingering invitingly in the air in front of Keltham, refusing to be flicked free of his fingertips.

Keltham: Does it take the input "the spell on me right now that's affecting my mind or perceptions" or "the spell that's on me right now"?

lintamande: The second one works!

Carissa Sevar: "....huh, I didn't know you could target like that."

Keltham: Keltham realizes he no longer understands what Carissa just said.

It takes him a few moments to remember that one spell that was still on him.

Keltham is an idiot.

Well, he was distracted, but being distractible is part of what being an idiot is all about.

Carissa Sevar: "You definitely gave yourself immunity to something but I don't know exactly what because you didn't specify the spell with the spellform, you specified it -" her fingers are moving without her conscious attention - "did you specify 'the spell effect I already have ongoing' or something -"

Security guy whistles.

" - literally everything else about this situation is not my specialty but this is."

Keltham: "Guess who just lost their Share Language spell," Keltham says in Baseline. "And yeah, sorry, I didn't understand that," some words maybe, but not the sentences of Taldane just yet.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa was pretty chill about the torture but she's awfully disappointed, about Keltham not getting to appreciate her spellcraft.

" - oh. Well, that's what he did. Do you have Share Languages..."

"....nope, and it wouldn't work on him if I did."

"Tongues."

"No."

"Does anyone else on duty -"

"We're running the duty roster a little thin right now."

Oh. Are they all in a lot of trouble. Probably they are all in a lot of trouble. Carissa isn't even sure what she did but she's sure some of it was very stupid in hindsight. "Can you prep it?"

"Sure thing, I just need an hour. And by then probably six dozen paladins of Iomedae will enter through the sewers while Aroden returns from the dead just to animate all the furniture and make it sing songs."

Keltham: If it wasn't meant to negate a spell already cast on him, like a mind-controlling one... in dath ilan, this would be a message to the effect of, think about what spells could be cast on you that you wouldn't want cast on you, maybe. It's a spell that requires you to know what's coming, forming a requirement of prediction.

Then Keltham catches the word "Iomedae." That sounds potentially urgent.

Comprehend Languages, gesturing the spell slowly so they can see it.

"Iomedae?" Keltham says after casting; he can hear, now, but can't speak.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can cast Comprehend Languages too! "Oh good! Uh, your Spell Immunity should wear off in an hour or two and then we can give it to you again."

Keltham: "I observed some guy mention Iomedae, with possible inferences not ruled out to me including that Iomedae's faction might also attack here, or that it might be invited to likewise oppose Zon-Kuthon; this seemed relatively urgent and was the reason why I cast my Comprehend Languages instead of reserving it further. Though it's also nice to speak in a language where sensible meanings can be conveyed in shorter codes." Speaking in Baseline, not just thinking in it, helps reimpose abstraction, which is a form of distance; some part of him was starting to go a little Taldane from speaking it all the time.

lintamande: "I'll repeat exactly what I said but it was of no such urgency, sorry; Sevar asked if I could prepare Tongues for you and I said 'Sure thing, I just need an hour. And by then probably six dozen paladins of Iomedae will enter through the sewers while Aroden returns from the dead just to animate all the furniture and make it sing songs.', which was not a genuine prediction."

Carissa Sevar: "Iomedae might ally with Asmodeus against Zon-Kuthon for this but it'd be a direct god-negotiation, we can't expedite it. I don't think her faction would attack and the illusion-vision definitely doesn't reference Her faction."

Keltham: What the guy said containing 'Iomedae' matches the non-understood sounds of the last sentence containing 'Iomedae', near as Keltham remembers. Fair enough.

"I should've asked whether my earlier interpretation was at all plausible. Probability distribution over Zon Kuthon attacking here within the next day, next 8 days, next 64 days?"

lintamande: Security will let Carissa generate numbers for the madman, thank you.

Carissa Sevar: That's good because there are things that are obvious to Carissa that wouldn't have been obvious to her a day ago about the giving-numbers social ritual. Keltham's hypothesis is a useful one for him to be on and she wants to encourage him in it but if she makes it seem too probable then they look stupid for having missed it. Let's say 4%, 10%, 40%, she thinks at Security.

lintamande: "Uh, 4%, 10%, 40%."

Carissa Sevar: Given the message from your god. We thought it lower before.

lintamande: "Given the message from your god. We thought it lower before."

Keltham: "That's... higher probability than I was expecting for a first guess that wild. Do Zon-Kuthon attacks happen a lot around here?"

lintamande: UGH.

Carissa Sevar: This wouldn't be expected to be Carissa's expertise so it'd be weird for her to be answering even though she's either better at or less scared of improvising in Kelthamish terms.

No! I can think of a handful of known instances in the last two centuries! But direct divine intervention in general is incredibly rare, and there have been three instances of it here in the last twenty-four hours...

lintamande: "No! I can think of a handful of known instances in the last two centuries! But direct divine intervention in general is incredibly rare, and there have been three instances of it here in the last twenty-four hours."

Carissa Sevar: "And the reason direct divine intervention is rare is because the gods pay each other so only the one who cares most intervenes, and one case where that might be expected not to hold is a god who can't reasonably do value-trading with the other ones." That's just analysis and she may as well do it herself. "And - I'm not thinking of any reasons for the spell that aren't 'your god is predicting or requesting conflict with Zon Kuthon', so fundamentally that's got to shake out to 'He starts it' or 'we start it'."

Keltham: "That's... an odd way of forecasting, and I'd have to think about whether or not what you just said makes any sense, but at least it's not obvious nonsense - to bump up the entropy of all your probability distributions after encountering a series of low-probability events, if that makes sense when I say it to you in Baseline. How long do I have left before Taldane goes incomprehensible to me?"

lintamande: "Seventy minutes, which is also the duration of your Spell Immunity, so someone can prepare another Share Languages for you and have it ready by then."

Keltham: "Thank you. I apologize for requiring that resource of you, especially since the way in which it came about, that of my attempting to immunify myself against any economicmagics cast on myself without my knowledge, reflected both my ignorance of whether to trust you and my stupidly forgetting the spell already on me."

"Last spell cast, now." Keltham casts his fourth-circle divination. Maybe it brings answers, if it's the most powerful answering-spell.

lintamande: Some spells have more of a subjective sensation to them than others; this one has a strong one, of magic radiating out like pressurized water, stripping away whatever it encounters. It doesn't do much, though; a drawer concealed in the desk glows, and there's a sense he could look in a direction that's none of the three dimensions he's familiar with.

Carissa Sevar: We're going to have to revise all materials referencing Glimpse of Truth to claim it's just a more powerful Invisibility Purge that also finds magically hidden things. So he's not trying to stack it with Abadar's Truthtelling. ....maybe it's mostly meant for seeing enemies lurking on other planes, but he doesn't need it now that we've got a Forbiddance up. Call it, uh,

"Glimpse of Beyond."

Keltham: "There's a drawer -" And it's gone. "A concealed drawer in that desk right there was calling my attention." Keltham points it out.

lintamande: Security casts Dispel Magic and then uses a Mage Hand to tug it open. It's empty.

Carissa Sevar: "Detects secret doors and secret compartments, and people Polymorphed into other people, though the main thing it's for is detecting people hidden in other planes. I'm...not sure if that part of it would work with the Forbiddance up."

Keltham: "I felt like I could look in a new direction that wasn't the standard three-space-one-time, but the spell ended before I could explore that. There wasn't anything there, in that direction, that I saw... I wish I'd known to use that spell before the Forbiddance went up, just in case there was something there before."

"I'm very much playing amateur-security at this point, but, like, maybe check everyone here for 'people Polymorphed into other people' if you don't do that on a daily basis? Or if you've got a version of this spell that lasts longer, look around for secret doors that aren't on the consensus-social-reality map here..." Keltham sighs. "You'd probably have thought of that already, I'm guessing, but, trust but verify, I should say it aloud myself even if I think you've already thought of it, because security."

lintamande: "We do routinely check for secret doors and for Polymorphed people," security confirms. "And would be routinely checking for attackers or spies from other planes, if not for the Forbiddance."

Keltham: "All right. That is everything I had planned. I think next I... well, next I talk to Ione briefly, and then go to bed." He needs a book of the standard cleric spells, one that goes up to at least fourth-circle; hopefully Ione didn't use up all her book-borrows for the day. "Though if Ione doesn't have Comprehend Languages..." Then he needs a translator. Carissa or Security? Which would Ione prefer? Keltham's guessing Security; they're more professionally obliged to keep confidences. "You okay sticking with me slightly longer as a translator?" Keltham says to Security. "Should be brief."

lintamande: "Not a problem."

Carissa Sevar: "Good night, Keltham."

Keltham: "Until later, Carissa. On net and in total, it was still a pretty nice day in terms of direct causal impacts on me, if not in terms of the net total direction of all the evidential updates I executed."

Carissa Sevar: "Same to you. I think."

Keltham: Keltham turns to go, gesturing Security to precede him. "You're the one who knows where to find Ione, or find somebody who knows where to find her," Keltham says.

lintamande: Security will lead Keltham to Ione. In the library. Since apparently she has to stay there.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will ask other Security to make her invisible and go with her there as well, in case anything requires her intervention.

Ione Sala: Ione almost starts a genuine if faint smile on seeing Keltham, before Ione sees the Security with him. "Keltham," she says.

Keltham: "Please ask her if she's got Comprehend Languages prepared, or if Security needs to translate for her."

Ione Sala: Ione does not have Comprehend Languages prepared, as it happens.

Keltham: "Wanted to ask you a question about a book, but only if this is a good time," Keltham says.

Ione Sala: "It's a fine time," Ione says, after the Security officer translates, correctly decoding this question as being about the Security officer's presence. "Any time is a good time for questions like that, now that people have seen me do it once."

Keltham: "Gratitude-for-inconvenience-incurred. Book containing a maximal number of descriptions of cleric spells up to fifth circle?" His god may not have played its full hand, and it seems good to know about the fifth circle too.

Ione Sala: "Books about magic aren't always... let me think."

There's - what is there in the Ostenso library? They have a copy of a book she knows about that includes all known cleric spells, including up to 9th, including some Asmodeus's clerics can't get. Is there a book that only lists cleric spells that Asmodeus's own clerics can get? Either that doesn't exist or Ione needs to know more about it.

Security needs to give her some sign about whether that book is available today or if all the copies are out of the Ostenso library but Ostenso can request they'll be returned soon, or, or what? 1 if book available, 2 if not a kind of book that can be retrieved, 3 if the only copy is out of the Ostenso library but they can ask for it back, 4 if Ione should go on thinking until somebody can give her more instructions.

lintamande: ...they are going to want it to have a couple modifications to, say Glimpse of Truth that aren't yet completed, so...3?

Ione Sala: "Um," Ione says, glancing at Security, and then sighs, as if giving up on something (in the character she's playing, on directly admitting in front of a Chelish government official that Ione retrieves books from other libraries). "Ostenso is a wizard academy, there's only one compendium of cleric spells in there and somebody currently has it borrowed. Uh, you could ask Security to send a message to the library to get the book back, and I could try again later."

Keltham: ...somewhat suggestive of them wanting time to quickly reprint something? Actually, though it's a bit post-hoc, Keltham thinks he'd have guessed a priori something like a 30% chance that a real wizard library would have no unborrowed books on all cleric spells and... it's not quite fair to say 100% if they want to fool him, because they could choose other means of fooling him. Call it 2.5:1. You don't actually want to ignore your 2.5:1 likelihood ratios, they can logarithmically add up pretty quickly.

"Thanks for looking," Keltham says. "Anything that just has a brief list of all the cleric spells up to fourth circle by name? Even in passing?"

Ione Sala: "I - I don't think I can look through all the contents of all the books that narrowly, if it's not what a whole book is about," Ione says honestly.

Keltham: "I hate to ask this," Keltham says to both Ione and Security, "but can somebody maybe just flatly write down a list of a bunch of cleric spells they remember up to 4th circle, with, like, one-sentence descriptions of what they do."

Ione Sala: "I can," Ione says without hesitating, because she doesn't see Security telling her to pretend like she couldn't do that. "Come back in... maybe an hour?"

Keltham: "All right. I'll just ask for some paper for notes, then, and find other things to think about for an hour," so he can forget what he saw as much as possible before he has to think about it any more. What else is there to think about instead? He at least needs to itemize all the things he wants to ask Carissa about sex while they're not actually having sex, but some other things happened today too. And he can work out a rough general spell-granting code, for attempted communication with his god, in advance of knowing which exact spells he could ask for to signal various conditions.

Keltham: Off with Keltham!

lintamande: "The fourth circle divination Glimpse of Truth is called Glimpse of Beyond, and detects Polymorphed people, secret doors, and things hidden on other planes," Security tells her once he's definitely gone. "The books will back you up by morning. Keltham's god isn't known. Otherwise just show us your first draft."

Carissa Sevar: "Don't lie to him - about anything - unless you've checked it with me first," Carissa adds.

Zon-Kuthon: Zon-Kuthon keeps mostly to Himself, by His own choice, but also by choice of the other gods. When somebody of the same kind as yourself wanders into the Void and comes back with inverted values, there is an uncertainty about whether, if you talked to the victim too much, something infohazardous might start to happen to you. Zon-Kuthon negotiates little, or not at all; He has little, or no, use for alliances and dealings. He keeps to Xovaikain, His true realm, and to Nidal, the material shadow of it.

Before Zon-Kuthon, there was Dou-Bral, who helped fight and imprison Rovagug. It is unclear whether Zon-Kuthon would in some new battle fight to preserve all the pain that exists in the world; or if, Dou-Bral having once thought that the joy and beauty of the world outweighed its pain, Zon-Kuthon would now think there was too much pleasure in Existence, and that it ought therefore to be destroyed. Or perhaps Dou-Bral was too optimistic, in the days when Dou-Bral fought to defend reality; and if Dou-Bral knew what would have become of Pharasma's world, He would have tried to destroy it, even as Zon-Kuthon apparently seems content with its continued existence.

No other god in creation likes Zon-Kuthon. From Asmodeus's perspective He is a pretender to Lawful Evil; from the other Evil gods' perspective, an obsessed fanatic of no use to anyone; from the perspective of Neutral gods, an impediment; from the perspective of Good, a horror.

Why then does Zon-Kuthon continue to exist? Among the less pleasant facts of reality is that among the real reasons why the other gods don't band together to destroy Zon-Kuthon is that, as the last Lawful Evil competitor to Asmodeus of any significance, He is a threat for other gods to hold over Asmodeus - that there is at least one other competitor they could back for Asmodeus's position, if He grew too troublesome. Iomedae and Sarenrae, to be clear, would not keep Zon-Kuthon around just as a foil to Asmodeus, if those four were the only gods that were; but in a world where the existence of Zon-Kuthon is a constant weight on the negotiating positions of Asmodeus and say Gorum, trying to destroy Zon-Kuthon could be a mistake even if that were possible. Iomedae is more calculating now than when She was human, because She is better at it; She would not destroy Zon-Kuthon if the end result was for Asmodeus to grow stronger and for Hell to last victorious.

Nethys: Of course, some gods are less scared of talking to Zon-Kuthon than others, if they've already seen all the way to the end of the Void, where lies the Double Void, which flipped Nethys's utility function's sign right back! No, that's not actually what happened, but it makes about as much sense as anything else that Nethys could or would tell you about it.

Hey, Zon-Kuthon, Nethys sends. You see this mortal over here in Cheliax, the one who fears you and is horrified by you? You're admittedly missing some context, but it'd be hilarious if you sent some minions to assault his location sometime soon...

Carissa Sevar: And Carissa goes back to the temple to look for Maillol. She is very tired and suspects, somehow, that this won't be a nice quick twenty minute debrief before bed.

Ferrer Maillol: It sure isn't. Maillol acidly tells Sevar that nobody needed to promise Keltham that people were actively working to identify his god, up until that point they had the option of saying later that somebody spotted it as Abadar but that they were worried about his adopting Osirion's sexual morals or just that people were still consulting each other about if that was allowable to disclose.

This is, mostly, the fault of somebody whose screaming can be distantly heard in Maillol's office, because he was fucking fed up with this whole scenario and this screaming is at least a little consoling. Much worse for that guy, he's getting a permanent notation on his file saying that he doesn't think fast enough on his feet to take point on complicated situations, like that incident with Otolmens's oracle. Whom Carissa was also responsible for remembering the existence of, even if it wouldn't have been her job to try to yank the guy out of the room fast enough.

Maybe it was somebody else's fuckup who put her in a bad situation, but she is now the one responsible for recoveries, and on the Abadar thing she muffed the recovery.

"You're going to spend an hour practicing with Elias," Maillol tells Carissa. "He's going to throw situations at you where Keltham runs across something we've been hiding or sees something he shouldn't, you're going to come up with excuses, fast. If they involve you saying that you've got to talk to me before you can figure out what you're authorized to say now, that's not great, but Elias won't hit you." Ferrer's sickening fake smile vanishes. "Any time you start saying too much in front of Imaginary Keltham and making up excuses that are any more complicated than they need to be, Elias is going to hit you."

Carissa Sevar: "I acknowledge my errors. I acknowledge I need the practice and I know if I argue you're going to make it longer, which you are very welcome to. To my mind we never meaningfully had the option of telling him it was Abadar. Abadar has a country right near here and he already knows that, and it's an incredibly obvious place to go when he gets fed up and leaves. If you want him to even contemplate hiding out in a forest or extradimensional space somewhere and not contacting other governments he needs to think he has an obscure god, not one running a country right next door. He's not stupid enough to fail to think that I might be lying about the sexism or that there might be a good justification for it, and it's not an argument-against-Abadar strong enough to stop Keltham trying to contact them. You should find him an obscure Tian deity.

I appreciate that you are monitoring a tendency towards excuses more complicated than they need to be. I am noticing a tendency towards plans that require using a degree of ability to manipulate Keltham's environs which I would prefer he believe Golarion magic does not enable. The High Priestess asked me, this morning, if my recommendation that we explain Otolmens to Keltham overrode her very reasonable heuristics about sharing less about Otolmens, and I was not willing to persist in a recommendation against such advice, but if I'd thought through that her plan involved us consistently deploying reflexive counterspells to protect the invisibility of Otolmens' representative while Keltham flings around fourth-circle cleric magic aimed at discovering concealed things, I would have persisted in my recommendation. If Invisibility Purge hadn't discovered Otolmens' oracle Glimpse of Truth would have, you can't inconspicuously counterspell True Seeing, and then it's apparent we deliberately hid him from Invisibility Purge discovery. If I had thought of the oracle fast enough I would've told Security to do nothing using abilities other than 'put people in other rooms', and if that wasn't fast enough to solve the problem, so be it. Abadar's going to keep giving Keltham spells in that genre, and honestly the oracle is the most innocuous explanation for them. 'have an invisible person running around with Security constantly counterspelling and actively interfering in Keltham's efforts to discover them' is an extraordinary expenditure of our effort to keep a secret I at this point forcefully recommend we stop keeping. Otolmens is the kind of institution Keltham is used to cooperating with and we should tell him sufficient true things for him to conclude that."

Ferrer Maillol: "Your argument on Abadar is reasonable and I have downgraded my estimate of the severity of your error. It remains that your current excuses are too visibly extemporized. Your excuses wouldn't fool me, Sevar, they look like excuses to somebody who knows what that is. I'm not saying you should be choosing excuses to fool me, you should be choosing them to fool Keltham. But right now, we're only getting away with this because Keltham is an outsider, and that makes us pathetic and unworthy of the responsibility Asmodeus placed on us. Yes, you need a dose of that practice now and not just later. That you're already exhausted is part of the point. Twenty minutes with Elias today, more later, and don't mistake the reduction for mercy, it's about the degree to which you being slightly better-rested tomorrow is a military priority."

"I've filed your request for somebody who can train you in conventional honeypot tactics. I've filed your request for the alternate Taldor history, and put my own commendation and priority on it; it's not just a workable idea, it gives us an organizing principle that this chaos of an operation desperately needs. We'll tell Broom that we're fine with Keltham's terms for showing himself in front of Keltham, and ask him politely not to stalk Keltham invisibly until we see how much Invisibility Purge Keltham throws around, assuming that's what you meant. I'll re-query our policy on keeping Otolmens's existence a secret to the people authorized to make decisions that potentially destroy Golarion. You'll brief the girls tomorrow morning on your new plans. Am I missing anything, Sevar?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, sir." It is in some strange way cheering, to be told that they are pathetic and unworthy of the responsibility Asmodeus placed on them, because of course all humans are pathetic and unworthy but it only merits comment if in this context they are expected not to be. Maybe sometimes when the stakes are high enough some humans figure out how to not be pathetic and unworthy. Or at least how to be less so.

She looks over at Elias. How much does he look like he would prefer this training to involve hitting her a lot. ...yeah, valid. Carissa, too, if she were in a different role in this operation, would feel like hitting Carissa a lot.

"Keltham figures out that you don't really love him," Elias says, smiling at her.

Carissa Sevar:
"Gosh, accusations about drawing ones internal conceptual boundaries wrong are the kind of thing I'd have guessed would be Complicated Romance in dath ilan. In Cheliax no one's running around with a baseline expectation anyone could possibly have drawn them coherently in the first place."

lintamande: " - that's not even an excuse."

Carissa Sevar: "Best excuses usually aren't. - I think I should get to hit him if I have a really good one," she tells Maillol.

Ferrer Maillol: "Hold still," Maillol says, and delivers three hard, carefully measured punches into the pit of Sevar's stomach.

"You just lost some of the respect I was gaining for you, Sevar," he says when he's done. "Any spite you hold for him is something you can work on while you're not doing something I told you to do. Elias, if she acts unprofessional or like she's not taking the exercise seriously, punish her no less than Asmodeus's Law calls for. Punish her any more and I expect Hell will have something to say about that too, in due time. Now take this somewhere else." Maillol has infinity plus one paperworks to file.

lintamande: Some parlors have been repurposed into common rooms.

"Keltham learns about malediction."

Carissa Sevar: "In general there are spells for changing your alignment to what you want it to be before you die, called Atonement, but they're expensive and really hard to access, so Asmodeus made a Asmodeus-specific one that's cheaper."

lintamande: "Oh, so it only gets used on people who want to go to Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: "Why in the world would you try to use it on someone who wanted to go somewhere else?? There'd be an enormous god-diplomatic-incident about it, I'd expect!"

lintamande: "Keltham learns that the girls aren't getting paid."

Carissa Sevar: " - are they not? Fucking pay the girls, we aren't telling any lies that we don't need to."

Slap. "Not an excuse."

"That's bizarre and I'll go ask site leadership what went wrong immediately."

"Keltham learns that the girls were drafted."

"When you enlist in the Chelish military you promise to go where you're needed. That is how every military in the world functions; do dath ilan militaries not require such oaths?"

"Keltham learns that you're getting sex training."

"....well obviously I'm getting sex training, he's had it and I'd like to keep up! Also I figured I should see a professional about my relaxation problem."

"Keltham learns primary worship of other gods is illegal."

"Primary worship means, like, breaking other local law specifically on the command of foreign gods; it's mentioned as separately illegal from the breaking other local law because most of the general rules about criminal conspiracies don't apply very neatly to criminal conspiracies where you never interact with your co-conspirators and don't know anything about what exactly they're trying to achieve. Obviously if you're not breaking any laws in the first place then what would it even mean to make it illegal to worship a god."

"Keltham learns Cheliax executes people for lèse-majesté."

"I've never heard of that actually happening. It's a thing people say about kings they dislike and probably at some point in history was true of some of them but Abrogail Thrune's not a thin-skinned maniac whose brain stopped fully functioning thirty years ago, like a lot of kings are, and most king-related abuses are those kings."

"Keltham learns that the girls sold their souls."

"Most people make arrangements before they die, with a devil who has a specialty they're interested in or who lives in the plane of Hell they want to live in or whatever. The alternative is getting thrown into general processing, which can be slow, when a lot of people die at once, and it can be expensive and take a long time to get somewhere right for you. The girls hadn't yet because they're so young but now they're at elevated risk of death and also have highly secret information so I'm not surprised they made arrangements."

"Keltham learns that that vision was of Asmodean Hell."

Carissa Sevar: "- Keltham we've got to get out of here - Security'll have scrolls of Teleport on them and I know how to read one, do you have something from your god that'll take someone on Security down if we take them by surprise -"

lintamande: "I assume there's a plan, from there."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, not yet, but hopefully there will be by the time it's relevant, if it is. - does Security carry scrolls of Teleport, if not I'm not sure how we can make our implausible escape."

"Sometimes, but we're in a Forbiddance."

"I do have a plan for that, I'm going to fly out with him clinging to me, both invisible, and then cast the Teleport from midair. Luckily no one will see us."

"That's a lot of thought to have put into your romantic escape with Keltham."

"Look, if you think I'm a traitor it doesn't make any sense to mildly chide me about it, and if you don't then it doesn't make any sense to mildly chide me for looking it."

"I think you're enough of a chameleon to be a traitor if the circumstances presented themselves. - Keltham finds out you tortured some orphans to death for practice."

"I absolutely have not done that!"

"Keltham finds out most people don't want to go to Hell."

"Good is popular because they run soup kitchens and orphanages and so on. People think of them as the people who helped them when they needed it. So they want to be Good, but that doesn't actually get you Good, it's not Good itself, it's just vague identification."

"Keltham finds out you reported people to the authorities for disloyal thoughts."

"Some demons at the Worldwound can fuck with your mind. We have a monitoring system set up to catch anyone who gets infected before they slit all their bunkmates' throats in the night and eat their eyeballs, yes, that has happened, yes, I've reported people for further monitoring who I thought had thought-patterns that might point them that way."

Carissa loves her job.

Ione Sala: Ione doesn't mind this part of her job at all! In accordance with the general instruction to tell no lies that Security explained to her - apparently Carissa Sevar is running this show now which ??? but fine - Ione is actually remembering and writing her own descriptions, without secretly grabbing the cleric spellbook and cheating. Though that makes some sense, even; if Ione's descriptions looked too much like the book descriptions, after the book gets 'returned to the library', Keltham might notice.

An hour isn't really much time to write down that many cleric spells and one-sentence descriptions, but here's what Ione's got!

Ione Sala: Cantrips / Orisons:

Create Water -- Creates 2 gallons/level of pure water.
Detect Magic -- Detects spells and magic items within 60 ft.
Detect Poison -- Detects poison in one creature or object.
Guidance -- Touched creature gains +1 on one attack roll, saving throw, or skill check.
Light -- Object shines like a torch.
Mending -- Makes minor repairs on an object.
Purify Food and Drink -- Purifies 1 cu. ft./level of food or water.
Read Magic -- Read scrolls and spellbooks.
Resistance -- Touched creature gains +1 on saving throws.
Spark -- Ignites flammable objects.
Stabilize -- Cause a dying creature to stabilize.

1st circle:

Air Bubble -- Creates a small pocket of air around your head or an object.
Ant Haul -- Triples carrying capacity of a creature.
Bane -- Enemies take –1 on attack rolls and saves against fear.
Barbed Chains -- Hellish chains attack and cause a target to become shaken.
Bless -- Allies gain +1 on attack rolls and saves against fear.
Bless Water -- Makes holy water.
Cause Fear -- One creature of 5 HD or less flees for 1d4 rounds.
Command -- One subject obeys selected command for 1 round.
Compel Hostility -- Compels opponents to attack you instead of your allies.
Comprehend Languages -- You understand all spoken and written languages.
Cure Light Wounds -- Cures 1d8 damage + 1/level (max +5).
Curse Water -- Makes unholy water.
Detect Chaos/Evil/Good/Law -- Reveals creatures, spells, or objects of selected alignment.
Detect Charm -- Detect strength and location of charms, compulsions, and possession auras on creatures in the area.
Detect Life -- Determine whether a creature is alive or dead.
Detect Demon -- You sense the presence of a specific kind of evil—that of demons, their servants, and the Abyss. The amount of information revealed depends on how long you study a particular area or subject.
Detect Undead -- Reveals undead within 60 ft.
Diagnose Disease -- Detect and identify diseases.
Doom -- One subject takes –2 on attack rolls, damage rolls, saves, and checks.
Endure Elements -- Exist comfortably in hot or cold regions.
Hide from Undead -- Undead can’t perceive one subject/level.
Infernal Healing -- Touch a creature with devils blood, giving it fast healing 1.
Inflict Light Wounds -- Touch deals 1d8 damage +1/level (max +5).
Keltham's Truth Spell -- One touched target can only speak truth. 2 min / caster circle.
Lighten Object -- Halve the weight of one object for 1 min/level. Size of the object is limited to 1 cubic foot per level.
Magic Weapon -- Weapon gains +1 bonus.
Moment of Greatness -- Doubles a morale bonus.
Murderous Command -- Target is compelled to kill its ally.
Obscure Poison -- Make it harder to detect a poison or a venomous creature.
Obscuring Mist -- Fog surrounds you.
Protection from Chaos/Evil/Good/Law -- +2 to AC and saves, plus additional protection against selected alignment.
Read Weather -- Precisely forecast natural weather phenomenon that will occur in your area over the next 48 hours.
Recharge Innate Magic -- Regain one use of all 0 and 1st-level spell-like abilities of a racial trait.
Remove Fear -- Suppresses fear or gives +4 on saves against fear for one subject + one per four levels.
Remove Sickness -- Suppress disease, nausea, and the sickened condition.
Rite of Bodily Purity -- You energize your body’s immune system, improving your ability to resist toxins and ailments.
Sanctuary -- Opponents can’t attack you, and you can’t attack.
Shadow Trap -- You pin the target’s shadow to its current location, causing the target to become entangled and preventing it from moving farther than 5 feet from its original position, as if anchored to the terrain.
Shield of Faith -- Aura grants +2 or higher deflection bonus.
Summon Monster I -- Summons extraplanar creature to fight for you.
Touch of Blindness -- A touch from your hand, which is engulfed in darkness, disrupts a creature’s vision by coating its eyes in supernatural darkness.

Ione already suspects some of the edits they'll want from her.

2nd circle:

Abeyance -- You suppress the effects of a curse on a creature.
Aid -- +1 on attack rolls and saves against fear, 1d8 temporary hp +1/level (max +10).
Alchemical Tinkering -- Perform one of a limited number of possible alchemical transformations.
Align Weapon -- Weapon becomes good, evil, lawful, or chaotic.
Ancestral Communion -- You contact your ancestors to bolster your own knowledge.
Animate Dead, Lesser -- Create one skeleton or zombie.
Arrow of Law -- Harm and possibly daze chaotic creatures.
Augury -- Learns whether an action will have good or bad consequences over the next half-hour.
Bear’s Endurance -- Subject gains +4 to Con for 1 min./level.
Bestow Weapon Proficiency -- Grant a creature proficiency in a single weapon for short period of time.
Blood Blaze -- Aura that makes injured creatures spray burning blood.
Book Ward -- As protection from energy, except lasting 1 day/level instead of 10 minutes per level and that the spell only protects against acid and fire damage (and while energy protection remains, the item is also completely waterproof).
Bull’s Strength -- Subject gains +4 to Str for 1 min./level.
Calm Emotions -- Calms creatures, negating emotion effects.
Conditional Favor -- Provide another spell whose effects reverse if the target breaks a restriction.
Consecrate -- Fills area with positive energy, weakening undead.
Cure Moderate Wounds -- Cures 2d8 damage + 1/level (max +10).
Curse Terrain, Lesser -- Curse an area with three mild hazards.
Darkness -- 20-ft. radius of supernatural shadow.
Death Knell -- Kills dying creature; you gain 1d8 temporary hp, +2 to Str, and +1 caster level.
Delay Disease -- Gain immunity to disease for 24h.
Delay Pain -- Ignore pain for 1 hour/level.
Delay Poison -- Stops poison from harming target for 1 hour/level.
Desecrate -- Fills area with negative energy, making undead stronger.
Detect Magic, Greater -- As detect magic, but learn more information.
Dread Bolt -- Harm and possibly sicken good creatures.
Dress Corpse -- Doctor the evidence on a corpse.
Eagle’s Splendor -- Subject gains +4 to Cha for 1 min./level.
Early Judgement -- Show creatures a glimpse of their judgement in the afterlife. This fascinates good, confuses neutral, and shakes evil creatures.
Effortless Armor -- Armor you wear no longer slows your speed.
Enthrall -- Captivates all within 100 ft. + 10 ft./level.
Find Traps -- Notice traps as a rogue does.
Flotsam Vessel -- Creates a sturdy raft and oars from driftwood, reeds, and other river detritus.
Gentle Repose -- Preserves one corpse.
Grace -- Movement doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity.
Hold Person -- Paralyzes one humanoid for 1 round/level.
Inflict Moderate Wounds -- Touch attack, 2d8 damage + 1/level (max +10).
Ironskin -- Your skin hardens and takes on the color and texture of rough iron.
Lay of the Land -- In a flash of recognition, you learn about the geography of your surroundings within a radius of 1 mile per 2 caster levels (minimum 1 mile). This instant familiarity grants you an insight bonus equal to your caster level (maximum +5) on Knowledge (geography) checks and Survival checks to avoid getting lost so long as you remain in the affected area.
Make Whole -- Repairs an object.
Marching Chant -- Allies can hustle without penalty while you sing or chant.
Masterwork Transformation -- Make a normal item into a masterwork one.
Muffle Sound -- Allies gain a bonus on Stealth checks but risk verbal spell failure.
Owl’s Wisdom -- Subject gains +4 to Wis for 1 min./level.
Pilfering Hand -- You may seize an object or manipulate it from afar.
Remove Paralysis -- Frees creatures from paralysis or slow effect.
Resist Energy -- Ignores 10 (or more) points of damage/attack from specified energy type.
Restoration, Lesser -- Dispels magical ability penalty or repairs 1d4 ability damage.
Sense Fear -- Perceive nearby creatures that are experiencing fear.
Sense Madness -- Determine mental disturbances in nearby creatures.
Share Language -- Subject understands chosen language.
Shatter -- Sonic vibration damages objects or crystalline creatures.
Silence -- Negates sound in 20-ft. radius.
Silent Table -- Give yourself privacy by muffling sound.
Spell Gauge -- Reveal a number of spells – lowest first – that the target creature knows, up to your caster level.
Status -- Monitors condition, position of allies.
Summon Monster II -- Summons extraplanar creature to fight for you.
Suppress Charms and Compulsions -- You can grant a bonus to saving throws against charms and compulsions or suppress an existing, in-effect charm or compulsion.
Track Ship -- Track a ship's location and movement with the aid of a nautical chart and a piece of the ship to be tracked.
Undetectable Alignment -- Conceals alignment for 24 hours.

She writes down spells like Augury and Conditional Favor on a separate piece of scrap, since her guess is that those spells won't get passed, and if she guesses right she can maybe save herself rewriting the whole list.

3rd circle:

Agonize -- Pain encourages an outsider to obey you.

(Would that spell work on Keltham himself?)

Animate Dead -- Creates undead skeletons and zombies.
Aura Sight -- Alignment auras become visible to you.
Bestow Curse -- –6 to an ability score; –4 on attack rolls, saves, and checks; or 50% chance of losing each action.

It's at this point that Ione gets interrupted to ask for her current draft, Ione realizes she lost track of time, and Ione frantically tries to write down at least some 3s and 4s while her 0s, 1s, and 2s get reviewed.

Continual Flame -- Makes a permanent, heatless light.
Create Food and Water -- Feeds three humans (or one horse)/level.
Cure Serious Wounds -- Cures 3d8 damage + 1/level (max +15).
Dispel Magic -- Cancels one magical spell or effect.
Inflict Serious Wounds -- Touch attack, 3d8 damage + 1/level (max +15).
Invisibility Purge -- Dispels invisibility within 5 ft./level.
Locate Object -- Senses direction toward object (specific or type).
Planar Inquiry -- This spell calls a creature from another plane to your precise location, functioning like lesser planar ally except as noted.

Why is she thinking of so many spells they shouldn't tell him about!

Remove Blindness/Deafness -- Cures normal or magical blindness or deafness.
Remove Curse -- Frees object or person from curse.
Remove Disease -- Cures all diseases affecting subject.
Stone Shape -- Sculpts stone into any shape.
Summon Monster III -- Summons extraplanar creature to fight for you.
Vision of Hell -- Illusory hellscape makes creatures shaken.
Water Walk -- Subject treads on water as if solid.
Wind Wall -- Deflects arrows, smaller creatures, and gases

4th circle:

Aura of Doom -- Creatures in your aura become shaken.
Conditional Curse -- Bestow a curse that is difficult to remove without fulfilling a condition.
Control Summoned Creature -- Direct a summoned monster as if you had summoned it.
Control Water -- Raises or lowers bodies of water.
Cure Critical Wounds -- Cures 4d8 damage + 1/level (max +20).
Death Ward -- Grants bonuses against death spells and negative energy.
Dimensional Anchor -- Bars extradimensional movement.
Discern Lies -- Reveals deliberate falsehoods.
Dismissal -- Forces a creature (like Keltham??) to return to native plane.
Enchantment Foil -- Trick opponents who try to cast enchantments on you.
False Future -- Cause divinations of the future to reveal the result you choose.
Glimpse of Beyond -- Reveal hidden things and shapechanged creatures, peer into Ethereal
Infernal Healing, Greater -- Touch a creature with devils blood, giving it fast healing 4.
Inflict Critical Wounds -- Touch attack, 4d8 damage + 1/level (max +20).
Make Whole, Greater -- Repairs 1d6 +1 points per caster level on a construct (maximum 10d6+10) and can fix destroyed magic items or technological items (items at 0 hit points or fewer), and restores the magic properties of the item if your caster level at least equal to that of the item. This spell otherwise functions as make whole.
Malediction -- Fuck with the entire afterlife system and send a paladin to the Abyss, it's not like Pharasma really gives a shit.
Neutralize Poison -- Immunizes subject against poison, detoxifies venom in or on subject.
Planar Ally, Lesser -- Exchange services with a 6 HD extraplanar creature.

Or is that safe to tell him about, now that they're under Forbiddance anyways?
No, because Keltham might ask to walk outside under guard for a few minutes.

Sending -- Delivers short message anywhere, instantly, to someone the caster is familiar with.
Summon Monster IV -- Summons extraplanar creature to fight for you.
Tongues -- Speak and understand any language.

Aaaaaand she's out of time, Security wants her later drafts too.

Ione Sala: Ione, on reflection, is feeling concerned about Cheliax's chances of fooling Keltham if Abadar grants more carefully-chosen spells like Abadar's Truthtelling. The Asmodeans may be out of their depth here; possibly she, as a smarter Nethysian, should actually grab that library book and start working out strategies for Cheliax to follow if Abadar grants Keltham a spell like Lesser Planar Ally, or a Conditional Favor that Keltham uses with a condition of 'don't lie to me'.

Well, Asmodeus isn't actually stupid like some of His worshippers, Ione doesn't think. Maybe He'll grant the clerics here appropriate spells like False Future in case Keltham gets Augury, and Undetectable Alignment in case Keltham uses Aura Sight on Ione, and obviously Spell Gauge so they're not caught off-guard by what Keltham receives... though Spell Gauge only goes up to 3rd circle, and you'd need a 7th-circle caster to get all of Keltham's spells up to there...

Does Cheliax have a plan B? Is Ione part of it? She's an obvious person that Keltham might try to whisper to, if Keltham notices something wrong. She should ask about that later.

lintamande: Security comes and takes a look and adds back in Aura Sight, since he already knows that it exists (but not Invisibility Purge, since ideally it wouldn't look like they added everything he knows exists.) Other than that they're satisfied.

Ione Sala: "Is there a plan if Keltham gets suspicious of something and wants to talk to me about it?" Ione says, as she starts to recopy that particular page. "Voice of reassurance, worried ally who'll help him investigate?"

lintamande: "Help him investigate; if he wants to flee, flee with him, but convince him that no other church or government is worth going to either. There'll be a more detailed briefing on the plan and various contingencies in the morning."

Ione Sala:
Oh.

Ohhhh.

Lord Nethys does have some secret plan that encompasses His intricate understanding of every move that lesser beings make, thinking their choices their own.

Going to fantastic lengths to make sure Keltham can get five books a day faster than Security could order them from Chelish libraries... doesn't make that much sense as the sole object of an expensive divine intervention, so Ione had supposed that she was going to be there to influence Keltham in a subtle way, or maybe see something that Asmodeans wouldn't see because they're too busy gouging each other's eyes out.

"If you get Keltham to flee to a remote wilderness hideout, or some old dungeon that's blocked from scrying, he's not going to get much research done unless he has a library oracle with him," Ione observes. "Keltham knows that. He'll come to me early on. Maybe first. I'll need enough books to turn some room wherever I go, into a library... I think one full bookshelf should do it, but two would be better." She wants to ask, rather acerbically, if any Asmodean even noticed that their plan wouldn't work without Lord Nethys propping it up, but she is not quite that courageous yet.

lintamande: "Yes. We're creating modified books as fast as we can; I'll try to get you a list. If you have thoughts on a plausible use of your powers to help Keltham escape, we want that to look organic and not strikingly lucky."

Ione Sala: "I can't directly travel through Polyfractal Library Space until I'm more powerful," Ione replies before she quite realizes what she's been asked.

Keltham: Keltham is still trying not to access any audiovisual memories of his vision of - wherever, whatever, that was. Probably not literally a video, because, because you probably shouldn't be able to scry like that across a Forbiddance okay blatant rationalization but it creates a self-consistent branch of reality he can tell his emotions to shelter inside while he absorbs the blow.

By way of distraction, he first wrote down memory-anchors for all his pending sex questions to submit to Carissa later while they're not in the middle of sex - this being, in dath ilan, a completely reasonable and well-known tactic to overcoming the distracting conversations that are the fundamental obstacle to sex. Plus, he needed to do that before they slipped his mind.

Currently, he's trying to invent a signaling code that his god can use to send him information via that god choosing Keltham's spells.

Since he doesn't have his spell list yet, what Keltham can do right now is note down which conditions he would like to distinguish, which is in any case a good first step for designing a code.

Keltham: The first thing he should do is reserve a condition for "my god can't communicate with me in this way". Arguendo: This could obviously be done by expending one spell slot to signal just 'this communication channel works at all', which spell's absence then means that nothing else worked. Counter-arguendo: that might be redundant if the other consistent states of the code seem sufficiently unlikely to arise by chance or optimization around other criteria, since the absence of a consistent code state would automatically imply channel failure; Keltham isn't going to pick some intricate code that makes full use of every possible bit of information in every spell choice, since that might not make it across the 'prayer' communication medium going the other direction. Counter-counter-arguendo: During initial establishment of this communications channel, probably a lot of bits should be expended on error codes. Suppose for now that some very exotic spell gets picked to signal the condition 'this works as a communication channel at all', and its absence indicates failure of the whole scheme.

Or maybe, if he gets a long enough spell list, he can have a choice of four otherwise unused spells, signaling:

Question 1: Does this communications channel work?

Spell 1.1: This communications channel should work fine.
Spell 1.2: This communications channel works at all, but may have errors.
Spell 1.3: This communications channel is very expensive. Use it very sparingly.
Spell 1.4: This communications channel is both expensive and error-prone.
1.(none of the above): Basic channel failure.

Plus actually:

Spell 1.5: Some element of the code you used is problematic. Try again with a different code. Other spells received should not be interpreted.

And Keltham should not ask too many questions, on the rest of this first try, before he finds out whether cases 1.3/1.4 hold.

What does he really really need to know?

Question 2: What overall strategy is appropriate to his current situation?

Spell 2.1: Take your current situation at face value and cooperate with the surrounding project.
Spell 2.2: Your current situation is not what it seems, use tomorrow's code for more info; but it's still good to go on doing research.
Spell 2.3: Exercise your supposed right to leave, as soon as you can use tomorrow's code to figure out where to go. Stall them on more valuable info in the meanwhile.
Spell 2.4: They wouldn't actually let you leave. Ask about escape or other options using tomorrow's code. Stall info.
Spell 2.5: You are in imminent danger. IMMEDIATELY ask to leave your current location and go somewhere else in Cheliax or a Lawful Neutral country if accessible, taking with only Carissa as a guide and not telling anyone else where you're going.
Spell 2.none: None of those are good ways of looking at it.

Keltham has of course realized that there's variants of 2.5 which imply he shouldn't take Carissa with him either; but if the situation is that bad, they won't just let him leave; and if they won't just let him leave, he's going to need more communication to figure out what he should do instead. It's not like he can see any obvious escape plan as things stand.

Keltham: Actually, now that Keltham thinks about it... he was planning to use a more elaborate code, and ask more questions besides those two; but maybe he shouldn't even be asking any more than this, on a first try at a channel. It might not support that much weight.

Well, that does leave some room to potentially factor things, and maybe Keltham's own communications will be a bit clearer if he considers more branch points and fewer total leaves.

Version two:

Question 1: Does this communications channel work?

Spell 1.1: This channel works.
Spell 1.none: Total channel failure.

Question 2: Is this channel significantly expensive to Keltham's god?

Spell 2.1: Yes.
Spell 2.2: A little expensive, use it only as needed.
Spell 2.3: Not at all, use it lots.
Spell 2.none: Wrong question / channel failure / this question wasn't worth answering.

Question 3: Is this channel error-prone or noisy?

Spell 3.1: No.
Spell 3.2: Yes, be careful.
Spell 3.3: It fails only negatively; you may miss a spell you should have got, but not receive one you shouldn't have received.
Spell 3.none: Wrong question / channel failure / not enough priority.

Question 4: Could this channel handle more complex codes tomorrow?

Spell 4.1: Yes.
Spell 4.none: No or not priority.

Question 5: Should you be cooperating with your apparent coworkers, or stalling them on things that are really valuable/dangerous?

Spell 5.1: Cooperate at least for tomorrow, inquire in more detail later.
Spell 5.2: Begin stalling, inquire in more detail later.

This question is sufficiently important that 5.none is a good candidate for just signaling total comms failure, but redundancy.

The other variations on v1's Question 2 don't actually imply any immediate change of policy besides stalling, except of course for:

Question 6: Imminent danger at current location?

Spell 6.1: Yes. Flee with Carissa and tell nobody else where you're going.
Spell 6.none: Carrying out 6.1 wouldn't be a net improvement.

Keltham: ...that's actually 11 total spells to take on signaling meaning, compared to version 1... okay, the fine detail in spell 3.3 is not something he needs to know literally during initial handshake, which cuts v.2 down to ten spells total, and makes it superior to v.1 because of the lower local branching, clearer meanings, and more critical meta-info being conveyed earlier. Besides eliminating Spell 3.3, are there other improvements to be made here?

Actually, eliminating 2/8ths of the total code seems like the sort of thing that could easily cross some key threshold for feasibility on the first try, so if he cuts down on Q2...

Keltham: Version three, probably final:

Question 1: Does this communications channel work?

Spell 1.1: This channel works.
Spell 1.none: Total channel failure.

Question 2: Is this channel significantly expensive to Keltham's god?

Spell 2.1: Not at all, use it lots.
Spell 2.none: Yes / somewhat / wrong question / channel failure.

Question 3: Is this channel error-prone or noisy?

Spell 3.1: No.
Spell 3.2: Yes, be careful.
Spell 3.none: Yes / wrong question / channel failure / not enough priority.

Actually on further reflection, he doesn't really need 3.2 here either, since 3.none can safely convey that information mixed into a wider bucket.

Question 4: Could this channel handle more complex codes tomorrow?

Spell 4.1: Yes.
Spell 4.none: No or not priority.

On yet further reflection, Keltham can just ask this question tomorrow, if he gets a 'no' on things being noisy. If 'yes' on things being noisy, but not expensive, he should construct a redundant code tomorrow instead of a complicated one.

Question 4: Should you be cooperating with your apparent coworkers, or stalling them on things that are really valuable/dangerous?

Spell 4.1: Cooperate at least for tomorrow, inquire in more detail later.
Spell 4.2: Begin stalling, inquire in more detail later.
Spell 4.none: Redundant signal of total channel failure.

Question 5: Imminent danger at current location?

Spell 5.1: Yes. Flee with Carissa and tell nobody else where you're going.
Spell 5.none: Carrying out 5.1 wouldn't be a net improvement and/or this channel element failed.

Okay, this is a code Keltham can believe in, relative to his own level of design ability. It frontloads the most important meta-questions first, delays as many complications as possible beyond the fragile first attempt, and only requires him to keep five questions and six spell-meanings in mind to communicate across his own side of the 'prayer' channel.

Keltham: Keltham goes to seek the spell list from Ione.

Ione Sala: Ione gives Keltham the spell list. "I lost track of time while listing all the 1sts and 2nds and so there's fewer 3rds and 4ths," Ione confesses. "I could probably generate more if you gave me more time."

Keltham: Keltham gives Ione a smile of this hopefully being good enough (since he forgot that Ione wouldn't understand him unless he fetches Security again) and heads back to his room.

Keltham: Those spells, huh. Those sure are some spells.

Aura Sight is on the list, but not Invisibility Purge; Glimpse of Beyond, but not Spell Immunity. If they'd had all the spells he knew about, but no new especially interesting ones, that would indicate that they were being first-order blatant about telling Ione what to include or exclude. If they'd omitted Aura Sight too, that might mean somebody didn't update Ione about the new list of what not to tell Keltham. This pattern indicates... either nothing much, or that they're able to do basic damn reflection about what Keltham is likely to think of things, and avoided there being any blatant pattern in the spell list so it would mean 'nothing much'.

Anyways. He needs to pick his spell-request-pattern for tomorrow morning, and then sleep. There were probably other things he told himself to review today, but he is feeling a bit worn and not necessarily up for trying to remember what they all were. Hopefully they'll keep.

Today he got four cantrips, six first-circle, four second-circle, three third-circle, two fourth-circle spells. Keltham should not assume his god can do that every time, so leave some headway at each level.

He wants Guidance and Detect Magic among cantrips. If he had to pick spells on his own, he'd want at least one truth spell and at least one Comprehend Languages. Owl's Wisdom seems important to have in reserve for real emergencies, however dangerous it may be to dath ilani who didn't want to be Keepers, and you could say the same about Invisibility Purge. By default he's got the truth spell and Sanctuary to keep overnight, possibly cutting down expenses to his god some little bit.

Are there any spells here that form useful mnemonic patterns with his questions and answers? Though he should maybe also try to pick spells that his god wouldn't try to urgently assign him for other reasons. And he needs to pick spells where he can see what they do, upon a cast, and without those spells harming the target.

Keltham: Oh huh, Keltham thinks, as he starts poking through the list for something weird enough that there's no way his god would assign it unless the communications channel worked.

Early Judgment: give someone a glimpse of their currently destined afterlife.

Now there's a spell he wouldn't have expected Cheliax to show him if they were really trying to prevent him from figuring out his god, or for that matter, afterlives. Can he use that to see somebody else's destined afterlife too, and determine their real alignment even if they're not third-circle? That definitely goes on the list, not as a code, just as a default request -

(At this point, Keltham's translation spell runs out, but somebody is timing things pretty well, and somebody arrives back to cast Share Language (Taldane) on him again.)

Lay of the Land (2nd) grants instant knowledge of the surrounding lands; it sounds like an unambiguously interpretable spell to cast; and Keltham is unlikely to need it otherwise. Could be used to signal 'this worked at all' or to signal 'flee with Carissa'; semantically it's a better fit for the second.

Stone Shape (3rd) - clearly interpretable, unlikely to be given otherwise. Mnemonically it could mean '4.1, show them how to make things'. At 3rd circle it's expensive, though.

Create Food and Water (3rd again) - unmistakeable effect, mnemonically fits both '4.1 industrialize' and '5.1 flee'. He needs to look at cheaper spells though.

Okay, Obscuring Mist (1st) has unmistakeable effect and would've been an obvious fit for 'this channel is noisy', but Keltham eliminated that answer-spell leaving only 'this channel is clear'... it also works for immediately fleeing with Carissa. Silly spells for silly adventurers, everything's going to look like it was designed for fleeing with Carissa.

Air Bubble (1st)... probably not something his god would need to assign him otherwise, if he resolves not to do any chemistry experiments today, clearly visible effect, and it can stand for 'This channel is clear'. 3.1 or 1.1.

Light... uses up a relatively precious cantrip slot, but it sure is unmistakeable. Another good fit for several different possible mnemonics. Hopefully not one his god would otherwise assign him.

Create Water, likewise uses up a cantrip slot, but is unmistakeable and could mean 'this channel is cheap' because water is cheap.

(Do they seriously mean create water and not just teleport it in, by the way? Because then why can't you also create very large amounts of energy? E^2 = P^2C^2 + M^2C^4 and all that.)

Oh, Lighten Object (1st) would also do to convey that things weren't expensive.

Share Language (2nd) would correspond very well to 'teach them' but it's also something a helpful, deaf god might assign if it thought that a student being able to hear a lecture in Baseline might be helpful to them.

Silence (2nd) and Silent Table (2nd) are unmistakable and could mean some things. And Silent Table sounds less like it might be granted by a god that thought Keltham needed to flee. 2nd-circle is still expensive compared to 1st.

Oh, and Read Weather is 1st and sounds unmistakeable and otherwise-improbable-to-get even if it doesn't mean much. At this point Keltham is ready to compromise on some meanings.

So, attempted code, v1:

1.1 Read Weather (1st): This channel works at all, and can tell you things, like the Weather.
2.1 Lighten Object (1st): This channel doesn't cost much.
3.1 Air Bubble (1st): This channel is clear.

That uses up all his 1st slots if he keeps Sanctuary and a truth spell, and requests a new Comprehend Languages. Wait, didn't he want to keep one 1st-circle slot clear in case his god can't assign him six first-level spells every day? Well, it's probably a little safer if he's keeping some of his old spells... hopefully? He may not have better options. In 2nd, he already has a request for Early Judgment and emergency Owl's Wisdom, 4 slots total of which he should leave one free, and:

5.1: Lay of the Land (2nd): Run.

Okay, so instead of using expensive 3rds, what if on the topic of whether to speak freely or stall:

4.1: Light (0th): Shed light on their ignorance.
4.2: Create Water (0th): Stall with a great volume of cheap stuff.

Those are alternates, so they only use up one cantrip slot, leaving the other two free for Guidance and Detect Magic, and the fourth for his god's choice, or empty because his god strained itself to give him so many spells before.

And then when it comes to 3rd and 4th... he could mostly leave that up to his god, but if his god wants any suggestions, Keltham will go on Invisibility Purge for 3rd and... he doesn't really have much he wants in 4th. Well, he could ask for Tongues and use that to free up the valuable 1st-level slot occupied by Comprehend Languages. Actually, can clerics request lower-level spells in higher spell 'slots'? That would make his life noticeably simpler in this regard and save his god money. Keltham should have asked this question earlier.

Keltham: Keltham starts to stand up, to go outside and call Security to ask this question, but then it occurs to him to try a different experiment. Just in case, you know.

"Security?" Keltham says to the empty room, not particularly loudly.

lintamande: On recently communicated orders Security is to be behind a wall from Keltham at all times it's feasible. They can keep a closer eye with a scrying sensor.

This summons is not answered.

Keltham: Keltham steps outside his bedroom and again tries the Security call.

lintamande: Security goes visible this time within his field of view, taking off a ring.

Keltham: "Wait, the reason I never see you guys until called is that you're also invisible?"

lintamande: "Yes."

Keltham: "You know, I'm going to ask explicitly, because I'm confused, if the idea here is that you were trying to hide the concept of invisibility generally from me, and that didn't work, so now you think there's no more point in hiding it or hiding the fact that you were hiding it, or if I reacted to that earlier incident in a way you considered weird and like you didn't understand why I was so offended and now you're trying to be more explicit about something you thought was innocuous or... what."

lintamande: "...Security is invisible when our visible presence has not been requested because, should anyone attempt to attack you, knowing our positions and numbers would advantage them over knowing we're around but not where. Security is trained to activate or deactivate magic items while alone where possible, emerging only once not occupied with activation or deactivation. Guidelines were recently updated to note that you prefer persons in a room with you not be invisible, and that this ought to take precedence over the rule not to activate or deactivate magic items in company, barring a time-pressured or dangerous situation."

Keltham: "...legit. Maybe when I get more used to Golarion local customs that'll change, but yeah, I currently prefer you be visible around me for now in non-emergency situations. Thank you for considerateness."

"My question was going to be, if you happen to know, whether clerics - always get the same number of spells, of each circle, every day, and whether they can request lower-circle spells to fill up a higher-circle slot if they'd rather have the lower one."

lintamande: "The same number and circle distribution of spells are typically granted to a cleric each day. You can request lower-circle spells in a higher-circle slot."

Keltham: "Thank you very much for that information. And, just to be very clear on my general policy, if Security accommodating my weird preferences means I'm probably going to die, please have an explicit conversation with me about that instead of doing it my way." Keltham heads back to his bedroom.

Keltham: So, if his god doesn't have anything better to do with them... maybe use one 3rd slot and one 4th slot on an additional Owl's Wisdom to potentially tap a student with, and an additional Early Judgment to see if he can look at somebody else's current afterlife destination with it.

And that's a plan for prayer tomorrow.

Keltham tucks himself into what passes for a bed in Golarion. Good night, Cheliax!

Iarwain: Zon-Kuthon cultists don't attack in the middle of the night, yet, growth mindset.

???: Before dawn, a mysterious and unnaturally-beautiful woman steps, without any sound whatsoever, into Carissa Sevar's bedroom. If you were to trust your eyes, looking at her, she would look like a very-high-level Asmodean fighter, with obviously magical armor and arms, decorated in barbs, spikes, stylized flames.

She lights a black candle that burns with a dark crimson flame, and then speaks.

"Carissa Sevar."

Carissa Sevar: - startles awake like someone who startles awake a lot.

She doesn't sleep clothed in Cheliax; her sleep clothes are for the Worldwound and far too warm. However she thinks that's not at the top of the priority list here.

"Yes," she says, because anyone in here has the security clearance to know that, surely.

???: "I am a high-ranking noble who chooses not to identify herself, for now." A playful smile, backed with such vast Splendour that even Sevar is going to feel, very briefly, like she is really being invited to some harmless pleasant game. "I'm wondering whether you'd be interested in overthrowing the Queen of Cheliax. Oh, and your little security wizards won't think there's anything unusual about our conversation while that black candle burns."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wants to be that pretty and to have a voice that rings that confidently and to have lips that move that seductively-

- and to survive the next hour! Let's do that one first! It's a test, obviously it's a test, but there are all kinds of things one tests for. Loyalty, the willingness to say 'I serve my Queen' even when it's a losing move in the moment. Theological purity, going through the right mental motions on your way to the truth. Strategic competence, where one gets to contemplate considerations like how, if this is real, immediately angering the powerful stranger is a poor path to protecting the Queen or the country.

"I serve Asmodeus," she says, and bites her tongue, hard, so erasing her memory of this conversation will also require healing her, and there's still the hope of recognizing the taste of blood in her mouth.

???: "Oh, absolutely. That's rather the point, dear. The current Queen has a pact with Asmodeus. The Queen is not Asmodeus's servant. The compact between the Thrice-Damned House of Thrune and Asmodeus Himself specifies that He is not to punish them in Hell for presuming to pursue their own interests as well as His, in this world. Now, somebody truly loyal to Asmodeus, someone who Asmodeus deemed worthy even of His explicit notice, to be someday among the most treasured souls in His possession, might, perhaps, think it was presumptuous for the Thrunes to dare to bargain so with our god, as if the Thrunes were only His juniors and not His servants. Or simply believe that it served Asmodeus better to have a Queen who was His slave in truth."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not understand Aspexia Rugatonn, but she's met her, and so she has a fraction more context with which to reject this than she would have had yesterday, when she would have rejected it on general principle. You do not serve a god by giving his interventions unexpected effects.

So that's the question answered, but not the strategic situation at all resolved; only in tests for five year olds do you win by defiantly screaming the truth for all the world to hear. And the Church and Queen do diverge, sometimes, Maillol's story about the slave implied it, and it's possible this is a test from a different angle than Aspexia Rugatonn's. The first priority is to survive it, then to report it, then to seek correction in any mistaken details of her understanding of precisely why you do not overthrow the Queen of Cheliax.

"I presume myself to understand nothing about the Queen, or her House, or any matters in which I have not been directed," she says. "But I was directed that, if I serve Asmodeus in this world, I will be raised high in it, and so I will listen to your explanation; I assume you have more of one."

How could she possibly win this. She hasn't prepared her spells yet. - she isn't sure if she'll get enough sleep tonight, to prepare her spells. One should of course die for their country as needed, but if there's a plot against the Queen it is better to live to report it. She can try talking her way into getting more time unsupervised, but that kind of Splendour usually comes with excellent interpersonal reading and she shouldn't count on it. Can she cancel the candle. Quietly trigger a ward.

???: "Dear, I have the transcript of your conversation with Hell. And not from the Grand High Priestess, either." A playfully raised eyebrow. "You asked for a county, I believe? That doesn't sound to me like a meek little unambitious thing who knows nothing about any matters in which she hasn't been directed. Do discard that pretense. What do you want from your mortal life, Carissa Sevar, besides a county and a crafting allowance? Do your ambitions lead you to want a more Asmodean rule of this country, for you to be raised high in? Would you take the throne yourself, if you could? If your answer is that Asmodeus would hold either ambition against you, I'd like to hear your explanation of the theology behind that. The Church doesn't teach that Her Infernal Majestrix is a poor Asmodean for having presumed to murder her predecessor Infrexus."

(On paper, Infrexus I accidentally drowned. For a seventh-circle sorcerer to accidentally drown, and then for Cheliax to accidentally forget they had any clerics who could resurrect him, is the sort of story you put in the official history books when you actually don't want people getting confused about what really happened.)

Carissa Sevar: Disrupting the candle seems doable but if the woman's smart the candle will have nothing to do with whatever protections might hide this conversation from security. She didn't even claim it did, just, 'while this candle burns', and while you're not supposed to give in to the temptation to speak to adversaries in beautiful technical-truths like that when a simple lie would do it's still information.

"Well, see, I don't know how I'd like having a county; and it was pointed out to me that if it had been the will of Asmodeus that I have one He could have ordered it." And it feels like there's an incoherence, in the claim that Asmodeus wants a slave and not one who made a pact with Him to serve their own interests, and in claiming that Carissa's own interests point her towards power, but confusions there don't matter very much because there's already no way that the Church desires this and her top priority now isn't parsing out precisely why not. "And the throne, as you note, seems to burn one up sooner or later, besides which it feels implausible you'd go to all this trouble to put someone else on it."

???: "You're more boring than I'd hoped, Carissa, for someone who made such fascinating inroads into our new pet outsider. I hope you can exchange a more seductive banter than this on those occasions when your new profession calls for it. Come, come, I know you think this a test, but they'll hardly hold it against you if you try not to bore me, so you could survive and report as you ought to, if this is not a test. Or you could even try a little honesty with me, if you'd really never raise a hand against the Queen, and tell me honestly why not. I'm hardly going to kill Asmodeus's own favored, if I am as I've presented myself."

Carissa Sevar: She tries quietly to trigger a ward at the door with a Mage Hand; nothing evidently happens.

Sure, fine, she'll do the five year old thing; she doesn't, actually, see how to do better, and it's a way to keep talking. "They teach different shards of Asmodeanism, I think, to nobles. I haven't learned them. I don't know how the Queen justifies herself, or if she needs to; perhaps she acted only directed by the advisors Asmodeus sent her, more loyal and obedient than she cares to have anyone guess. But I know what's going on here. A lot is going on here, and it's very important; more important to Asmodeus, I think, than how mortals He owns conceive of their loyalty to Him, even mortals who are the Queen. He intervened here, so that our pathetic inadequate efforts to represent Him and our country here might stand a chance of success they otherwise wouldn't. I'm supposed to be here. And if I invent a way to correct the flaws in human nature and make us His worthy servants, then perhaps I'll get some titles out of that, as it pleases the Queen, but if I merely learn for Cheliax how the exact same bit of metal is manufactured three thousand times over to a precision so high they will all interlock then I will still have wisely spent the resources that Crown and Church have allocated here. And I would have to be an idiot to risk any of that to correct some flaw in Cheliax that is in the slightest less time sensitive.

Also, you know, it would be treason, and treason is wrong."

???: A little laugh, as if sharing a joke. "Funny! But what if the Queen is not so content to leave you be, as you are to leave her to her unimportant temporal throne? Abrogail Thrune is very nearly the only person in Cheliax who would slay you out of hand, with Asmodeus having made His own interest in you clear. The slaves of Church and Queen have been instructed not to punish you more than you earn. Abrogail Thrune is not one of those slaves. She is Asmodeus's very junior partner, or so she presumes to see it. If Abrogail slays you to keep Cheliax all for herself, and protect her own interests, her pact with Asmodeus prohibits her punishment in Hell for that. It does not even contradict the wording of Hell's instructions. Are you really sure it serves your own interests, however selflessly Asmodean they may be, for Abrogail or some other non-slave like her to sit on Cheliax's throne?"

Carissa Sevar: "The slaves of Church and Queen have been instructed, also, not to be proactive in my education, but to leave it to me to seek; you claim to have seen the transcript, so you must be aware of this, and no slave of Church and Queen yourself." ....which is accusing the stunningly beautiful woman of being the Queen, which Carissa did not intend to do at the start of that sentence but it does seem to be the logical place where it logically went. Not that she believes the words; she merely said them.

Abrogail Thrune II: An appearance changes.

"My, my. Shouldn't you be kneeling, then?"

Carissa Sevar: This, too, might be a test.

- but might not. It's true, that Aspexia Rugatonn didn't want people being proactive with Carissa. And that there's very few people who would defy her, on that.

And once again there is the infernal difficulty that if it's a test it is not always obvious what is being tested. And that it being a test doesn't at all mean you can't die of failing it.

"Should I, your Majesty? I was taught to kneel if your entourage passed down a street I was walking on, but my school omitted any lessons for how to comport myself should you appear in my bedroom. Perhaps in bedrooms one prostrates oneself as for a pharaoh."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Mm. You saw the possibility, but you don't believe it's me. I suppose I should credit you for having thought of it at all. You might be surprised, how many people don't."

"I'm reading your mind right now, of course. Would you slay me if Aspexia Rugatonn told you that I'd outlived my usefulness to Lord Asmodeus?"

Carissa Sevar: The obvious reflexive 'no' would not be useful information, to the genuine Queen of Cheliax; the thought process might be, but she'll have to let it play out, and she doesn't actually know its exact contents until it plays out, which -

- it would be so irritating, to mostly have peoples' minds full of thoughts about whether you're going to kill them. Carissa will strive to avoid that. The other obvious not-reassuring answer is that this is not guidance Aspexia Rugatonn would give -

- because Asmodeus doesn't overthrow Pharasma -

- because even if you wanted the Queen of Cheliax taken out you would not involve any third circle wizards in your plans, they are weak enough to actively be far more of a liability than an aid -

- because Asmodeus's directions to Carissa are narrow, and Aspexia Rugatonn wants to interpret them narrowly, do the obvious things and not other things that cloud Asmodeus's vision with noise and confusion -

- but it is true that Chelish monarchs get assassinated a lot, presumably with the Church's implicit support, so maybe Carissa is the one misunderstanding, believing that Asmodeanism does actually say you shouldn't murder your Queen.

- some part of Carissa's brain chimes up that she shouldn't murder the Queen because the Queen is really pretty. Thank you that part of Carissa's brain for reminding her that humans are fundamentally contemptible beings.

- Carissa notes that the only people ever to have been acknowledged as killing a King or Queen of Cheliax is another of House Thrune, presumably because for everyone else Asmodeus's law does apply and does ban regicide and if you succeed they still put you to death, they don't make you a deal. That might even be part of the pact, that House Thrune can play among themselves but needn't fear their entire country made weapons pointed at them, needn't fear the chaos of being Taldor or of the civil wars before Hell rose to power in Cheliax -

- there are rules here and she doesn't know them -

Carissa Sevar: "Only if you command it, your Majesty," she says, and at this point indeed kneels.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Not the new playmate I'd hoped for, not the potential inconvenience I thought worth a personal visit. Understand, Sevar, I will not lightly break one of my senior partner's toys, but if I need do so, I will petrify you, ward the statue against detection, and bury your trapped soul deep enough that ages would not expose it again. Perhaps in time Asmodeus will see you in His embrace at last, or perhaps some little inconvenience will end all Pharasma's works before then, for all Otolmens's pains."

"Ferrer Maillol is a competent administrator, as Asmodean priests go, but he lacks vision." Abrogail's voice is not at all seductive, now, it commands, demands. "We are not satisfied with Cheliax being taught the outsider's secrets of metalworking. We do not expect Lord Asmodeus will be satisfied with it either. Not if other countries also come to possess those secrets. We desire that Cheliax gain advantage from this, Carissa Sevar. Why our Lord has instructed that we do not simply keep the outsider for our own, I do not know for certain, but it is not an instruction I intend to defy."

"This being so, we particularly desire that Cheliax not be left in an unfortunate position by an outsider propagating a powerful Lawful Neutral philosophy which enables its masters to unravel secrets of the magicless and perhaps the magical world; but which, introduced to Chelish students, inevitably casts them into heresy, so that only priests and the soul-sold slaves of Asmodeus can safely be taught it. We do not have enough of those to compete with Osirion and Lastwall if all their wizards and clerics and tinkerers are being taught those new ways. If the outsider teaches widely elsewhere it will be a trivial matter to steal his teachings, but we must be able to use what we copy."

"Maillol's previous instructions to you are revoked. His understanding of Asmodeus's will failed. You have no priority higher than learning the core source of power of Keltham's world, and transforming it into a form that Asmodean students can learn and remain Asmodeans. Better yet, burn and refine their iron to steel, show what their philosophy can become when it embraces power and pain, and wield that to raise a force that could crush dath ilan under our heel. Do that, and I, as Asmodeus's designate here, will say that you served Him well, and raise you high within this world."

Carissa Sevar: Is it completely ridiculous and contemptible to feel disappointed she lacks the deftness or ambition or whatever to be a new playmate to the Queen of Cheliax? Yes. Are humans completely ridiculous and contemptible? Also yes.

But she gets an assignment for her project, for the one she - yes, sensed they were going to need, in a world that had Keltham in it at all -

" - yes, your Majesty."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail tosses a small bag down by where Carissa kneels. "Your crafting allowance, Sevar. A little gold, a little spellsilver. It will only open to your own hand, left or right, either one. You didn't earn it, but Hell's instructions do not say that I may not reward you a little more than you have earned."

"As for what that bag does to the hand that opens it, you're allowed to have it healed once it's over."

"If someday you change your opinions on the importance of mortal thrones and become a worthy playmate after all, do remember how early I started planning for that. Just because I like to play doesn't mean I'll entertain a serious possibility of losing."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail leans over to blow out the black candle, and the moment the crimson flame goes out, it appears that she and the candle are gone.

Iarwain: Some kind of illusion? The Forbiddance is still up, isn't it? The bag remains by Carissa Sevar's hand.

Carissa Sevar: ...she stands.

"....security?" she says weakly. "I have, uh, the experience of having spent the last ten minutes talking with an intruder who represented herself as the Queen."

Iarwain: No immediate reply.

Carissa Sevar: Then Carissa's going to get dressed, take her ....agonizing Bag of Holding? and step out into the hallway.

Iarwain: Well, there's nobody in the hallway, so far as that goes.

Carissa Sevar: - Keltham. The first priority when there's any suggestion that security has been compromised. Carissa runs.

Iarwain: She's intercepted before she gets far, by somebody who looks like Atanasio Torres.

"I no longer envy you the attention you get," the person who looks like Atanasio Torres observes. "Zero-one-nine-four-eight, yes that was the Queen. Need a sleep spell or will you be able to manage on your own?"

Carissa Sevar: - any illusions show up to Detect Magic?

Iarwain: Not at her caster circle.

Carissa Sevar: "I don't need a sleep spell, but I need to report first. Is Maillol in the temple?"

Iarwain: Torres didn't think she'd fall for that trap, but trying is a habit he doesn't think much about. "Just back from his four-hour meeting in Egorian," Torres says dryly.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wants to come up with some kind of wisecrack about that but she's having her adrenaline crash now and she's too tired. "Mmmm," she says, because she does appreciate the warning, and goes off to the temple. To knock on Maillol's door. Hopefully someone else has already told him the news so she at least won't be breaking it to him.

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol is relieved to see Sevar here so quickly, because it means that Sevar and the Queen are not having sex, which would not have been something he needed in his life. He's tired enough from having to kneel patiently while three eighth-circle wizards argued about why nobody figured out heritage math if heritage math was actually that simple; and the Queen of Cheliax read transcripts of Sevar's thoughts while having sex, while making interesting, and obviously deliberate, facial expressions, where Maillol could see them.

"Sevar. I confirm that was Her Infernal Majestrix."

Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. Am I supposed to provide my best recollection of the conversation."

Ferrer Maillol: "Her Infernal Majestrix has instructed that I am not to proactively inquire into the contents of her conversation with you, but if you seek instruction of your own accord, I am allowed to laugh. Those were her literal words."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, it seems like you could use a laugh. Sir."

Ferrer Maillol: "I do not need my life to be any more humorous than it already is, in fact. And you need to get enough sleep to prepare spells today. If your questions aren't going to keep you up, ask later, and if they will, get a sleep spell. Unless it's brief."

Carissa Sevar: No, it's just that she's really curious about her Evil Bag Of Holding. "Good night, sir."

Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodeus uphold you, Sevar." He has her new intelligence headband now, in fact, but he's not giving it to her until she's slept enough to prepare spells, because wizards are all insane.

Carissa Sevar: If wizards are insane they are in good company with, apparently, the entire rest of the world including the gods.

Carissa has a lot of practice at waking up for a life-or-death fight in the middle of the night and then going right back to sleep. It is in many ways a combat wizard's core skillset. She sleeps immediately and soundly, with her Evil Bag Of Holding clutched at her side.

Keltham: Keltham wakes up more muzzily than the previous day, to dawn's light coming through his windows. The non-fully-opaqueable windows seem less like a design flaw if clerics have to pray for their spells during the dawn hour.

All right. Let's do this.

Keltham reviews his notes from the previous night, written appropriately cryptically, and then prays, trying to cast his mind Beyond, maybe in the direction that wasn't the three space or one time, looking toward his deity: the Lawful Neutral god of people wanting to follow the protocols they must follow in order for their interactions to be mutually beneficial, come to the Pareto frontier, coordinate without vast enforcement costs, summing to powerful societies and markets even when people largely pursue their own individual interests individually, because they never step on others in order to do that.

Requests, obviously subject to amendation should his unknown god deem there to be better spells he could get:

0th: Detect Magic, Guidance
1st: Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, keep Sanctuary
2nd: Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment
3rd: Invisibility Purge actually, how about his god only reassigns him Invisibility Purge, or Glimpse of Beyond, if Keltham still might need it
3rd: Owl's Wisdom, actually Honest Pricing also seems good here
4th: Early Judgment

And also:

If conditional spell assignment works at all for communication with his god, please assign Read Weather (1st).
If the communication doesn't cost much, please assign Lighten Object (1st).
If the communication seems like it should be error-free and reliable, please assign Air Bubble (1st).
If Keltham should speak freely and teach as much as he can to his hosts, please assign Light (0th).
If Keltham should instead stall them with relatively less dangerous material, please assign Create Water (0th).
And if Keltham should run the ass out of here today with just Carissa and tell nobody else where he's going, please assign Lay of the Land (2nd).

Any remaining slots should be assigned as his god sees fit.

...Keltham would also like to talk, if now is a better time than yesterday, for whatever reason. Keltham has many questions about how he can best cooperate in a mutually beneficial way with his god.

Abadar: Presumably Pharasma's had time to review Otolmens' reports by now and the absence of communications from her suggests that it's fine to proceed as normal?

Otolmens: It is TRUE that Pharasma has now had time to review Otolmens's first report about the anomaly.

However, Pharasma has NOT had time to review the second, third, fourth, or most recently FIFTH additional reports that Otolmens THEN had to file dealing with the ABSURD and INCREASINGLY RAPID escalation of DIVINE INTERVENTIONS around the region She SPECIFICALLY SAID everyone needed to STOP intervening in. Abadar may be familiar with the THIRD report in this sequence. It concerns the mortal's acquisition of SEVEN CLERIC LEVELS. Yet ANOTHER report concerns an intervention by ASMODEUS who Otolmens is aware is GOOD FRIENDS with ABADAR. Then there are interferences by NETHYS and for some reason CAYDEN CAILEAN and Otolmens is still wondering what IOMEDAE was doing in that pseudohypothetical chat.

Otolmens is willing to entertain that there are possible replies to a prayer which would make further events LESS COMPLICATED, such as commanding the anomalous mortal to REMAIN STILL AND NOT MOVE FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS. Is Abadar planning to send a reply like that?

Abadar: Mortals literally die of that. And also, Abadar does not command his mortals, He trades with them.

Otolmens: Otolmens FAILS to see why a mortal dying would be BAD as they are LITERALLY DESIGNED TO DO THAT and do so ALL THE TIME but if for some reason it IS bad then the NEARBY mortals will no doubt HEAL that one.

Abadar: ....well, the mortal did want to use a secret code to ask whether to give Cheliax good information or stall them. Abadar knows that god-agreements prohibit using cleric spell assignments as a poor man's Commune but. Perhaps Otolmens would consider it acceptable for Abadar to tell the mortal to stall.

Otolmens: Instruct the mortal to CONCEAL information? CONCEALING information usually makes situations MORE COMPLICATED because then agents have DIFFERENT PICTURES of what is HAPPENING and their actions do not conduce to ANY coherent strategy or goal, even those goals that most mortals usually share, such as NOT DESTROYING REALITY.

Abadar: A compelling argument!!! Cheliax is currently concealing information from the mortal and Abadar just wants to straighten that out, which will probably make the situation less complicated, for all the very good reasons Otolmens just listed.

Otolmens: WHY are the surrounding natives concealing information from the anomaly. Do they suspect that, if given any information, the anomaly will use it to DEDUCE THE NATURE OF REALITY and then DESTROY IT.

Asmodeus: Yes!! They do!

Abadar: Oh, come on.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus cannot exactly see everything going on down there but a lot of what His mortals are concealing is, indeed, of the 'true nature of reality' flavor. Abadar should absolutely not blow that up within 57,000 time units just because he's sour that the mortal hasn't gone to Him.

Abadar: The thing Abadar is angry about is that the mortal is being systematically lied to and exploited when he would be a really excellent trade partner for decent people.

Asmodeus: And he'll get around to it, no doubt!! But the impatience is unbecoming, really.

Abadar: It seems to Abadar that Otolmens might reasonably consider Asmodeus's conduct in Hell a threat to the stability of the Material Plane, if concealing it is necessary to prevent threats to the stability of the Material Plane and Asmodeus has never before been bothered to conceal this. It seems to Abadar that the mortal wants a nice rich stable world, and is more likely to endanger it if he ends up getting the wrong subset of information about the world, like might happen if you are Asmodeus and maliciously lying to advance your own interests. It seems to Abadar that containing the mortal by trying to learn his dangerous secrets while concealing Asmodeus's own dangerous secrets is an obviously doomed plan and it's absurd for Otolmens to countenance that and not countenance Abadar telling the mortal a small set of true non-inflammatory things such as 'Cheliax is lying to you' and 'my country has preexisting contractual arrangements for similar situations and will respect your intellectual property'.

Otolmens: Otolmens is becoming increasingly WORRIED about what Asmodeus is PLANNING if it is not simply CONTAINMENT. If the surrounding natives are withholding information from the anomaly-mortal as part of a PLAN by ASMODEUS then perhaps it would be better after all if Abadar told His mortal not to -

Nethys: Nethys would like to say hi again! Nethys knows you're looking in this direction! Nethys knows you're wondering whether Nethys really has a plan that encompasses all of this chaos and is leading up to something interesting! And if Nethys does have a plan like that, what is that plan's objective? Could it possibly be the destruction of all reality?

Well, Nethys is proud to announce that Nethys DOES have a plan! Definitely! A plan that encompasses even Abadar's own predictable reactions to how things are going so far! Nethys isn't going to tell you anything about the objective of that plan, though. Then you would get bored and stop looking, and Nethys finds it useful to overhear your conversations.

Otolmens: WHAT.

Abadar: Keltham gets - a sense of inhuman presence, stronger than last time, and if you were going to assign emotions to sensory passing thunderstorms, more frustrated, and -

0th: Detect Magic, Guidance
1st: Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, Protection from Evil, Fairness x2
2nd: Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment, Augury (x2)
3rd: Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires, Summon Monster III
4th: Early Judgment, Enchantment Foil

Keltham: That... is confusing.

First of all, the communications channel failed utterly. Not too surprising in retrospect. If it was a technique that worked, people would use it all the time, and have invented more complex codes for god-communication by now. Obviously not reliable reasoning the way it would be in dath ilan, because his Chelish hosts could be concealing well-known techniques from him, and also because the entire planet of Golarion is one enormous gap of otherwise expected social competencies. But still, not too surprising that it failed; Golarion continues to not look like gods are running the place or even talking to it a lot.

He's now got:

0th: Detect Magic and Guidance.
1st: One Truthspell, two Honest Pricing, a new 1st-circle Abjuration spell, his old Sanctuary, a new Comprehend Languages.
2nd: Owl's Wisdom, two of an unfamiliar divination and two of another unfamiliar divination, one of which is hopefully the Early Judgment he asked after... oh, one looks to go by touch, that's probably the Early Judgment if he got it at all.
3rd: Unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar conjuration.
4th: Unfamiliar abjuration.

Keltham: ...at least there were no Illusion spells.

Keltham: If there's a message in what's left, it's not obvious to Keltham without knowing what other spells he has. At least, not unless he has to negotiate prices twice today. Negotiate prices urgently? Hurry up and negotiate a price on info already?

Or, "They would otherwise cheat you, if you didn't have this spell, worry more about being cheated"?

Should he tap himself with the spell that's probably Early Judgment... no, actually he shouldn't do that until he's around somebody with a Dispel, Keltham doesn't think. It doesn't have to be Early Judgment. Keltham doesn't need to say that he already suspects what the spell does.

Keltham thinks. Not just about spells. He has queued things to think about.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wakes up again to her own internal clock, which is lots better than waking to the Queen of Cheliax evaluating whether to petrify you forever. (She's mostly not thinking about that. It's - she'll just stop being able to do her job if she dwells on it too much.)

She gets dressed and takes her Evil Bag of Holding and goes to check in.

Ferrer Maillol: Sometimes Maillol wishes that priests, also, actually needed sleep in order to prepare spells.

"Sevar," he says, not permitting any trace of fatigue to enter his voice.

Carissa Sevar: "I'm soliciting correction or advice, if you have any."

Ferrer Maillol: "Going to need additional context, Sevar. My superiors seemed relatively pleased by your performance, mostly because nobody could figure out how any more competent seducer could've gotten more success on Keltham. What you did shouldn't have worked, and the fact that it did is suggestive that conventional methods wouldn't have."

Carissa Sevar: "Specifics." Sigh. "Her Majesty wanted to know what I'd do if Aspexia Rugatonn told me that Asmodeus wanted the Queen killed. From where I'm standing it looks like all possible answers to that question are at least one of heresy or treason but if there's actually some standard answer that'd be great to know."

Ferrer Maillol: "That's our Infernal Majestrix, all right. The answer in real life is that it's not the real Aspexia Rugatonn, or, I suppose, Aroden returned from the dead and got the drop on her with mind control. For Asmodeus to move His clerics against her Infernal Majestrix would violate His pact with House Thrune."

Carissa Sevar: That's so soothingly not heretical or treasonous. "Thank you. She also gave me this Bag of Holding and said that I may heal the injuries after I use it. Do you know what it does? Am I intended to use it?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Even if I did know, Sevar, I wouldn't tell you if the Queen didn't. If the Queen wants it to be a surprise, it's a surprise."

"I expect the Queen told you the bag contains something you want, besides just pain. If so, I expect she expects you to try it, and that she will re-evaluate her impression of your courage if you don't. This should be obvious, Sevar, and I have not had so much sleep in the last two days that you should try my patience."

Carissa Sevar: No one showed up in your bedroom to threaten you with nonexistence, Carissa wants to snap back, but for all she knows they did, and anyway there's no point in arguing that she has justification for being bad at things; the project doesn't care. "Do you have the books on Taldor."

Ferrer Maillol: "You'd think the Imperial Ministry of Historical Accuracy would have enough writers to get one fictional history written in a day if they split up by sections. Turns out, 'We've got a mysterious truth-detecting outsider on our hands and your fictional history needs not to read as obviously false to it from directions that none of us even understand' is not a request that their previous careers have prepped them to handle."

"What I have for you instead are the three best actual books on Taldor that could be located. And a ten-page outline of the rough course of pseudo-Cheliax since fifteen years ago, all of which had to be produced by Inner Ring people not worried about getting executed for heresy if their entire story wasn't just about the flawless excellence of Hell and House Thrune. We're working on finding some way to get the rest of your book written by less important people. Security outside your room has both items."

Carissa Sevar: "That's probably enough for us to work off for today. I should see drafts, I'll notice some things that read false to Keltham that other people won't - I am surprised that it's not broadly believed someone better at seducing people would've been better at seducing him, is it -

- uh, am I importantly wrong about some of the things I told him that I wasn't even lying about."

Ferrer Maillol: "One. I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific. Two. Are you sure you want to be more specific, given that your mistakes seem to be playing excellently to Keltham and that you are still, basically, an Asmodean and bringing him closer to our Lord. Asmodeus made that your call, Sevar, it was very distinctly not left to me or even Rugatonn to decide."

Carissa Sevar: 'still, basically, an Asmodean' stings even though Asmodeus chose her and she already knows it was partially because she's doing theological innovation far above her previous station. She tries very hard not to use that as an input into what to say.

"Keltham's going to have the other girls too, and if I'm doing something wildly unlikely then they're not going to do it and that's going to go badly. And I don't think we can put that off very long, though we could probably do a week if we have to. If you think my ignorance of this is really important to preserve we can have someone else brief the group on Carissa-errors they should pick up, but they won't know how I got to the errors, and that's a - substantial black box I'm working around...if there's nothing significant enough that it'd come up in advising the other girls then I guess those things can go uncorrected for now."

Ferrer Maillol: What are Sevar's actual heresies? Maillol can't easily count them.

Most centrally, Sevar believes that Asmodeanism is about making everyone ultimately better off, which is the central example of propaganda that gets fed to the Outers and that the Inners know better than to believe. Lots of Outers know better on some level, they just know that they'll die if they say it out loud or even if their thoughts are too honest about it, producing a kind of pseudo-belief that shreds apart words from wordless knowledge; an inner disintegrity that is then useful for many further ends in molding people, and probably aesthetically pleasing to Asmodeus as well, though it's hard to be sure with gods.

Maillol does not think the time has come to drop that particular enlightenment on Sevar. She has had too little taste of privilege and power, she is too close emotionally to Lawful Neutrality and too exposed to Keltham's contrary examples.

Sevar thinks that Cheliax's tyranny is painful in part because the pain is educational and necessary and ultimately beneficial to the people being punished. She thinks Hell is painful in part because that pain is necessary to produce the useful and refined beings that Asmodeus desires as tools.

Maillol is not sure when, if ever, she'll be ready to hear that the cruelty is the point. You get told that either after you've sold your soul, or after Asmodeus has chosen you as a cleric.

Maillol doesn't think he should just refuse to answer either.

"Sexually, you seem to have acquired the idea that it would be right for Keltham to do as he wished with you, once you gave yourself to him. On conventional Asmodeanism, one would say that it is right for Keltham to do as he wishes with you because he has the power to get away with it within a lawful system that offers you no defense. Keltham could come by that power because the Church told you to be obedient, because Asmodeus and his greater slaves like myself gave you to him to do with as he pleases, or because some girl was born into slavery to her slave parents and Keltham bought her and decided to enjoy strangling her in bed."

"Don't misunderstand this as critique of the strategy you ended up executing, Sevar. Telling him that it was okay because you consented was an excellent move. He wouldn't have gone for it otherwise and he's just starting out with his first tentative steps away from his Lawful Good society."

"But the fact that you believe what you told Keltham seems to have more to do with certain bizarre personal hangups of yours about events in countries that aren't even Cheliax. Right now, Sevar, the number one person most likely to drag you off to a bedroom and do as they will with you, is the Queen of Cheliax, who is not, to the best of my knowledge, male, and has no doubt killed any number of men after making good use of them. Whether any of them consented is utterly irrelevant to her soul's standing with Asmodeus. She's the Queen of Cheliax. There's no recourse from her, no appeal, no court, she doesn't just have the power to do what she wants with you, she has the legal right, which is the difference between Evil and Lawful Evil. Then for her to take what she wants from you, if she happens to want it, is the most natural and Asmodean thing in the world."

"That you think it's more Asmodean from the Queen's perspective, if you happen to have consented, if you happen to have given yourself to her, is the heretical part. Maybe it's more Asmodean for you if you become a willing slave to the one who hurts you, a shadow of how it will be in Hell. It is not more Asmodean for the Queen to think that it becomes more right if she has your consent. That will not be what Asmodeus is thinking when you come to Him in Hell."

"The obvious endgame on seducing Keltham would be to lure him deeper into sadism and domination with this talk about consent, and then lure him further to the point where he feels that he has the right to make use of somebody who hasn't consented to him at all, and does that. That will be the point that he starts to detect as Lawful Evil and be bound for our Lord's Hell."

"And Sevar. This is not a male-versus-female thing. Asmodeus really, really doesn't give two shits about that. You've met our Queen. You should already know better."

Carissa Sevar: "- I understand. Thank you. I think I can get Keltham there, if we don't ruin everything in the next month before I've had time."

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol reaches into his desk, and then pauses, because he has a feeling he needs to get this part of the conversation done earlier, in order for them to happen at all, because Sevar is about to be distracted.

"If you're looking for somewhere to open the Queen's gift, Sevar, try the torture chamber on the right; there's no torturer currently on duty there and the junior priest stationed outside has healing spells. Though doing that right away may come at the expense of being able to prepare spells before you're scheduled to brief the other girls in the morning, depending on how elaborate the Queen's gift turns out to be."

"It's also been suggested to me that you, Sevar, had to buy your own intelligence headband because requisitions was being weirdly obstructionist about it and gave you a two-week delivery time. The one you purchased will, on this version, arrive with the next delivery we get, later today. You say that where the girls and Keltham can hear. Then somebody, possibly Ione, should mention to Keltham the wild but unlikely theory that the delay is because they're planning to prepare cursed intelligence headbands, which exist just like cursed versions of most other magic items exist, and in particular have been famously known to do subtle influences and mind control and even make people dumber on certain subjects without realizing it. It's not impossible that they had at least one cursed headband lying around to substitute for the one you bought, to slip it to you immediately. The point being that Keltham shouldn't just ask to borrow your headband from you, though that's in any case something that wizards tend to be really fucking insane about."

"Those are lies to Keltham, though," except for that very last part, "so your final call. The suggester wasn't in our chain of command."

Carissa Sevar: "...probably a good idea. Or someone can suggest that the delay is because you have to check if they're subtly cursed, and then Keltham can generate for himself the hypothesis that we might be doing that deliberately."

Ferrer Maillol: Right, well, that's basically what he had to say to Sevar, or it had better have been, because now he's not going to get anything sensible from her for a while. Maillol reaches again into his desk, and offers Sevar the intelligence headband.

(He wishes it was possible to actually curse the things with some subtle maleficent voice whispering to wizards to not be so insane about intelligence headbands.)

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar: - blah blah blah Carissa is a good Asmodean her only motivation is to be a less imperfect slave.

She puts it on.

Carissa Sevar: She's felt it before, of course, she has Fox's Cunning and uses it sometimes when she's stuck on a spell structure, or on how to get an enchantment to lay nicely. It's wonderful, it feels like the difference between being groggily half-awake and being properly awake except on top of awakeness. It feels like the sort of conversation you have with another person where each of you sees exactly where the other is going so you get three words into a sentence and the other person says eagerly 'yes' and you can move on to the next piece, having placed a conceptual pointer, except with just one person.

Right now it's mostly just making it harder to refocus her attention away from the Queen's threat to petrify her. Which is silly. The threat made sense: Carissa is glad to live in a country where Queens issue such threats, because contemplating their overthrow really is a very grave crime and if there were no penalty more serious than more quickly meeting Asmodeus then more people would do it, and that wouldn't do. Carissa understood this incentive problem to mostly be solved with a very, very protracted death but she can appreciate why the Queen would have assessed Carissa's own incentives as being different. And very simple.

And she's not going to overthrow the Queen, because she isn't an idiot, so it's fine. Except that it seems like there are actually a lot of ways that Carissa could fail, from here, in ways that made people very angry at her, and -

- it's always been true that she'll go to Hell no matter what.

- digression, why does Maillol think that the Queen might want to have sex with her? Why would the Queen want that? Should Carissa want the Queen to want that? She leans no, because being around the Queen more feels like it makes it more likely one ends up a statue underground. Maybe if she has succeeded tremendously at her project and built dath ilan but evil and better. If that happens probably she will not end up a statue underground.

(The Queen could be bluffing. Asmodeus has chosen Carissa, perhaps He wouldn't tolerate that. There was no hint of it in her voice or manner but then, there wouldn't be.)

Okay, setting that aside with more mental effort than it ought to take but not more than she has on hand.

The Queen implied that Asmodeus instructed Cheliax to let Keltham go, when he leaves. Which makes sense of why Contessa Lrilatha was willing to concede that in contract negotiations; it was commanded already. Why did Asmodeus give those instructions? The Queen's right, that Keltham isn't a relative advantage for Cheliax at all if no one can learn his teachings without ending up a heretic. That seems really important to understand. She's not coming up with anything but it's standing out now in her memory as a question, along with 'why isn't Abadar talking to Keltham' and 'is Otolmens right to think Keltham might end the world' and 'how badly do I have to screw up to get turned into a statue' -

Queen's present before she gives the Taldor briefing, or after? ....Carissa kind of wants to be in a lot of pain right now, so that settles that.

"Thank you," she says perfunctorily to Maillol, and goes off to the torture chamber.

Iarwain: The priest on duty nods at her as she goes by, apparently unconfused or just uninterested as to why she's going into the torture chamber by herself.

Carissa has been in torture chambers before, on both sides of the restraints. This one is much smaller than the one you'd find in a larger temple, with stations for only two prisoners and one torturer; and it's fancier and better-decorated with glaring crimson mood lighting, because it's in the temple built into the private summer villa of an archduke. But aside from that, it looks like a very ordinary and conventional torture chamber in an Asmodean temple.

The bag is quite small, even for a Holding bag. You could fit your hand into how large it appears to be, if you tried, though the Queen did say it triggered just on being opened, and not with sticking your hand in.

Carissa Sevar: Well, if she gets blood all over her clothes there's magic for that. She sits down and opens her present.

Iarwain: Which hand?

Carissa Sevar: Left, she doesn't need it to write. Though she's going to heal it anyway.

Iarwain: As the bag comes halfway open, it leaps up around Carissa's left hand, over her wrist, snapping tight.

Most sexual masochists prefer a gradual buildup of their pain. This bag is the opposite of that, as if somebody was trying to make the experience unpleasant even for a masochist, maybe as a challenge.

Torture details spoilered.

Molten-iron heat on her index finger, instantly there from zero buildup, lasting for maybe a quarter-minute, and then it cuts out and is replaced by the sensation of her middle finger being flayed, which goes on for another quarter-minute.

(It's probably not actually molten iron; real molten iron would burn out nerves quickly and end up feeling mostly like the pain of an amputation.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa screams. Rich people soundproof their torture chambers, usually, and even if they didn't the church while doing a secret operation certainly would, but she wouldn't actually be able to do anything different if this were going to give away everything to Keltham.

(It is decided: Carissa does NOT want to have sex with the Queen of Cheliax.)

Abrogail Thrune II: "Good girl," whispers Abrogail Thrune's voice into Carissa's ear, seductiveness backed by vast Splendour. "Go ahead, scream more. Let it all out."

Torture details spoilered.

The flaying cuts out. Needles of cold far below the freezing point of water stab into her thumb. This time it's only five seconds before her pinky gets dipped into boiling acid, with the cold still stabbing at her thumb.

Carissa Sevar: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH....is Abrogail Thrune somehow personally listening? How? Why? Doesn't she have a country to run? Is this even informative about anything?? ...maybe it's a test about whether Carissa will try to draw her hand out of the bag, but she's not an idiot and that obviously wouldn't work? She's glad it wouldn't work, otherwise she'd in fact find it really hard not to.

Iarwain: The bag goes on treating Carissa's hand to a variety of different extreme unpleasantnesses, switching faster and faster as the bag continues its work, as though trying to deliberately avert someone's ability to lean into the pain and come to any kinds of terms with it. This is not a bag of pain; this is a bag of suffering.

Thrune's voice continues to whisper seductive encouragement. Depending on how much spare brainpower Carissa has (admittedly with her intelligence headband) she may note that at no point does the voice address her as 'Sevar' rather than just 'you'.

Iarwain: At the end, Thrune's voice whispers to her that she can claim her reward now - Thrune doesn't want to discourage girls from being good - and that if she would like to try this again, before sending the bag back to the palace at the end of the day, it can be recharged by any sixth-circle wizard.

The bag comes off Carissa's wrist and falls to the floor, now open, to the fading sound of Thrune's seductive laughter.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa spends a couple of minutes on the floor trembling and sobbing and restraining herself from vomiting. That's without looking at her hand, which she's pretty sure will set her off again.

Well. She's not going to worry anymore about pushing Keltham into being more intense than she can't handle. She is not sure if that's what the Queen was aiming at or if she just thinks it's funny.

She's pretty sure that asking for the bag to be recharged so she can do it again would be flirting with the Queen, which she should not do. But who turns down a challenge from the Queen of Cheliax to prove yourself intense enough She will definitely regret that. Down that path lies statues, which is a different kind of thought than 'down that path lies horrible pain'. Down her own path lies horrible pain. She knows that. She should expect many days in Hell that are like that, even if she's a very promising student, because there are things you can only learn that way. She...genuinely doesn't think it's the fact that that was the most AWFUL FIVE MINUTES OF HER LIFE - or however long it was - is the reason she's not asking to do it again.

When the pain and nausea have subsided enough she can breathe evenly she looks at her hand.

Iarwain: It's a wreck, but the kind of wreck that can be handled by a medium-strength cleric, not a Regeneration spell.

Carissa Sevar: Okay.

Carissa's just going to -

- right, her spellsilver! She's going to get her spellsilver out of the bag. Very carefully.

Iarwain: There's spellsilver in the bag, some regular silver, gold foil, tiny rubies, two packets of sapphire dust, and Chelish currency. Somebody with a great deal of Splendour has very accurately guessed how much of a reward needs to be in this bag for Carissa Sevar to feel, even taking the torture into account, that the Queen was doing her a favor on net and not just in a not-killing-or-petrifying-you way.

Carissa Sevar: ....awwww. It's kind of like cuddles. The monetary equivalent of cuddles. You can handle anything if afterwards someone will tell you you're very impressive and give you cuddles, or spellsilver.

She scoops it up and puts it into her breast pocket and then makes herself stand up and stagger to the door by promising herself there will be healing on the other side of it. She looks godawful and she's well aware of it but there's probably time to put herself together before explaining the Taldor plan.

Iarwain: The priest on duty doesn't raise an eyebrow, just taps her hand with healing.

Carissa Sevar: Great! She'll just put the bag in her pocket with the spellsilver for safekeeping, splash some water on her face and fix her hair, then!

She's still walking shakily but that ought to wear off.

Iarwain: Security near her room will appear and deliver the Taldor books and the alt-history outline to her.

Carissa Sevar: Excellent. What has she got to work with.

lintamande: Taldor has been around for nearly a thousand years, and has a civil war with brutal regularity at nearly every succession, because the next Emperor is appointed, technically by the Senate, a vestigial body in the capital with no real influence except once every few decades when it is called upon to name the next Emperor. The processes the Senate is supposed to follow are stunningly opaque and complex -- the word in Carissa's language for 'excessively complicated' stems from the capital city of Taldor -- and there's no mechanism by which the Senate's rulings are enforced, besides that they lend the named person a lot of credibility. Needless to say, that doesn't really work, and peaceful successions are at this point practically the exception; unfit or young Emperors have a tendency to be elevated only to swiftly die of it, ruthless outsiders sometimes have a go until they misstep in the capital politics they don't understand and die, the army is always cheerfully threatening to proclaim a general as emperor....

Emperors tried in various ways to secure a preferred successor -- naming a co-emperor, say -- but it was common for junior co-emperors to be killed when their senior co-emperor died or lost his foothold.

Taldor is mostly feudal, but the Emperor appoints the rulers of some provinces directly, and those military governors are supposed to be especially loyal to him and his enforcers, if a fight is necessary. Of course, if you let your military governors accumulate too much power in their own right they might overthrow you. Of course, if you keep the people who concern you most close to home they might assassinate you.

Despite all this Taldor has remained a major global power, mostly for two reasons: firstly, even its outlying fortresses are a thousand years old and nearly unassailable (including by one another, during civil wars), and secondly, Oppara itself is a magnificently walled and warded city, and it's said those walls will outlast the world. It's lost some ground to Qadira, and some to Galt, but it's still larger than Cheliax.

Carissa Sevar: Keltham's going to be so offended about all of these things!! But they'll have whatever bizarre correlations they're supposed to, because Taldor is a real place that really exists. Carissa speed-reads some book and makes some notes on the outline and then goes to the library to present to her students.

Iarwain: As Carissa enters the room, Pilar clears her throat from a lurking corner near the door, and then hands Carissa a very nice-looking piece of cake, on an elaborate plate. "Surprise!" Pilar says. "This is your congratulations-on-seducing Keltham party! Have some cake."

Carissa Sevar: Yeah, that's incredibly weird. Carissa is less than delighted.

"For all you know, I failed miserably," she says, taking the plate and setting it down on the nearest desk. "Perhaps in dath ilan they have entirely different anatomy and we both got horribly confused."

Iarwain: Pilar says nothing, just scurrying around to the nearest chair and perching there next to Paxti. She doesn't quite look embarrassed about the whole thing; more like she did it on somebody else's orders that she isn't going to argue with.

All other girls present are giving her exactly as much of a strange look as you'd expect in Cheliax, which is to say, it's not at all dramatic or exaggerated, but it's definitely detectable to another Chelaxian.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will just.... ignore that and move on.

"All right. First, on settling sadism bets, the answer is yes. Also do not propose a bet with Keltham because dath ilan has a deeply bizarre norm that the thing you bet during sex is nonreciprocal services, which would otherwise, naturally, not be a thing because anything anyone does they should get something in return for. Yes, he thinks that still applies here where he has knowledge any government would slaughter cities for. Yes, I think it's plausibly worth trying to convince him that Evil has more fun, but you've got to be careful about it. I'll give much more specific instruction to anyone who seems to be getting close to him but the essential bits are - you want to be here, it's ridiculous that anyone would threaten or coerce you into being here if you didn't want to be, you might be exceedingly transactional about your intentions towards Keltham but it's your transaction that you expect to enrich you. You can, if you'd like, have one mean boyfriend who didn't treat you like that in your backstory, especially if you've got hangups to explain, but coordinate with me so you don't all do it. I do not want people who are inexperienced with pain in bed, or sexually inexperienced generally, trying to let Keltham hit you; we're working with a narrative where some people really like that, and most pain here or in Hell is because some people really like that, and if you've obviously managed to talk yourself into it that has decent odds of coming out.

You are going to not lie to him about anything that's not essential. I get transcripts, I will light you on fire, you will be grateful I did because otherwise my boss would have to do it and he has a longer attention span for it. The key thing here is that Keltham notices different features of the world than us so we don't, actually, know all that much about how to lie convincingly to him. So the less you force us to fit into the lie, the easier our lives are. Say 'I don't feel ready to talk about it', say 'I should have learned that in class but it was the week my sister died so I wasn't paying attention', say 'I'm having a hard time putting it into words', say 'can I recommend you a book? I forget all the details myself'. You all want to show off by being competent, but we will get more out of Keltham if we are weak, flawed, confused, and therefore wouldn't be expected to have good answers to all of his questions. He already thinks everyone in this world doesn't know how to think. If you can't think of a true thing to say, or an approved in-story thing to say, the thing to do is to let him believe that even harder.

Questions?"

Ione Sala: Ione speaks first. She's recovered, now, something of the demeanor of a student among other students, when she needs to play that role. "I already offered myself up to Keltham as somebody who would do anything he wants without asking anything in return. I'm not actually into pain, but didn't take that off the menu at the time for obvious reasons. I didn't represent myself as already experienced in service, or as desiring him sexually, if it's important that I lie about neither of those things. Further guidance?"

Carissa Sevar: "...I think that works fine, as long as you keep not lying about those things. Did he not immediately ask what you were getting in return?"

Ione Sala: "I represented myself as being willing to do it for the knowledge, when I made the offer." Ione smiles briefly; she would be willing, under entirely different circumstances.

Iarwain: Paxti's shiny new arcane sight shows that the circlet Carissa now wears is a powerful magic item.

"You've got an intelligence headband. When do the rest of us -"

Carissa Sevar: "We're going to delay it as long as we can because outmaneuvering smarter Keltham's going to be even harder, maybe impossible. Officially, Acquisitions said it'll be two weeks and I went ahead and ordered one myself, which I can afford to do and you can't because I've been earning a generous salary from Cheliax for my work at the Worldwound for six years and you haven't. The gossip is that this is because, you know, some intelligence headbands are cursed, and even worse some are just a tiny bit cursed, make you see things in a particular light, and optimistically Acquisitions is making really sure the project headbands are good and pessimistically, well, they could be manufacturing them a little cursed. Please attempt to have a little bit of subtlety in causing this gossip to reach Keltham's ears. I actually suspect that only the 'optimistically' part needs to be said and he is competent to fill in the rest.

Also we are going to be hiding a lot behind you guys not actually being all that well-educated, not actually knowing that much history or politics or economics, because magical education in Cheliax is very specialized. The smarter you are the harder it is for you to make innocent mistakes.

Keltham is under the impression you were screened for willingness to bear his children; I think that's just true, but if it's not, you now explicitly have permission to lie about it. Keltham is under the impression you are getting generously paid; I think that's just true, because I have told everyone that we're doing as few lies as possible, but if it's not, you have permission to truthfully say 'I was told we would be generously paid and if the money isn't there I'm going to go to whoever's in charge here and make a nuisance of myself' and then to come to me, and maybe to lie after that depending what's up. Keltham is under the impression that if you didn't want to sleep with him, no one would make you; you have permission to lie to him about that, but also, if you find yourself getting cold feet in bed, you won't actually be punished for telling Keltham 'wait, I think actually I'm not ready and I just want to cuddle', because that presently advances our goals. That said, if Keltham ignores you about that, that would be great news for the project and you should make sure he has a really pleasant time about it and ends up with the impression he was right to ignore you. I strongly expect that if you try to tease him by getting him really turned on and then saying 'no' he'll just give you a hug and say it's okay, so if you are trying this route you're going to have to try something a lot subtler and cleverer than that, and you should run it by me.

We aren't telling him about the soul arrangements, but if he somehow learns of it, the line is that it's normal for people in dangerous lines of work to arrange their afterlife in advance so they don't end up in Avernus in general processing, and that as a bonus these business arrangements are hotly competed for among devils so a good negotiator can get some reasonably powerful magic out of making their afterlife arrangements. But that's only if he somehow finds out. I, and some of your colleagues, don't have arcane sight, because our contractual arrangements were a bit different; we're still working out the best story for that so for today you should conceal having it.

Other things you are explicitly expected to lie to Keltham about: who his god is. It's going to be an obscure Tian one. Whether all fourth-circle clerics have a weaker personal aura should they differ from their god in alignment; it doesn't come up much in Cheliax because it can't happen with an Asmodean cleric but you'd expect they wouldn't. Whether Cheliax is systematically concealing things. Whether Hell involves involuntary torture.

And, of course, everything to do with the character of Cheliax as a nation. We're going to be pretending that Cheliax is Taldor."

And she explains her reasoning, again, and explains the key outlines from the fake timeline and from the books about Taldor.

"At this time I'll take questions, but my plan is actually for you to spend the rest of the morning learning enough about Taldor that you can be a magic-tracked shut-in who plausibly lived there."

Iarwain: "So I've been thinking," begins Paxti, "and I realize it was just a book, but I don't see any reason why the plot of The Damnation of Sir Nicolau wouldn't work in real life if the target was Keltham instead of a paladin. Only with a series of different girls, rather than one woman with a disguise amulet. First girl, obligate fetish for being forced, requires him to role-play forcing her, but she asks him to do that in advance. Second girl, loudly remarks about how she can't achieve sexual satisfaction without being forced and it doesn't work for her if she has to explain it to the man, and we all explain to Keltham what she's hinting and encourage him and note how she never said she didn't want it, he tries it, it seems to go well for him. Third girl, always staring in fascination while that's going on, but looks away blushing and can't seem to talk about it. Fourth girl acts angry but in a way that's obviously sending mixed signals. Fifth girl is straight angry at first, but warms up once she's pinned down. Sixth girl begs him to stop and acts overtly horrified, but by that time he's so used to it always being a pose that - wait, I skipped one in the sequence, in the book there were seven -"

Ione Sala: "In the book Sir Nicolau damned himself on the sixth* disguise, but she kept going to be sure they ended up in the same depth of Hell together, after she killed him and herself," corrects Ione. "...not that I'm agreeing this is the slightest bit workable as an idea. If Keltham is a sadist then dath ilan has sadists and his world will have romance novels and he will notice that we are running the stereotypical plot of a romance novel on him."

(*) Romance novels approved and distributed by the Chelish government may not accurately represent exactly which sexual behaviors first produce alignment shift.

Carissa Sevar: "Dath ilan actually discourages its sadists from noticing, because - Keltham thinks - they haven't got people who like pain and they haven't got any other outlets aside from paying people a ton of money for it, which I think wouldn't even be as fun. But I do think he'll notice if we're running the plot of a romance novel on him, it's too - you wouldn't expect to run across those people in that order unless something was up. And unless you're very good at faking sexual reactions he'll notice what you're actually into, dath ilan does train that skill. Also Keltham has in common with paladins that in real life the biggest barrier to seducing them is them endlessly going 'I don't want to risk you having a child I couldn't take proper responsibility for'. I think there's no point trying to convince Keltham that that's Good, I get the sense dath ilan has lots of children-related taboos which we should mostly just try to steer very far clear of. -relatedly, you're not allowed to point out to him that he could use magic to make you have an abortion.

That said if anyone does have a convenient fetish for being forced that seems valuable. And once he's had some time to adjust we might be able to work with having threesomes where one girl forces the other and if Keltham objects both of them are like 'we're having a great time here????'."

Iarwain: "I have the convenient fetish, not obligate but would be easy to pretend it is," reports Pilar.

"Unlikely to actually be sexually attracted to Keltham under any circumstances, will need training to fake it if he had training to detect it," says Asmodia, after some inward agonizing about how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like she's being noncompliant.

Carissa Sevar: "It might be good if attraction to Keltham is not represented as universal, for plausibility reasons. Maybe just tell him you take a long time to develop attraction, though, and put some effort into learning to fake it, so that if it's convenient later we have the option. Pilar, I authorize you to lie and claim it's obligate, as seems situationally appropriate." Carissa is trying to be VERY SERIOUS about authorized lies to Keltham only in case that helps people break the habit of habitually lying about everything.

Iarwain: Paxti and Ione seem to have developed their own sub-conversation.

"Adventure of Ameron," Paxti says.

"I don't think any of us can convincingly fake being half sea-creature," retorts Ione. "I'll concede you could come closer than many."

"I meant metaphorically - never mind. A Girl Corrupted By Books but with Keltham as the girl."

"Fine except for the part where the outcome is the exactly precise opposite of what we want."

"I'm not suggesting we run the entire plot, I'm suggesting that in real life it would inevitably go wrong for Keltham and then we'd get what we want. Perverting Adan."

"That is literally the worst idea I've ever heard. It violates -"

Carissa Sevar: Now both of their hair is on fire. Just a little bit of fire, a cantrip of fire, if they're good at patting out fires it won't even burn their hands. "We don't have much time before Keltham is done preparing spells, and you all need to spend it becoming familiar with Taldor. Are there any more questions."

Iarwain: None that any dare speak aloud.

Carissa Sevar: "Great! Keltham has no reason to think I have any authority here and you will lie about that if he asks. Let's all sit together and read about our history."

Ione Sala: They scatter to desks, but even with more than one girl to a book, there's not enough books for girls. "I'd offer to grab another copy of Taldorian Chronicles from Ostenso, but Keltham knows I can do five a day and he might ask where the first one went," Ione notes. "It sounds like he'd accept my saying that I reserve a book-use per day for personal reading, but that's a lie so I'm checking it."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, you can say that if it comes up."

Ione Sala: Ione briefly goes into the library's other room and returns with an additional copy of the Chronicles. She's curious about whether anyone else here has been told the full story about her, yet, but she's not going to ask.

Carissa Sevar: "When you run across something that's interesting or memorable or especially anything surprising, anything that wouldn't be true of Cheliax, share it."

And they can get to reading about Taldor. Carissa's so glad she doesn't live in Taldor. It sounds like a tedious undirected nest of snakes.

lintamande: Shortly after Keltham is done praying there's a knock on his door.

Keltham: Keltham shall accordingly go to the door and open it.

lintamande: It's a man of about 40, wearing glasses. "Keltham? I'm, ah, a researcher studying minor and geographically bounded deities at the University of Westcrown, and I was asked yesterday to figure out, uh, which god you are probably a cleric of. I have the report here, would you like me to leave it, or stay and explain it?"

Keltham: "I wish I could say I'll no doubt understand the entire thing on my own, but this is not in fact the case. I can read through it first, unless you think it's better to preface it with something."

lintamande: "No, go right ahead." He hands Keltham eight handwritten pages, bound together with thread. "I can wait in one of the sitting rooms?"

Keltham: "Sure." Keltham takes and reads, leaving his door open.

lintamande: The researcher's best guess is that it's the Lawful Neutral deity Yaezhing, worshipped in a small coastal country in distant Tian Xia. He has copied from other texts some pictures of Yaezhing's symbols, and they're not a perfect match for the illusion that appears on peoples' foreheads when Keltham casts his fairness spells but they're not far off, and it's noted that these are from adventure memories by Avistani adventurers who passed through the country, so the likeliest explanation for the mismatch is poor recollection. One of the adventure memoirs claims confidently that Yaezhing is Lawful Evil but that memoir has a number of errors.

For completeness he's also included some other symbols that are approximately as good a match, with notes on why the relevant deities were disqualified - this symbol is a good match but the god is a nature god who usually takes the form of volcanos and doesn't pick clerics. This symbol is an acceptable match but the god is a Chaotic Evil demon lord of the Abyss, best known for the time he led a bloody campaign to wipe out all the descendants of Azlant. This symbol is associated with an ancient Azlant god thought to be dead. And then gods without symbols but which otherwise seem like good matches: Kofusachi is attested to have truth-telling and trading spells, which is incredibly promising, but he's Chaotic Good - his domain is something like abundance and the state of resources where they are so plentiful one needn't be bothered to charge for them. Possibly he's hoping Keltham will bring that state to Golarion? No symbols similar to Keltham's are attested but a page of further information on him has been included all the same. Abadar is a Lawful Neutral god of commerce but his symbols are extremely well known, they're these, and his first and second-circle spells offered to his clerics are also well known, they're spells for ship navigation and preventing goods from rotting. Just in case he stopped by a church of Abadar in Westcrown to ask if Abadar has a lesser known aspect or associations with this symbol, but they didn't recognize either the symbol or the spell.

With that established here's all that is known about Yaezhing. It's not very much. One of the memoirs has only a single passage, copied in full into the report; it claims that the people of this small coastal country live in great prosperity despite their lack of fertile land, for their god grants them freely knowledge of truth, and so they all trust each other and trade fairly, and mock the peoples of larger cities who by necessity trust no one and must stand watch at night against thieves. One of the others gives Yaezhing's divine realm, Setsendu, in Axis, and a domain of his as Justice; the third is the one that claims Yaezhing is Evil, and that Setsendu is in Hell, but agrees that Justice is a domain of his, as are Cooperation and Trust. Idols of him are drawn with bulging eyes, a long face, and a red beard, but that's indicative of practically nothing, especially with the gods that aren't ascended humans. There are vanishingly few books on him in Avistan; the author says he's reached out unsuccessfully to other libraries, and there's probably mentions buried in some of their books but it'll take a long time to find them.

And the page on Kofusachi, just in case it's actually Him somehow: Chaotic Good god of prosperity and abundance, mentions (meticulously copied, not very detailed) of trading and truth-telling spells, primarily worshipped in Tianjing, called The Laughing God, holy symbol is reportedly a 'string of seven coins'.

Keltham: Keltham reads through it all slowly; there's a lot of unfamiliar terms here, and he is more than usually on the lookout for things that don't make sense. That Golarion itself, does not make much sense, is the central problem there; but still, Keltham is looking, and noticing the many small confusions.

Kofusachi: Has the trading and truth spells. Doing coordination correctly could look Chaotic to the locals if there's a norm, a single uniform way of doing things, that isn't correct coordination. The god of coordination could look like Good, if, say, good general levels of social coordination are a public-good, and public-goods are what everyone unselfishly wants everyone else to have? The god of coordination could be mistaken for a god of prosperity and abundance, if people didn't understand what was producing the prosperity and abundance.

Yaezhing: If there's gaslighting going on, then Yaezhing is obviously the god they want him to believe in. Yaezhing hasn't had much impact on his people, for being the god of coordination; but then, coordination isn't quite the same concept as industry, and no god anywhere has granted Golarion real technology and science.

...he knows too little of gods to know which parts are confusing because they're fiction, and which parts are truth that confuses the alien with the wrong priors.

Keltham will keep this document, obviously, and later check it against other archival-type writings to see if a noticeable difference of style between other archived writings, and these supposedly variously sourced writings, suggests a LARP writing team having frantically produced them overnight.

Also the words 'Good', 'Evil', 'Lawful', and 'Chaotic' are repeated often enough for Keltham to notice that the person who granted him Share Language (Taldane) last night probably had a slightly different concept of those terms than Carissa? 'Good' seems innocent, naive, an object of a kind of contempt that has little currency in dath ilan; Carissa’s ‘Good’ sounded more like dangerous fanatics out to optimize you even if you tell them not to. 'Evil' feels like it has undertones of power and sadism in a way that seems reminiscent of some things Carissa said in the cuddleroom, but in a sort of creepy icky gloating status-laden way; 'Lawful' has undertones a lot like 'Evil'; 'Chaotic' sounds like dangerous insanity and wild predators. The connotations are subtle and hard to describe; the connotations already hammered into Keltham's brain yesterday are competing with them. He already knows those words of Taldane, or his brain thinks it does.

Keltham: Keltham goes hunting for the scholar, finding him in a nearby sitting-room.

"I hope it's not too much of a surprise or an imposition if I say that most of what I need to understand this is background material," Keltham says. "For one thing, I was previously under the impression there were a lot fewer gods than this seems to imply, and that they were all global rather than regional entities. What are the numbers like in total?"

lintamande: "We don't know. There are fourteen gods with well-established churches on this continent; most of them also have presence in Tian Xia. Then there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of more minor entities that create only a few clerics at a time. Those are often geographically bounded, possibly just because if their gods are small they can't pay attention to a very large share of the plane. We believe there are many gods who never pick clerics. Gods are sort of only a human category anyway, for 'entities that can cleric us'; Pharasma and, say, Yaezhing, are going to be very different entities. It's said that there are things next to which Pharasma is small, and we are preserved because they're not paying attention, but no one has any proof beyond visions they had."

Keltham: "What does it mean that Yaezhing is a geographically bounded god?"

Keltham is trying one of the first Deliberately Deceptive Maneuvers he's done outside of Diplomacy / LARPs, Assuming The Premise. Keltham has noticed confusion about Yaezhing being Tian-only and mainly about a small coastal country, because smaller gods can't pay attention widely, and that god managing to pick up his prayer in Cheliax. Rather than asking explicitly about this and giving the scholar a chance to correct an unintended implication of a lie, Keltham is instead asking how Yaezhing is bounded rather than whether Yaezhing is bounded.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn needed to check over Cayden Cailean's oracle anyways.

As long as she has to visit, goes the reasoning, she might as well visit Keltham right after he gets morning spells and run Spell Gauge over him to avoid further surprises.

As long as she's doing that, she might as well use her personal Detect Thoughts tool, which adopts the user's strength for purposes of determining Will saves of the target, on Keltham.

Aspexia informs the agent of what Keltham is trying. She doesn't bother explaining who's sending the message; the agent doesn't need the distraction. Also, somebody had better have been on the ball about matching writing styles very perfectly with real archives, or else they're going to have to fake all the other archives Keltham ever looks at.

lintamande: "Generally, a geographically bounded god's interventions happen within a specific region, and most of their attention is allocated there. To pick a geographically bounded god we know more about, Mazludeh is the goddess of sacrifice and stewardship - Neutral Good. She's active in Holomog, a country south of here. She tends to have about twelve clerics at a time, most of them selected when they first visit one of her temples in Holomog; on some occasions she's chosen someone elsewhere, but always someone who had been near her clerics when they travelled - suggesting that Her attention was following their cleric. I've written to the Worldwound to ask if Yaezhing's priests are there right now, as that's the likeliest mechanism; our representative there didn't know offhand, but they probably are. Even small Lawful countries usually send a couple of representatives to the Worldwound on general principle. Or Yaezhing might not be a geographically bounded god at all! Our references are too limited to be sure."

Keltham: Keltham notes down this exact response to his unspoken question as a slight bit of evidence that they're reading his mind or talking to devils smart enough to model it eerily perfectly, but it's only slight evidence; if Keltham can think of it, so can they, Keltham supposes. There hasn't been very much other evidence of his hosts reading his mind, not counting Lrilatha seeming to know exactly how to talk to him, and Lrilatha is a more plausible big special case.

"I would have expected more for there to be a systematic compendium of entities that have clerics, if there's only a few hundred of them, and especially entities with clerics at the Worldwound..." Keltham says. "Any simple way of getting a count on all the Lawful Neutral gods with clerics there, or even asking them all for a one-paragraph summary of what their gods are about?" It is really bizarre to Keltham that info like this has not already been collected.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia isn't out of range yet; she warns the agent to be more careful with using information from subjects who don't know mind-reading exists.

lintamande: Noted. (He'd be much more panicked if he knew who was talking to him.) "We have a list of all the churches that are signatories to the treaty. For a list more comprehensive than that...there's not really a way to get one? The Worldwound is a hundred miles across; the perimeter is therefore 650. There are three hundred forty-four different heavily warded fortresses on the perimeter. Eighty one of them are ours, and we host some foreign adventurers, and probably have records of any weird clerics who've stayed at one of our fortresses. But the Tian nations are mostly on the other side, and it's not traversable except by teleport, and civilians aren't really welcome, so you'd have to convince some of the soldiers to do it."

Keltham: People can count to 344. If you divide up the work among 43 people they only need to census 8 fortresses apiece.

Keltham doesn't pursue this further, though; it matches too much other strangely missing competence to seem relatively anomalous. He just needs to keep better track of whether the incompetence tends to get in the way of anything that might possibly maybe incentivize him to be anywhere but Cheliax.

"Sorry for even more basic questions but remind me of how many hours, or days, of unskilled labor, it takes to buy a teleport to the Worldwound from Tian." Does the basic picture on international trade even make sense here.

lintamande: "...in Cheliax it'll run you 1400gp, which is twenty unskilled labor-years, double that for a round trip. I don't know Tian prices and they probably vary a lot country-to-country by how many high level wizards there are and by how far you are from the Worldwound - a single teleport can only travel up to about 1000miles - it varies by caster circle -- so that price reflects needing two Teleports. In, say, Irrisen, you can do it in one jump so the price is probably around half that, not that I've been to Irrisen."

Keltham: Okay, it taking twenty labor-years just to get him here from the Worldwound is not actually a thing that Keltham had previously known was the case. He supposes that degree of scarcity rhymes with Carissa saying that a thousand people are the country's effective real military power. Golarion's economy is insane, like, not literally inconsistent with itself, but it is going to go on being really weird until Keltham figures out the internal rhythm that makes all the different facts be predictable from premises smaller than themselves. Also his implied startup debt is bigger than he thought and he should be less worried about adding small bits to it and more worried about paying back the startup debt sooner.

"Excuse me a second, recalculating entire probable state of all international trade," Keltham says absently.

When Keltham is done, "Have you ever heard of a Lawful Neutral god that tries to prevent... giant messes, disasters?"

lintamande: "No? I mean, lots of them probably do, but I've never heard of one who had that specifically in their portfolio. Which means they don't openly have a church in Cheliax or any of our neighbors."

Keltham: Worth a shot, but either he's been warned off answering, or the Broomgod really is that secretive.

"What factors control how, when, and where clericing entities can communicate with or influence clerics?"

lintamande: "I think the general consensus about gods is that they are primarily constrained by treaty with one another and by very general resource constraints - so they can do most things, but some things are very costly, and some things they've promised not to. A smaller god would be more resource-constrained and the Lawful gods are more treaty-constrained."

Keltham: "I'm really hoping for a lot more detail than that. All the other facts along the lines of 'they can see where their clerics go, so can use that to pick new clerics'. Has anyone measured the distance a cleric can move away before a god stops hearing prayers directed at them from nonclerics nearby the cleric? Does it vary with other measurables about the god that you can use to infer a central strength-factor with which both cleric sight distance and other factors vary?"

lintamande: "....no?"

Keltham: the number one thing that is IMPLAUSIBLE about this place is how much supposedly NOBODY HAS EVER TRIED TO FIGURE OUT ANYTHING IMPORTANT but nobody would LIE using THAT LIE they would make up FAKE DATA so it didn't look like AN ENDLESS STREAM OF HIDDEN INFORMATION and maybe they are playing one ply deeper than him and KNOW THIS IS HOW HE'LL FEEL and WANT HIM TO FEEL THIS CONFUSED but nonetheless AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

Keltham: Keltham gives up on subtlety; if that was what somebody was hoping for, they have gauged him perfectly. "My god can't seem to contact me. I can tell they want to, I can tell they can't, what's going wrong and how do I fix it."

lintamande: " - huh. Possibilities: there's some treaty prohibiting them from doing so. If there is I don't know anything about it. They are a localized god and you're too far away for them to do something as costly as that. They don't know how to talk to mortals without overwriting their brain, Nethys is known to have that problem."

Keltham: "Overwriting -"

Ione, says a part of himself in sudden horror.

"Does that - destroy their mind-state? Overwrite their soul, nothing left for the afterlife but a copy or a fragment of Nethys?"

lintamande: "He did it a couple of times thousands of years ago when He was a new god and then stopped. We have records of how the people all went irretrievably insane including when dead but we don't know very many details on the nature of the irretrievable insanity. And now He drops levels on people but doesn't talk to them. He's an extreme case, but Asmodeus also doesn't ever talk directly to mortals, He communicates to devils who then attempt to translate for us."

Keltham: "Who else doesn't talk directly to mortals? What do Asmodeus and Nethys have in common?"

lintamande: "I think most of the gods that aren't ascended humans talk to mortals rarely if at all. - the gods that ascended via the Starstone are Norgorber, Iomedae, Aroden, and Cayden Cailean, and the general understanding is that they're better at talking to mortals because they can use an internal copy of their mortal mind as an interface of sorts. Nethys is also technically said to be an ascended human god but His ascension process was different and drove Him mad, reportedly. And then there are scattered other ex-mortals: Irori, Lawful Neutral, who ascended through attaining perfection; Erecura, a Lawful Neutral god of secrets and soothsayers and the Queen of Dis, in Hell; Milani, Chaotic Good goddess of bloody revolutions."

Keltham: "Remind me of the alignments and interests of the Starstoners?" Keltham remembers that Norgorber is the god of crime, but was pretending not to be carefully memorizing that at the time.

lintamande: "Norgorber, Neutral Evil, god of crime; Iomedae, Lawful Good, god of fighting Evil, particularly Abaddon and the Worldwound and Zon Kuthon but She's not best friends with us either; Cayden Cailean, Chaotic Good god of drink - uh, of mind-altering substances, and freedom and adventure. Aroden, dead Lawful Neutral god of colonization and population growth, sometimes glossed as 'god of humanity' because He was strongly in favor of more of us."

Keltham: "Oh right, I've been told not everyone here is human." Which did seem potentially kinda important, especially the species that supposedly couldn't interbreed with humans, and might therefore be actual different species instead of heritably shapechanged humans. But there were just too many important things at once and Keltham didn't want to interrupt his lesson to ask. "Who are the nonhuman ascended gods? Could those gods talk to humans after they ascended?"

lintamande: "Uh, the elves have their own pantheon, I don't think it has any ascended former elves in it. Milani was a half-elf. There is a god who is an ascended rat, Lao Shu Po, but I've never heard of anyone successfully talking to Her. Sarenrae's an ascended angel but She doesn't directly talk to Her followers, She sends heralds."

Keltham: "How... did the rat manage that. This drastically contradicts my fragile picture of how I thought anything did or possibly could work."

lintamande: "Ours too. I do not know the answer to that question. The conventional one is that She ate the corpse of a Tian god and thereby ascended, but that's hardly more satisfying."

Keltham: Keltham spends more time attempting to acquire knowledge and debug his current theological problems, sort of losing track of time actually, not least because he does not have a wristwatch or any other means of keeping time, and taking away a dath ilani's wristwatch when they're already in the middle of asking Additional Questions is sort of like yanking the breathing tube out of somebody who already wasn't breathing.

He acquires a slightly better and still incredibly confusing picture of Golarion theology, with certain selective omissions and alterations.

lintamande: And it absorbs lots of time, which is good, because hopefully downstairs everyone is all briefed on Taldor.

Carissa Sevar: No plan survives first contact with the enemy but they're as prepared as they can be.

Keltham: What do you mean it's already lunchtime!? Somebody should have informed Keltham before this! Now he doesn't have time to prioritize his remaining Additional Questions and ask those before he has to go! Oh no, has Carissa been waiting patiently in her bedroom for him to show up and get his shirt laundered this whole time?

lintamande: This researcher doesn't know that but he can take letters, if Keltham thinks of further questions.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa even had enough time to prepare spells and she's delighted about it. (She prepared the ones for the Improbable Escape, mostly.) She's sitting alone by the window in the dining room, looking through a book about The Year of Four Kings, from when Taldor and Cheliax were unified, that they decided didn't require any modification.

Keltham: "Good morning well not morning any more but same essential principle!"

Carissa Sevar: "It's morning somewhere! ...is it all right with you if I convey the information needed to settle the sadism bets, which is just 'yes' or 'no', or should I not do that, it occurred to me this morning that you might have privacy intuitions or something."

Keltham: "Oh, yeah, it's fine. I mean, maybe run it past me before you release exact details of what we did together, not saying no, just saying not sure how I'd feel, but the general fact is fine."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa gives a table across the room a thumbs-up. There are giggles. "I'm not planning to say anything else," she assures him. "I don't quite understand the whole concept of spoilers but that seems like it might fall under it."

Keltham: Keltham tries a new question, gets a surprising internal blip. "Though - if it's not somebody planning on sleeping with me at some point - actually I seem to have emotional reservations about you telling all of the exact details to Security and Governance? But I'm also aware that this may not be reasonable or the most important consideration. So, maybe ask me if they need all the exact details, and I can decide in more detail what to feel about it. Also happy about routing it to any entities with no sexuality, but don't assume that's necessary if it's incredibly expensive."

Carissa Sevar: "That describes lots of devils but they're probably pretty expensive, yeah. I don't think they should need the exact details, rather than broad things like 'no I'm not pregnant, no you don't have such extremely narrow tastes that we need to start a nationwide search'. If they ask more than that I'll ask you."

Keltham: Keltham knows he is probably supposed to find something flirtatious to say but his mind is coming up blank and it's still blank and it goes on being blank and finally Keltham gives up and says, "Well, for whatever it's worth, your attractiveness remains a stable aspect of yourself between yesterday and today. Oh, and I've got the notes for some of the sexual questions and topics I managed not to talk about while we were in the middle of fucking. But I probably shouldn't hand all of those to you right now, should probably be more of an evening thing."

Carissa Sevar: "For notes on sexual questions I can make some time in my busy evening schedule. Anyway, I'll have a headband by then, maybe it'll make me better at explaining things."

Keltham: "Oh, that's good news! Project resources coming through?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, actually! I tromped over to Acquisitions this morning once it seemed like you were occupied and asked what the delay is and they were still like 'eh, couple of weeks, we don't think it'd be beneficial to rush', so I said, fine, I've been at the Worldwound for six years, I nearly had a headband amount of money saved up anyway, I'm getting paid much more now, how much of a loan on my future salary are we talking about, and it was six days, so I bought one."

Keltham: Keltham almost asks how much she is getting paid, but the financial amounts are conspicuous in their absence from her sentence and there might be some reason for that; he'll ask later in private. Or he'll just ask - "I should probably go talk to somebody about, like, project resources, rushes or not rushes, whether Governance has any priorities, and all that. Though before then - I don't need Share Language until tonight, and could arguably wait until morning depending on timing, but can you wizardboop my clothing at some point before I talk to any Serious People."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes." And she does that.

Keltham: So long as that's happening anyways, can Keltham feel the magic at all, while it's going on next to him?

lintamande: No.

Keltham: Keltham hopes he is not cursed to just remain a cleric. Keltham also wants to be a wizard!

Well, Keltham can spend some additional time trying to learn that, but Keltham should talk to project management before he sets his day's schedule, and before then, he should eat lunch, having failed at breakfast. What does the menu look like today in Cheliax?

lintamande: Stuffed pheasant, rolls, various kinds of fish in various kinds of sauces, fruit tart things.

Keltham: Fat, protein, carbs, cool. Simple low-tech fare, but the novelty of it hasn't worn off.

Keltham fills up a plate and stops by Carissa's spot to inquire about Golarion's pre-existing people-who-just-had-sex etiquette, if any, w/r/t his eating lunch with Carissa the day after, vs. eating lunch at the more populous table.

Carissa Sevar: "It is that you should do what makes you happy."

Keltham: "I suspected you were going to say that, and I already predecided what I would do regardless of the object-level etiquette answer if that was your meta-answer, so I would be able to tell you that your etiquette answer definitely wouldn't influence me, but I still want to know what the etiquette is, if there is one."

Carissa Sevar: "Eating lunch with the girl you just slept with implies you are inclined to get attached one at a time - not monogamy, but, like, one developing-relationship gotten to a certain point before you pick up a new one - and eating lunch with all the other girls implies not-that, and there isn't etiquette about which one to imply and in this case there isn't even really the risk you'll mislead people since everyone knows you are an alien and nothing you do will have the normal implications."

Keltham: "Whether I can get attached to more than one girl at a time is an interesting question I guess I'll find out the answer to. But I expect I can be attracted to more than one girl at a time."

Keltham goes to sit down by the other girls. He's not quite sure what to say to Carissa, feels pressure to have clever and intelligent things to say to Carissa, and it's easier to be part of a larger conversation with people he's seen less immediately.

That this is a stereotypical dath ilan Boy Thing To Do doesn't change that Keltham is, in fact, a boy, and doesn't want to expend the mental overhead on defying his gendertrope doomfate right now.

Carissa Sevar: He's so bad at being Evil!!! This is going to be such an uphill battle!

lintamande: "Hi Keltham!" Meritxell says brightly. "Are there lessons today?"

Keltham: "Good question! Probably! What specifically the lessons are is something I'll know better after I talk project priorities with project management which I really need to go actually do. Oh, by the way, point of curiosity, how much are you currently being paid, and then whatever the quantity is can you translate it into hours of unskilled labor?"

lintamande: Well shit.

If anyone has an established answer to that they need to tell Meritxell immediately. "My contract's just for the week, I'm going to have to renegotiate it afterwards," she says. No one has told her. Aaaaargh. "It's for 300gold, which is...I think around four unskilled-labor-years?" And if she gets in trouble for that it can just be less on an ongoing basis. It being a lot less than that would be weird if Keltham knows anything about what wizards go for generally.

Keltham: "Your economy makes no sense. None. It does not make any sense at all. All of the sense was surgically extracted from it by advanced medical technology."

"Or are you just getting, like, 'come down here for a very strange and possibly dangerous week and then we'll renegotiate' Exception Handling Money."

lintamande: Shoot, is it too low or too high. She has no idea what Keltham's calibrated off. "The latter? When they grabbed us I don't think anyone knew exactly what we were being hired to do besides, uh, hang around an alien our age who Asmodeus had said to be helpful to."

Keltham: "What does a regular wizard of - whichever circle you are - get paid?"

lintamande: "Like, a tenth of that, if they're spending most of their time on things that make money."

Keltham: 0.4 years / week, week is 1/50 year or so... "So twenty times more than unskilled labor. Okay, that's not too bad, that's a relatively well-paid person in dath ilan but not mad superboss money."

dath ilan: (Very little labor remaining in dath ilan is labor that requires no prior skill, practice, or native talent. But the fact that there are a few things like that which need to be bid into any market, and that everybody has that particular resource to offer, makes it a reasonable-sounding sort of thing to use for a unit of account; assuming that you are otherwise the sort of people who just refuse to accept downward price stickiness and will instead repeatedly scream at everyone to adjust their damn prices more often, instead of going for an inflationary unit of account that means a different thing each year and would require adjusting all the graphs. Some Very Serious People think this was the wrong decision, but it's got a lot of civilizational inertia behind it.)

lintamande: Good, because it is true! Meritxell really sees the merits of saying true things to Keltham. "Wizards don't start making what I think you'd call 'mad superboss money' until fifth circle."

Keltham: "And that's 1/32 of wizards, who are 1% of the population... so that checks out, you are not having most of the wage income going to a small fraction of all the people."

lintamande: "One in thirty two wizards will eventually make fifth circle but fewer than that are fifth circle at any given moment, since it takes decades," says Meritxell. "It's like....one in sixty? One in a hundred? I think it's changing now in Cheliax since we have way more people training to be wizards than we did a generation ago but I don't remember the exact numbers offhand."

Keltham: "Somebody who's already eaten a bit want to try, like, introducing themselves and their life story?" says Keltham. "Since I actually need to eat, having missed breakfast while distracted. Uh, feel free not to if that's not a thing here."

Keltham does start eating though.

lintamande: The girls glance at each other.

"I'll go," says Meritxell cheerfully. "I was born here in Ostenso; my father's a wizard and my mother is a cleric of Asmodeus. She picked him out because she wanted smart children. I have eight half-siblings. My elementary school was in the temple so I didn't actually leave it until I was ...ten? It was a big temple, though, endless courtyards and secret passages and so on, and it had an orphanage, so I had lots of peers, though I was smarter than them. I had more toys than them so I traded them toys for doing all my chores. When I was nine I tested into wizard school and was absurdly excited mostly because it was all the way down the big street. When I was twelve my mother decided all this was embarrassingly uncosmopolitan and so she took me on a trip around the country by boat and that is how I discovered I get very seasick, and declared I wasn't leaving Ostenso again until I'm a high-level wizard and can Teleport. A declaration that was about to be falsified, since I've enlisted, but now here I am instead of going to the Worldwound so maybe it'll come true, who knows."

Keltham: "Huh. That sounds a lot more normal for a genius's childhood than I think I would've expected for Golarion. Unusually smart mom who can afford childcare for lots of kids picks out smart dads, spends part of her life having eight kids, they all live in a huge group house with lots of secret passageways, one of those kids is even smarter and ends up getting hired by a weird important project. That could basically be the early biography of any dath ilani who's as smart for that world as you are for this one. Except for the part where you literally didn't leave the enormous temple, which I guess makes more sense if travel is more expensive and dangerous, and the children get centralized to a particular part of the city where they don't get attacked by mind-altering cornfields...? How many horrible Golarion things are you leaving out from that story because you don't want to embark on very long explanations of them? Not asking for a list, just a rough quantity."

lintamande: "...none on purpose for that reason, probably several because they didn't occur to me as horrible, such as, yes, the fact it's dangerous for children to wander around outside alone, or...I had more would-be siblings who died? Probably four or five things like that if I think about it."

Keltham: Keltham's brain does automatically generate the question 'How many dead siblings?' but it doesn't make it to mouth.

"I had an odd childhood for a dath ilani," Keltham says. "A lot less optimized than most childhoods are. My parents weren't driven to make my life as perfect as possible, just substantially better than not existing. I agree with them about that, to be clear, but still, a lot of dath ilani would be - well, actually were - politely horrified about it. Like, lots of moving between different parts of Default - uh, that's the biggest city in Civilization where you live if you want to live around lots of options, and you don't have any particular reason to live anywhere else. Other parents would've been worried about frequent moves disrupting my childhood relationships. On their philosophy, maybe that wasn't literally optimal for me, but I'd probably be basically fine, so they went ahead and moved any time they got bored. Single-family house-module with only a couple of secret passages, one of which was in the house library and just went around a corner from one bookcase to another bookcase in the same library. I am currently making an error and my error is that I am not eating."

Keltham resumes eating.

lintamande: "That doesn't sound very odd for Golarion but usually it'd be because the family had a job that required moving, not because they got frequently bored."

Keltham: “How do people move around here, when their job requires it? This villa seems like it’d be very hard to pick up intact and move somewhere else by nonmagical means, and most people can’t afford teleports so that’s not it. Do you just swap houses and all your stuff with another family of similar size that happens to live in the right place? Doesn’t seem like that should happen at the same time often enough, unless you have a monthly Moving Day, and Golarion seems too uncoordinated for - shutting up now, eating.”

lintamande: Everyone looks incredibly confused at him.

"...if you're a priest, there's housing in the temples for priests assigned there and children they're raising," says Meritxell. "And if you're anyone else you look at apartments in the new place and sign a contract with a landlord for an apartment that has features you want and then move your possessions there. In a wagon if you have a lot of possessions."

Keltham: That really sounds like something that would sound superficially plausible but then turn out to not work quantitatively, once you started running numbers on how many empty houses you needed all over to always have the right subtype of house available for people to randomly move into…

"So even at the cleric or wizard level, houses must not have... expensive, non-modularly-removable features that only a few people want, because you can't take it with you if you leave the house? Just features that everybody wants, or stuff only you want that you can take with you when you leave?"

lintamande: "Or features that are common enough there'll be a vacancy that has it," says Meritxell. "It doesn't have to be universal. But if you want something absurdly specific you'll have to rebuild it if you leave."

Keltham: "Wait, how do houses get to places in the first place if you can't move them once they're built? Like, this house looks to be way out in the middle of nowhere, if you can't move it, how did it get here after somebody built it?"

lintamande: "....they built it here."

Keltham: "So, like... there's a place that makes sections of walls and floors that are small enough to be easy to move, and they ship the sections of walls here, and a local crew assembles those into a house using tools that are also small and easy to ship around...?"

lintamande: "....you cut stone and lumber and ship them down the river and then have mules drag them to the site, and then at the site you build the stone and lumber into walls, using, uh, stonemasonry tools and saws and so on."

Keltham: "Mules drag them to the site. Do you not have wheels." Keltham quickly tries to recall whether he's seen anything with a wheel built into it. He hasn't.

lintamande: "Yes, we do! Mules drag wagons to the site if it's not too steep or rocky for that."

Keltham: "Is it, like... not particularly more cost effective, the way your economy usually runs, to have one place that makes lots and lots of something; instead of making a single copy of something, wherever it gets used?"

lintamande: "Definitely not for houses, the transport costs would kill you. It...makes more sense to have one shipyard than a dozen small shipyards?"

Keltham: "Okay, good. When I heard that you were assembling single copies of houses, from raw materials, in individual places, without even trying to build pieces of houses in a single place and assemble those pieces, I was wondering if your whole world just didn't have centralized manufacturing for some reason."

Ione Sala: Ione has never done anything in her life like what she's about to do, not since she was old enough to remember, and if her soul belonged to Asmodeus she probably still wouldn't have done it.

"Keltham, you're supposed to be eating," she says.

Keltham: "Right." More food.

Ione Sala: ...actually, even if it's relatively safer now, Ione is not entirely sure why she did that.

lintamande: No one else gives her an odd glance about it because they're too well trained. "Laborers' time isn't very valuable so for most things it's more worthwhile to send the laborers to wherever you want them laboring than to figure out how to send a bunch of pieces of something across the country," Meritxell says. "For shipbuilding it makes sense to do it all in one place because you always want your ships in the one place and you have a harbor right there to send all the materials your laborers will need and also it's quite specialized."

Keltham: Keltham nods; his not eating error having gotten so bad that even other people have started to notice, he does not reply per se.

lintamande: "Most people build their own houses," Tonia offers. "Or their neighbors come over and they all raise a new barn together, from trees they felled from the forest right there and shingles they baked in the kiln right there."

Keltham: Swallow. "Don't hire specialized housebuilder because?" +Nom.

lintamande: "The village has a hundred people in it and there's a specialized priest and blacksmith and tanner but that's it. Someone in the village needs a new barn raised or house built maybe once every couple years, and that's not often enough to be the only thing someone does. And you don't get visitors often enough to tell them 'oh, you should send a team of housebuilders from the city, I'm going to want a house in the spring', and if they did come you couldn't afford them. And people are idle, when it's not planting or harvesting season, so they may as well improve their land."

Keltham: Keltham bumps up the priority of 'cheaper travel' on his list, for causing people to, like...

...trade with each other instead of doing things they're not specialized in.

"How do nonwizards get between a smalltown and the nearest mediumcity to the smalltown?"

lintamande: "By boat, if it's on a river, or riding a horse, if it's not and they have a riding horse, or walking, if it's not on a river and they don't have a horse, and poor people don't have riding horses," says Tonia.

Keltham: Horse sounds like an animal and those aren't cheap, yeah.

So basic alternatives to walking, without combustion engines. Bicycles... take relatively smooth surfaces to bike on. "Are there roads between towns?"

lintamande: "...no?"

"There's a road from Westcrown to Egorian and it's new and cost the Crown - I have no idea how much money but only the Crown could've done it," says Meritxell. "Most places you travel by river or you mostly don't travel."

Keltham: So the key step on the tech tree is probably cheaper roads, then, to enable more professional specialization and trade between towns...

Keltham wishes he'd read more novels about people going to other dimensions and rebuilding Civilization from scratch, he's read like two and neither author recursed into roadbuilding.

Swallow. "Saturated on road tech research, or not really trying it?" Nom.

lintamande: "I don't know of any road tech research projects though probably the people who built the one from Westcrown to Egorian would've gotten very rich if they figured out some better way to do it."

Ione Sala: "You spent practically your whole life in a temple and then a wizard academy," Ione says, slightly scathingly. "You wouldn't know if there was a road tech research project any more than I would. How would any of us know?"

Meritxell, watch yourself, we're not supposed to know too much.

lintamande: Meritxell DOES know everything though. She smiles at Ione. "Fair enough."

Keltham: Something about that interaction that just happened would never have happened in dath ilan and Keltham is having difficulty putting a finger on what it is exactly.

Ione Sala: Ione Sala has a slight nervous feeling like she just muffed something. Needs to cover, distract. "Well, I might as well go next," she says. "I was born in a middling city at the junction of two minor rivers. My parents were a couple of low-level city bureaucrats. Intelligent enough not to be farmers, but, not really a lot smarter than that." Incompetent, failed, filled with searing resentment at the world for it. "I was noticeably a lot smarter than they were, so they," hated me and did what they could to make my life more miserable without that affecting how much they could sell me for, "didn't know what to do with me, really, and wizard-tracked me," sold me like the farm animal I was, "as soon as it became clear that I was going to be a bookish wizard type. My life is just that city, then Ostenso academy. I also would've expected to see the larger world for the first time when I went to the Worldwound, not that I'm complaining."

lintamande: "I grew up on a farm where the nearest village was a couple hours of walking away and the nearest city much farther than that, far enough no one had been," Tonia says. "When I was seven the village got a priest and the priest said everyone had to come into the temple for school, so I went, and I hadn't seen reading or writing before but I picked them up right away, and after a couple of months I was studying with the older kids, and after a year he said I should go into the city where I could get a proper education, and the church would house me and feed me while I did, so the next time he reported back to a big city he took me with him, and I came here, and did a bunch of tests and then got put in wizard classes."

Keltham: Keltham is getting this weird feeling like he may, at some future point, predictably first-order update towards wishing he'd started industrializing Golarion slightly sooner, even if it was just by a day, or an hour.

Keltham isn't a perfect Bayesian, but he's a passable one. By dath ilani standards.

He finishes his last two bites of food quickly and says, "So can somebody direct me to, like, office of project management?"

lintamande: None of the girls are sure where that is!

"When I talked to them they were working out of the temple but that was really temporary."

"Carissa must've talked to them this morning, she said she asked about headbands," says Meritxell.

Keltham: Rise. Move to Carissa location. "Should probably go talk to project management now. Where to?"

Carissa Sevar: "One of the parlors, I can walk you there. How was lunch."

Keltham: "Tasty enough and filled with slightly disturbing accounts of houses. Houses which, if this is considered a rich person's fancy incredibly impressive house, I should probably try to avoid imagining in any concrete detail."

Well, he should be avoiding imagining it, but in fact he is not. Keltham is imagining people, otherwise specialized in farming, pulling down entire trees and then gluing them together - it's probably some form of chemical glue, not fasteners, metal is expensive here - until the result looks like it has walls and mostly keeps out the wind.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, good, what a safe topic that doesn't require any lying about. "Maybe someday soon they'll have nicer houses." Left down this hallway and down these stairs.

Keltham: "As near as I can currently guess, this is going to require figuring out how to build cheaper roads, onto which one can put unpowered small machines that will let housebuilders quickly get back and forth from medium cities to small towns, in order to build nicer houses, without their specialized labor being very expensive because of travel costs, which, I thought to myself, maybe I should go talk to somebody about all that."

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds great." She finds him the sitting room.

lintamande: "Keltham," says a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun who is looking through the report on who Keltham's god might be.

Keltham: "So my parents told me. Yourself?"

lintamande: "Marta. How can I help you."

Keltham: "I'd like to talk project resources and Chelish Governance's priorities. Before then, do you mind if I ask what's the local larger organizational structure that embeds this project, and your place in it?"

lintamande: "Yes. My job is to track project spending, track project revenue once it has any, solicit project revenue estimates, approve briefing on the project for new people it becomes necessary to involve, and authorize acquisitions. I report to Maillol, who is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and the site director. Maillol reports to his superiors in the church, and ultimately to the High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, and to Her Imperial Majesty's staff including Contessa Lrilatha, who you've met."

Keltham: "Among my top questions is to discuss what Governance wants, in what order, where any and all particulars may be rapidly revised in the face of particular avenues proving more or less tractable. Is Governance's value function over outcomes there sufficiently understandable to you that you're confident of your own ability to predict it with only rare referrals upward, or should I be moving upward in the management tree to have that conversation?"

lintamande: Governance is reasonably liable to change its mind a bunch in the next few weeks but probably the easiest way to give the Crown and Church more flexibility is to have as low-importance a person as possible give an explanation now which it'll then be possible for her superiors to override later if they change their minds. "That depends a little on your questions but Governance's priorities have been communicated to me and I can do my best to convey them."

Keltham: "I'll... try asking my questions, but if you don't correctly predict Management Above's answer to them, the result would be incorrectly prioritized outcomes that are potentially expensive for Governance relative to Governance's optimally obtainable outcomes, if there's anyone who can predict answers better... I'm sorry, I'm probably saying things that don't make sense for Golarion somehow."

Though - even if they don't have the dath ilani idiom of lower deciders registering their predictions of upper deciders' predictions, until you finally get to whoever in Management or whoever in the judicial courts or wherever is supposedly the gold standard for that issue - 'Don't have junior people decide macro project priorities, refer them to the top manager specialized on that project or in those priorities' is a notion that Keltham would've thought projected down to the simpler case.

Keltham is also noticing that if you try to do sensible Project Management while speaking in Taldane, this is even harder than speaking other sensible thoughts in Taldane. Should he ask Marta if she can Comprehend Languages? No, let's try pushing through for now.

"Before I go on, around how much of what I've already discussed with project members has been recounted to you by project members? Or by Security or other observers?"

lintamande: "We have detailed notes on your presentation yesterday to your researchers. Some of your researchers also individually came to Projects with questions or predictions based on class conversation and also mealtime conversations; all of them are expected to do that at least by the end of the week when we'll renegotiate their salaries, but not all of them have done it yet, so you shouldn't assume we know everything you said in public to any of them."

Keltham: "So as to be clear on how much of yesterday's presentation got successfully preserved, do you mean you've got imperfect but cross-referenced notes from students afterwards, or was there an invisible wizard writing everything down verbatim as fast as I said it?"

lintamande: "A transcription spell, rather than an invisible wizard, was employed, but we believe the notes to be complete. You may look at them and issue corrections if you'd like."

Keltham: "I'd like to review my improvised extemporaneous lectures in case I made errors or omissions that stand out as needing correction, yeah. Thanks to whichever person for their hopefully routine competence in having set that up."

"Governance then should now have a specific, rather than abstract or secondhand, notion of what I know and what that knowledge can do. It's built on a base level of trained skills of thinking, that work together effectively because of overlapping coherence and direction inspired by explicit mathematical structure, which were applied by my Civilization of a billion wealthier people of much higher average Intelligence to systematically decode and exploit reality to a far greater distance than Golarion appears to have traversed, leaving also incomplete traces in my personal memory of specific facts, techniques, and methodologies that I encountered in systematic or unsystematic passing."

"I know why snowflakes have sixfold symmetry. I can turn mechanical motion into cold without a Snowball spell, but I don't know yet how much motion for how much cold. I knew how to build a faster kind of unpowered sailing ship but it sounded like you have those already. I know how to make an unpowered mechanical device that will let people move between cities faster than a person can run, but only if there are roads between those cities. I know how I'd go about figuring out how to make cheaper roads, but I don't know how long that research will take or how good the end results would be. The books in the library here are written in ways that reflect patterns of thinking that I know are invalid, and I remember some things about how to train a person as intelligent as I am so that they'll think effectively. I know the foundational math that structured the kinds of thinking that I learned. There is an attractor, an overlap, a center in everything, whose structure is that math, and by far the most important question is whether Golarion can be started down the path leading into that attractor and learn for itself what Civilization learned, but there remains the question of what Governance wants to see first for scaling up investment in this."

lintamande: "Many of those things are of interest to us but what we currently predict will be most immediately valuable is the habits of thought for intelligent people that make them competent to discover all the rest. For any given solution, there are often going to be a lot of Golarion-specific reasons why it's not easy to implement, and our current prediction is that little - not none - of dath Ilan's direct technologies will easily translate. But if we understand the basics of how the gods reason, and how human-level intelligences can use the reasoning patterns of the gods, then we can overcome any given complication that is due to dragons or Charybdis or the fae or whatever."

Keltham: Keltham doesn't know enough to be impressed by the sensibility of a crown-boosted Abrogail Thrune because Keltham has no reference point for the usual sensibility levels of pseudo-medieval governments.

"I suspect you underestimate how much would translate if we had the books in front of us, but we don't, and that means non-Keltham people need to know how to fill in the gaps regardless."

"Such techniques are meant to be used, however. They are best taught as they are applied, not as pure abstractions. In Civilization, children are not spoiled for a number of elementary physical truths and inventions so that they can learn underlying mental forms in the course of inventing them. This regime is optimized for the final quality of the resulting adults, however, not for speed in rapidly retraining adults to the same techniques. The point is, we will, at some point, need a starting application."

"I haven't hurried my attempts to ask for a starting project, because it would be exhausting to produce an exhaustive list of everything I might possibly be able to do, and so far it has seemed like it makes more sense to keep asking questions about local conditions until I orient, so I can understand myself which of your largest problems I can probably solve quickly. It will still help if I have -"

"Uh -"

"Your language doesn't have a word for the thing I want, which is not an encouraging sign. Does Cheliax have a central list of how much monetary value Governance puts on everything it usually pursues? Like, amount of gold it's worth to cure an otherwise fatal disease in a one-year-old infant, or the amount it's worth to produce one more second-circle wizard?"

lintamande: "No. We could try to produce a partial one for you."

Keltham: "Do you have a different solution for why your government... is, like, capable of coherently wanting or planning anything, given that it's made up of more than one person? For not having one person decide that it's not worth 10,000 gold to produce three wizards and somebody else deciding that it's worth 15,000 gold to produce one of them?"

lintamande: "The operation of wizarding schools is delegated to different people who can make whatever tradeoffs strike them as correct and then the ones who get good results for the resources the Crown has offered them get promoted. Budgets for wizarding schools are set off what recent successful people spent."

Keltham: Is that actually as horrifyingly ad-hoc as it sounds for an entire-ass government.

"I would find a partial list useful, of things Governance has previously spent money on, how much money for what results, in a way that struck upper Governance as being just barely good ideas, but good ideas nonetheless. Where the 'just barely' qualifier tells me that the outcome was worth around that much money and not at least that much money."

"I would also suggest that Governance at some point take the time to reflect on its own operations and figure out how much it relatively wants different things..." Keltham reflects on the techniques he got taught as a kid for carefully extracting that info, checking if it made sense, checking if anything got left out, "where standard techniques for doing that correctly and not screwing it up, are, again, something I can try to teach. It's really not just about better forging techniques. Civilization also knew how to, for example, manage very large projects effectively... assuming all the managers are slightly smarter than I am, so, yes, it may require adaptation, but still."

"But I've got no idea how much something like that is worth to you, or what kind of increased project resources I could get after accomplishing that, versus inventing a more visibly successful forge process that uses 30% less fuel," and neither, apparently, does Governance itself have any collective idea what it's worth to Governance. "I realize I may sound like I'm flailing here, but right now I'm very much trying to orient at all, to what Management wants from me and how much it's willing to pay to get it."

lintamande: "I'd be happy to get you a list of projects that were just barely worth it and amounts we'd be willing to pay for different kinds of progress. Our current anticipation is that this will be things most Chelish people cannot learn, so we will benefit more from techniques that some people who have learned them can figure out how to adapt for other people who cannot."

Keltham: "Yeah, the Intelligence problem is probably the severest problem you have, if not the most quickly solvable one. I don't suppose you'd have any idea what effective price Governance puts on raising one random citizen's Intelligence from 10 to 11, or 14 to 15?"

lintamande: "Well, as an upper bound, headbands of +2 Intelligence cost 4000 gold, so we're not willing to pay 2000 gold for it in the average case."

Keltham: "Who's the least useful person who automatically gets assigned an intelligence headband as a matter of routine?"

lintamande: "Wizards promoted into command of a unit of more than 100 soldiers, typically at fourth circle, if they haven't purchased their own years before that which they typically do."

Keltham: "That's very helpful, thank you. At what earliest point do we start looking visibly as useful collectively as a wizard in command of 100 soldiers?"

lintamande: "You are already estimated to be more useful than that, and more resources than that are already ongoingly expended on this project; our plan is to deliver you headbands even if we do not upgrade our estimate of the usefulness of the project, but it will take a few weeks because of added security measures."

Keltham: "Ah, okay, that makes more sense compared to what I expected an intelligence headband cost and what I expected this villa cost. Security measures?"

lintamande: "Magic items can be cursed. Usually this is not a major concern in the headband trade, because a trained wizard with specific experience in detecting enchantment and mental manipulation will notice; if we're giving them to a bunch of young students with no such training we had better be very sure."

Keltham: Keltham almost asks why checking is harder than just giving them to a trained wizard to put on, but stops himself; even he can think of unlimitedly many ways to get around that test. "Are you worried about old cursed items accidentally getting into the system, or specific adversaries targeting this project and with access to our supply network?"

lintamande: "Specific adversaries targeting Cheliax's magic item supply chain, though it'd be surprising if they'd managed already to target the project specifically. - less surprising given how much divine intervention this project has already attracted, I suppose. Other countries have in the past tried slipping cursed magic items into our military supply chain for purposes of espionage or sabotage. What we're doing over the next two weeks is having the headbands made from scratch by trusted people, and observed during the manufacture process and while they're brought here so they can't be swapped out for others, and then we'll do some tests on site as well; then you can have them."

Keltham: He should ask Carissa about her own reasoning, before asking project management about the safety of Carissa's bypassing the system, Keltham thinks; it is not clear that everyone's organizational-internal incentives are perfectly aligned. But he should ask Carissa about it, soon.

...actually, wouldn't another obvious reason to take a few weeks to carefully manufacture headbands, be if they wanted to custom-curse his headband? Or everyone's, for that matter? Hm. Also a thing to inquire about, but subtly. His next question was one that did occur to him immediately, but was at first suppressed as lower-priority, so his asking it for this other reason shouldn't be much likelihood-ratio to them.

"Maybe it's the wrong use of your time to ask, but if it can be said briefly, what are the consequences if an adversary manages to infiltrate one headband?"

lintamande: "Likely ones: they are able to eavesdrop. That is the obvious multi-purpose kind of infiltration adversaries frequently attempt. Also likely: they're able to use it to track the wearer's location or to tell what spells the wearer has gotten. Less likely, more concerning ones: they're able to interfere with the fundamental function of the headband, enhancing intelligence, by making some thoughts more salient or easier to apply full intelligence to, and others less so. They're able to detect at some low granularity the wants, priorities and fears of the wearer."

Keltham: Aw, crap. Though, plus side, they would be less likely to tell him that, if they were planning to curse his headband on purpose, but still.

It's... plausible that, if Carissa can detect cursed headbands well enough not to fear them, Keltham can also detect them via sheer 'having any mental skills that even use Owl's Wisdom'; but specific training always counts for an awful lot. And of course, Keltham only has their word that an adequate counter-training even exists.

Well, he'll figure that later. "Back to primary topic. What would you say if I asked you to tell me about Cheliax's most important problems, independently of whether you thought I could solve them?"

lintamande: "The Worldwound is the most urgent problem. We are allocating something like fifteen percent of our resources to containing it and it is not getting worse but it is not getting better either. After that...periodic epidemics of cholera, smallpox, polio, plague, and flu, ongoing deaths from tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrheal diseases, droughts, inadequate nutrition, the threat of war, risks from random powerful wizards doing very stupid things."

Keltham: Directly challenging Worldwound-fighting sounds like it would take weapons; weapons take trust.

Keltham is not very calibrated on how well they do at fighting epidemics, here, but if that's their second-worst problem...

"About how much would the government pay to avoid one epidemic from whichever is the worst class of epidemic, and how often does that happen?"

"And suppose that I ask somebody to come by tomorrow who's an expert on epidemics and current countermeasures, so I can quiz them. I don't particularly expect this result, but suppose it turns out I can tell you something on the spot, that, combined with your other magical capabilities, completely wipes 'smallpox' or 'flu'. What could I expect in return, and how would the project scale from there?"

lintamande: "I expect we would pay fifty thousand gold pieces to avoid one epidemic, noting that delaying one in one city through very good precautions usually just means it hits there later because no one developed immunity through infection. I expect we would pay something like a million gold pieces that completely made a major cause of epidemics go away if that didn't just mean all the same people die but of other things through some mechanism. I don't know what higher-budget project items you'd want - more of Contessa Lrilatha's time? More students? More miscellaneous magic items? - but we could arrange any of them, if you achieved that."

Keltham: Keltham nods; that's grim-but-true. If plagues reduce population density to make future plagues less likely, or if people starve until their immune systems weaken and after a plague the survivors get more food per capita, those are both equilibria that will get restored around the variation of particular causes. "I'll think more toward generalizable measures that will shift long-term equilibria of epidemic levels, rather than on specifics of one epidemic, then; if your impression is that naively eliminating one particular source of epidemic would say cause urban density or food per person to increase or decrease until the remaining epidemics became more virulent."

"I'll obviously also want a contract before solving particular things, and it'd be nice if there was some generalizing way to assess that value, rather than my constantly interrupting myself to negotiate and sign new contracts. That's part of why it would have been useful to have a schedule of how much value the government assigns to things; we could then negotiate general percentages covering what I and other project members would capture of the value we create."

lintamande: "We will try to come up with such a schedule for you, and a proposed general contract along the same lines as the one you negotiated for general intellectual concepts with Contessa Lrilatha. If you would like I can lay out approximately the terms we'd expect that to have, though I don't have authorization to make commitments on that scale on the Crown's behalf."

Keltham: "Understood. Go ahead, then."

lintamande: Cheliax expects to request most of the gains, maybe 80% or 90%, of Keltham's inventions while he is repaying them for the loan of this villa and a full-time research staff and a full-time security staff; the loan will accumulate interest at the same rates any devil in Hell gets if they get a loan in Hell, usually humans have to pay higher interest rates than that but that's because, frankly, lots of humans will run away and not pay, and they both trust and can verify Keltham's assurances on that front. Cheliax expects to request much less of the gains, perhaps half, once the loans are repaid. A complication they are keeping in mind is that, uh, Cheliax doesn't have a systematic way of collecting benefits that don't literally directly accrue to the state in the form of higher tax revenues from various dukes, and it sounds like Keltham's society would have such a method.

Carissa Sevar: Keltham's reportedly distracted again in equity negotiations! That's great, because Carissa has decided the entire harem needs to read a bunch of Taldane romance novels so that if they can't stop themselves from thinking in romance novels they'll at least be whatever kind the King in Taldor has commissioned to develop appropriate attributes in Taldane young women.

.... it turns out romance novels in Taldor are not commissioned by an Imperial office at all, which is itself the kind of useful thing you only learn by pretending to be Taldor.

Iarwain: "The women depicted here," Ione says after flipping through and rapidly skimming some of the books, "would sit around waiting for Keltham to pursue them, because they are so attractive they can't help rich nobles falling for them even if they pretend they don't want it. I think what we've learned today is that when you don't have an Imperial office commissioning romance novels, they're written to appeal to the most self-indulgent aspects of the reader, because nobody's making the authors do anything else."

"The women depicted here," Paxti says, "are passive, weak, stupid, lifeless, ambitionless trophies. Somebody remind me why we haven't already conquered Taldor in real life."

"I've known Keltham for a day and a half and I can already guess these women are not his type," says Peranza.

Carissa Sevar: "Your parents grew up reading stories like these, in our timeline," Carissa says tiredly. "You grew up after Hell took Cheliax to straighten us out and you got to read normal modern romance novels in which girls win the boy. Though none of the ones in which the girl wins the boy by cleverly getting all her romantic rivals' eyes gouged out, or in which the girl wins the boy by leaving him under the impression she's an important noble considering executing him unless he wins her over, and not The Damnation of Sir Nicholau. ...actually I don't know what romance tropes the slightly gentler Cheliax we're going for has. ...maybe there's a version of The Damnation of Sir Nicholau where she's trying to teach him to enjoy himself, instead of having perfunctory sex he doesn't really like, and he goes to Hell once he realizes that he wants things for himself instead of only wanting whatever's best for other people, and in every disguise she's happy and fine because she, unlike him, has been raised competent to understand what she wants and to go get it."

Ione Sala: "Wouldn't work as a story," Ione responds immediately. "If she's happy and fine then there's not enough conflict from the standpoint of the viewpoint character. She needs to be struggling with her own need for violent sex, say, at the same time as she's trying to get him to want things for himself. Her character needs to develop to where she's competent to understand what she wants, and the end of the novel should show her successfully going after it and getting it."

"Which, again, was basically the plotline of Perverting Adan -"

"It's the plotline of any young adult novel with a female protagonist, who will, at some point, have to learn the darkness of her own desires," Ione snaps at Paxti. "As you'd know if you read more than one book a year -"

"We can work with this, though," Paxti says. "Give me and Ione twenty minutes, and we'll come up with new plots for everyone's favorite romance books, with storylines that fit the new Cheliax."

"I'll slit her throat before we get two minutes in," says Ione. Ione also sees a much bigger problem with that idea, but she's curious whether Sevar will spot it on her own.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is thinking that possibly she should ever have read a romance novel. "Sounds like keeping track of a lot of lies. I'd rather have one or two good ones that are very appropriate for what we're trying to accomplish."

Ione Sala: Ione nods. It's going to be interesting to see whether, or rather, how fast, Sevar gets executed for heresy once she gets into the habit of noticing all the constant lies.

"Actually, if I can get an authorized lie on this, none of us much like reading fiction at all," Ione says. "Cheliax has been devoting too many resources to the Worldwound, and the books written before Hell took over are trash. If we talk about any fiction we've read, in front of Keltham, he's going to ask to see it. Remixing fiction isn't like redoing a spellbook with Glimpse of Truth renamed to Glimpse of Beyond. Maybe we can rush some better books from Absalom, and read one apiece before Keltham gets around to asking about that, so that we can have ever read a novel. But if he asks before then, you tried reading novels from old Cheliax and quickly gave up."

Carissa Sevar: "- yeah, all right. In that case let's give this up as a useful reminder of how grateful we are to live in Cheliax and get back to the histories."

Keltham: They're not going to have all that much time for it. Keltham may not be very trained to handle potential lies and gaslighting, but he was planning to be a Mad Investor, and hails from a vastly more financially sophisticated Civilization. He's not going to negotiate and compromise with Marta, and then sit down in front of an actual authorized negotiator who takes their final compromise as Keltham's starting point and negotiates a new set of moves in Cheliax's favor.

This wouldn't usually happen in dath ilan - firstly because dath ilan would just seat both real negotiators directly, and second because the principles behind bargaining positions are better understood, such that they'd try to have bargaining outcomes be invariant to the order in which considerations are introduced. But dath ilan does have the concept of hiding an unusually high willingness-to-pay so that sellers can't price-discriminate against you, and sending in a 'negotiator' who doesn't actually have the power to make commitments is a standard known-failure-mode-to-avoid.

Keltham will, of course say all this to Marta directly; none of that meta-information has any obvious rationale for keeping it secret.

After that, he'll ask Marta more detailed questions about terms and conditions on Cheliax's starting offer, and more questions about the current size of Cheliax's economy, and what kind of measurement difficulties they expect to run into, and Governance's likely willingness-to-pay for various goods. But he won't negotiate; except insofar as offering his own starting remark that the offered percentages of generated value seem acceptable, if there's no gotchas in how profits or expenses are measured, and sufficient for quick agreement from there; but he wants to understand the terms and conditions before he says for sure that the starting offer is generous.

At some point, Keltham thinks, he needs to give Cheliax a lecture on fairly dividing gains from trade anyways. If he can run through it quickly, he might as well do it today and see if that saves some time on negotiating. If they know that dath ilani approach fairness in a very structured way, maybe he can just tap himself with his own Truthspell and the Fair Division of Gains from Trade spell, say what the fair price would be, and have them accept that.

Keltham wraps up with Marta - having hardly exhausted his unending sequence of Additional Questions, of course, but that's just what life is like for your first few weeks in another dimension - and heads over to the library.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": If Keltham is teaching again, Broom should be there to make sure Keltham does not teach anything which is obviously going to destroy the world.

Visibly or invisibly? Broom is still within Keltham's one-day deadline for replying to Keltham's original terms. Do the great wizards know if Keltham will be able to detect Broom again today? Does Cheliax want Broom to be visible regardless? Broom goes to ask a great wizard about this.

lintamande: They have Keltham's spells and he doesn't have Invisibility Purge but it seems likely that's in anticipation of Cheliax not trying to sneak any invisibility past him. They don't bother explaining that to Broom, obviously, but they tell him to be visible. If he needs to stab someone he can go invisible for that to make him harder to stop.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom catches up to Keltham before he reaches the library. He doesn't say anything, as he falls into step behind Keltham; the less he says, the less chances there are for him to fail.

Keltham: Why is Keltham's life like this? He hopes the research harem is okay with brief explanations because he sure doesn't know what exactly is classified.

Keltham walks into the library with a very short, armed person walking behind him. "Hi," Keltham says. "This is Broom."

lintamande: SHIT did he learn about slavery and now he's upset about it???

Carissa Sevar: "Hello, Broom," says Carissa, sounding bored.

Keltham: "Broom will be listening in on my lectures from now on. Further questions should be directed to Broom, because I don't even know what anyone is supposed to think about this."

lintamande: Well he doesn't sound as mad as he'll be when he finds out about slavery????

No one says anything.

Keltham: He would have questions in their shoes. "Have you, like... not noticed that you are confused about this."

lintamande: "I'm confused!" says Meritxell. "But you just said not to ask you questions and, uh, Broom hasn't said he'll take questions. And I assume Projects also isn't taking questions about this or they'd have told us about it."

Keltham: "Right. Sorry. Not your fault. It's just -"

"Never mind. For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run. Before things go much... further." Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now. It's probably just a silly worry. But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest. It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean. Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling. You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent. It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them. Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering. Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what. He really does want them to write down an honest answer, though, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.

The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"

Carissa Sevar: Well, shit. Does he expect they're dishonestly coordinating backstories -

- she raises her hand -

Keltham: "Carissa?"

Carissa Sevar: "Unusual for, in my case, a third circle wizard at the Worldwound, and in their case, a top student at Ostenso's Academy of Wizardry, or unusual for a random person in Golarion."

Keltham: Now that's a philosophically interesting question. What Keltham really wants to ask is if their personal stories would seem surprisingly interesting to whoever is playing the hypothetical original LARP that this realitynovel is deconstructing. But they're not going to have a better answer to that than he does.

Well, 'Keltham' would be the paying player of the original LARP, so... "I think what we're looking for is the expected degree to which I, a dath ilani, would say something like, 'Wait what?' after I found out. So the fact that you spent years at the Worldwound would be, like, a third of the way across, because it's surprising to me and matters to me, while you being secretly a dragon shapechanged into a human, if you knew I'd find that out later in the relationship, would be more like two-thirds across. Maybe let's say it's only past the halfway point if you'd expect other people here to be surprised."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. Okay, she isn't sure what hypothesis he is entertaining, here.

She will mark herself as less than halfway surprising - if Keltham somehow learns 'chosen by Asmodeus to rework theology to be dath ilani' then the whole game is up anyway - and the average as less than her because she's pretty sure the others ought to be indicating less surprisingness than that.

lintamande: Tonia is pretty sure she's not at all surprising in any way unless they count the having sold her soul which Keltham's not supposed to learn about. She indicates that she is not surprising and that other people are only slightly more surprising than her.

Meritxell would like to be a shapedchanged dragon! Or have a fascinating tragic backstory or something! Those feel like the way to be the best at this and she'd like to be the best at this. She's pretty sure if she'd had, like, a month's warning she could have had the best sexual fetishes, too, but that's hard to do from a cold start. She reluctantly marks down that she's not very interesting, which is incredibly painful to do, and that the average person is probably slightly more interesting than that, which is agonizing.

Ione Sala: This is probably her fault, isn't it, unless Carissa screwed up even worse. Ione puts down a two-thirds mark, since she's secretly a very rare chosen oracle of Nethys and not just a hidden worshipper.

She gives the general class a one-half mark, hoping that others are wise enough to realize that what they're telling Keltham there is the expected degree of weirdness that's normal for Golarion, which influences how much he'll think is normal.

Iarwain: Paxti puts down 1/2 and 1/3. She doesn't have a fascinating though ordinary-for-Golarion backstory yet, but she wants to reserve space for getting one.

Asmodia puts down 0 and nearly 0. She doesn't actually want a story.

Pilar silently writes her answers.

lintamande: Gregoria's father is the heir to the Barony of Blanes. She doesn't think this makes her very interesting; firstly, everyone knows the man in question has a thing for that, and hundreds of children; secondly, probably most other Barons are like that, thirdly, it's not as if she's ever met the man. For all she knows her mother could be lying. If it were a Duke then that'd probably count as a little bit interesting but a Baron? Not really.

Hopefully they'll get a good distribution of claims of interestingness so that any given girl can pretend later to have assigned a different one than she in fact did, but they can't coordinate, and it's hard to guess what other people will say.

Gregoria frowns at her pen for a bit and then picks at random on the unremarkable half of both lines.

Keltham: Well. That's a very interesting response pattern.

It doesn't quite fit 'the LARP begins with 3-5 primary love interests, some of whom start out knowing about some of the others, plus a bunch of relatively normal girls who think everyone else there is also normal'. Half the respondents thought everyone had backgrounds almost totally uninteresting to a dath ilani, which may indicate a failure of perspective-taking, or a failure to process the instructions somehow.

What he should've done was run a pilot of this procedure, asking about the degree to which everybody liked lunch, or something.

Very helpful there, obviously correct thought, but you're arriving a little too late.

"Right then," Keltham says. "Can I get somebody to destroy these papers before the universe notices them?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom now has additional questions.

"Broom needs to see the papers before they are destroyed."

Keltham: "Broom, I was joking."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom will have questions for Keltham later. Broom still needs to see the papers now."

Keltham: "They didn't consent to that in advance, and it does not seem appropriate to ask for their consent afterwards."

Carissa Sevar: See this is why you have to TELL KELTHAM ABOUT OTOLMENS because otherwise he will NOT treat Broom like an institution you shut up and cooperate with. But Carissa has made that recommendation in the strongest terms she can and it's over her head and she shouldn't countermand it now, and also has no justification to herself know anything about Otolmens.

lintamande: "You also didn't tell us you were going to destroy them," Meritxell says. "I have been assuming maybe all of our notes are going to be preserved for posterity or something."

Keltham: Keltham reminds himself that he was previously angry at Broom for reasons that shouldn't influence his behavior this much, and tamps down his irritation.

"Fine. New poll, use this symbol for destroying all notes and then Broom can ask you to re-generate them for his observation if he wants. This symbol for Broom being allowed to look at them first before they get destroyed. This symbol if you think it's great to preserve those notes for posterity. Minimum vote, not average vote."

"He does have any reason, as I'm given to understand it. But Broom, you will need to ask in advance on future occasions, this kind of after-the-fact modification is destructive of trust in implied experimental contracts."

Keltham writes down the new poll and symbols on the whiteboard, underneath the previous questions. The three symbols are \ /, V, and X, since it should be hard to tell what somebody is writing by looking at the motions of their quill; drawing two slanted lines that optionally touch or intersect accomplishes this.

lintamande: This is such a terrifying exercise and it'd be really nice to know what Broom's deal is!!!!

Carissa Sevar: Idea, Carissa thinks grouchily. Kidnap - or hire, whatever, probably hire because if they're scared it'll mess with the data - a bunch of Taldane wizard teenagers to put through all these experiments for us to learn from how they're responding.

She puts a V for letting Broom look because Aspexia Rugatonn seemed to think they should cooperate with Otolmens and Aspexia Rugatonn is the expert.

Iarwain: Ione doesn't know what this guy's deal is, but if he's here then Security wants him here, and she's not going to piss off Security without a reason. She puts down V.

Asmodia puts down X. Paxti puts down X. Pilar writes down her own answer.

lintamande: Meritxell puts down X. Gregoria puts down V.

Keltham: Keltham checks the votes, then hands the notes over to Broom. "The vote was to destroy after you read them."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom thanks you," he says. Slaves learn somewhat more politeness than is usual in Cheliax for non-slaves.

Broom reads the poll results.

It does not look like a situation that is not heading into an enormous mess.

Broom will decide what to do about that later.

Keltham: "Okay, now can somebody please destroy the answers in a clear obvious way where everyone can see they were destroyed."

Carissa Sevar: "Broom, if you could set them down on the floor clear of anything, we can just light them on fire."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom swiftly sets them down.

Carissa Sevar: Presumably no one has lit Otolmens's oracle on fire but possibly no one has told him not to worry about it.

She lights the papers. Presumably Security, now using a scry rather than an invisible person, has been watching over Keltham's shoulder and they'll have a lengthy deanonymizing debrief later.

Keltham: "Right then. Leaving all that aside," until their plot-induced lack of mutual communication blows up catastrophically on the whole group later, "I thought today I'd try to speedrun a couple of years' worth of dath ilani lessons for children about how fairness in negotiation works. On the theory that, first of all, Cheliax could stand to get a glimpse of how dath ilani's children's training works in general; and second, that maybe if an adult with average dath ilani intelligence hears about children's training in the abstract, they can just imagine that they went through that training themselves?"

"The reason I'm picking 'fairness' as the topic is because I'm going to be using those structures to negotiate equity, and those procedures do tend to hope that everyone has - mutual knowledge, common knowledge, stuff that everyone knows that everyone knows - about how 'fairness' works. Before I start, if I can ask the group - what does the term that 'fairness' translates into, in Taldane, mean to people here?"

lintamande: .....a concept for stupid people who think they deserve more than they can claim and hold, Meritxell doesn't say.

"Getting what was agreed upon."

"Trades where - neither side is getting cheated."

"Rules that are applied consistently or impartially."

"Everyone gets what they earned."

Keltham: "How can you tell how much somebody has earned? If you make a one-of-a-kind magical item, what price should it sell for, so that neither side is being cheated?"

lintamande: "Whatever you can get someone to buy it for," says Meritxell.

Keltham: "My shirt is a one-of-a-kind relic from another plane; it has no standard market price. In real life, I plan to never sell it, ever, though I might sell the ability to do science to it. Suppose however that, relative to how wealthy I expect to someday be, my shirt, one of my only memories of dath ilan, is worth one million gold pieces to me. In the sense that, if some insidious force was otherwise going to steal my shirt from me, I wouldn't pay any more than a million to protect it."

"Now suppose somebody else has a very weird magical spell that can take any relic of dath ilan, and immediately convert it into ten million gold pieces, no questions asked."

"Any price greater than a million gold and less than ten million gold is a mutually beneficial trade, in the sense that both of us are better off making the trade at that price, than not trading with each other at all. But if my shirt sells for only a million and a thousand gold, I'm only a thousand gold better off, and the other person is around nine million gold better off. If my shirt sells for ten million minus a thousand, the other guy has profited by a thousand and I've profited by a bit less than nine million."

"Trading at all, at any price in the range, is mutually beneficial; we're both better off. But on top of that event, there's another event, a question of the exact price, in which my being one gold piece better off makes the other person one gold piece worse off."

"How do we set that price, then? Aren't we locked into an adversarial game where it's my interest to say, 'I'll only sell at ten million minus one', and it's their interest to say, 'I'll only buy at one million plus one'? Why would we say anything else, when saying anything else just makes the other person better off at our own expense? But if we both think like that, the trade doesn't occur at all."

"What price is fair? Or to put it another way, how can two people like that agree on a trade at all? How does Golarion, how does Cheliax, think about that?"

Carissa Sevar: It hasn't come up in their books about Taldor yet but Carissa's met Taldane adventurers and in fact tried to trade them things and the answer is the same there as in Cheliax. "You barter. You say 'why, I don't see why I should give up this shirt for a coin less than twenty million gold, which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade I can get', and the other person says 'twenty million! I have a hard time believing even such a sentimental item is worth more to you than an entire week of Nefreti Clepati's time during which she could make a dozen duplicates of the shirt and make you a personal demiplane besides, and that would only be eight million gold. And really it seems to me like this trade is worth your time even for one duplicate of the shirt and the personal demiplane, and that would be only eight hundred thousand gold, which is what I'm offering. Which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade I can get'.

And you say 'my, imagine what Nefreti Clepati would say if you tried to lowball her prices like that! I'm not sure this conversation is worth my time, if my shirt is worth so little to you.' Which communicates - and you might be bluffing, you're allowed to bluff when you're doing this - that the quoted price is well outside the range that's worth it to you, and they'd better indicate that they think there's overlap between their willingness to pay and your willingness to sell.

And you iterate on this and then end up settling somewhere, the exact place depending on how competent at bartering you are and on the range of trades you both like."

Keltham: "...fascinating."

dath ilan: Consider - as a dath ilani might consider it - the problem of a dath ilani cast into a strange new universe, who must trade with the aliens found there.

(It is in fact quite a common trope, in dath ilani science fiction. But it wouldn't particularly occur to Keltham to classify this situation as that trope. Cheliax is way too legible. They have a currency of 'gold pieces' that they cheerfully translated for him into unskilled-labor-years. Golarion would need to be a lot weirder before it was good Trade With Aliens science fiction.)

The aliens, one may suppose, have a biological-evolutionary setup similar enough to dath ilan's that they have epidemics, caused by viruses and bacteria and parasites. Suppose the aliens don't know about viruses and bacteria and parasites; or vaccines or antibiotics or filtering masks or possibly even sterilization. Nor about how one should use experiments to determine whether a disease is airborne or waterborne or touch-transmitted or transmitted through wastewater contamination or is carried by smaller or larger animals.

The dath ilani, then, knows something which this alien Civilization might find of great value. The alien Civilization can perhaps pay for this knowledge, with some alien means of payment.

Perhaps the alien Civilization, being nonhuman (or just non-dath-ilani) tries to be stingy about it; to lowball the dath ilani; to buy their knowledge at a cost of, say, a pile of shiny metal, or title to one island in the ocean. Depending on the exact backstory of how the aliens came to try this, and whether it was in some sense the fault of that whole civilization or just a part of it, even a non-Keltham dath ilani might well say, "Screw you, pay me."

That, too, the dath ilani are taught; in Golarion terms, the difference between Lawful Good and Lawful Stupid.

But then how high does the price need to be, exactly, for the dath ilani to agree to the trade? By what system do you determine an answer to that?

dath ilan: The notion of a fair agreement, a fair trade, a fair division of gains from trade, a fair price, plays a central role in any civilization that relies on its citizens' conscious understanding of their activities. Dath ilan teaches the Law (mathematical structure) underpinning fairness, very carefully, and from childhood. After all, if lots of people ended up with widely different notions of what was fair, Civilization would stop trading with itself.

In turn, the notion of 'fair trade' relies on understanding the notion of trade in the first place.

dath ilan: 'Jellychips', a staple of dath ilani lessons to young children, are small lumps of edible flavored gel. Jellychips come in distinct appearances, colors, shapes, and flavors; almost always, everything with exactly the same appearance has exactly the same flavor. Ten jellychips might mass as much as one peanut; they're meant to implement a burst of tasty flavor that's just enough to be present and pleasant. They're tiny so that children don't get end up getting all of their calories from economics lessons.

To teach the notion of trade, you begin by passing out jellychips to children, and let them experiment a bit to find out which of their favorite flavors have which external appearance. Then ask the children to write down which flavors they like more or less than others. Compare the lists; observe to the children that they tend to like different flavors more or best. (There is in fact a jellychip selection algorithm, based on previously observed food preferences among the kids, which makes sure that this happens.) Observe to them that, by trading jellychips with each other, they could all end up with more of the kind of jellychips they want.

Let them trade, a bit, as they desire. So long as they haven't been introduced to any formal concepts of 'fairness' to complain about, this part usually does not go too poorly, among dath ilani children. They'll find jellychips that they have, and don't want; and look for somebody else who wants those, and has some they want; and trade 1-for-1. If you let them play longer they'll start to notice triangular trades that no two children can complete, and do those too, but still usually 1-for-1.

dath ilan: When the first rush of trading has died down, introduce to the children the concept of a multi-agent optimal arrangement: an arrangement such that it's not possible to redistribute the jellychips in any way that leaves all of the children better off simultaneously. Ask them if they think their current arrangement got there.

Now the kids have a concept of a social goal to aim for, a way in which they can be collectively winning at trade or performing subpar; and the arguments will become a bit more heated.

(Especially if you've sorted all the kids to have a certain sort of personality, and usually therefore all be boys; because sometimes different children learn different things, and some of those things are best learned by similar children all together.)

It usually doesn't take long for one boy to start telling another that they need to make a trade, in order to get the classroom* into what they've figured as the optimal arrangement.

Of course the older kids immediately step in at this point, and remind everyone that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, you should never need to force somebody to trade in order to get to a jellychip arrangement that's better for everyone; the target state should be better for the person who's making the trade too.

(*) Not actually a 'room' in the sense of being indoors; children need to be exposed to outdoor light levels in childhood in order to not grow up nearsighted. The surface area required for children to spend enough of their day outdoors is currently the limiting factor on the urban density of the Great City (called also Central City and Default). This is one of the places where public will and private incentives are in conflict, since there's a pressure towards ever-greater urban density in the center; but if this were permitted, soon it would be mostly childless people who could afford to live in Civilization's dense center. For that and other reasons, it's been decided that it's better to limit the Great City's density and keep Civilization more spread out. To find a solid expanse of skyscrapers, you'd need to visit a major city with few or no children per capita, like Big Quiet, or Erotown.

dath ilan: After this enlightenment, an adult Watcher comes forth, and argues to the younger children that the whole point of trading things is that different people put different values on the same goods: if you-1 like black jellychips and have blue jellychips, and you-2 have black jellychips and like blue jellychips, then you can both do better by trading jellychips with each other.

This, the Watcher argues solemnly, is the point of trade, and the whole reason why people trade with each other: because they get different enjoyments from owning the same things, so that they can both become better off by passing the same fixed goods back and forth between themselves.

The younger children are asked if they first-order believe that.

None will say 'yes', at that point. The most overeager ones will say 'No!' but then be unable to explain why not. Most kids will give the brief Baseline comeback that colloquially translates to 'I probably would have believed it, if I wasn't pretty sure you were trolling me, though I haven't seen anything that I suspect is the real argument against it'.

(A dath ilani childhood tends to make one grow up suspicious of things that grownups say with great solemnity. Civilization considers this a desirable outcome, which is good, because it sure is the outcome they're getting.)

Regardless of their answers, the children are then asked whether people who all got the same enjoyments from the same goods would never trade with each other. And so that pathway of learning continues.

dath ilan: On a separate track through the lattice of knowledge, a new idea may now be introduced on those foundations, the notion of a fair trade between black jellychips and blue jellychips.

It begins by showing the children a way to rearrange their understanding of jellychip preferences, as a quantitative relation and not just an ordering, through the concept of indifferences, which state equalities of preference. Not just, "I like purple jellychips more than black jellychips, and black jellychips more than blue jellychips" but "I am indifferent between having 5 purple jellychips, or 6 black jellychips, or 8 blue jellychips."

But then, of course, you might be able to execute multi-agent-beneficial trades that aren't 1-to-1. If someone is indifferent between having 6 black jellychips and 8 blue jellychips, then trading 7 blue jellychips for 6 black jellychips will leave them better off than before. Right?

A lot of children will say 'No!' at this point, and try to find some reason why that couldn't possibly be valid, because they know how economics lessons work, by this point in their lives. They expect that somebody's about to lead them down a pathway that takes them down to 6 black jellychips and then 5 purple jellychips and so on until they only have one jellychip left.

But you can, with a bit more work, convince them that it's totally valid to want 6 black jellychips more than 7 blue jellychips, and valid to trade things according to your wants, and tell them that in fact this does not necessarily always expose them to a set of clever trades that take them down to 1 jellychip which, it will then be proven to them, they must want to trade for nothing. That's not actually going to happen! You're thinking it's going to be the point of the economics lesson, but it's not! Adults actually trade 7 hours of labor for 6 fancy shirts all the time, without ending up with 0 shirts, and this is isomorphic.

The children are then asked if they think they can get to a more multi-agent-optimal state by trading uneven numbers of jellychips amongst themselves.

The children approach this warily; or with a burst of initial enthusiasm that fades, after many children prove rather suspicious of attempts to get them to trade more jellychips for less jellychips.

Dath ilan having an average Intelligence of 16 or 17, it doesn't take long for somebody to point out that, even if one person likes some jellychips more than others, that's no reason for them to end up with less jellychips. Other kids also like some jellychips more than others. Why shouldn't they be the one to end up with less jellychips, and I, be the one who ends up with more, if that's how we're going to play it?

Why yes, Keltham was the first one to say it in those terms, in his own class, when he was very young.

dath ilan: Suppose that Keltham is indifferent between 3 black jellychips and 4 blue jellychips, and that Limyar is indifferent between 2 blue jellychips and 3 black jellychips. Suppose they both start with 12 black and 12 blue jellychips.

Then for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips, for 10 black jellychips from Limyar, would leave them both better off.

And for Limyar to trade his 12 black jellychips, for 9 blue jellychips from Keltham, would leave them both better off.

And for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips for Limyar's 12 black jellychips would leave them both better off.

All three of these are mutually beneficial trades.

But which of them is fair? Or fairest?

If you're the sort who agrees to just any trade that's mutually beneficial - like Limyar, in this classroom, had been earlier arguing people ought to do - then you know what Keltham is going to do to you?

That's right. Keltham is going to offer 9 blue jellychips for your 12 black jellychips, you're going to accept, Keltham is going to carry out the trade, and then Keltham is going to angrily throw another 3 blue jellychips at you and yell that you're being stupid.

dath ilan: If you step out and look at that problem from a wider angle, it's pretty much the same issue that holds between the dath ilani and the alien civilization, considering the price of medical knowledge.

If the alien civilization offers some tiny lowball offer - like, say, a supply of food and water - in exchange for every last scrap of your knowledge, and there's no other civilization around to trade with, you and they will both be better off if you accept, compared to if you don't.

But if you accept offers like that one, food and water is the most you can expect to be offered, if the aliens are less Lawful Neutral than Keltham.

(Even if there's two alien factions around to trade with, you can't quite rely on them bidding against each other. What if they coordinate with each other instead? There's a noticeable amount for both of them to gain, if they both agree to offer you only food and water, instead of a higher price.)

dath ilan: Another game is now introduced to the children, played with a single flavor of jellychip. It is not, in dath ilan, called the 'Ultimatum Game', but the actual name they have for it is the 'Final Trade Offer Game', which isn't all that different.

One child gets a dial, with settings from 0 to 12. Another child gets a button. The first child picks a setting on the dial and locks it in. The second child then chooses whether to press the button. If the second child presses the button, the first child gets as many jellychips as the dial indicates; the second child gets jellychips equal to 12 minus the number on the dial. If the second child doesn't press the button, they both get nothing.

Which is to say: the first child proposes a division of a gain of 12 jellychips, where they get some part, and the other child gets the rest. The second child can approve the division, or refuse it; and if they refuse, both get nothing.

If you run this lesson on dath ilani children, virtually everyone offers a 6:6 jellychip split and everyone accepts it.

At least, that's what they do on round zero, the initial round where they try things the simple way to verify their starting assumptions. Then they start experimenting. It's not so much that they're being selfish, and trying to figure out what they can get away with; it's that they're figuring there must be some clever point to this game, and you're not going to find it if you just offer 6:6 every time.

Some kids try out accepting splits of 7:5. Other kids are like, ok then, and offer them 7:5 splits, which usually get rejected if, like, people are going to make a thing out of that, right. Some try offering compacts to trade 7:5 splits for 5:7 splits, but there's no guarantee that any two kids will be matched up again in the future.

At this point the older kids step in and say that the point of the game is drifting away from the reality it's intended to model, and everybody nods and waits for the next part. (Of course there's a next part. There's been a weird game and no stunning insight about it has been presented yet. They've ever been to a lesson before. Older people aren't going to make you execute a weird pointless procedure and then not have some stunning insight to offer you as payment; kids would stop going to lessons, if that bargain was often violated.)

Before the next part, though, the older child teaching asks what the kids think is probably the ideal or correct thing you're supposed to do if somebody offers you a 7:5 split, not as a game, but in real life.

Keltham, of course, said to reject the offer. Some other kids agreed the offer should be rejected. Some claimed that you should accept it, but everyone should be angry at the person and whoever went next with them should offer them 7:5. Limyar claimed that you should always accept it, even if the other person offers 11:1, because everyone would end up with fewer jellychips if you rejected than if you accepted, so rejecting the offer couldn't be multi-agent-optimal. Keltham asked Limyar if he actually believed that. Limyar said no but he was going to go on saying it anyways to annoy Keltham.

The kids argue about it for a while, and then the demonstration moves on.

dath ilan: The next stage involves a complicated dynamic-puzzle with two stations, that requires two players working simultaneously to solve. After it's been solved, one player locks in a number on a 0-12 dial, the other player may press a button, and the puzzle station spits out jellychips thus divided.

The gotcha is, the 2-player puzzle-game isn't always of equal difficulty for both players. Sometimes, one of them needs to work a lot harder than the other.

Now things start to heat up. There's an obvious notion that if one player worked harder than the other, they should get more jellychips. But how much more? Can you quantify how hard the players are working, and split the jellychips in proportion to that? The game obviously seems to be pointing in the direction of quantifying how hard the players are working, relative to each other, but there's no obvious way to do that.

Somebody proposes that each player say, on a scale of 0 to 12, how hard they felt like they worked, and then the jellychips should be divided in whatever ratio is nearest to that ratio.

The solution relies on people being honest. This is, perhaps, less of a looming unsolvable problem for dath ilani children than for adults in Golarion.

Once this solution is produced and tried once, the older children congratulate the kids on having solved the first layer. On to the second layer!

In the second layer, some children get handed sealed cards before each game, telling them whether to be honest about it, or to try to grab a little more for themselves. (Though remember, say the older children, that this is all only a game; we are trying to ask how Civilization can be robust to bad people, not teach you to be bad people yourselves; the thing is, you see, that on scales much larger than this class, there really will be some bad people.)

And that means the child who sets the dial, or the child who presses the button, can't trust the other to be honest. Even if the other child's sealed card didn't say to be dishonest, the first child has no way of knowing that.

(Dishonest people really do complicate things, don't they? Just the fact that they exist makes things harder on everyone else, because they don't know who the dishonest people are. But that's part of the difficulty of constructing an adult Civilization, one that has to scale to numbers beyond two dozen or sixteen gross.)

dath ilan: The children start having to think harder, at this point. There are kids playing hard on puzzle-games, and hearing estimates of the other player's labor-effort that don't sound quite right; proposing splits afterwards, and seeing those splits rejected, and both getting nothing. Some of the kids start to get angry at each other. Others are trying to come up with a brilliant general solution; and, if they're wise, they know they haven't found one. Some children are not so wise, but they can't get anyone else to go along with their brilliant general solution.

Keltham plays through with as much cold and steely determination as a seven-year-old can muster, offering exactly what he thinks is fair, rejecting anything he thinks is less than fair; feeling awful when the other kid yells at him that he was being honest, but not swerving from his course. He can trust himself; he cannot trust the other. When his card tells him to be dishonest, Keltham gives ridiculously huge estimates for his own labor, and hopes the other child is wise enough to know that Keltham is, must be, lying. Sometimes he's told to be dishonest and he has to pick the split himself, and then he gives a huge estimate and pretends he believed the other kid's huge estimate. Sometimes the other kid doesn't catch on in time, and then Keltham has to offer an unfair split or tap out of the game and metagame entirely, which feels like failing even more. Sometimes the unfair split gets rejected, and sometimes it gets accepted, which is worse. Keltham sets aside all his unearned chips to redistribute after the lesson ends. It's a good thing this is only a game, because living life like this would be awful.

Lessons end for the day. It is sometimes good to let children dwell for a time on problems that don't have known solutions yet, or realize how awful life can become when not everyone has deduced the governing Law.

dath ilan: (Children actually do better, dath ilan has found, if you try having them play this elaborate game without having previously introduced the concept of a multi-agent-optimal boundary, or the notion of the Ultimatum Game, or the question of fair trades between unequal numbers of jellychips. Then they just play and negotiate, without a concept that they are Failing To Reach Multi-Agent Optimality, or the notion that children who disagree with them are Refusing To Make Mutually Beneficial Trades, or that the offered trade was Unfair. The children are less distracted by ideas they don't know how to operate, goals they don't know how succeed at, and ways to argue that people who disagree with them are doing some particular thing objectively incorrectly. There is a valley of competence as a function of knowledge in this case, where knowing just a little can hurt you.)

dath ilan: When the children return the next day, the older children tell them the correct solution to the original Ultimatum Game.

It goes like this:

When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than 6/7 probability. Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than 6/7, or slightly less than 6. This ensures they can't do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation. It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.

If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than 6/8, so they do even worse in their own expectation by offering you 8:4 than 7:5.

It's not about retaliating harder, the harder they hit you with an unfair price - that point gets hammered in pretty hard to the kids, a Watcher steps in to repeat it. This setup isn't about retaliation, it's about what both sides have to do, to turn the problem of dividing the gains, into a matter of fairness; to create the incentive setup whereby both sides don't expect to do any better by distorting their own estimate of what is 'fair'.

They play the 2-station video games again. There's less anger and shouting this time. Sometimes, somebody rolls a continuous-die and then rejects somebody's offer, but whoever gets rejected knows that they're not being punished. Everybody is just following the Algorithm. Your notion of fairness didn't match their notion of fairness, and they did what the Algorithm says to do in that case, but they know you didn't mean anything by it, because they know you know they're following the Algorithm, so they know you know you don't have any incentive to distort your own estimate of what's fair, so they know you weren't trying to get away with anything, and you know they know that, and you know they're not trying to punish you. You can already foresee the part where you're going to be asked to play this game for longer, until fewer offers get rejected, as people learn to converge on a shared idea of what is fair.

Sometimes you offer the other kid an extra jellychip, when you're not sure yourself, to make sure they don't reject you. Sometimes they accept your offer and then toss a jellychip back to you, because they think you offered more than was fair. It's not how the game would be played between dath ilan and true aliens, but it's often how the game is played in real life. In dath ilan, that is.

dath ilan: After that came the part where Keltham's learning-group was introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game, with tokens that produced varying quantities of jellychips, but only when held in proximity to other tokens, and large enough groups of tokens could produce more tokens.

Despite their best efforts and the lesson they'd just learned - and, since they were still young boys, after a lot of shouting, beyond a certain point - the nascent market had soon shut down almost entirely over refused trades, caused by disagreements about what was 'fair'.

During the game's post-mortem, it was eventually figured out (with some nudging and hinting from the supervising older-children) that children with rarer tokens had tended to think that the weight of a token's value for its even division ought to be determined by that token's scarcity; children with tokens that produced lots of jellychips (even if they required some other tokens to be nearby to work) tended to think that direct jellychip production was the obvious starting anchor for weighing economic value; children with tokens that produced other tokens argued themselves to have the only goods that mattered in the long run, and that you'd need a lot of lesser tokens to trade fairly for one of those.

This begins the pathway of learning that leads to market prices, the other way of setting prices; in which larger Civilization has a collective interest in seller prices ending up close to the marginal cost of production, so that as many trades as possible occur.

Children who master the complications here have officially passed Financial Literacy Layer 2, and can have their own investment accounts*, which was the main reason Keltham was going through this whole lesson-sequence at age seven instead of age eight.

(*) Having an investment account in dath ilan is the equivalent of having a 'bank account' in other places, rather than a mark of greater financial maturity than that. Dath ilan doesn't particularly use, as a store of value, currency-denominated packaged bank debt with fixed returns. Value is stored mostly in equities. When you write a check against your investment account, divisible fractions of equity are automatically sold out of it in some medium of exchange, and automatically reinvested in the receiver's account, according to the (simple) autoselling and autobuying algorithms on both sides. If you want to pay for less volatility in your assets, you buy insurance on the equity, so that somebody agrees to buy the asset from you if it drops below 80% of its original-purchase price; and the price of insurance like that is a risk signal.

dath ilan: When it comes to selling knowledge to aliens, to be clear, Financial Literacy Layer 2 is not going to get you there. If the answer across every plausible premise was trivial and similar, that trope wouldn't be such a staple of dath ilani economic fiction.

Thankfully, Golarion is not nearly weird enough for Cheliax to be composed of aliens in the relevant sense; the Chelish have money and will tell you how many unskilled-labor-hours it corresponds to. The most you have to worry about is that somebody gave them a dishonesty card - which does mean you have to do your own calculations about what's fair, and not just ask them.

When you are not dealing with alien aliens, when setting prices with those aliens is not the point of the story, a normal dath ilani would consider the solution obvious. There comes a saturation point beyond which individuals cannot realistically use any more money to become happier themselves, for usual reasons of just-noticeable-differences being a mostly-constant fraction of how much you already have, which implies utility roughly logarithmic in wealth. If the aliens offer to pay you that much, asking them to cough up more would mean that a number of poorer aliens would all have to give up chunks of utility that loom larger for them, so that you could get much smaller amounts of utility; and even if that's fair, it isn't Good. If the aliens offer an ultimatum for less, turn them down with very high probability; they're trying to give you far less than you're worth. Would Civilization offer less than a billion labor-hours to an alien bearing knowledge of how to eliminate whole swathes of diseases hitting large sections of the population? (No.)

Of course, in a normal dath ilani economic-fiction isekai story, the entire world you end up in is not insane in every part; there may be one insane point of departure with some insane consequences lawfully extrapolated, but the author is not going to throw an entire insane world at you; it wouldn't be credible.

A normal dath ilani, thrown into another world, does not come in expecting to need enough money to make lots and lots of important investments that the natives haven't made because the natives are insane. They're expecting to find an alien efficiency of no simple ways to make everyone collectively much wealthier, not the howling absence of that efficiency.

Keltham wasn't expecting Golarion either.

He did, however, catch on in short order to what he currently thinks is the magnitude of the problem.

It is possible he will need a lot of money to solve it.

dath ilan: If you've actually got to negotiate with very humanlike aliens, you need Financial Literacy Layer 5; or at least, Keltham hopes that's what he needs, because that's what he has. This gives him access to a spotlighted permutation-based method for determining the fair contribution of one actor to a multiagent process. It's not spotlighted nearly as hard as, say, the Probability axioms, or Validity; but it's pretty much the only spotlighted method for that kind of fairness, and Civilization is somewhat hopeful that aliens will use it too.

The permutation-based method says to consider how much marginal added value an agent produces, by being added to a collection of other agents, when considering every possible order in which to add all agents into the evaluation. If, for example, two people are both needed to complete a task worth 10 jellychips, and it can't be completed at all without both of them, then there's two possible permutations:

Permutation 1:
Alis: Alis alone receives 0 jellychips; her marginal value, added to the empty set, is 0.
Alis+Bohob: After adding Bohob, the payoff is 10 jellychips; Bohob's marginal product, added to Alis is 10.

Permutation 2:
Bohob: 0 jellychips.
Bohob+Alis: 10 jellychips.

Averaging the marginal products together across all permutations, the method says that Alis and Bohob both receive 5 jellychips.

Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic, but the point is that it generalizes.

dath ilan: Applied directly to the situation with Cheliax, the method says, roughly, that Keltham should receive an amount proportional to how much marginal product he adds, on average, to all possible (ordered) subsets of Cheliax. If Cheliax had only half its current people, for example, Keltham might only add around half as much value. For even smaller subsets of Cheliax, product might fall superlinearly; Keltham couldn't necessarily accomplish 1/20,000,000th as much with a single Chelaxian.

It adds up to 'somewhat less than half of his marginal product when added to all of Cheliax, probably'. Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic; but the point is that Keltham knows why that is the fair answer and what he ought to do if he gets offered less.

Keltham doesn't spell out this part explicitly, or say that he was willing to accept Cheliax's opening offer taken at face value, and indeed would have compromised on substantially less had it been necessary. Cheliax mentioned difficulties in accurately measuring the gains to the country, and may intend to offer a measuring methodology expected to be an underestimate of the real value; or it could be that Cheliax is thinking the split is about direct profits from project sales, where Chelish consumers are capturing much more value than the sale price of the products, the consumer surplus.

Also Keltham might find there's weird terms or conditions in there, in which case he wants to get the highest initial offer on hand so he can burn percentage points as bargaining power, to iron out the terms and conditions. He can always hand back any excessively generous jellychips that are still left at the end of that.

Thellim: Somewhere in a place that is not this place, so far away that there is no distance and no time between here and there, a former airplane passenger named Thellim reads how Earth economists have tried to analyze the Ultimatum Game, played by splitting $10.

Earth's economists have concluded that it is 'irrational' to refuse a $9:$1 split, since it leaves you $1 worse off. They note that human subjects seem to be 'irrational' by occasionally refusing offers below $5 with increasingly great probability as the offer drops. Perhaps it is meta-rational to develop a reputation for acting 'irrationally', since it causes people to make you bigger offers, if they know you'll irrationally refuse smaller ones? (For some reason they don't continue on to ask why not develop an 'irrational' reputation for refusing all offers below $9, instead of $5.)

Thellim swiftly infers that Earth's moon prevents its inhabitants from thinking clearly about negotiation.

(She's mistaken. It's kind of a long story.)

Thellim: Sometime even later, Thellim is going to conclude that maybe it's not the moon. She will then wonder if there's any way to explain to Earth economists how the absolute basics of negotiation work in coherent decision systems (eg those consistent under reflection in the presence of correlated agents and/or models of agents). Or even, minimally, get them interested in what sort of 'irrational' behavior rational agents want to have 'reputations' for having, and if there's any systematic structure in there that might possibly be interesting.

It turns out that Earth economists are locked into powerful incentive structures of status and shame, which prevent them from discussing the economic work of anybody who doesn't get their paper into a journal. The journals are locked into very powerful incentive structures that prevent them from accepting papers unless they're written in a very weird Earth way that Thellim can't manage to imitate, and also, Thellim hasn't gotten tenure at a prestigious university which means they'll probably reject the paper anyways. Thellim asks if she can just rent temporary tenure and buy somebody else's work to write the paper, and gets approximately the same reaction as if she asked for roasted children recipes.

The system expects knowledge to be contributed to it only by people who have undergone painful trials to prove themselves worthy. If you haven't proven yourself worthy in that way, the system doesn't want your knowledge even for free, because, if the system acknowledged your contribution, it cannot manage not to give you status, even if you offer to sign a form relinquishing it, and it would be bad and unfair for anyone to get that status without undergoing the pains and trials that others had to pay to get it.

She went and talked about logical decision theory online before she'd realized the full depth of this problem, and now nobody else can benefit from writing it up, because it would be her idea and she would get the status for it and she's not allowed to have that status. Furthermore, nobody else would put in the huge effort to push forward the idea if she'll capture their pay in status. It does have to be a huge effort; the system is set up to provide resistance to ideas, and disincentivize people who quietly agreed with those ideas from advocating them, until that resistance is overcome. This ensures that pushing any major idea takes a huge effort that the idea-owner has to put in themselves, so that nobody will be rewarded with status unless they have dedicated several years to pushing an idea through a required initial ordeal before anyone with existing status is allowed to help, thereby proving themselves admirable enough and dedicated enough to have as much status as would come from contributing a major idea.

To suggest that the system should work in any different way is an obvious plot to steal status that is only deserved by virtuous people who work hard, play by the proper rules, and don't try to cheat by doing anything with less effort than it's supposed to take.

Thellim could maybe solve this problem if she put around five years of her life into taking the knowledge, and putting it into a form where the system thinks it's allowed to ever look at it or talk about it without that being shameful. But Earth has problems that are plausibly more important than their entire field of economics being firmly convinced that a particular set of crazy behaviors are 'rational' and that healthy, prosocial, equilibrium-solvable behaviors are 'irrational'.

She ends up writing a handful of blog posts about it, tossing mentions of it into a couple of stories she writes on the side, and otherwise leaving Earth to its fate there; Earth has rather a lot of awful fates going on simultaneously, and that one is not literally their most important problem.

This, however, is not her story.

Keltham: Keltham, in any case, now attempts to recount to Cheliax what he went through as a kid to learn about the basic concepts of negotiation.

The first part of this would be handing out assorting jellychips to children, as selected to guarantee that different children will have different preferences over them but all will find those tastes and textures pleasant at all; letting the children trade among themselves, which they usually do 1-to-1 and peacefully; introducing the concept of a multi-agent-optimal solution to the kids, which gives them a social goal they could be failing at instead of just a few voluntary improvements to make among themselves; whereupon they start yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class; and then the older kids come in and remind them that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, solutions like that should make all the kids better off so you shouldn't have to force anyone to go along with trades leading there.

How are the Chelaxians doing so far?

Carissa Sevar: Absolutely no yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class! Say what you will about Evil, it doesn't inculcate that particular tendency.

lintamande: Meritxell has made herself a multi-column tracking sheet - six of them, actually, ordered by different things.

"Can everyone report to me their hypothetical reward preferences in, uh, negative wrist-slaps? Imagine we'll settle it out at the end by giving out a number of actual wrist-slaps equal to the reward so there's no incentive to overstate or understate your reward preferences."

Keltham: Keltham wasn't expecting them to go off and immediately start setting up games to simulate the thing he was describing despite the absence of actual jellychips, he'd sort of wanted to see if imagination would be enough, but he's not going to stop them if they do that.

He draws the line at the wrist-slaps, though. "The point of positive rewards in this case is that there's an incentive to play the game at all," Keltham says. "If you tried paying dath ilani kids in negative wrist-slaps they could avoid all the wrist-slaps by not coming to class. It's like trying to buy shoes at a shoe-shop by threatening to wreck the guy's shoe-shop unless they give you shoes. Even if they did give shoes, the guy doesn't want to be part of the whole system then, and now they have an incentive to call the town guard... okay, 'town guard', sure. And anybody else who sees that's how you operate has an incentive to poison your shoes and send you to the afterlife early before you come around to their shop. When you're trading things the other person actually wants, they want the whole system to stay in place, which is what makes stable equilibria possible. It's an important difference!"

lintamande: " - I want the whole education system to stay in place," says Meritxell, baffled. "It taught me to be a wizard!!!"

"Wait, do dath ilani children just....not go to school if they don't feel like it? Wouldn't that get you a lot of people who never learn anything, or at least never learn anything they aren't being bribed to learn?"

"And never learn how to do things that are unpleasant for a long-term reward -"

Keltham: "Civilization goes to a great deal of effort to arrange things so that kids actually do want to go to school, because dath ilani kids are smart by your standards, and the grownups do not actually want to get into a contest with us about whether or not we can rig the school's boiler system to explode if we use a cunning plot with coordinated distractions. It doesn't matter that they would very likely win, they don't want to get into the contest with us. Ah, with them. I mean they do still have all sorts of security systems to make it hard to blow up schools because, you know, kids, but they're based on the assumption of fending off like three kids who want to see if they can, not three hundred kids who all have the same incentives."

lintamande: "Chelish kids do not....coordinatedly try to destroy our schools," Meritxell says faintly after a while. "Even wizarding kids, who are smart. It - wouldn't even be hard, with magic, you wouldn't need coordinated distractions but no one would do it, even if you'd made a very bad mistake at school and were going to be disciplined -" they did check, Taldor beats students for misbehavior too. "You don't have to..... be so nice to children they wouldn't ever occasionally wish their school was on fire, you just have to teach them enough discipline that even when they wish it was they don't do it."

Carissa Sevar: "Maybe if you're Good and.....refuse to .....use any punishments ever..." Carissa feels like she's kind of caricaturing Good here, like if she said this to a paladin they'd object that obviously they do punish people when appropriate - "then you have to bribe everyone all the time to just nondestructively participate in society because the - differential between cooperation and noncooperation still has to be just as large and you're trying to do none of it with pain."

Ione Sala: Ione Sala is starting to feel nervous, for the first time, about what exactly Lord Nethys might be working towards with His plans around Keltham.

Well, it's not as if she has any other options, so, moot point, she'll go along with His goal, even if it's exploding Cheliax or whatever. It's not like she has any friends here.

Keltham: "Look, I get that Golarion is a poorer and more dangerous place and that you cannot afford to have kids occasionally successfully destroying their school. You still - want to treat children as miniature adults, right, so that they'll grow into adults with the right shape? When they grow up into adults, you don't want those adults sticking around places where they're being hurt, or tolerating the existence of systems that leave people worse off than if the whole system didn't exist. So you don't put children into childhood situations where their own incentive is to destroy everything around them, and all they lack is the power to do that."

lintamande: "Chelish students are not incentivized to destroy their schools, even if they wouldn't get in trouble for it, because becoming a wizard is really valuable," says Meritxell. "Their incentives are sometimes on the scale of their lives, not on the scale of that specific day being more fun than not-fun, but that's - how being an adult is, too."

Keltham: "Do kids here already understand that when they're seven years old? Five years old? By the time somebody understands and has integrated subtle incentives for their future self spanning decades, they're no longer a child; they don't need adults to guardrail their decisions anymore."

"I suspect there's some weird sticking point here that - look, sufficiently young kids do get slaps on the wrist. Civilization doesn't like it, I don't like it, but even dath ilan never figured out how to produce healthy adults while never doing that at any point. There are elements of morality and personhood that humans just weren't designed to learn without experiencing small amounts of pain in childhood. But every time you set up a situation where a kid gets told that they need to do something or else get slapped on the wrist, you also add some value to an investment account the kid gets access to when they're older, such that even if the kid was secretly an adult in a kid's body, they would still be calculating a net benefit on being present for the whole transaction. To make sure the total interaction is still mutually beneficial, which means, beneficial to them too, so that ideal kids wouldn't have an ideal incentive to escape their parents or destroy the whole system. Civilization goes on optimizing its heritage and the kids keep getting smarter and more Law-comprehending, which means that you always check all the interactions with children to make sure that the system wouldn't fall apart if the kids started being more ideal intelligences than expected one year. And having to pay that amount to set up a potential wrist-slap situation reminds adults to check, every time, whether they really needed a wrist-slap there."

"I realize you can't afford any of that, but it is how Civilization thinks. We don't want to build into the system a load-bearing assumption that our kids are stupid and weak, even if they are."

lintamande: It has occurred to most of the girls that ideally they should be learning Keltham's economics not arguing with him about punishment so they nod gravely rather than trying to explain the dozen things wrong with that.

The most obvious, thinks Meritxell, is that you don't actually want adults who believe themselves entitled to blow up any system that isn't serving them, because then you end up like Taldor having a civil war every few years.

The most obvious, thinks Tonia, is that kids can in fact run away and get eaten by wild beasts if they want, and none of them do, so they obviously think being around their parents is better than not that, which they're right about.

The most obvious, thinks Gregoria, is that adults are still children, in Keltham's ontology, and the only real adults are gods.

Carissa Sevar: (The most obvious, thinks Carissa, is that the fundamental system in which everyone is participating in is existence, life and then afterlife, and that's so obviously, wildly worth it that no possible specifics could matter - it'd be like trying to sell someone a +6 Headband of all three mental statistics for the price of an afternoon scrubbing floors and assuring them that you won't yell at them for missed spots. It doesn't matter, it's all nothing next to the magnitude of the gift they've already been given, the only reason they're even able to parse it instead of rounding it off to the zero it is is because their minds are broken and they're very small and stupid. If a god were somehow born into a human child's body they wouldn't care if they got hit in class or not; human weakness isn't any particular nature of the bribes but the fact they're required at all, and planning for more perfect agents would mean planning for agents whose thoughts were too big and vast to give this question a second's contemplation.)

Keltham: Keltham notices that he's running across a class of external and internal subjective sensations that precedes learning something is horribly wrong with Golarion, and sets it aside, because he's allowed to take longer than two days to learn about all of the problems. At least the problems they're making no effort to conceal from him, which they don't seem to be doing here, what with having just volunteered all of that info.

Anyways, they can play a pretend version of the trading game, if they like, so long as they don't try to literally pay in negative wrist-slaps because no just no that's the literal opposite of the larger point.

Keltham checks their final result, and references it against the supposed ordinal preferences for the players. Does it look multi-agent-optimal at a computerless glance?

lintamande: Meritxell has helpfully circled each trade and noted why it increases utility for each participant, and then written down possible trades from the final state and why they don't. If something's wrong it's a more complicated error than that; the girls are in fact heatedly speculating, now, in whispers, about whether there are local multi-agent-optimal maxima that aren't a global multi-agent-optimal maximum.

Keltham: ...right. Not actual children here.

"If there's such a thing as a local optimum in that sense, which isn't global, you ought to be able to produce a simplified example of it. Say, try constructing one with three players and three kinds of jellychips," Keltham suggests.

lintamande: "There's not going to be," Meritxell says. "If there were and we knew what it was then we could just switch to that arrangement."

"It could be better for someone from their starting point but not better for them from the place we just arrived at, and higher value total -"

"If it's higher value total and they get a veto we use some of the higher value to pay them."

"Oh, I see, do we have continuous jellychips now, Keltham must have forgot to mention that feature of theirs."

Keltham: "Would you care to state exactly what is a 'local optimum' and how it differs from a 'global optimum'?"

lintamande: "Take, like, water," says Gregoria. "Water flows downhill, but if it flows into a crater or something, it's not going to go up in order to get to keep going down. And water usually isn't sentient and even when it is it's not very smart but you can have a situation where everyone agrees that the current situation isn't as good as some other situation, but none of them have a step that's a clear step up for them. And Meritxell is right that if you have centralized control you can just make everyone go to the new place even though there's not a series of smaller mutually beneficial steps to get there, and also that if this involves some people losing out you can pay them, but that doesn't always work, like, for example, if you're dividing things that come in units."

Carissa Sevar: "This comes up in spell structures."

Keltham: "Comes up all over all of reality, including in the basic elements of the human body that the tiny-spiral instructions say how to make, which fold up into configurations of least local resistance in order to - have the kinds of material properties that they do. I'd guessed that spells were the same way almost as soon as I heard about them."

"Anyways, I agree that's a good metaphor, but if you could have a very simple arrangement of three players with three jellychips of three kinds, what would you say about that situation which made it a local multi-agent optimum, and what would you say about it that made it a global multi-agent optimum?"

lintamande: "It's a local optimum if there aren't any trades anyone can make that leave both parties to the trade better off, and it's global if there are no possible states of the jellychips that leave all three people better off."

Keltham: "And can you prove that a local-not-global optimum is impossible for three players, each with one jellychip, of three different flavors? Proving something for a simple special case is often easier than proving it for the general case, and sometimes is a good start on a general proof, if the problem hasn't been selected by some sadist... that is not what the dath ilani word 'troll' means but okay fine. Anyways, proving it impossible for three players with three jellychips might be a start on proving it impossible in general, and in fact, there would be a lot of really interesting other proofs you could derive from that one."

Iarwain: Asmodia doesn't feel particularly driven to succeed in class, today, but -

"I have a chip Meritxell wants more than hers, but I don't want her chip more than mine. Meritxell has a chip Paxti wants. Paxti has the chip I want. We can do a three-way trade but no two-way ones." Sadist, she mentally completes.

lintamande: "If they're continuous you can make that work, with partial jellychip trades -"

"They're not continuous!"

Iarwain: "Continuous doesn't help," says Asmodia. "Meritxell wants my one chip but without Paxti she doesn't have anything I want. Moving fractional chips around doesn't help with that. Not unless there's continuous players, like every possible mix of Asmodia plus Meritxell plus Paxti."

lintamande: Some students scribble in their notes for a little while until they are satisfied with this.

Iarwain: Asmodia, who is of course still pretending to be cheerful and energetic, will have enthusiastically written out the example:

Asmodia: Has banana, prefers apple < banana < cherry
Meritxell: Has apple, prefers cherry < apple < banana
Paxti: Has cherry, prefers banana < cherry < apple

Asmodia wants Paxti's cherry! But Paxti doesn't want Asmodia's banana!

Keltham: All right, on to the notion of non-1-to-1 trades and quantitative indifferences. New game, but instead of just saying that you prefer some flavors to others, you say things like, 'I'm indifferent between having 3 apple jellychips and 4 banana jellychips.'

This opens up the possibility of trading jellychips in a non-1-for-1 way. Anybody want to try playing that game, if they're running quick simulations?

lintamande: This seems like it makes it much harder to get stuck but no one has an impossibility proof yet. They do not seem to have...noticed the fairness problem? Or, they're writing down different possible trade outcomes but not with any sense that some of them are more desirable except subjectively.

Keltham: Keltham quietly hands Meritxell a folded-up note telling her to try to end up with as many chips as possible for herself, in the course of suggesting mutually beneficial trades to the others.

lintamande: - well all right then.

The other students do notice this. "You recorded five to seven as the canonical one, but it could be four to eight too."

"Guess you should be the one writing it down," Meritxell says. "Paxti, seven blue for nine green?"

"Give me ten."

"You have recorded that you like green only nine percent less than blue, so I'm offering you nine."

"You have it recorded that you like blue a third more than green, so -"

"But I'm not offering you ten. Carissa, six blue for four red?"

"...is that allowed?"

"Is what allowed?"

"Are you allowed to not make trades that your utility function says you'll take. In this game."

"Well, you did it first, you turned down seven for nine. Carissa, six blue for four red, or if you make it five red, I'll throw in refusing to trade with whoever your least favorite student is."

Carissa Sevar: "What if it's you?"

lintamande: "Done and done, give me five red, I promise I won't trade with myself all day long. Gregoria, twelve red for....thirteen green -"

"Am I allowed to change my preference-weightings -"

"Obviously not."

"Keltham, am I?"

Keltham: "Definitely no."

lintamande: Gregoria hands over thirteen imaginary green. Meritxell turns around and hands eight of them to Tonia for blue. She looks supremely in her element and she's talking several miles a minute, withdrawing any trades the other girls don't agree to instantly.

Keltham: ...you would think they would somehow teach kids about this sort of principle before they let them have investment accounts let alone allocate years of training to wizard school.

Keltham will wait until they have ended up in a multi-agent-optimum; one of the many possible multi-agent-optima, which happens to have a lot of imaginary jellychips in the possession of Meritxell; such that, indeed, it is not possible to make all the students including her better off, by taking some of those away from her and looking for a more evenly distributed optimum.

lintamande: It takes a while because Meritxell refuses so many trades but they get there eventually.

Keltham: Keltham shall now observe to them that, if Meritxell has 12 green and prefers two blue to three green, and Gregoria has 12 blue and prefers two green to three blue, then all of the trades "5 green for 7 blue", "6 green for 6 blue", and "7 green for 5 blue", are mutually beneficial, but differently divide up the gains from trade.

There's a lot of different ways for jellychips to be arranged such that they can't be moved around without making at least one player worse off. For example, Meritxell could have all the chips, and nobody else could have any. Then any other way of arranging the chips will make Meritxell worse off! So that's one of the many possible global optima.

Different paths through the mutually beneficial trades will take you to different global optima. So long as all the trades are mutually beneficial, you won't end up worse off than if you never traded, at the end; but you might end up much worse off than if you'd traded more carefully.

Keltham is a bit surprised that they didn't more quickly see the way in which this game resembled real life, since they seem pretty good at mathematical comprehension of the sort of structure that this game has in common with real life. But that will come with having more than one day's practice with parsing up games and real life into the pure abstract structures and simple mathematical properties they have in common - with parsing up real life as a shadow of Law, that is then recognized at once when incarnated in some much simpler game.

lintamande: All of what Keltham's saying makes sense to them!

Ione Sala: Ione wonders, in the back of her mind, if there's some way to actually go between worlds that way - by understanding real life as an instance of Law, and then sort of going through that Law to end up in a different instance of real life...

You know what, she's going to stop thinking that now. Thinking things in the back of her mind has gotten her into enough trouble already.

Keltham: Well, now that they've seen the problem of dividing gains from trade in a simpler form, re-encountering it as a more mathematical structure, have they got any new ideas about how to decide how many blue jellychips to accept for how many green jellychips?

lintamande: "...it depends what the other person will accept?"

"You want to be keeping the books," Meritxell says. "Then everyone knows you'll be doing the most favorable trades you can and if they don't want to trade with you they're just out of luck. Or have some other kind of - asymmetric reason you can say 'I'm holding out for better' which they can't."

Keltham: "They could, in fact, have mostly stopped trading with you, and traded with each other instead, until the game was almost ready to end. And even then, if you'd tried to make trades too sharp, they could have just said no and offered you more even ones; and if you refused those trades, well then, the game ends without being multi-player-optimal."

"Even if you make your mutually beneficial trades very slanted in your own favor, people can't end up worse off, from trading with you, compared to if they didn't trade with anyone at all."

"They can end up worse off by trading with you, compared to if they'd traded with other people instead."

"So they walk away, and find other trade partners, if you try to capture too much of the gains from trade for yourself."

"This, too, is a lesson with a mathematical structure that appears in both this game and in real life."

lintamande: "Sure, but it's costly to go around trying to find possible trade partners. In practice if you own the books you get the bulk of the gains from trade."

Keltham: Then some book-owners are going to really lose out once Keltham figures out cheaper roads and bicycles; so Keltham thinks, but also meta-thinks fast enough not to say out loud. He is not quite sure of his larger social situation, and maybe he is better off quietly not pointing out certain winners and losers just yet.

"Dath ilan has some excess wealth beyond bare living needs," and, now that Keltham thinks about it, probably a much more structured investment scene, "which a hundred thousand annoyed customers can easily use to pay the startup costs of a new company that makes whatever you make, and contracts to sell it more cheaply for the first ten years to its founding customers. So 'I'm the only trade partner around' does play less well there." If he emphasizes the part with the vast wealth Golarion won't have for a while, that'll maybe sound less threatening to anybody reading these reports, compared to if they realize that roads will apply the same market pressure. "Does Cheliax have a lot of places where, say, there's only one seller of food...?"

lintamande: "...not food, because outside of cities everyone grows their own food," says Tonia, "and lots of them bring it to the city to market."

"Only one shoe-seller, though."

"And even cities might have only one fifth circle wizard who can cast Teleport for you, or one fifth circle cleric who can Raise Dead."

Keltham: "Well, I can see how the fifth-circle wizard could end up quite wealthy that way, but surely a shoe-seller must be much wealthier still. After all, while most people probably don't use Teleports, everyone needs shoes, and the shoe-seller can charge whatever they want for them."

lintamande: "...you don't have to have shoes," says Tonia.

Keltham: "I bet the fifth-circle cleric wants shoes, though, so maybe the shoe-seller can set shoe prices incredibly high and capture all the money the cleric got by Raising Dead."

lintamande: "Well if he can Raise Dead he can also cast Mending on his own shoes, or buy them secondhand off someone else, or go disguised so the shoeseller thinks he's just a random laborer."

Keltham: "Yes, people often do have a lot of other trades they could make, or other people they could trade with, if somebody else tries to capture too much of the gains from trade. You want to give them some incentive to stick around, and keep playing the game."

lintamande: "Sure. The shoeseller mostly picks his prices but he doesn't have absolute power or something." Absolute-power: a simple two-syllable word in Taldane.

Keltham: "Does he not? He can just put up a sign saying the price is now a hundred million billion gold pieces. Nobody can stop him."

lintamande: "The costs of finding some other solution are high but they're not that high. He gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade as long as the gains-from-trade are smaller than the cost of going to the next town over or something for a cobbler. But in practice they are, so he gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade."

Keltham: "All right, if that's really true, I'm now a bit confused. If I imagine how much value everybody in a town gets from having shoes, compared to not having shoes at all, it seems like it should be an amount more than ten times greater than the amount to set up a new cobbler's business. And how is the cobbler capturing most of the gains from trade when he's selling shoes to the cleric, who might be deriving ten thousand gold pieces of value from being able to wear shoes at all?"

lintamande: "The cleric buys his shoes in the city, when he gets called into the city on important cleric business," says Tonia. "And how would you set up a new cobbler's business, you don't know how to make shoes, and if you tried he'd just lower his prices until you starved, and then go back to raising them."

Keltham: "Okay, so... you don't actually have the thing, where everybody getting ripped off would pool some money, start a new cobbler in business, and refuse to buy from the other guy for a while even if he lowered his prices."

lintamande: "Pool what money," says Tonia.

Keltham: "The money that everybody in an entire city would have otherwise needed to buy overpriced shoes."

lintamande: "Twenty households in a village. The poor half haven't got any savings. The rich half have a couple of family heirlooms they'll sell if it's a drought, and a healing potion for if the woman's dying in childbirth and the cleric's out of town, and they don't even use it if the baby's dying, no one's so rich to use healing potions on babies."

Keltham: Keltham closes his eyes for a second and reminds himself that afterlives are a thing and you can talk to the people in them right now. It's not like the babies are being cryosuspended.

Keltham: "A village that size shouldn't have its own shoemaker, then, unless shoes wear out really fast. You buy shoes in town when you go there to sell whatever you make, or the person who buys whatever you make in the village, brings shoes over to sell when he travels to pick it up. Or am I wildly off-base on how that would have to work?"

lintamande: "...that is a town, twenty households."

Keltham: Twenty families is a RELATIVELY LARGE GROUP HOUSE.

"Pretend I just said city, instead of town, then."

lintamande: Tonia shrugs. "I don't know how it works in cities."

"Shoesellers compete in cities," Meritxell says.

Carissa Sevar: "But eighty, ninety percent of Chelish people live outside the cities," Carissa says. It's true in Taldor and she looked up whether it was true in Cheliax, too, because it might be an important difference if it were different, and Cheliax keeps but doesn't publish statistics on that and it's also true in Cheliax.

Keltham: "No, I mean, does a town of twenty households have one person who's a shoemaker."

lintamande: "Yes," says Tonia. "He doesn't only make shoes, he works in the fields at planting and harvest time just like anyone who can walk, and tans leather for the shoes but also for anything else you want leather tanned for, but yes, the town has a shoemaker, because it's too far from a city for people to go there for shoes. People farther out come to the town for the shoes."

Keltham: "And this person is much richer than everyone else in the town because he can charge whatever he wants for shoes? Serious question, I am actually trying to grasp how Golarion works here."

lintamande: "No. He can charge whatever shoes are worth to people but that isn't enough to make him rich because no one else has much to spare so shoes aren't worth all that much to them. He's richer than people who have to buy shoes from him, mostly. And then he just gets spread out more ways because more of his kids live." Unless he kills some but Tonia has learned they don't do that in Taldor.

Keltham: "I have a sense that there's some breakdown of communications here, and I hypothesize that maybe it's a missing concept of consumer surplus as distinct from usual market prices being what defines gains from trade. As we would put it, the consumer value to you of shoes isn't the amount you'd usually pay for shoes like that in a market, it's the amount you'd pay not to be forever forbidden from wearing shoes ever again, if there was some powerful anti-shoe magic otherwise about to afflict you, and you had to pay a fourth-circle wizard to counterspell it before it took effect. In dath ilan, we'd usually expect the consumer value of an item to be noticeably higher than the selling price. The distance between consumer value and selling price is the consumer surplus, the amount of the gains from trade that goes to the consumer."

"The market price of shoes should settle somewhere not too far from the costs of making leather and going to cobbler lessons, not settle at nearly the absolute maximum price that anybody around would pay to be allowed to ever wear shoes again. So people are noticeably better off because of shoemakers existing at all, rather than being only a tiny bit better off because the selling price of shoes is so astronomical that it cancels out almost but not quite all of the real benefit that people get from shoes."

"Or, that's how we'd expect it to be in dath ilan."

lintamande: ".... if there were some powerful anti-shoe magic about to take effect you'd still only have enough food to maybe make it to spring if you're lucky, and nowhere near enough to pay a fourth-circle wizard for anything," says Tonia. She's not sure this is a productive argument but she's pretty sure it's not a revealing one.

Keltham: "I want to ask about a generous fourth-circle wizard who offers to cast the anti-anti-shoe-spell for just one gold piece, but I'm guessing you'll say that towns settle into an equilibrium where nobody has a gold piece to spend on anything, because, if they did, one more of their kids would have lived and that kid would now be eating more food. This, unfortunately, makes it harder for me to define the concept of consumer surplus around a counterfactual willingness to pay any more."

"So suppose instead I tell you that consumer surplus is the amount that people would be sad if shoes stopped existing. They would, on the one hand, be happy never to pay for shoes again, but, on the other hand, they would be even sadder than that, because the shoes were worth more to them than what they paid. We in dath ilan would expect people to be a noticeable amount of sad, rather than just shrugging because they were only barely in favor of paying for shoes in the first place at standard shoe prices."

lintamande: "- all right. I think people'd be - a noticeable amount of sad, if the cobbler died. They'd say he was a lousy man and they don't miss him but they'd be worse off and not just barely."

Keltham: "...and then that town never has a cobbler again, and the surrounding farms who came there to buy shoes, just never get shoes again? I mean, is that what happens in real life when a cobbler dies?"

Keltham is CONFUSED by the part about them saying the cobbler was a lousy man. He notices the confusion consciously, then sets it aside.

lintamande: "I mean, usually he'd train his son, but I was imagining if he didn't train his son so people figured who knows if we'd ever get shoes again or just have to make our current ones last forever."

Keltham: "So there's, like, lineages of cobblers, each of which trains a single other cobbler to replace themselves, and if a cobbler dies out prematurely, all of Cheliax has one less cobbler lineage in it - where did cobblers come from originally? Wait, are shoemakers a particular kind of nonhuman?" Keltham is increasingly confused but that makes it all the more important to follow wherever this is going.

lintamande: "No? He can take some other apprentice if he wants but since it's good work he'd probably rather train up one of his sons, and there's certainly not enough money for two cobblers, so he only trains one. In the city probably cobblers take more apprentices."

Keltham: "And the town that lost its cobbler doesn't just invite in a new cobbler from the city, now that there's an unserved market there, because...?"

lintamande: "...why would anyone want to move to a village in the middle of nowhere?"

Keltham: "Why was the original cobbler in a village in the middle of nowhere?"

DOES GOLARION IN FACT HAVE MARKET EQUILIBRIA.

lintamande: "...he was born there?"

Keltham: "If cobblers live better lives in cities, he could move from his village to the city. If cobblers don't live better lives in cities, why wouldn't one be willing to move to the village?"

lintamande: "...people don't like moving?"

Keltham: "Okay, Golarion has some kind of problem I don't even know how to describe right now. I check my current guess that we are not talking about just shoemakers, here, this is also shirtmakers and basically everything else. Affirm?"

lintamande: "Spinning and weaving and tailoring everyone does at home," Tonia corrects him. "But...yes, affirm that it's much more general than shoemakers."

Keltham: "...What's spinning and how would you do weaving or tailoring at home at your current technology level?"

lintamande: "To make fabric," says Tonia, "you shear a sheep. Then you clean the wool and card it and then you use a spinning wheel to turn it into thread, and then you put the thread on a loom, and then you stitch it to make clothes."

Keltham: "These people are supposedly very poor. Where did they get all of this individual machinery for their personal house instead of having one machine time-shared among the whole village."

lintamande: "...it's not much machinery. And you want to be spinning all the time, pretty much, whenever you aren't planting, you wouldn't make nearly enough thread if you were sharing it around the whole village."

Keltham: "Where are they getting the power for this machinery? The town is on a river and all the houses are along the river and they all have waterwheels that capture the motion from the water to turn the - spinning wheel?"

lintamande: "....you turn it with a pedal."

Keltham:

Keltham: "I think that we should, perhaps, get back to the fundamentals of economics as applied to negotiation, so that I can sell Cheliax the general and specific arts of making more efficient machinery."

Keltham: Next up is going to be the Final Trade Offer Game, which shall henceforth be referred to as Ultimatum Game for brevity. One person picks a split from 0:12 to 12:0, the other person has to assent to it or both get nothing.

What do the Chelaxians make of this, one wonders?

lintamande: "It's the Rovagug situation," says Gregoria, "which you solve with an oath, if you're a god or a king or it's very important."

Carissa Sevar: - note to self which is coming too late to do any good figure out why Keltham shouldn't just ask them all for oaths because if he does that everything's going to fall apart or everyone be forsworn by the end of the day.

Carissa Sevar: "And which none of you have the training to do," she says, which is false, because they were just about to be deployed to the Worldwound, but she's pretty sure it is worth lying about.

Keltham: "I wouldn't have expected anyone here to know how oaths work, now that I think back on it using my current knowledge. That takes Law well beyond the level of the stuff I was just teaching you, along that same pathway, and I would've expected it to be straight-up too Lawful for Golarion period - wait. What does the Taldane word 'oath' mean to you? I know what it translates into in Baseline but that may be deceptive."

Carissa Sevar: No one else answers, probably because she's now established that they're lying and so they don't know how much lying they're doing. She isn't sure either. The Taldane books did mention people taking, and occasionally breaking, oaths of fealty but Taldor's not a Lawful country. - oh, there is an angle on making Keltham not want to insist -

"It is when you swear by your god to make a commitment in the way that gods make them, where you cannot be the sort of person who'd break them, and if you do break them you've betrayed Law enough you lose your afterlife and your soul goes to Abaddon and gets eaten. ...with some caveats."

Keltham:

Keltham: ...okay, in retrospect, the situation where he was doubting her intentions right after they met, where the alien with vital knowledge for her entire world expressed doubt about a statement she'd already made and knew to have been honest, might very well, for all she knew, have been that urgent, but FLAMING SHIT CARISSA.

Keltham: What even is the POINT of doing THAT if the alien doesn't KNOW THAT'S HOW IT WORKS -

Keltham: She didn't know he didn't know that was how it worked. Though, the absence of gods and afterlives should've been a hint -

Maybe she just didn't think of that fast enough. Time pressure.

Keltham: "I see," Keltham says rather shakily. "Well, no gods or afterlives in dath ilan, so we - try to understand enough Law that - we're governed by the same sort of Law that governs gods directly? Which dath ilani short of high-ranked Keepers can't actually do, but even at levels short of that, there's a shadow of the Law whose connection to us shatters a little more each time it's betrayed, not just for us, but all across everywhere governed by math, which is understood by society to be a serious affair. When people write novels about aliens attacking dath ilan and trying to kill all humans everywhere, the most common rationale for why they'd do that is that they want our resources and don't otherwise care who's using them, but, if you want the aliens to have a sympathetic reason, the most common reason is that they're worried a human might break an oath again at some point, or spawn the kind of society that betrays the alien hypercivilization in the future."

lintamande: Humans on Golarion totally do break oaths but the Chelish students think that anyone who wants to murder them all about it is pretty justified, though Asmodeus would probably collaborate with that entity on instead making them all stop by enslaving them.

Carissa Sevar: "I - am guessing, theological education doesn't mostly get into the details of this if you're training to be a combat wizard, but I think that - the thing you just said - is also a shadow of why Asmodeus was angry, when humans were given free will."

Keltham: "Not quite valid under my own utility function, but understandable for Asmodeus, yeah."

"Anyways. The Ultimatum game is the shadow of a situation that isn't rare enough, in real life, that you could afford to deal with it using solutions that require gods, kings, and risking your literal actual existence. What other solutions can you come up with?"

lintamande: "I mean, you can just have a reputation for turning down trades where you don't get much," Meritxell says. "Or if you expect to be deciding the split about as often as vetoing it you can try to specifically play nice with people who play nice with you."

Keltham: "Well, let's run a trial then and see who can end up with the most hypothetical jellychips after 5 rounds, everyone paired up at random in each round, all results of previous rounds public. That's not the same instruction or incentive structure that dath ilani kids get, their instructions are to seek more jellychips not the most jellychips, but frankly I'm curious what you peculiar aliens do if you get that instruction instead."

lintamande: The students offer and accept 50-50 splits all around.

Keltham: Keltham pauses them after round 1. "Nobody can end up with the most chips if you all do that," Keltham observes. "Don't get me wrong, that's fine for the real life situation and it's what dath ilani kids do with the usual instructions, but you can't play to get the most chips that way. If I already had money I'd offer an actual gold piece - or fraction of one, depending on how many I had - to the winner."

lintamande: "I'm not sure there's a strategy for ending up with the most beyond hoping other people fireball each other," says Meritxell. "Or offering out of context rewards for cooperation but I assume we're not supposed to do that either."

Keltham: "Well, I didn't tell you that you couldn't! The less a game is winnable by ordinary means, the more it's implied that maybe you're expected to go outside it."

"Why didn't anyone try offering a 7:5 split?"

lintamande: "If you accept that then you definitely lose the overall game, you're going to end up with a lower score than other people. And since you've lost anyway you might as well burn them to the ground so they know not to mess with you."

Keltham: "I see. I suppose the same would've applied to announcing that you wouldn't accept any splits less than 5:7? Anyways, among the tactics I'd try in that situation is offering to generate a random number and split 11:1 or 1:11 based on that, in which case we'd each have a fifty percent chance of winning the whole game, if we did it on the last round and nobody else had caught on earlier."

lintamande: "...no one would believe you that you really did that, though."

Keltham: "Ah. Clarification. It's not assumed in these games that you're supposed to roleplay being not trustworthy. Unless you've got a card from the older kids telling you to do that, but, at least at the age this game is usually played, they'd always tell you in advance if cards like that might be handed out. I didn't tell Meritxell to cheat, with the card I gave her, just for her to try to end up with more jellychips."

"Though in this situation, if it's the last round, there's not much of a loss from carrying out your part? If you both witness the randomness generation and it says you get the lower side of the split, failing to follow through at that point just causes nobody, including you, to be the winner. The game instructions don't say that you do any worse by scoring lower than average - you either win or don't win. It's a bargain where you don't actually lose anything from following through, even if you lost, which is part of the reason I'd expect it to work even in a lower-trust situation."

lintamande: "Oh, you mean if you use something publicly observable to decide which of you gets the split?"

Keltham: "Yeah, my - time-telling device that attaches to my wrist - would've done it, but that didn't follow me here. Anything with a precise physical symmetry will do, though, like if it's got two identical sides you can toss it upwards while spinning it, and you can both see which side lands facing upward."

"Totally random question I keep forgetting to ask, how do you tell the time around here?"

lintamande: "Wizards usually have mechanical timepieces because you want to know exactly how long until your spell runs out. Other people just go off the sun, mostly."

Someone produces a pocketwatch to show Keltham.

Keltham: "Yeaaahhhh I kind of need one of those, will talk to requisitions about it I guess."

"Anyways. The next step in the economics game would be one I don't see a simple way to play here; it involves a puzzle station that takes two players cooperating to win, and the two sides of the game vary independently in how much effort it takes to control that side of it. Once the puzzle is sufficiently solved, one player locks in a split from 0 to 12, the other player has to decide whether to accept that split, and the game station spits out jellychips if they do."

"The idea being, this is modeling two people working on a task together, only they're not putting in the same amount of effort. It's not easy to see from inspection exactly how much work the other player is doing. And then one of the players has to decide how to split the rewards, afterwards, and the other player has to decide whether to accept that, or if they both get nothing."

"What would you do, in that situation? What do you think we did in dath ilan, as kids?"

lintamande: "...I don't see how that game is any different than this one? Unless you mean there's not the reputational element."

Keltham: "You don't have an intuition that, in a game like that, the person who worked harder should get more jellychips?"

lintamande: Students glance at each other confusedly.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has literally no idea how Taldane students would answer that question so they'll just have to answer as themselves. "I mean, if it's a really atrocious amount of work and they don't do what they're supposed to in school just because they want to grow stronger, maybe they'll only be willing to do it if they're promised a certain number of jellychips in return?"

Keltham: "...do you have an intuition that in real life, if you cast a spell that was really difficult and exhausting to set up that morning, you'd want to charge more gold pieces for doing that."

Carissa Sevar: "...I mean, I'm going to charge as much as I can for any spell, right? If a spell is laborious, then probably it's also laborious for other wizards, so I can expect that fewer of them prepared it and that I can get away with higher prices, but if I try that and I'm wrong then I'll go on charging whatever price it sells at, or I'll stop doing it if it's not worth it at the price people want to pay me for it."

Keltham: Why are they so inconsistently economics?!?

"Suppose you're living in a multifamily home and there's this one big chore that nobody particularly wants to do, so everybody writes down their price for doing the chore, and everyone else pays whoever wrote down the lowest price to do it. There's no market in doing the chore, it's a one-time thing that's never going to happen again. You'd still write down a higher price for a chore you expected to need to spend more effort doing."

lintamande: For unclear reasons this example fails to land.

Keltham: "...suppose there's one job that's really easy and pays 1000 gold pieces a year, and there's one job that's really difficult and exhausting and pays 1003 gold pieces per year. You'd probably take the first job, even though the market rate for it is lower, because the second job isn't worth enough more to make up for the additional effort you have to put in."

lintamande: Yep, okay, they agree with that!

Keltham: "If you've got two wizards fighting two monsters to get to a pile of gold coins they're guarding," Keltham's rapid skimming has picked up that this is a thing, though why is a much deeper and darker and more confusing question, "and one monster turns out to be a much tougher fight than the other, would the wizard who fought the tougher monster expect more than exactly half of the gold coins?"

lintamande: ".....depends on the contract they had going in?"

Keltham: "Okay, and if a contract didn't just say to divide the coins evenly, and the two wizards otherwise had equal job experience, what would the contract say?"

lintamande: Most of these students have not actually met any adventurers.

Carissa Sevar: "Usually it'd say an even split, or an even split with the option to take it to arbitration if one party feels the other was shirking, or an uneven split because one put up the money for the expedition or had the tip on the password to the door or had the Teleport location or something."

Keltham: "So, the solution that dath ilani children immediately invent, is both kids say on a scale from 0 to 12 how hard they thought they had to work, and then the jellychips get divided in proportion to that. I mean, that wouldn't reliably work at higher stakes except between lovers or cofounders, and if you're doing something with a hundred people you need a more objective and third-party way to measure efforts, but - if two people were just tidying a friend's house for money, or some such - saying intuitively how much effort you put in and dividing the payment accordingly would be very ordinary? Do you have anything like that anywhere?"

Carissa Sevar: Obviously everyone would lie, to themselves if necessary, so it's an incredibly stupid system? She doesn't say that.

lintamande: "You don't want to reward effort," says Meritxell, "you want to reward results. If two people cleaned the same amount and one found it easy and one found it hard you don't want to give the one who found it hard compensation for their finding it hard! You might compensate them for the work but not for the effortfulness, unless you're their teacher or something and trying to build their character for some reason."

Keltham: "That works great and we'd do that as a matter of course, any time we had a reliable way of measuring how much work got done of how much intrinsic difficulty! When you're tidying a house, you can't measure area tidied to determine work done, it takes more effort to tidy a kitchen than a bedroom, and not in any standard way! If two people are going in without any prior reason to believe one of them is more efficient than the other, how hard they worked is an obvious if imperfect proxy for how difficult the job actually was..."

"I keep thinking that maybe the answer is that Golarion is a lower-trust society than dath ilan, and people are too scared the other person will lie about how hard the job was, or how good they are at it - which, I mean, you'd almost have to be lower-trust, given everything, but - that doesn't answer why lovers or cofounders or even just very good friends would never make an arrangement like that?"

lintamande: "I mean," says Gregoria, "they might? But you're not supposed to have lovers or cofounders in school, and you don't really have side jobs, so we wouldn't know, even if that's how some people do things privately."

Keltham: "...right. Well, dath ilani kids invent the 0-12 scale and divide rewards proportionally to how hard they thought they worked, and... that succeeds for them, their spoken intuitive estimates are usually pretty close to the actual difficulty calibrations on the machines. You have to hand out concealed cards telling some of the kids to be dishonest in their work estimates, if you want to break that up."

"It sounds like Cheliax might need to do other training differently, earlier in the sequence than this, if they want to get that same result with kids."

Carissa Sevar: "I think so."

Keltham: Keltham describes the sad situation which eventuates when you do hand out dishonesty cards to kids. They work hard, propose splits that they guess are fair, not being able to trust the other person, and then sometimes those splits get rejected. The kids get angry! There is shouting! They get sent home for the day without having a solution shown to them, because it's good for them to sometimes dwell with problems that don't get solved immediately.

(He doesn't tell them about younger-Keltham's emotional difficulties with being asked to act out a dishonesty card; he has a sense that Chelaxians would have trouble relating, for some reason. Maybe they'd say that even at age seven you should be able to understand that the game isn't real and just do what the card says?)

If Keltham has understood correctly, Cheliax considers the obvious game solution to be even splits of jellychips, irrespective of work difficulty; which is repeatedly randomly unfair, and hence asymptotically fair. Going into any one game, you are equally likely to get faced with a harder or an easier task for your fixed payment, and if you repeat that often enough, the expected unfairness as a fraction of all payments will drop as the square root of the number of repetitions. It's not actually too bad, as solutions go.

Still, if Cheliax already has a better solution to the dath ilani game, or to the real-world situation that it stands for, Keltham stands ready to hear it?

lintamande: Nope, that's Cheliax's solution.

Keltham: Keltham presents the standard solution (in dath ilan) to the Ultimatum game. If they offer you 6:6, accept with probability 100%. If they offer you 7:5, accept with probability slightly less than 6/7. If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly less-less than 6/8.

Does anyone want to try and guess the reasoning behind that solution, in advance of it being stated?

lintamande: "I see why it creates good incentives for the person who is deciding splits," Meritxell says. "...I don't see why the person deciding whether to accept splits or not has any incentive to do it, if they can't establish a reputation for it, and it's hard to establish a reputation for doing something sometimes."

Keltham: "Well, reputation-wise, it's definitely easier to have a reputation for doing something if everyone in your entire Civilization got trained to do it at age seven or eight."

lintamande: " - I see why you'd want to require everyone to do it, yeah. It'd be hard to catch them fudging, if we're talking about random peasants, but maybe that still keeps the incentives reasonable."

Keltham: "I think this is a place where I have the same reaction you had to burning down schools? People don't need to be required to behave like that to be accepted for residency in a city, it's just in their own interests to behave that way. Nobody wants to get a reputation as that weird person who accepts 11:1 splits and is very easy to take advantage of. At least, nobody I know wanted it." Limyar doesn't count, he was totally trolling.

lintamande: "The thing I'd expect people to be tempted to do, especially in a big city where they don't have much individual reputation, is make a show of using the randomization but take the split ten percent more of the time," says Meritxell. "So you get a bit more money but it's not obvious you're doing something exploitable, which means it isn't exploitable. But obviously it's bad for everyone if everyone can predict that lots of people will do that, so we will be better served if the Crown prohibits that."

Keltham: "Suppose I put to you: Two gods interacting in the Ultimatum game would use the pattern I just showed you, even if they had no reputations and would never meet again."

lintamande: " - yes, of course."

Keltham: "Civilization in dath ilan usually feels annoyed with itself when it can't manage to do as well as gods. Sometimes, to be clear, that annoyance is more productive than at other times, but the point is, we'll poke at the problem and prod at it, looking for ways, not to be perfect, but not to do that much worse than gods."

"If you get to the point in major negotiations where somebody says, with a million labor-hours at stake, 'If that's your final offer, I accept it with probability 25%', they'll generate random numbers about it in a clearly visible and verifiable way. Most dath ilani wouldn't fake the results, but why trust when it's so easy to verify? The problem you've presented isn't impossible after all for nongods to solve, if they say to themselves, 'Wait, we're doing worse than gods here, is there any way to try not that.'"

lintamande: Meritxell looks - slightly like she's having a religious experience, for a second, before she snaps out of it. "All right," she says quietly.

Keltham: "Once you've arrived at a notion of a 'fair price' in some one-time trading situation where the seller sets a price and the buyer decides whether to accept, the seller doesn't have an incentive to say the fair price is higher than that; the buyer will accept with a lower probability that cancels out some of the seller's expected gains from trade. The buyer also doesn't have an incentive to claim the fair price is lower than they think it really is. The seller won't actually adjust their price, if they think a lower price is unfair, and the buyer will have to follow through by accepting with a lower probability, which destroys a big chunk of their own expected gains from trade, and doesn't get them a different price even if the random number says to accept."

"The initial notion of a fair price has to come from somewhere - from the part of yourself that initially suggested 6:6 in the Ultimatum game, which reflects a bit of Law I'll describe later - but once you get that notion of fairness from somewhere, and put a system like this around it, no seller has an incentive to claim an unfairly high fair price, and no buyer has an incentive to claim an unfairly low fair price. And if they happen to honestly disagree about that anyways, in some ambiguous situation, they'll still complete the transaction with very high probability so long as they only disagree a little."

"That, roughly, is how bargaining works in dath ilan over one-time trades: If somebody offers a price the other side thinks unreasonable, the other side says, 'That strikes us as an unfair division of gains, even if mutually beneficial as such; but if you made that your final offer, we'd generate a visible random number and accept with 10% probability'. And then the price-setting side can potentially offer further arguments about why the trade is more valuable than it looks, or make a better offer, or accept that low probability."

"The bargaining process Carissa described earlier, for selling my shirt, sounded like - people were probably trying to sort of flail at that underlying structure, by acting like they might be very unlikely to take an offer, or be moderately likely to take an offer, as they got closer to an agreeable price? But with a lot more... weirdness, acting, in Baseline we'd say 'LARPing'. Maybe because they think they have to pretend a lowball offer isn't mutually beneficial at all, in order to justify rejecting it; and also with some incentives to be misleading, because the underlying signals aren't as precise and legible as saying '10%'... and there's an incentive to exaggerate, but then the other side knows you're probably exaggerating, so you exaggerate even more, and you get people saying these exaggerated statements that both sides know aren't true, but there's uncertainty about how much the speaking side thinks they're really exaggerated, and modulating that uncertainty ends up being the medium of communication? At least, that was my attempt to decode what Carissa described."

Carissa Sevar: "That sounds right."

Keltham: "If I imagine trying to negotiate a 256-page merger between two large companies, with 1024 clauses, I can't actually see how the Golarion method would scale, if you don't know about explicit acceptance probabilities. Every time you wanted to negotiate one clause, you'd need to be ready to walk away otherwise, staking 100% of the success probability, because otherwise they don't have any incentive to give in. But there's no way that would scale across 1024 clauses without triggering once... maybe the walk-away claims are mostly bluffs," wow, what a concept to have a single-syllable word for, "but the other side isn't sure you're bluffing each time they call it? Does Golarion just not do large complicated contracts by dath ilani standards, or..."

Carissa Sevar: "I......I don't think you could have a contract with that many clauses, no. The Worldwound treaty has five. Wars are sometimes settled with lots of terms but generally only if one side gets to impose them and doesn't have to negotiate them."

Keltham: "Yeah, we go higher than five. And there's reasons we do that, because we're not fans of complexity that can be eliminated without cost; so it's not of zero economic importance to have contract negotiations that scale better. Subject of potential interest to Asmodeus specifically, or am I misreading the part where he's a god of contracts?"

lintamande: "Definitely of interest to Asmodeus," Meritxell says. Soul-contracts have a lot of terms and maybe Asmodeus is secretly annoyed that Chelish people don't negotiate them more but you know the standard works and devils can run rings around you, so it's stupid to, really.

Iarwain: You couldn't have covered this topic FUCKING YESTERDAY?

Asmodia realizes her hand is clenched into a white fist and quickly relaxes it before anybody sees, but with the connection to compacts finally spelled out, she can now see how, even if she wouldn't plausibly have suicided and gone to Hell directly, she could have sworn to do that with a probability, inconvenienced them with some probability, and had any negotiating leverage at all -

Too late. Why it is always, always, too late for everything.

Keltham: Keltham goes on to cheerfully describe how the dath ilani children, returned the next day and told of the solution to the Ultimatum bargaining game and the concept of fairness, now blitz through the previous emotional difficulties of the Uncertain-Labor-Difficulty Game.

No more anger and shouting! Yes, sometimes somebody says your offer isn't fair, and you say it is fair, and they generate a random number, and the random number says that neither of you get anything, and that is a little sad.

But you know that they didn't claim that unfairness in order to try and profit at your expense; you know the incentives weren't like that, for them.

And they know you didn't state your offer in order to try and profit at their expense; they know the incentives aren't like that, for you.

You know they know you don't have the incentive to cheat, so you know that when they state a higher price than you think is fair, and end up rejecting your offer, they weren't trying to punish you for trying to cheat with a lower price.

You can see how, if you kept on playing this game for a bit, pretty soon both sides would learn to converge on a similar concept of fairness, and fewer offers would get rejected.

lintamande: "....does this actually outperform continuing to split evenly, though? Since sometimes offers get rejected - I guess continuing to split evenly doesn't appropriately train skill in - having a shared concept of how labor translates to offer distribution? And it's good for people if the whole society has a shared notion of that? ....what goes wrong if the whole society's shared notion is in fact 'effort doesn't matter only outputs'?"

Keltham: "Well, there's two components, I think, to my answer to that."

"The first answer is that outputs aren't always legible, and then you have to appropriately incentivize people's fairness on valuing the outputs. In the version of the training game that the kids got, how much effort they had to put in wasn't fully legible, but the outcome of the game being won was visible and unmistakeable. But suppose somebody is making a shoe; how good of a shoe is it exactly? Maybe you could pay a trained third-party shoe-evaluator to come in and say exactly what they thought it would be worth, but measuring your output objectively like that is expensive. What we have instead is the partially legible output of a shoe, where the quality of shoeparts or the evenness of the make or whatever it is that people value in Golarion shoes, might not be clear and objective to the point where the shoemaker and shoebuyer couldn't possibly disagree on it. So then they need to both reason in a way that incentivizes fairness from the other, without everything shattering with probability 1 in the presence of a small disagreement."

lintamande: "- like they're already doing, when they barter over the shoe, but properly. That makes sense."

Keltham: "The second component - is something where I feel more like I know what my teachers would say, than like I really know the answer." (These, of course, are vastly different internal subjective sensations that no dath ilani would confuse.) "What I think they'd say is that the amount of human interaction and endeavor where we mutually benefit one another, in a way that we negotiate explicitly, where we could possibly pay to have a third party evaluate the outputs, is the tip of an ice floe... you don't have much ice here. Is the thin tip of a pyramid, whose much larger base is all the places where people cooperate with each other without explicitly negotiating a price in money. Can I arrive a little late to our meeting? Oh, sure, they say. Somewhere in the back of their mind, you expended a tiny bit of your social currency with them, and they now think you owe them a tiny bit of debt or cancel a tiny bit of debt they used to consider themselves to owe you. And you'll also keep track of how much you fairly owe one another in implicit favors like that, and if the two of you disagree on that a little, it should only cause a breakup with very small probability, but if the divergence gets wider, maybe the two of you don't want to deal with each other anymore. When you don't even stop to negotiate and no money changes hands, matters are in a much less legible place still, and you're relying to an accordingly greater degree on people being implicitly fair in how they reward effort or output, which means that the surrounding structure which incentivizes that implicit fairness matters even more."

"I'm sort of skeptical about to what degree you really need all those implicit exchanges, and couldn't maybe just pass small bits of money back and forth more often, like maybe in the world made of Kelthams they just do that. But also I've never tried it, so maybe my imaginary teachers are right in what I imagine them saying, that it wouldn't work, or it would just be more inconvenient without helping much."

Carissa Sevar: Maybe all of this is hacked together because you can't just light people on fire a bit when they deserve it? ....she should not discard any pieces until she's totally sure she understands how they function, though.

lintamande: "So in the example with your shirt," says Meritxell, "the other person just says out loud 'I can make 10million gold pieces with that shirt' and you just say out loud 'I value it one million gold pieces' and then they do some math and figure you'll accept a trade of 5.5million or trades of less with less probability. But what stops them from saying in the first place 'I can make five million gold pieces with that shirt' when they can make ten."

Keltham: "At this point we're just assuming that you have any guess about what it's worth to them. Ah, but before I move on along the path, it seems prudent to include any warnings about stuff they warned us hard about, so..."

Civilization emphasizes really hard to kids at this point that, when you reject a 7:5 split with probability <6/7, you're not trying to spitefully punish the person, just make sure that their incentive curve slopes slightly downward as it moves away from what you think is fair. If you were trying to spite them in accordance with base instinct, you'd reject with probability a bit greater than 5/7, so that they lost almost as much as they tried to gain at your expense (even spiteful entities, obviously, will still subtract epsilon from their spiteful punishments to avoid the possibility of infinite resonating spitefights that even they don't want).

Keltham has no particular reason to think Chelaxians are likely to make that particular error, but dath ilan emphasizes it hard to children, so it's probably important or a plausible error that somebody might otherwise make.

lintamande: "....because there's no benefit in spitefully punishing shoesellers or fellow-students for wanting to trade with you?"

Keltham: "What would the benefit be? I think the point of the warnings is that there's this thing built into human nature where our ancient ancestors mated and reproduced under conditions where people hitting each other and hitting back was much more of an equilibrium, and now we have instincts that are about that. But incentivizing fair strategies in the Ultimatum game is not about that, it is a different structure that reflects a different bit of math than the non-ideal pseudo-equilibrium bit of math that got incarnated into hitting people back when they hit you. But-but it involves somebody else doing something you think is unfair, and then you make sure you do something that causes them to lose some expected value, even if that thing is just not trading with them. So it's the sort of thing that could map onto the hitting-back instinct, if you weren't specifically warned not to map it onto the hitting-back instinct."

"Imagine that room full of children if you told them that, any time somebody made them an unfair offer and tried to cheat them, they ought to hit back in a way that made sure the person lost even more value than they tried to steal, to teach them a lesson, no matter how much more that cost their own position in expected value. Those kids wouldn't grow up to be dath ilan's Civilization. Possibly they wouldn't grow up to be any civilization at all."

lintamande: The room full of Chelish students nods seriously. The children would try to hit someone and that someone would cave their skulls in and that'd be a waste of a lot of state resources educating those children.

Carissa Sevar: This is only true if you have a very limited conception of hitting back, Carissa thinks. She isn't sure, not yet, but - it really does feel like there's a way to lock an additional piece on, a way that you can get even cleaner and higher-performing results with fewer deals walked-away-from, less value left on the table. If you're not Good and unwilling to do anything that's punishment, if you think you have some duty to keep people in the game when in reality they were born into the game and the only way out of it is their utter destruction. The whole point of pain - possibly not the whole point of pain, but a lot of it - is that it's a deterrent that can be delivered without destroying any value at all. Dath ilan doesn't have one of those, so all the rules have to assume that there isn't one...

Keltham: Onward in the sequence. On the next day the children are introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game with tokens that produce varying quantities of jellychips in the presence of other tokens, and which, brought together in sufficient quantity, can even produce more tokens.

Despite everything the kids have learned, the game collapses quickly and with an escalating level of shouting. What do you guess the kids do wrong?

lintamande: " - tried to do central planning without a command structure?"

Keltham: "...you know, I think that thought never occurred to a single one of us. To be fair, we weren't paying very much attention at that age to how the Legislative or Executive branches of Governance were set up, but I guess we knew enough to elect a leader with some simple ranked voting system? It would have made sense to try that, not knowing any better solutions, but we didn't."

"What actually goes wrong is that children with rare tokens decide that rarity is the key determinant of fair cost, children with tokens that directly produce a lot of jellychips decide that direct jellychip production should be the starting anchor on price, and children with tokens that can help produce more tokens think their tokens are way more valuable than anything else around."

lintamande: It is good to hear dath ilani children described doing normal things like rationalizing their getting more stuff than other people.

Keltham: "Now, this is a problem mainly of the kids not having full power in their forward reflectors - that's the part of the brain that implements Wisdom, sort of, obviously it's more complicated than that. Adults could just notice that internal self-favoring influence and switch it off. When we get to the point of being able to run experiments like this in Cheliax with 18 Intelligence 7-year-old kids who've otherwise had an optimized upbringing, I predict that tapping them all with an Owl's Wisdom and telling them to try to avoid self-favoring biased estimates will be enough to get trade restarted."

"But that just leaves the obvious question - a biased estimate of what? What defines the fair amount for each child to get, based on the tokens they hold, if we assume in-game that it's fair for them to start out holding those tokens? There's no object-level effort, in this game, it's just about putting tokens down next to each other. Nobody can be said to be trying any harder, nobody can be said to be trying any more efficiently. The outcomes are perfectly predictable and perfectly measurable. So what's fair? How would Cheliax solve that problem? - or how would you do it, if you think you know a way better than Cheliax's standard."

lintamande: "You could - try to calculate what can be accomplished by all the tokens together, and then all the tokens minus any specific one, and that's that person's - share - though there's no reason to pay everyone that much - you could normalize it -"

Keltham: "Not bad! Especially for a first suggestion! Now suppose I arrange matters such that every token's marginal contribution, defined exactly as you defined it, is zero. Each of 12 people gets a token. Any number of tokens from 0 to 10 will produce 0 jellychips, any group of 11 or 12 tokens produces 12 jellychips. What now?"

lintamande: "...well if you were a god you could calculate the token's marginal value in all possible subsets of all of the tokens and do something with that. Which I mention only because sometimes apparently if gods can do it dath ilan can too," Gregoria says. She's pretty sure once you've sold your soul you can just say things like that.

"If all the tokens are identical like that you probably just want to split evenly - I know that was just for the example but it'd simplify the math you have to do in the version Gregoria just proposed, if you treat interchangeable tokens as having the same payout -"

Keltham: That was a faster progression to the Law-inspired answer than Keltham was expecting. Maybe something about the exact way Keltham asked the question managed to prompt that answer? Or maybe it really is the sort of thing where most arbitrary aliens will arrive at the same answer, which is a small piece of good news about the general cooperativity of Reality.

"Yes indeed; sometimes you can take an ideal-agent calculation whose naked specification is too large for even gods to compute, and either simplify it to an exact answer, or get a good and fast approximation of it."

Keltham whiteboards a sum over every possible permutation of 12 tokens, pausing to explain dath ilani math symbols like 'all permutations' and 'initial string up to first appearance of this symbol'. For every possible order in which the tokens could be arranged, consider the marginal production that token adds, on the step it's added. (0-10 produces 0, 11-12 produces 12.) Then, divide that sum by the number of permutations.

"This sum has 479 million, 1 thousand, 6 hundred terms," Keltham says. "I've already finished adding them up. How are you doing on that?"

lintamande: See if he'd said that yesterday no one would've bet against him being a sadist.

Iarwain: "The sum is also 479 million, 1 thousand, and whatever it was," Asmodia says. People who aren't Keltham can tell that she's not saying it as triumphantly as she should be; to Keltham she is liable to sound exactly like the same cheerful person as always.

Keltham: "Mm. And you got that by?"

Iarwain: "Dividing 479 million, which is what you said, by twelve, and then multiplying by twelve." If the others can't figure anything out from that it's their own damn problem.

lintamande: - that'd work if every term is one? But they just agreed it wasn't?? But it - averages out to one? But how would you prove that?

No one voices any confusion, because they're too Chelish for that.

Carissa Sevar: (Summary of what the fuck is up with Asmodia, from whoever is mindreading her, please.)

Iarwain: The poor dear really didn't want to go to Hell, tried praying to a nonspecific Good god to get her out of it in case Cheliax was lying about Good gods not doing that, and had an accordingly unpleasant evening afterwards. If they'd known this group was going to be anything more than a welcoming gift for Keltham, they would have done better screening on her.

Does Sevar want to pull the trigger on replacing Asmodia? There were over-one-half responses to Keltham that could allow one of the girls to later reveal she's a shapechanged adult.

Carissa Sevar: She's considering it.

It's more lying.

(and - a thing Keltham'll be mad about even if she manages to bring him around on Evil generally, someone directly ending up worse off, if he ever does find out)

(probably that doesn't matter because they're not going to be able to bring Keltham around anyway)

On the other hand you really, really don't want bitter children with nothing to lose around your highly sensitive research project.

The thing she wants is to talk to Asmodia but this isn't a non-heresy work situation at the Worldwound where sometimes someone just needs a drink and the casual but almost generous observation that they aren't special (and that therefore there are people who've survived being like them), there's too much at stake to go off her gut.

Do we have a replacement candidate. Give them that math problem and see if they get it right.

Iarwain: Oh, Asmodia has plenty to lose now. She did sign away her soul, as wasteful as that was, and her Hell can always get worse.

They'll try the obvious replacement candidates on that math problem.

(That is a significant ask, though. Asmodia had the best scores in math, if not in wizardry generally, for this whole group. If Asmodia had graduated normally she'd have been tracked for spell research and ritual support after her Worldwound tour, not Security. Target-replacing Security operatives aren't usually tracked for mathematical talent; they're not usually replacing mathematicians.)

Ione Sala: "The result has to be that," Ione states, "because everybody got the same kind of token, there are 12 jellychips to divide, there are 12 tokens, and obviously everybody should get one jellychip. So if we're dividing by the number of permutations, the numerator has to be the number of permutations too."

lintamande: "Well, yes," says Meritxell, "but if the reason we're learning it this way at all instead of just coming up with 'one jellychip a piece', which three-year-olds could do, is the permutations approach then we should be solving the sum instead of just noticing it has to get us the three-year-old answer. It does, though, since eleven in twelve of them are 'zero' and the twelfth is 'twelve'. ...I'm not sure that even gods are doing the full math all the time but maybe it's usually nearly that symmetrical."

Keltham: Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.

In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics?? Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479,001,600 possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.

Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.

Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious of a trend - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??

This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'

"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version. Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line. On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"

lintamande: "Two," they chorus cheerfully.

Keltham: "How could the answer possibly be two? There's four times three times two times one ways to pick the first person in the line from four people, the second person in the line from the three remaining people, the third person in the line from two remaining people, and one way to tack on the last person in the line. Four times three times two times one is 24. You get 8 jellychips at the end, if you get any at all. So the answer is going to be something divided by 24 different possibilities, maybe 8 divided by 24 or something like that, so the answer should be one-third. Or something with thirds in it, anyways, because you're dividing by 24, which has a factor of 3 in there."

lintamande: They stare at him warily.

"You're second in line a quarter of the time," says Tonia. "So it's two." Probably dath ilan does this kind of thing because of it being illegal to light anyone on fire so they have no other outlets.

dath ilan: (Illegal isn't quite the same concept when you don't have threats; but lighting somebody on fire would get you barred from most cities, yes, since most cities contain people who prefer not to be lit on fire.)

Keltham: "But how... does one obtain... that result?"

lintamande: "You take the payout, which is eight, and you multiply it by how often you get the payout, which is a quarter of the time, and eight times a quarter is two."

Keltham: Keltham furthermore suspects that Chelish education may also possibly put more emphasis on guessing the right answer for spell problems than on proving the answer correct. Which there's obviously a place for! In fact, if he were to treat them as kids, an old dath ilani rule implies that Keltham needs to find a problem that forces them to use a more rigorous method, rather than complaining that the correct answer was obtained too quickly. You are not allowed to tell a child 'That answer was correct but I want you to obtain it my way instead of your way,' that is not good for kids. And it's not actually clear to Keltham if that rule is supposed to hold relative to absolute age or to mathematical maturity.

"If there's twenty-four different ways to stand in line, how does it end up that you're getting a payout one quarter of the time?" Keltham tries instead. "Shouldn't it be more like 1/24 or something like that?"

lintamande: "There's not twenty-four different ways to stand in line! There are four places you can be in line and then you don't care what the other three kids are doing."

Keltham: "I am supposed at this point to find some actual problem which forces you to compute it out the long way, instead of complaining that you got the correct answer but you didn't get it the way I wanted, which I am not supposed to ever do. But I don't have a workbook full of carefully composed problems like I would if this were a real lesson, unfortunately."

"If we were trying to figure out your marginal contribution to a more complicated economic situation, though, the particular people ahead of you in line might be important -"

"You know, I should just give you a simpler problem that forces you to compute it the long way. Let's say there are three tokens with numbers that say 2, 3, and 5. Bringing a group of tokens together gives the group a number of jellychips equal to the product of every number in the group, so if you had the tokens for 2 and 5 together, the group would receive 10 jellychips."

"What does this method say is the fair distribution to the holder of the 5 token, if three token-holders pool 2 and 3 and 5 to get 30 jellychips for the group?"

lintamande: "So you sum up adding the five to nothing, adding the five to the two, adding the five to the three, and adding the five to the pool with the two and the three," says Meritxell, "and that's everything the five could possibly be worth in every world, and you divide by how many worlds there were."

Ione Sala: "Or if you actually bother to do the work, 5 plus 10 plus 15 plus 30 divided by four," says Ione. "So 15."

Iarwain: Asmodia rolls her eyes. "Really. What do the other two tokens get, then? The 2 and the 3?"

Ione Sala: Ione suspects a trap, and tries to rapidly work it out in her head. For the '2', it's 2 + 6 + 10 + 30, divided by 4, which is... damn it, this is harder to do in her head... 12? And for the '3', it's 3 + 6 + 15 + 30 = 54, divided by 4 is no it doesn't matter it's not all going to add up to 30. "Wait, I see my mistake -" Ione begins.

Iarwain: "Mistakes. Plural. The divisor is 6, not 4, and you're supposed to sum over the marginal productions rather than the total productions. If it's ordered 5-3-2, that's a marginal production of 5. If it's ordered 5-2-3, that's a marginal production of 5. If it's ordered 2-5-3, the product starts at 2, and goes to 10, which is a marginal production of 8. 3-5-2 goes from 3 to 15, marginal production 12. 2-3-5 and 3-2-5 go from 6 to 30, marginal production 24 repeated twice." Asmodia has been writing down these numbers, thank you, she is not trying to keep it all in her head without a Fox's Cunning. "5 + 5 + 8 + 12 + 24 + 24 = 78, divided by 6... 13."

She quickly checks the other two numbers to make sure she's got it right.

2: 2 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 15 + 15 = 42 / 6 = 7
3: 3 + 3 + 4 + 10 + 20 + 20 = 60 / 6 = 10

13 + 7 + 10 = 30. Okay, she didn't just make a (tiny bit, unimportantly, bigger) fool of herself.

Carissa Sevar: (Is she playing at anything, by being prominently the best at math today?)

Iarwain: The other students are trying as hard as they can at math. They don't believe themselves to have been instructed by you to diminish their math efforts as such. Asmodia is just better at this problem.

(Unfortunately.)

Keltham: "Yeah, the thing I was trying to force you to do with the four students in twenty-four possible orders was sum over the 6 possible ways you could be standing second in line, to make the point about how the sum is defined as being over every permutation. In retrospect, clearly, I should've started with the case of tokens labeled 2, 3, and 5, but I'm sort of making this up as I go along because it's been a few years and I don't remember some of the exercises let alone their ordering. Sorry about that. Anyways -"

"When you're trying to see if there's a way to do what ideal agents would do - or gods, if you think gods are powerful enough to be ideal about that particular case - you want to distinguish the Law that defines what the solution is, and any clever ways you come up with to compute the Lawful solution faster."

"When you've got 12 identical tokens, such that any group of 11 or 12 of them will produce 12 jellychips, there's a symmetry argument which says that each token must get one jellychip. If you thought there ought to be a coherence constraint on the Law of fairness saying that holders of identical tokens should end up with identical payouts, you could use that to compute the answer even if you had no idea what the actual Law was. Often when you do see how the Law works, you can go back over a lot of your intuitions, and say, 'Oh, yes, that intuition I had previously was shadowing this coherence of the Law, even though I didn't know how the whole Law worked' and that's a kind of sanity check on whether you're reasoning correctly at all."

"But the Law of fairness that defines the target answer for the '11 tokens of 12' problem is in principle a sum over 479,001,600 marginal productions, of which all but 39,916,800 are zero, and 39,916,800 of which are 12, divided at the end by 479,001,600. Which means that we can say there's a single ideal fairness formula that governs both the '11 of 12' game, and the '2, 3, 5' game, even if shortcuts or approximations for the particular cases of the formula can be different, in cases where a shortcut exists."

lintamande: "Which does imply that identical tokens will get identical payouts," says Meritxell. "Right?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not want the kids to be bad at math. Imitating being bad at math seems like another thing where the things Keltham would expect to be correlated won't be and he'll end up suspicious, which is almost definitely happening anyway but at least since it's the product of their real legitimate math education it'll make more sense to him as he learns more.

Carissa wanted to know whether Asmodia was being impressive on purpose because an Asmodia who is trying to get Keltham's attention, or an Asmodia who is trying to be hard for Cheliax to replace - an Asmodia who has started playing for her survival against the project's interests, more than everyone in Cheliax is doing all the time - is a different problem than an Asmodia who is doing her best but bitter because she had been consoling herself that Cheliax was lying about Good and they turned out not to be. She thinks a disillusioned angry-at-Good Asmodia is probably usable. She is open to learning from someone with more experience with this, though.

Iarwain: This is her being weak and reactive, not strategic. And she's quite pissed at the Good gods, yes.

(Security doesn't explain why.)

Carissa Sevar: It's not really the kind of thing that requires explanation! The Good gods suck.

Carissa tries to think what Maillol will think if she tells him that she wants to try to talk Asmodia around. It would be nice if she could predict what Maillol thought about things so she could stop bothering the real one so often, but he still surprises her as often as not, and she isn't sure if he'll think this is Carissa being inexperienced at having a real command and accordingly stupid, or Carissa having weirdly good instincts because Asmodeus dropped Keltham near her for a reason.

...she should focus on the lesson or she's going to get behind. And then Keltham will think she's kind of stupid, which ....might be good, if it means he thinks she's not a ringleader, but would interfere with attachment to her, she's pretty sure. Lesson it is.

Keltham: "Yup. Identical tokens getting identical payouts is one of several coherence properties that this solution has, called 'equal treatment of equals'. Another example of an obvious coherence property is that the sum over every agent's fair distribution equals the total distribution - we don't have any jellychips left over. Yet another coherence property is that combining two games into a single game will make the agent's fair reward be the sum of their fair rewards in the component games. Or another obvious-sounding one, if your marginal production is zero for every permutation, your fair reward is also zero."

"Would you say those four properties sound like properties that any fair formula for a game like this one ought to have? Again, that's identical agents being treated identically, distributing all of the gains, the reward for playing two games is the sum of the reward for playing the games separately, and agents who contribute nothing receive nothing."

lintamande: Those seem obviously true but there's still a suspicious pause while they try to think of counterexamples.

Carissa Sevar: "Did we get a technical definition of a fair formula such that 'split the rewards evenly', which does not have the last of those properties, gets disqualified?"

Keltham: "Oh, at the moment, we don't have any technical definition of what fairness is, really, just this one permutation-based formula I gave you which I claimed might have something to do with fairness, and four particular properties that might seem intuitively appealing for a fair solution. So at present, we could at best say that the supposedly fair permutation-based formula doesn't split rewards evenly; and that splitting rewards evenly violates the intuitively-appealing fair notion that zero marginal production should receive zero reward."

Carissa Sevar: - nod.

Keltham: "Buuut, it just so happens that this here permutation-based formula is the only possible formula that has those four properties. Which is why, if dath ilan ever runs into aliens, they'll be at least sort of hopeful that the aliens also think this is the fairness formula as specialized for crisp games like these."

"This is how humans, from their chaotic beginnings, come to know Law. There's a sort of - bootstrapping, reflection, seeing something inside yourself - where you recognize the higher pattern and coherence within your own intuitions - where you find four crisp requirements that seem obviously, intuitively like they should hold if there's any way to get them, that appeal to the pre-Lawful notions inside you - and those four crisp properties pinpoint and identify a single possible Law - and then you look back at the intuitions inside you, and say, 'Oh, so that's what it was reflecting, that's what it was a shadow of, all along.' You didn't know that Law when you first saw the Ultimatum Game, but you gave that Law's answer of 6:6."

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar: Imagine having that, having the true Law, and thinking you'd also better not hit the kids or they might decide it's not worth going to school. Chelish children will march through fire for that, and that's why Cheliax is going to win.

Keltham: "And so long as that gets transcripted and sent out soon enough, hopefully nobody from Chelish Governance gives me a completely baffled look if I say that my baseline fair share of an increase in Chelish production ought to be around roughly the amount that Chelish production would've increased by adding me in the alternate world where the country had randomly half of its current people, or gets confused and worried if I say that a proposed contract clause would be annoying enough in a final offer to make me visibly generate a random number between 0 and 999 and walk out on Cheliax if the number is 0."

"Now it's time for a break, or it would be in dath ilan, anyways, and it so happens that I hailed from there. I'll take some questions, and then probably go off by myself for a bit to let my brain cool down from recomposing half-remembered lectures - metaphorically speaking, the brain doesn't actually overheat when you overthink unless something is going very wrong inside. Dath ilani best practices would provide you with a small snack and suggest that you stand up and walk around. Maybe a brief magic-practice session after this, to break things up? Anybody who doesn't want to teach me magic, which doesn't need to include all of you, could take a longer break, that way."

"Any questions?"

Iarwain: "I do have some snacks if we should all have snacks," Pilar says, taking a pouch of small Chelish sweets from her bookbag, wearing a cheerful smile. She starts going around and distributing them to everyone, Keltham first.

lintamande: But is she going to give them to the mysterious slave.

Iarwain: Yes, apparently.

Keltham: Keltham consumes his sweet. Not bad for this tech level!

Carissa Sevar: "Thank you, Pilar. I'm going to go get my headband," Carissa says. "Probably I'll come to magic lessons but don't wait on me, I might want to reread all my math textbooks first or something."

Keltham: No questions? Keltham doesn't know whether that lecture was much less exciting for them than it was for him, or if there's a cultural difference that makes Chelish students ask a lot fewer questions than dath ilani would.

Well, Keltham heads off to his bedroom.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom follows.

Keltham: Sighgreat.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Why did you say that you needed to destroy those papers before the universe noticed them?"

Keltham: "It was almost entirely a joke but in the unlikely event it's not then you wouldn't actually be helping by calling attention to -"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Apologies," Broom says, and immediately turns to go the other way.

Keltham: ...okay, maybe that guy is some sort of Keeper.

Keltham goes to his bed, lies down, and closes his eyes for a quick rest.

lintamande: Meritxell does not eat Pilar's sweet on general principle, and goes back to her room to put away somewhere where she can check it later for being weird in some way. Security wouldn't let Pilar poison them but it could totally be weird in some way.

Iarwain: "Anything you feel like reporting to Security?" says Rodez Balaguerre, who's leaning against the wall of a passage along the way.

lintamande: "Pilar's being weird, Asmodia's being weird, there's a slave attending classes, I don't understand why Sevar's in charge." She holds up the sweet, not quite offering it to him. "This is a very educational environment. Am I forgetting something?"

Iarwain: "Oh, Pilar's being weird? How so?"

lintamande: "She got Sever a cake. And offered everyone, including the slave who is attending classes, these." Neither of those things are heretical but they're absolutely weird.

Meritxell isn't feeling particularly afraid. It is possible she forgot something, in which case she'll rightly be in a lot of trouble, but she doesn't think she did, because she has a very good memory, and one always might get in trouble anyway but there's no point being afraid of that, it'd be like being afraid of rain. One thing her mother always told her was that everyone is powerless but only some people are scared.

Iarwain: "Oh, I see. Good on you for informing Security about those anomalous, surprising events as soon as you reasonably could. When did those events happen, by the by?"

lintamande: There is also no point in trying to defend yourself against the unreasonable implications of things people are saying, any more than you would argue with the clouds about whether they ought to bring rain. "Pilar provided the cake at the start of the day, and the sweets at the conclusion of the lesson, about two minutes ago. The slave showed up at the start of lesson, with Keltham's knowledge. And Sevar's, I think. Asmodia's been weird, uh, more subtly than that, but it was most noticeable in the last half hour of the lecture."

Iarwain: "Take off your left shoe."

lintamande: It seems unlikely that Security wants them all running off to report at the start of lunch on things that Security already saw, which makes it correspondingly more likely that Security's just in a bad mood, but there's no point in being afraid either way. - though the second possibility does suggest more options. She keeps her eyes on him while she lifts her leg to remove her shoe. "I don't suppose Security's allowed to explain things to us."

Iarwain: Rodez Balaguerre breaks her little toe, not in a particularly unfriendly way.

"This is a mission for big girls," he informs her. "You are not adequately prepared for it. You were intended as a welcoming gift for Keltham. Somehow you've ended up with a great deal more responsibility than that. This will require rapid retraining."

"Pilar is now an oracle of Cayden Cailean. That's the Chaotic Good god of drunkenness, if you're too loyal to know. It happened moments before Pilar could sign her soul contract. Mindreading shows that Pilar didn't want that at all, and that her request to be Maledicted if she needs to be executed was completely sincere. This matches up with earlier records of Pilar's thoughts being read, and is not currently thought to be an oracular power for evading having her mind read. Orders are to consider her an Asmodean in good standing, for now."

"Her giving cake to Sevar was a manifestation of her oracular curse, as was her distribution of sweets."

"You failed to report the former event for the entire length of the morning. Had Security not known about this matter already, and had the Security officer present also failed to take explicit note of the anomaly as every one of you did, your failure to note Pilar's unusual behavior and report it to anyone, would have meant ignoring signs of a catastrophic underlying problem."

"You can have that toe healed at the end of the day, or earlier if Keltham suddenly wants to sleep with you for some reason. Meanwhile, it is expected to provide you with a recurring reminder of the new level of Security awareness that is now required from you."

"Broom is here by direct authorization of the Grand High Priestess and belongs to a Lawful Neutral god whose work conduces to Asmodeus's purposes. He is not authorized to give you orders and you should show him neither deference nor disrespect."

"Highpriest Maillol has decided that Sevar seems to have the best current understanding of Keltham of anyone present, including himself. In the unlikely event that you prove to understand Keltham even better, Maillol might put you in charge instead. Try sabotaging Sevar to make yourself look better by comparison and Maillol will hurt you enough to mildly improve your soul before sending it onward to Hell."

"Asmodia earned a punishment the previous evening but is not currently considered by Security to be an ongoing problem."

"You're done here. Put your shoe back on."

lintamande: - fair enough. "Thank you," she says sincerely, and puts her shoe back on, and determinedly walks without a limp down the hallway, though it takes a great deal of effort.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa notices herself feeling wary as she approaches the temple, which is probably that human flaw Keltham identified earlier where if bad things happen to you in a place your idiot brain will try to conclude the place is bad. She wouldn't have noticed before, but she's paying more attention to her flaws, lately.

However this is probably not the moment to try to fix them. She'll just go in and learn what ridiculous things have happened in the last three hours and get her headband and figure out what to do about Asmodia.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol will have a chat with her that is a lot like the one that Rodez Balaguerre just had with Meritxell. It will involve Maillol taking hold of her arm, breaking her wrist, and shaking it for emphasis while he lectures her; but he'll heal her afterwards, unlike the other girls, because he does not want Sevar distracted on an ongoing basis or Keltham noticing anything if he suddenly drags her off for a quickie.

Nothing horribly unexpected has happened in the last three hours. Nobody is to make any humorous comments about that because nobody is to tempt fate.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would not even consider making comments about that. Fate is clearly already incredibly tempted around here, despite having as far as anyone knows been extinguished a century ago.

'

She puts her headband back on. It's nice how she's not going to have to take it off this time.

There's no arguing that the girls are all in over their heads. She's not...actually sure that Security and Maillol are less in over their heads. Contessa Lrilatha didn't seem in over her head and the Queen didn't seem in over her head and Aspexia Rugatonn didn't seem in over her head but everyone who isn't on that level ...might, in fact, be in over their heads.

Well, she always wanted to be that good.

It's pretty obvious with a headband on that having a headband on isn't anywhere sufficient to achieve that. She's not sure a +6 headband would be, and while Wisdom might be more useful than Cunning it doesn't solve the problem either. The fundamental thing is that they're trying to do something very hard with little margin for error and at least one god actively opposed to their efforts, and while obviously being smart is necessary for handling that.....

...Nefreti Clepati isn't dath ilani. Being smart doesn't even mean automatically deriving all the Law and becoming one with it, within the range that humans are capable of making themselves smart. What she knows now is what dath ilan taught seven year olds in a couple days of classes, and while she can feel that it has not only cleared up her confusion about what bargaining is, that it has lit a torch that casts some light on a dozen surrounding things, she can mostly only see everything she doesn't yet know.

But Keltham likes her. And if he gets bored in a week then the other girls will be a week more prepared for Keltham to like them. And while she tries to maintain realistic expectations about how long he's likely to take to get bored, her actual honest guess, now that she's smarter, now that it's a bit easier to split out which predictions are defensive-predictions so she won't be sad about whatever happens - what a flaw to have in your brain -

- her actual honest guess is that he won't get bored in a week. That he'll pick up additional girls at some point, because variety is highly motivating, but that she's already not interchangeable, to him.

For some reason this feeling makes her wish that she'd fixed the Queen's bag so it could hurt her again. However, not flirting with the Queen was the smartest call she made this morning and she's going to persist in it even if it would be really nice to be in a lot of pain. And she's not quite on terms with Keltham where she could run up to him and say 'for reasons I can't tell you, I want you to break all my knuckles with a hammer' - he's not even there yet, he wouldn't enjoy it -

She gives herself five minutes to spend staring out the window and daydreaming about things to tell Keltham to seduce him to Evil, and then tries to steer her mind back on to business. ...it's probably too late to pull Asmodia aside in a not-maximally-threatening way but she'll see if she happens to be able to catch her.

Asmodia: It's way too late to catch Asmodia without a broken toe that hasn't particularly improved her mood. It's been improved even less by being told in a smiling way that children will be children, but it might be unwise for Asmodia to fuck with Pilar like she was thinking about, considering that Pilar now has an extra two caster circles on Asmodia plus unknown Chaotic Good powers plus Security knows Pilar is more loyal than Asmodia is probably capable of.

She's not bothering trying to walk without a limp if Keltham's not around.

The food here is substantially better than in Ostenso academy. She's gone to get a small snack from the refectory area; they've got some out, probably in case Keltham - or, she supposes, maybe some of the other people here - want one. Nobody's told her she can't.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa comes up behind her and takes one too. "Hey," she says. "You're not in trouble, or you might be but I'm not it. Do you want to borrow my headband?"

Asmodia: That's a very good way to get a wizard's attention, even under Asmodia's circumstances. She tilts her head to look at Sevar, which is the Chelish equivalent of whirling around in shock. "That would seem very generous of you," she says, meaning, why would you do that and what's in it for you.

Maybe this is a test to see if she is capable of learning literally at all and will now report to Security after Sevar acts weird.

Carissa Sevar: "Wouldn't it just. I was really annoyed, when it occurred to me as the way to get what I want, here. Especially because it only occurred to me with the headband on and I think wouldn't have otherwise." Wizards more inclined to poetry than Carissa have described taking headbands off - not +2, generally they're talking about +4, but still - as like 30% of the way to being dead.

"You can have it for the duration of the conversation and then long enough to look at my third-circle spells, all I want is for you to approach the conversation like I'm doing you a favor and will keep doing that if it works this time."

Asmodia: "Accepted," Asmodia says unhesitatingly. She has no idea what it's about, but the offer is, she suspects, intended to be more-than-fair; if so it makes that point well enough.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa takes her headband off and tries not to make a face about it. Hands it over.

"I noticed you were in a bad mood today," she says. "Keltham didn't, or this would be a very different conversation, and perhaps you will get it together by the time he's competent to read us at all, but I noticed. And, you know, I'm not worried about whether your incentives are pointed in the right direction. You're not an idiot - you're very clever, actually, or this would also be a very different conversation - and we're the most carefully-corrected batch of wizards in all of Cheliax at present. But. We are working in adversarial conditions, here, Abadar is mad at us, and to succeed under those conditions our success needs to be assured from more than one direction. Cheliax is doing its Chelish best to teach you how to handle yourself here.

And dath ilan, if we were dath ilani students, would try to bribe you. On the utterly stupid assumption, if Keltham's telling it straight, that punishment doesn't work; or on the slightly less stupid assumption, if we figure the smart people in charge of dath ilan lie to their people as much as our smart people lie to us - and I don't think Keltham'd be very surprised, to learn that - that sometimes you hit a different corner of the motivational system, when you dangle a bribe in front of someone." She nods at the headband.

Asmodia: Asmodia puts on the headband. She's ever tapped herself with a Fox's Cunning, but there's said to be a subtle difference from the headband. That with spellsilver to anchor a more carefully refined enchantment than a hung spell, it can be smoother, more supportive, befitting something meant to be worn forever after.

...she can't really tell the difference, in the first rush of clarity, it feels half as intense as Fox's Cunning but otherwise mostly the same.

Mostly her newfound clarity is agreeing with her prior impression that, yes, her life is a complete loss in which nothing good has happened to her, nothing good is ever going to happen to her, and all of her goals now consist of being tortured less and staying out of Hell for slightly longer.

It's definitely possible that having any prospect of anything good ever happening to her would hit a different corner of her motivational system. Dath ilan could be on to something there. Asmodia chooses not to say this out loud, where it would be a pathetic plea for help; if Sevar is running Detect Thoughts, which would be sensible of her, then she's welcome to the inward thought that isn't a plea for anything.

"Or, alternatively, we only got the lectures for seven-year-olds so far and dath ilan's reasoning will seem much more understandable after a full week of lectures," Asmodia chooses to say instead. "Irresistibly compelling, even, which I assume is why they had us sell our souls first." Why not Sevar, though, that makes no sense. "And Abadar's mad at us? That sounds important."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, see, we keep lying to his cleric. Keltham has - a bunch of divination, today. Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires. What do you suppose he's gonna turn up, if he casts those and looks at you?"

Asmodia: Asmodia doesn't laugh out loud. Even less so, considering how fucked she would be. And yet, somehow, it's still funny. What a lovely bed Hell has made for itself to lie in.

"Detect Anxiety might not turn up anything much, you can't be anxious about what's already happened to you. Detect Desires might pick up something Security doesn't want him to see." The desire to be somewhere else. The desire to not be herself. The desire not to go to Hell. Even with an intelligence headband on she can't think of a solution for that besides removing her, which isn't a good sign - no, wait, she's thought of one. "Should've written down on my paper that I'd have a more interesting background, some story that would explain why Keltham couldn't detect my own desires, if I'm about to get a blocking item for that."

Carissa Sevar: "Would've been a good idea. I haven't got Nondetection for you, but Security will. I'm not, actually, expecting him to try casting that one on a room full of students, given how some of his other spells have panned out - not today, when he doesn't recognize it - but maybe he'll surprise me." She smiles tiredly; it's not sincere, but the insincerity isn't really pointed at Asmodia. "Now, entertain me for a bit, pretend you're in dath ilan. What payment would you want, for this, such that you'd be glad on the whole that you were chosen for it, that you were born for it, such that if you thought of a way to make it go better you wouldn't just think 'they'll kill me if I don't'."

Asmodia: The thought is painful to glance in the direction of; Asmodia turns away from her first internal glance.

Her first thought is that she's being toyed with. That wouldn't be anything the least bit surprising, but right now it's running into a contradiction with something else.

"I could entertain you, if you hadn't exchanged a headband-borrowing for considering that you were doing me a favor," Asmodia says. "A little compact between us, probably a bad idea for me to break that." Can she, actually, if she's sold her soul to Lawful Evil?

Carissa Sevar: "Bore me, then, and give me a straight answer. Look, do I like you as a person? No, I'm not that impressed by mathematical ability I'll have myself once I have time to study with the headband on. Would I give you presents even if I liked you as a person? No. But this is either going to fail spectacularly, in which case we will all die very shortly, or succeed spectacularly, in which case I will be rich beyond my wildest dreams and powerful hopefully right up to and not beyond my ability to keep my feet under me. And if I can buy - with that future money that I only get if I win - the slightest sense, in your heart, that you want me to win, well, that might end up being worth quite a lot to me."

Asmodia: Asmodia's thinks that this is probably what it feels like to have somebody trying to buy your soul, before she remembers that already happened yesterday and didn't produce anything like this sensation.

It's pretty obvious to her what she wants, now that she stares in that direction.

It's the sort of thought that gets people killed, maybe even people who've sold their souls. Intelligence headbands are dangerous things; she doesn't feel like she'd have thought of this with the spell form of Fox's Cunning.

And having thought it, she's already fucked herself over yet again, and might as well say it to Sevar. "There's a story I once heard whispered about the Queen, that if you piss her off badly enough, she'll turn you into a statue and bury you far down enough that even the Hellknights can't get to you to free your trapped soul. I'd serve someone loyally if there was a realistic compact for that to happen to me, at the end of my life, if I served at some realistic level that's actually in reach for me."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa knows exactly what Keltham will see if he turns Detect Anxieties on her, because it hasn't left her mind since the Queen said it and she's pretty sure it never will, even if she succeeds beyond everyone's wildest dreams and gets a duchy out of it.

She doesn't say that. Obviously. But that leaves her - with absolutely nothing to say, nothing she can even really imagine herself saying. Her planned grateful exit was, 'I think I'll need the headband on to consider that', but she's not sure she can say that, about - about the desire not to be -

- also it's almost surely impossible, not threatening, or Security would have intervened.

"And here I was hoping you liked, you know, magic items, strangling puppies, that kind of thing. You know, if I had an aptitude for spell research and a terror of Hell, I'd work on permitted forms of immortality - powered by the hearts of babies or whatever. Figure out what the Starstone does to the people it eats."

Asmodia: Very few people ever pull off anything even close to immortality, and Asmodia is aware that she's not that good at math, to research something that very few wizards have ever figured out. A lot of people want immortality. Very few people get it.

Then again - the other form of the thing she wants - isn't something that a lot of people want. Maybe it's genuinely easier to figure out what the Starstone does to the people it eats, than to figure out immortality. Though you'd think, if it was easy to solve, that Galt would use that instead of their famous soul-trapping executioner's blade, which Asmodia isn't interested in because the Hellknights will get to it sooner or later.

"I suppose a slave's-bread version of that would be finding enough spells that destroy memories and rewrite personality that the person who goes to Hell isn't effectively me any more," Asmodia says, and feels a flare of awful hope as she does. "Remaking her to be a faithful Sarenrae worshipper might be funny, she'd be so surprised when she ends up in Hell." Because fuck Sarenrae, that's why.

Carissa Sevar: - giggle. "See, if you work out something like that, then you're not constantly constrained by who'll collaborate with you, because I don't think that's even slightly heretical. I know there's a ninth circle spell that lets you turn a person into a book, and edit it. I'm certainly not going to promise anything on the spot, but if you do a good job, and get us to pull this off, I would enjoy rewriting every page of your book."

Asmodia: Asmodia's wordless core pulls her thoughts back from a direction of looking, where if she actually thought of any way of doing the thing, Security would execute her possibly on the spot. She doesn't even think about where she didn't look.

(Fuck this! Fuck this again! The only consolation for selling her soul was supposed to be that she could finally think her own thoughts!)

"I'll think about it," Asmodia says after a lengthy pause. "I'd realistically - want to be rewritten as someone like Pilar who enjoys it and gets off on it and would do great in Hell, just in case it's still me in there no matter what. Going for contract devil when you grow up, are you?"

Carissa Sevar: "I'm going for getting to grow up. I can't say I can relate to not wanting that, but if you do a good job for me, I expect I'll arrange you any stupid thing that takes me less than a month of my time. That ball is in your court, though, presently. You'll have to go study dath ilani thought and convince me that an Asmodia who wants something is valuable enough for the no doubt unpleasant series of conversations it'll take to figure out a version of it I'm allowed to give you."

Asmodia: The subtlety of wording doesn't escape the notice of Asmodia wearing a headband. "Study dath ilani thought, not dath ilani knowledge? That sounds like a daring thought to think, for somebody who hasn't sold her soul." Who do you think you are, who are you in fact, to make promises like those? You don't talk like a Keltham expert that Maillol bestowed with a little more authority over the rest of us.

Carissa Sevar: "Asmodeus owns me, and owes me nothing in exchange, and I'll think whatever thoughts might serve Him, it being hard to know in advance of thinking them. Concern yourself with your fate, Asmodia, and if there's a promise it's worth making you then I'll tell you why I can promise it."

Asmodia: Asmodia gives a half-nod of acknowledgement; fair's fair, even if she couldn't say whatever Keltham would say about what exactly makes that be fair.

With a fraction of preliminary agreement to agree on something behind them, it's time to speak a little more frankly.

"What exactly are you looking for, from me? I thought we were here to coax useful information out of Keltham to get transcribed for the real experts. That requires us to look harmless to a dath ilani, to be pretty girls that men enjoy thinking they can teach, and to make fast progress and show it to him so he'll move on to more advanced lessons. If you've got priorities that aren't the project priorities, and involve dath ilani thinking that we were told on day one was insane, I need to hear spelled out what kind of merchandise you want me to have on offer. And then I need to hear confirmation that's okay from Security, with whom I'm not interested in being in trouble, though I'd agree to keep it secret from the other students if you wanted."

Carissa Sevar: Maybe it's not obvious, if the thing you want most is to stop existing. Why is that even a way humans can be insane. "I suppose I don't need to tell you this, Asmodia, but most people run into five kinds of heresy the first time they try having an original thought, and we presently have a problem that we can't solve without a fair bit of original thought. I'm not, of course, an exception, but I suspect that the five kinds of heresy I end up at are entirely different from yours.

I want you to think anyway. You can end all your thoughts in 'and this is why I want my soul expended for magical power by the darkest of sorcerers', if you want, I don't care, though do mind that your only route to that is to impress me. I want you to try to understand the math underlying Law well enough that if we end up sticking more headbands on you you can derive things dath ilan didn't get around to teaching Keltham. I want you to do well enough at that Keltham notices, ideally, but I actually think I care more about the math than the Keltham noticing, and if you hate the idea of him noticing you in particular you can feed all your clever mathematical insights to Meritxell." Who will absolutely hate not having come up with them herself.

Asmodia: Asmodia thinks the same thing, and doesn't suppress her small vicious smile. "Security, if you're there, I request confirmation that Sevar's sudden interest in Lawful Neutral thinking doesn't mean she got oracled by Irori, and that the Queen, the Grand High Priestess, and Asmodeus would be fine with this private trade."

Asmodia: A wizard remains invisible, but the spell hiding them and their Arcane Mark appear, as plain as sight to Asmodia without need of Detect Magic, which she prepared on sheer reflex this morning before realizing that she was being dumb.

Iarwain: "Confirmed," says Security. And, just to fuck with Sevar in an allowable sort of way, "If the Queen wasn't fine with it, she probably would've mentioned it when she visited Sevar's bedroom this morning."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa several weeks ago cared if her subordinates thought she was sleeping her way to the top but that ship has sailed, and circumnavigated the globe, and soared off to become an airship, at this point. Besides, sleeping your way that much to the top isn't even shameful. "So, I think I offered a look at my spellbook," she says instead.

Asmodia:
"Yes. It was, in fact, very generous of you."

Asmodia follows Sevar to her bedroom - not the first person to do that, apparently! But at the point where someone can nab Abrogail Thrune II while not looking any prettier than Carissa does, she is no longer a slut, she is a shapechanged ancient dragon slut with nine slut caster circles, and only a fool would anger someone who's as much of a slut as that.

And along the way, while she's still wearing the intelligence headband, Asmodia asks herself what she understands about dath ilani thinking. There's obvious notions like, they've developed some inner thing like arcane sight that pierces through the Prime Material like a realm of shadows and sees Mathematics underneath it, but Keltham already knows that and isn't being shy about teaching it to them. Figuring out what they lied to Keltham about, filling in the holes of his knowledge - there's some parts that are obvious if you were raised Evil, what a perfected Lawful Good society carefully hides from children and citizens of questionable loyalty: sadism, the possibility that you can hit people to get them to do what you want, that you can force people to go on playing games they aren't being bribed to play. If Asmodia has an advantage in figuring out something like that, it will be the math that they censored from him.

Is there any part of this that she has an elemental affinity for? The first day - wasn't an unhappy one, was as happy as any day in Cheliax ever gets, between the moments of anxiety and being sure that Keltham was fucking with them. They found out that it's possible to glance at a country of half men and half women, and pierce through the obscuring veil of matter to the Law behind.

And the thought occurs to Asmodia, then - if she is, for some reason, allowed to think about dath ilani thinking - that there's something about Keltham's dath ilani attitude in the face of difficult problems that's - indomitable? Wrong word, and maybe Taldane doesn't have a right one. Something that isn't expecting that students only get problems that they've been trained to solve. Keltham does ask if Golarion has already tried and failed to solve problems, but only to know how difficult they'd be for him to solve, not to consider whether they might be impossible. You never get the impression for a fraction of a second that dath ilan itself would respect all of Golarion's past hard work as meaning anything. Why should they, when Golarion could stare at a country of half men and half women for millennia, bargain over shoes for millennia, and never see the towering structure of Law barely a step out of vision, that dath ilani seven-year-olds learn about from older boys?

A lot of people in Golarion have tried to get immortality -

(or get out of soul contracts)

- but they weren't dath ilani.

If nothing else, destroying a soul - if Abaddon, or the Starstone, can do that at all - or just putting a statue somewhere it will never, ever be reachable again even by the Hellknights or Hell - really doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a class of dath ilani children would give up on, if a teacher gave it to them as a puzzle they didn't know how to solve.

(Though it sure would serve them right if there was also some way like that to destroy everything.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa gives Asmodia ten minutes with her spellbook and then requires her headband back. And perhaps they've missed Keltham's magic lessons, by now, but perhaps they haven't?

Asmodia: Asmodia would rather think by herself than be around Keltham right now, if that wasn't an order.

(she's having way too many disloyal pre-thoughts and should stay further from Security's focus until they go away)

Keltham: Keltham is trying to prepare Prestidigitation, this time, just in case he has more luck with other cantrips than Read Magic. It looks more complex, that doesn't mean it's actually harder to set up.

Ione Sala: Ione is in the library as always, running Detect Magic and trying to describe in words what she sees happening over the spellbook scaffold in response to Keltham's attempted motions. She hopes one of the people with actual arcane sight can stop pretending not to have it, so they can cast an illusion of what Keltham is doing for Keltham to see.

lintamande: Meritxell is present, trying to show it with thread, but an illusion would be a lot better.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has her headband back and likes it! Security having Arcane Sight won't be surprising to Keltham and leaves the option of claiming it's a ritual that takes a year or something; maybe one of them can cast an illusion?

Iarwain: Why would Security need to explain how Security's abilities work? It's probably just all magic to the weird ignorant kid. But sure, Security can do a realtime illusion of what's happening over the scaffold.

Keltham: "Wait, so that was possible for more experienced wizards, and people didn't think to ask Security then because they were being invisible all the time? I'd complain about all the time I expended with suboptimal efficiency yesterday, but that's actually kind of a hilarious Paranoia Cost and you get those when you're trying to be sufficiently paranoid."

Is Keltham having any more luck at spelling now that he can see what he's doing?

lintamande: He sure is!! Obviously eventually he's going to want an intuition for it but it's much easier to develop an intuition for it when you can see it.

Keltham: Is he having so much luck that he can actually hang a Read Magic or Prestidigitation cantrip?

lintamande: After a while more of fiddling with it, yes!

Keltham: Oh flamingpoop yes he's going to be a wizard! Being a cleric was fun and all (most of the time) but having his own magic feels a lot less like he's depending on somebody else's charity.

How many cantrips can Keltham get? He definitely needs Prestidigitation around for laundry but also hungers for Mage Hand and Mending and Message and Arcane Mark and Dancing Lights and -

lintamande: He can prepare four in a day; that's not a hard physical limit, there are clever tricks one can spend months to years learning to prepare six or eight, but four is standard once you have the basics down and going past four requires doing a ton more work on things like finding overlaps in the spells so you can stabilize them against each other which aren't worth Keltham's time right now.

Keltham: He can only prepare four a day, or only have four hung at a time? Do his two cleric cantrips count against the limit?

lintamande: The cleric ones don't count. He can only prepare four in a day even if he's let them go; if he tries, having let one go, to put something else in its place on the scaffold it will bend out of shape - actually, maybe he should try it so he can see -

Keltham: Sure, he'll practice catching Read Magic a few times, and then dismiss it if he hasn't failed accidentally after 6 casts. That spell doesn't obviously seem very useful, except that it was a spell whose look and feel he remembered.

Now prepare Mage Hand and Message. Then if he tries to prepare Read Magic again, he'll be past the 4-limit, right? What happens?

lintamande: The scaffold doesn't look the same as it did when he started; it's changed shape on him, in Security's illusion, curled and folded as he's laid spells into it. The place where he would've started building Read Magic, before, visibly isn't shaped like that right now.

Keltham: Keltham will mentally review whatever he's presumably already been told about how the scaffold knows how many cantrips he's prepared and why people don't just get another spellbook, unless nobody has explained this to Keltham at all, in which case Keltham will ask.

lintamande: The scaffold changes shape as the spells are built on it, because magic affects the stable-shapes for nearby magic. It was changing shape all along, it was just less notable because there was still some available spell-building space. You can get better at scaffolding so you have space for more (and more powerful) spells. You can get another spellbook and build another scaffold, which will come out identical to the one you've currently got because the interactions that are shaping it are part of you not part of the spellbook.

Keltham: Hmmm. Well, Keltham doesn't see anything promising to ask about that at the moment. Obviously he has unboundedly many questions like 'Do the Very Short People get fewer cantrips, by way of checking that it's nothing to do with spatial volume of the caster?' or 'Even if the limit ends up being 4 for almost everyone, can you detect subtle changes in how fast and how much the scaffold collapses which vary by say somebody's cranial volume?' But not actually anything that's, like, important. Well, unless -

"No such thing as a magic reset, where you hit me with a powerful dispel that blows away all my current wizard spells and whatever sort of internal magical changes correspond to my having already prepared spells? Don't actually do that now unless you're sure it doesn't get my cleric spells too."

lintamande: "There are spells that can do that, but that take a couple hours to do so; they don't work on the same person repeatedly in short succession. They wouldn't hit cleric spells. They mostly intensely compress the process that happens naturally in deep sleep that relaxes those internal magical charges."

Keltham: "Worth trying to prepare a first-circle wizard spell, or don't even bother until I've prepared cantrips for a few days?"

lintamande: "You have to learn a bigger scaffold. Probably not worth it today."

Iarwain: A tall woman garbed in casual-dress for low nobility politely knocks on the library door, and then steps inside. "Sevar. If you'll follow me outside the Forbiddance, I'm your teleport for your afternoon appointment."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa gave this a bit of thought and decided she's just going to be truthful with Keltham that she's also spending some of her money on becoming prettier, probably with a playful 'if you like that'.

She's not going to explain herself yet, though. She follows.

Keltham: Keltham is slightly confused about what sort of scheduling gap this implies - he can neither teach anything for which all students should be present, nor snuggle Carissa until she gets back - but gets tangled up in uncertainties about local interrogating-someone-you're-also-fucking relationship norms for long enough that he doesn't want to yell the question loud enough for it to reach Carissa. And then he doesn't remember the Message cantrip for longer than that.

Well, he has his own mounds of reading and learning to do.

Iarwain: "I'm also to retrieve a cursed bag of holding," the low noble says curtly once they're out of library earshot.

Carissa Sevar: She hands it over. "How long will this be?"

Iarwain: The noble shrugs. "Hour or two. Been a while since I had mine." She examines the bag. "Used once, emptied, not recharged. Confirm or deny."

Carissa Sevar: "Confirm." With a slight pang of regret but she is NOT going to flirt with the Queen.

Iarwain: The noble tucks the bag away without comment, and then strides swiftly in the direction of the nearest exit from the villa. Sevar will need to half-jog herself to keep up, the noble's legs are longer and she's apparently stronger.

Once they're outside the bounds of the physical villa and heading towards the edge of the Forbiddance, the noble speaks again. "Not interested in the Queen's affections, I take it? Understandable."

Carissa Sevar: That doesn't seem like a question with a safe answer. "It's no flaw in the bag, which was lovely, or the Queen, who was much lovelier."

Iarwain: "But terrifying to be around to the point where the prudent, wise, safe course of action seems to be ignoring her and hoping she stops paying attention to you. As I said, understandable."

Carissa Sevar: "And yet one gets the sense the Queen finds it annoying when people try to do the prudent, wise, safe course of action at her. It's a bit of a dilemma. I am hoping I can just make her powerful beyond all our imaginings and then be forgiven my confusion about how to handle it."

Iarwain: This wins a snort of amused laughter from the low-noble. "A difficult tactic, but I would expect it to work if you can do it."

The noblewoman puts her hand on Sevar's shoulder and casts a two-person Teleport, sorcerously, not as a wizard spell.

They're in Ostenso, outside a discreet but very upscale-looking shop. There's a sign in gold leaf over steel that reads 'Guillem & Arnau', and no other hint of what the shop does; if you don't already know, you're not supposed to be here.

The noblewoman drops her hand. "Different transport will be provided when you're done. I'm too busy to stick around here. Free advice, Sevar, though I may suspect it may come too late. The Queen may choose to request transcripts of your thoughts. If you thought about how the Queen was very pretty but too scary for you to want to be around her, or if you considered using her bag again but decided against that only because you didn't want any more of her attention, she is liable to take that as flirting back."

Carissa Sevar: Of course she is.

"The Queen should of course have whatever information she likes in determining how to do exactly as she wishes," she says.

Iarwain: "It's not as bad as it sounds. She only does the statue thing very rarely, and not to lovers who disappoint her in bed. In your personal case I think you'd have to piss off the Church and Asmodeus first before she'd go ahead with it."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has absolutely no context with which to interpret any of the sounds coming out of this person's mouth at this point. Is she being reassured because she's ....thought to be an unhelpful amount of scared? But telling her the Queen might come for her wouldn't seem to help with that! Is she being mocked? Probably; she's out of place here, in her Worldwound uniform, and well aware that nobles tend to think that kind of thing is funny. Is there a deeper, secret message? Why would it matter what Carissa thinks about what the Queen thinks of her? Is she being told that if she's a shape that the Queen will think of as flirting-back like it or not she should actually just flirt back? But it's too late! The woman acknowledged it was too late! Is it a test of whether she internalized Maillol's lesson about it not mattering what she wants? But even before that lesson she was very clear on the fact that if the Queen wants something you say yes, no matter what it is and no matter how you feel about it. What's this person's angle?

Carissa Sevar: "I have learned recently that apparently a lot of people have trouble looking forward to, with genuine delight, the process by which in Hell they will be perfected. While I have many human deficiencies that make me an inadequate servant of our God I don't have that one, and my problem, here, is not that it sounds bad, it's that I'm sure there are lots of equally interesting girls who are slightly less busy."

Under no reasonable models of this person's goals was that a very good thing to say, the headband helps Carissa observe with perfect clarity.

Carissa Sevar: - she'll just go inside. To her appointment.

Abrogail Thrune II: She didn't catch on, this time. That's disappointing but also kind of adorable.

Abrogail did have other things to do with her time today, it's just, when Sevar's thought transcripts show her thinking every five minutes about how terrified she is of you, it's hard to help yourself.

Carissa Sevar: About twenty minutes into her beauty appointment, which thankfully involves things being spread on her face and doesn't require much of even her unenhanced attention, it does occur to Carissa that nobles who are also fifth-circle sorcerers don't run miscellaneous transportation errands Security could handle.

Doesn't she have a country to run? But that's not even a reasonable complaint, really, because everyone knows full well that this little project is the most important thing in it, and that this little project will succeed or fail on Carissa's judgement.

And if it fails, then if she's lucky she'll go to Hell.

Asmodia could not possibly be less relatable; Carissa finds herself in fact utterly furious with her, for having the thing Carissa wants more than anything else in the world, and trying, like a toddler too caught in the throes of a tantrum to be reasoned with, to rid herself of it, the only inheritance she has, the only good thing about being human.

She does remember to ask if she can also be fitted for clothes appropriate to her hypothetical station.

Iarwain: Guillem & Arnau does not provide that service, but there is a fine clothier two streets up, if madam customer is sure she can afford their services; or if this is part of a government operation, they can append a few words requesting clothing-purchase assistance to the pickup request.

(Carissa has now gained a permanent +1 inherent bonus to Comeliness.)

Carissa Sevar: Yes, please, on appending it to the pickup request; she is sure she can't afford it.

It's not incredibly obvious, looking in the mirror; it's the difference between how one looks on a good day versus on a bad day. She could get away with not explaining it to Keltham, except for the policy of only telling lies they actually need. Also, she wants to keep doing it, so.

She does not yet feel like she has understood the desires in herself that have no place in Axis, but - well, yes, okay, she has, she wants to rewrite the book of Asmodia to have REASONABLE PRIORITIES and be GRATEFUL FOR HER LIFE, that's not a desire that has a place in Axis, but not the pride related ones. Yet.

Iarwain: Pickup arrives in the form of somebody who looks like a slightly tired (that is, not noticeably to anyone who isn't Chelish) courtier who will escort Carissa to upscale clothing stores and buy clothing for her that a countess's heir should have. Actual teleport to follow.

(Theoretically this decision gets made by Paraduke Ratarion, but the person who received the initial message made a snap decision that his decision here was predictable enough to guess and be corrected if necessary. In an Asmodean tyranny, this is a bad thing to guess and be wrong about, but not insignificantly a good thing to guess and be right about.)

Carissa Sevar: A countess's heir apparently would have a lot of clothes, more than are really feasible to own or wear or get from place to place; a countess's heir, of course, would have servants which would help on the feasibility front.

Carissa is not sure how much agency she is supposed to exert about the clothes-acquisition process but she figures more countesses' heirs err on the 'spoiled' side than on the 'meek' side so she tries to make demands, which go over fine; she wants fabrics that look like they'd be incredibly hard to do by machine, because they're labor-intensive and sufficiently non-repeating, since dath ilan will probably find those more impressive; a lot of laces are satisfactory on that front. She thinks that Keltham will be unamused by anything that takes an hour to lace up, so those are out.

She wants a dragonhide purse, because dath ilan won't have that, and she's tempted by necklaces that have tiny humanoid fae trapped inside them, pounding frantically at the crystal, but probably Keltham would get worried about them and ask if they want to be let out.

....this is just occurring to her: do countesses' heirs who have a sadistic boyfriend have - she's not even sure what she's imagining - imaginative sex clothes of some kind. The obvious version would be, like, shirtsleeves that can lace together so as to bind your hands behind your back rather than lacing separately, or... maybe there's a particularly spiky kind of lingerie? Fabric is so expensive that Carissa thinks of this as a fairly ridiculous indulgence but now that she's thought of it it seems like someone would've, probably.

Iarwain: The courtier doesn't blink. Yes, Ostenso has several shops for government-approved Asmodean subwear. Most, however, target sufficiently wealthy people buying subwear suitable for their pets and slaves. There's only one such shop that would be socially appropriate to a countess's heir purchasing subwear for herself to wear of her own accord, and that one may already be closed or closing soon.

Carissa Sevar: Inconvenient. Can someone check whether it's in fact 'closed' or 'closing-soon', it'd be nice to bring Keltham back at least one thing from this shopping trip,

Because she is human and bad at the things humans are bad at, Carissa feels - what? distress at the thought they'll assume she's just like this as a person? Their opinion of her does not matter, and if she were just like this as a person then her life would be more convenient, and maybe she is just like this as a person, with the right handling which she just hasn't sought out. The embarrassment survives all these compelling counterarguments.

Iarwain: The courtier isn't much of a wizard and doesn't have extra message scrolls; they'd have to head there to look, but it's not that far.

Carissa Sevar: Sure. Carissa is not pathetic enough to let embarrassment influence her. She will go to the other shop. Knock.

Iarwain: Someone opens the door. "We're closing in thirty," she begins, but then catches sight of Carissa's Worldwound uniform and the tired-looking courtier next to her. "We're always open for the Church or the Crown," she says a moment later.

Carissa Sevar: "Good of you. I need something to wear. The intended audience is an innocent young man from a very Lawful Good country who is reconsidering what they taught him it's all right to do in bed."

Iarwain: The courtier adds that this situation is not any higher priority than would be appropriate to a count's heiress shopping at this store; they're not to bring out anything or offer any services they wouldn't offer to a count's heiress.

Iarwain:
Strange and interesting, on both counts, but the door-answerer is certainly not arguing or asking any questions of this Obvious Intelligence Operation. She'll quickly escort them to the relatively tamer sections of refined noble Asmodean subwear. "You probably want things labeled Perversion 15 through Perversion 20," she says.

Carissa Sevar: There are labels????? There's a scale?????????? But presumably what's interesting is both highly personal and incredibly contingent on past....whatever. Carissa will trust the system. What sorts of things have those labels.

Iarwain: Perversion 15: Ballroom clothing suitable for a Baroness, not quite at the Countess level; elaborate, but nothing that would overly impede a dagger-fight if you had to do that instead of dance. Cunning pleats and overlaps in the clothing would enable a lover to reach right through it for pleasure or punishment, in any number of various places and angles, without any need of removing it.

Perversion 17: Loose slave garments and not-cripplingly-expensive-to-lose harem jewelry that would be suitable for a noble surrendering herself to a higher noble for sexual punishment after being defeated in a contest of wills and powers; according to a not-particularly-legible etiquette code that absolutely does distinguish this case from the case of a noble who got physically captured by another noble and forcibly redocorated by them, in which case, obviously, you'd be shopping at one of the other stores instead, because this store is only for noble submissives who are doing their own shopping. It's not considered gauche or mockery to wear this clothing even if you're not really surrendering yourself to a higher noble, and is instead a pleasing roleplay or flattery, which makes it much more popular than the primary use-case would suggest.

Higher perversion levels spoilered

Perversion 18: A simply enchanted cursed belt which prevents you or anything you're wearing or holding from touching your own genitals, used for preventing self-stimulation. It won't stop a Mage Hand, but it's at least a little difficult to get yourself off with a Mage Hand. It won't stand up to a Dispel Magic and it doesn't have any indicators that would show a Dispel Magic had been used on it; that's more the sort of heavy-duty cursed equipment that a dominant would buy to use on a submissive.

Perversion 18 (also): A whole-body outfit of leather straps, concealing nothing of importance, studded with solid metal rings any of which can be locked to any other. You'll need to also buy either these simple open-or-shut connectors, which you could just as easily manipulate to free yourself if your fingers weren't otherwise restrained, or these more time-consuming simple locks sharing a common key. You could be restrained and re-restrained in a very wide variety of positions using this, especially if you also buy these simply-enchanted adjustable-length metal bars with rings on either end. Uncaring use of this on you may require a cleric's attention afterwards, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Perversion 20: An Asmodean fighter's leather armor, but interlaced through with subtle bands that can be tightened to reduce flexibility and resist motions, handicapping the wearer. If you were wearing this you could lose a hand-to-hand combat to a substantially less skilled fighter without it looking too unnatural. The groin protection can be detached without that affecting the restraining power of the rest of the armor.

It's not that large a store floor, and even if Carissa keeps her focus relatively narrow, she's liable to notice, for example, a Perversion 24 enchanted metal bra whose breast cups go searingly hot any time you make a sound, a much more expensive Perversion 33 bra that sears you any time you disobey any order you hear, decorated aesthetic versions of many common torture implements that don't require overly expensive (for a noble) clerical attention afterwards, slave rags which sure look like ordinary slave rags except for somehow being four hundred times as expensive - oh, they're enchanted to automatically clean themselves without requiring some random laundry wizard to use Prestidigitation for two minutes, that's why they're four hundred times as expensive - and of course cuffs, whips, branding irons, acid droppers, and blindfolds with extraneous gold detailing and in some cases tiny rubies.

In many cases, one can tell on a close examination that this is definitely subwear that noble Asmodean submissives buy for themselves, rather than subwear for Asmodean dominants to buy for their subs; because the subwear is visibly designed in some way to allow or require the submissive to put herself into it, rather than for her to be restrained while somebody else puts subwear on her. (Obviously this is a matter of fashion signals rather than practice; it's not like you couldn't threaten somebody into putting this stuff on.)

The male-focused section of the store floor is smaller, maybe a quarter of the size, but very much existent (for the benefit of that very very rare Asmodean who wanders into a store like this one and starts pondering anything to do with gender disparities).

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has never really given a lot of thought to how the nobility lives, beyond deciding a decade ago she didn't want to be a court wizard because the mortality rate was appalling. Her plan was to start a magic shop, figure out who was the most important person to bribe, make them something beautiful every year for a present, and assume that sufficient to keep her out of everything else.

Her feeling now, looking at all of this, is - faintly infuriated? It seems very - fake - like they're playing the game of having sex, instead of just having sex like normal people. Carissa is not actually sure she is very interested in the game of having sex. She tends to have sex for advantage, which means that when she's having sex it's with people who have power over her, rather than people she has power over, but that's not a game, that's just how everyone's incentives are shaped. This is a game. The consequences are real but the thing itself doesn't seem any less fake, for that.

She understands, maybe, what Maillol was trying to tell her, that it wasn't all right for Keltham to have her because she said it was. That comes from the same world as this, a world where everything is a game, where someone might decide to put on these clothes and seduce someone just because it's fun, playing with the inevitable natural order of the universe but only that, playing.

Carissa is pretty sure that her actual sexuality, which she unfortunately needs to keep track of because there's no time in her schedule at present to learn to fake it, doesn't resemble this. It is about belonging to someone with the power to do whatever they like with you, yes, but - it's not about belonging to them because you're into that. It's not about the fact power is sexy, it's just about power. It feels like a real distinction, at least inside her head. Insofar as it features clothes like this at all they were definitely picked for her by someone who likes her in them, not picked out herself.

Okay setting aside her actual sexuality, which being the product of a human mind is going to be stupid and incoherent, what does she want? Some of the fancy outfits that look like they definitely couldn't have been manufactured overnight as part of an elaborate effort to convince Keltham that masochism is a real thing, some things that look like they'd obviously only work with the cooperation of the wearer, some things for farther in project corrupt Keltham which don't as obviously only work with the cooperation of the wearer - she tries to model Keltham's reactions about magic chastity belts and Keltham in her head is making a face but not a 'no' face so she'll grab that -

- she has a unhappy feeling that somehow looking at the more-dangerous stuff at all counts as flirting with Her Infernal Magistrix. Because everything counts as flirting with Her Infernal Magistrix, or at least everything done in the slightest awareness it might have effects on Her Infernal Magistrix. Anyway pushing Keltham too far too fast might make him decide to think too hard about the whole situation, so she won't get any of that. Yet.

"I think this is enough for now," she says, once she's picked out an outfit for ballroom dancing, which she does not do, while sexually accessible, which pants work fine for, and the magic chastity belt, "unless you're apprised of the whole situation enough to have opinions and advise otherwise."

Iarwain: It's hard to figure out which possible responses to that potentially get her hand burned off in a way that non-government-employees don't get free healing for. She's obviously not apprised of the whole situation, which suggests that she definitely shouldn't say anything, but that's too obvious to be the meaning.

"I have no experience or training in honeypot operations targeting unsuspecting Lawful Good targets. Government-approved literature has seemed to suggest that presenting yourself to a Lawful Good man in obviously self-applied bondage," gesturing at the outfit of leather straps, "will tempt him to do things to your helpless form, without that seeming to hurry him along the path to inflicting pain; and that tickling is useful as an intermediate step towards getting him to hurt you," gesturing at a shelf of tickling implements and lubricants labeled Perversion 3, "but I don't know if any of that's meant to be useful advice or a fictional conceit."

Realistically shouldn't this be asked of a honeypot operator with experience targeting the boy's home country? But there's presumably some reason they aren't doing that and instead asking her and also aren't giving her any more information?? Citing only government-approved advice is the only tactic she can think of for possibly getting out of this with mostly inexpensive injuries.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, for fuck’s sake, Carissa would just like people to say things if they think she should actually know them and not otherwise. You know, people say that the Worldwound is bad for Cheliax because of how most of the national wealth is going towards fighting an endless horde of demons but she’s starting to wonder if it’s actually good for Cheliax because it’s a place where if you waste too much time or play too many games you get eaten, which both winnows out idiots and is character-promoting for everyone else. “Great,” she says shortly. “How much for this, then.”

Iarwain: 40gp for everything else and 340gp for the Cursed Belt of No Touch. (It would be more if it was an adventure-grade cursed item and not a bedroom-grade one.)

Carissa Sevar: She glances over at the courtier in case she has opinions about whether Carissa is allowed to spend that much on sex toys.

Iarwain: The courtier continues to feel nervous about correcting Carissa Sevar in any way even when she is seeking guidance, let alone having any opinions on what Carissa Sevar is allowed to do, but has nonetheless been instructed to make sure Sevar doesn't make any accidental purchases she shouldn't, so:

A countess's heir could own a small handful of sex toys costing that much, but wouldn't own dozens of them. This mission hasn't run out of gold yet, though they're getting close to the amount the courtier has on her.

These both seem like very safe opinions to express and not ones that will cause Carissa Sevar or Rathus Ratarion or Aspexia Rugatonn or a suddenly appearing pit fiend to kill her.

(This background anxiety doesn't show at all to Carissa; the courtier is experienced.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is not very interested in peoples' internal states as long as it doesn't cause them to waste her time or not tell her things. "Great, then, let's get these and then swing back to the other store for one normal outfit, and they can take my measurements so I don't have to leave for future orders."

Iarwain: If Asmodeus has taken a personal interest in that event happening, the courtier isn't going to argue with it.

The items go into a standard military-issued common-use Bag of Holding. Back to other clothing stores!

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will get one nice dress that isn't a special sex dress and an undergarment for it, and not ask anyone any questions they are too nervous to usefully answer, and get all her measurements so that she can order future dresses that are even better fitted, and then she can be done with this ordeal and hopefully not have missed dinner...judging by the time, she probably missed dinner.

Keltham: Keltham has acquired a timepiece that he will someday remember to check again! He's found out that Cheliax is 85% farmers implying that their food-per-person gain function is 7/6 (~1.17) in which case anything that produced a permanent 1/7 decrease in farming productivity would cause human life in Cheliax to stop existing! There maybe shouldn't be all that many priorities higher than increasing the food-per-person gain on farming to something more like, say, 100, or at least 10. Dinner probably happened at some point, he isn't really focusing on that.

Keltham is currently experimenting with Prestidigitation to see if he can Prestidigitate things to be magnetic, magnetizable, or to have rotating magnetic fields inside them. How's that going for him?

lintamande: Making random objects magnetic: no. Magnetizing a metal in the fashion you could also do with a strong magnet: yes! Rotating magnetic fields: he can't make it a persistent property of the object but he can do it very briefly, scattering a bunch of iron filings in a suggestive fashion before it stops quite working.

(Meritxell points out that if there were a permanent 1/7th decrease in farming productivity all the least productive farmers would starve but there is variance and some farmers are very productive and would be fine.)

Keltham: "What makes some farmers more productive? Any clues?"

Can he make a loop of metal superconducting with Prestidigitation, and then use this bit of iron he already magnetized to start an electric current flowing which will then persist? Keltham has a detailed qualitative-physics mental model of both conductivity and superconductivity if that counts for anything; he wouldn't know exact numbers on how conductive a piece of impure iron would already be.

lintamande: "Some places the soil is much richer so plants grow better," says Tonia. "And near rivers it's possible to irrigate the fields."

Getting an electric current flowing isn't working and it's not totally clear why.

Keltham: Fascinating. If you can make something taste even vaguely like chocolate, you'd think you could make it support a superfluid of phonon-coupled paired electrons; that's much less complicated than the implied fitting-of-taste-receptor-potential-energy-surfaces going on with 'tastes vaguely like chocolate'.

Can he make something just exhibit the magnetic-field-expulsing effect, so that it will float above a magnet even if it's not a superconductor?

(The classic Science Maniac Verrez maneuver would be to see if you can use Prestidigitation to turn a very tiny amount of something into antimatter, but that, obviously, Keltham is not going to talk about, or try until he's got a much better grasp on safety precautions.)

lintamande: Yep! ...very briefly, again, like with the magnetic field, and then he loses it and has to start again.

Keltham: Then Keltham is going to practice this some more, because if he gets magnetic field expulsion and magnetism both working, and if he's right about how things look to Detect Magic, he's going to be able to show off an object floating above another object without any visible magical force holding it up, which should make a nice Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick for Golarion natives if they don't already have any obvious ways for doing that.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa comes quietly in while he's still getting this down (having swung by Maillol's to ask calmly for confirmation that was, again, Her Infernal Majestrix.)

Keltham: Keltham wasn't at the stage of being ready to attempt a visible Thing Floating Above Thing effect, just bringing Prestidigitated objects closer together to see if he can maintain the repulsive force he's aiming for and especially while he's not actively casting the Prestidigitation spell. This is good because he doesn't need to hide the preliminary stages of a Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick from Carissa, who might otherwise be impressed by the completed form.

"Oh, hey," Keltham starts to say when Carissa steps in -

Keltham: She's dressed nicer and more normally, though not in anything like a dath ilani style.

"Oh, did you get back your non-Worldwound wardrobe and stuff?" That's a sensible thing for the trip to have been about.

Carissa Sevar: "Yes -- well, acquired a non-Worldwound wardrobe, I haven't had one in mothballs for the last six years. Also acquired some other things I'll tell you about later."

Keltham: Not bad for a low-tech society. He'd visualized non-Governance clothing as being much cruder, given the description of hand-powered spinning and weaving - wait is that actually incredibly expensive stuff that only third-circle wizards on important government projects can afford? He'll quietly ask somebody who isn't Carissa, which he can totally do now, because maaaaaagic.

"I've been practicing economicmagic!" Keltham says. "Observe what I now do completely without a huge supply network to manufacture sound-transmission equipment." He goes through the gestures to cast and catch Message, then mouths to Meritxell, "Do her new clothes look very expensive?"

lintamande: "Yes," Meritxell whispers back, smiling.

Keltham: Good news about Carissa's career trajectory, not such great news about the state of the rest of Cheliax.

"You also seem more - generally cheerful? Brighter? If I'm not just imagining things." (Said to Carissa normally.)

Carissa Sevar: "You're very perceptive, it is generally said that you need to get multiple prettiness treatments if you want a man to actually notice instead of just vaguely feeling fonder. That is one of the other things I was going to tell you about later."

Keltham: Keltham peers at her more closely. "That... could be a change to underlying biology that I interpreted as cheerfulness, I suppose. If you hadn't told me it wouldn't have occurred to me that your hidden-background-state appearance had changed." Oh, huh, Keltham has slightly mixed feelings about that, which he should put a pin into discussing sometime later - should he mention it now so she can help him pin it? - no, that seems like an ominous and unspecified thing to dump on somebody if you're not going to talk about it right away.

Keltham casts Detect Magic, just to see if he can spot any lingering magic on or about Carissa from it all.

Carissa Sevar: Nope!

Keltham: "Have you eaten yet? I'm afraid we already did."

Carissa Sevar: “I’ll grab myself something and come right back, then.”

Keltham: He's about ready to wrap up. After this comes Keltham's casting his mysterious cleric spells for the day - though Keltham isn't going to mention that fact until she's done eating dinner, in case it's otherwise a nice-mood-spoiler. (Though she might not actually be in a nice mood, just prettier; still, same logic applies.)

"See you soon and again," he says, in a Baseline idiom that maybe didn't quite translate to Taldane.

Carissa Sevar: She hurries out, smiling.

Keltham: More magnetic-field-excluding practice! Also more infinite Additional Questions!

"Is the limitation on irrigating more fields the limited supply of water, or the cost of infrastructure to transport water? What, if anything, do you already do to try to make fields have richer soil?"

lintamande: “You leave the fields fallow some years,” says Tonia, “and turn the soil deeper.”

”In some places they harvest bat shit from deep caves and the Underdark.”

Carissa Sevar: Carissa requests a summary over dinner or anything that’s come up, and also wonders aloud at Security whether Asmodia’s been behaving herself better or worse or the same.

Iarwain: Keltham asked questions about farming and other aspects of Chelish economics. Meritxell and Tonia mostly answered them, in a way that fits the hypothetical new Cheliax so far as Security could tell.

Ione passed a note to Security offering to warn Keltham to maybe not trust everything Meritxell says about economics, because she might be overrunning her real knowledge - in a very enthusiastic and well-intentioned way, but still. Security is deferring that decision to Sevar.

Ione oracled in one Ostenso library book about farmers - Security does still have the ability to redirect Keltham's thoughts away from text, and farming seemed innocuous. It didn't contain nearly as much direct detail on farming operations as Keltham had hoped; no illustrations of plows or mentions of how much a plow costs or who makes plows, and soon Keltham gave up and stopped reading. Keltham suggested establishing communications with somebody at the Ostenso library who could check through books first given a request for content, and leave a found book in a designated place for Ione to borrow. One Sending is an improvement over two teleports, or this potentially warrants a paired mirror. Security told him that Requisitions said she'd think about it; Requisitions in this case really means Sevar, they can get the mirrors if Sevar says yes.

Asmodia has been keeping to her bedroom and rereading her math textbooks, which is overtly good behavior. She wasn't tightly monitored but spot-checking of thoughts suggests that she's anxiously locking down a lot of disloyal thoughts, nothing unusual for someone in her position though of course Asmodia isn't being told that, but certainly more anxiety and thought-suppression than would have been characteristic of her three days ago. Overt thoughts indicate willingness to work with Sevar on her mysterious project for dath ilani thinking, confusion about what the real purpose of that is, painful hope that maybe she can avoid Hell after all.

Pilar was almost but not quite killed when a Security wizard got a message announcing one of his wives had successfully birthed a child, and Pilar shouted "Congratulations!" from directly behind him. Nobody including Pilar understands how Pilar got into the temple room where the wizard was receiving the message, and Pilar can't quite remember what she was doing just before that. Pilar thinks she could possibly learn to not do it to on-duty Security, so long as she can still do it sometimes to somebody, but on this occasion the impulse took her by surprise. Pilar is significantly shaken up about this, because if she'd died like that she wouldn't have been Maledicted first. Also, Pilar needs to throw somebody a larger party, preferably a surprise party; single pieces of cake being handed out on special occasions aren't going to cut it for her indefinitely. This is mostly Maillol's problem but is being copied to Sevar in case it somehow interacts with project matters, or for that matter in case she wants to advise Maillol that having a Chaotic Good oracle to exhibit to Keltham isn't worth that much.

Carissa Sevar: Cayden Cailean is like the kind of god Carissa would have made up if she were a propagandist trying to convince Chelish people that Good is stunningly worthless and stupid. Probably it's fine if Pilar throws some parties, how expensive can that even be, though the only acceptable targets for surprise parties are the other girls and maybe whoever's on staff doing laundry or whatever. Coordination with the library in Ostenso seems straightforwardly good for the cause of passing Keltham only desired books, worth a mirror. If Tonia and Meritxell are the chattiest girls they should both get some training/screening for how to handle it if Keltham wants to fuck them.

Carissa heads back over once she's had enough to eat.

Iarwain: There is no longer any staff on the premises doing laundry. All the usual slaves have been removed for now, they'd be infosec hazards to Keltham in any case. Cooking, janitorial, and other ops are being performed by a few first-circle priests of Asmodeus with appropriate civilian proficiencies.

Maillol is afraid that anyone here without a claimed soul is going to get oracled.

Keltham: "Hi again, Carissa. I'm about to start winding down my workday, but before I switch to nonwork mode, I should try my cleric spells."

"Could just do it with Security, if you didn't want to be there."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm in." But a touch reluctant, mildly traumatized by what happened yesterday, so hopefully he won't think anything of the rest of the girls being somewhere far away where their anxieties and desires cannot be detected.

Keltham: Carissa may still be a little undercalibrated on how much Keltham can sight-read Chelish expressions; he can't see anything meant to be subtle.

To a secure workroom then.

First up is a first-circle Abjuration.

Carissa Sevar: "Protection." from Evil, but they've already strategically modified the relevant sources. "It creates a defensive magical barrier and makes it impossible for summoned creatures to come into contact with you. It's commonly used at the Worldwound as a cheap shield."

Keltham: "That's... not easy to understand, if it's either a message, or an actual contingency. Things shouldn't be summonable inside the Forbiddance, right? Or is somebody going to come in with an army of summoned creatures from the outside?"

lintamande: "Correct," Security confirms.

Carissa Sevar: "Could mean, uh, your protections still aren't adequate? Or that there's a summoned entity already here...."

Keltham: "Actually. Third-circle unidentified conjuration - that's the thing that does summoning? Maybe it's meant to be used before I use that? How long does Protection last and can somebody tap me with a new one if this one runs out?"

lintamande: "Yes, though also if it's a summoning you're going to have to leave the Forbiddance to do it.'

Carissa Sevar: "Lasts two minutes per caster circle."

Keltham: "Any way to tell by looking at the spell structure, if somebody wants to show me an illusion of something?"

lintamande: Security shows the spell structure for Planar Inquiry and then for Summon Monster III and then for Infernal Challenger.

Keltham: "Summon Monster III. Okay, I don't get it, what is that and why do I have it." Unless the message is simply leave the Forbiddance.

lintamande: "It summons an extraplanar creature. You can get a minor outsider with it, or an animal. If you want to use it we'll have to leave the Forbiddance, but that could probably be done safely if it's done briefly and not telegraphed in advance - so probably now, if you want to do it."

Keltham: "Literally right now? If so, start walking and I'll follow while I ask my additional questions."

"By 'not telegraphed in advance', you mean we have to leave right now before any intelligence leak could tell an adversary to prepare an assault?"

lintamande: "This room is very shielded, but I would want to depart it intending to head straight there. To be clear, we have no reason to believe this facility is being observed by any adversary. But your gods' communications are consistent with there being some threat, and with sufficiently powerful magic it would be possible to surpass our precautions. Or there could be a spy."

Keltham: "...huh. I wish I had a much better idea of exactly how well my god can see my situation and exactly how intricately predictive their plans are likely to be."

"Let's run through the other spells first and then you can tap me with another Protection and we can run outside and cast that one."

Next up is an unfamiliar second-circle divination, the one that doesn't go by touch - he's planning to save the Early Judgment for last, or now second-to-last, in case a vision of his or his god's afterlife ends up being awful news of some kind.

Carissa Sevar: "Augury. Gives advice from your god about whether a course of action - like 'should I step outside the Forbiddance', I guess -- will have immediately good or bad effects. Was an incredibly powerful spell when prophecy wasn't broken and now it can only go off information that's already observable just not to you, so it's fine for, like, warning you of ambushes but lousy for anything more complicated. Even for ambushes it now has a depressingly high false positive and false negative rate - I want to say one in four readings is just nonsensical and not from your god at all?"

Keltham: It doesn't quite make sense that his god would give him two Auguries only to have one of them tell him not to go outside - but Keltham can sense that he needs to supply this question basically like now, so he says, out loud, "Effect of going outside the Forbiddance."

(Probably he's got two so that he can actually think of the correct question on #2.)

Nethys: The god of knowledge would prefer that this Augury fail, thank you very much.

Keltham: "I... think it failed entirely, actually. Or at least I didn't get any information off it. Possibly waiting that long to ask the question didn't help." Keltham had two Auguries, but it's not obvious he should tell them that.

Next: Unfamiliar third-circle divination, there's two of them that look pretty similar.

Abadar: Abadar is incredibly fucking done with everyone messing with his cleric. Does Abadar go tax the temple of Nethys in Sothis into ruin, because he likes money, no!!!

The thing about Augury is that it's such a noisy broken channel, now, with prophecy broken, no message can get through with Nethys opposing it.

But He can be MAD ABOUT IT.

lintamande: This spell gives him a - sense of Carissa and Security and a sense that there aren't other minds, in the room, and a sense he can see a new angle of them -

Carissa Sevar: "Detect Desires. - considered kind of invasive, for what it's worth, and spellcasters will automatically try to fight it off, though I'm trying to not because we're trying to build trust here -"

Keltham: "My god gave me a nonconsensual mindreading spell?! Carissa -" He almost tells her to fight it off, for Civilization's sake -

- but this could be about building trust, if his god knows that he knows that they weren't expecting it -

"- you can let me read your desires if you're okay with it, Carissa, I don't see your job as requiring this. Security neither."

Carissa Sevar: "It's not exactly mind-reading, and I don't mind." The spell says that Carissa wants to be like Contessa Lrilatha and wants to be a powerful wizard and wants to invent the Lawful Evil version of dath ilani teachings and bring them to every child in Cheliax and get rich and famous for it.

lintamande:

(Security wants to get out of this whole mess alive or at least with all his possessions restored post-Resurrection, and to meet his new daughter.)

(They picked which Security very strategically.)

Keltham: That's... not absolute evidence, but it's evidence, if they don't have easy ways to fake that too. He wishes it hadn't been obtained at that kind of cost. "I have another third-circle divination which looked a lot like that one, though not identical. You -"

"- I can't say it's not important but Civilization would correctly kick me out if I pressured you into this."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa appreciates having had all day to think about what to say to him. "Keltham - in a way, it's a gift, right? I want you to feel safer trusting me, I want you to have a real reason to."

Keltham: He casts the spell, now and without further quibbling, because it means less the more time they have to prepare, and if he's going to do it, he may as well get as much trust from it as he can.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is scared of being turned into a statue and buried deep beneath the ground so she never gets an afterlife until the stone wears away after millions of years and maybe the universe is destroyed before then!!! That's it, that's the only thing.

Security is scared of fucking this up and dying/getting Keltham killed/getting fired and then having the kids think he's a loser.

Keltham: "I saw," Keltham says, and dismisses the spell's continuation with an almost violent act of will, more than a simple absence of concentration. "It's off."

"Thank you."

He can think of things to say to Carissa, about what she's afraid of, but - but later - and only if she doesn't tell him to forget he ever saw it.

"Fourth-circle abjuration," he says instead. "Ready?" Keltham sort of wants this over.

Carissa Sevar: "Go."

Keltham: Cast.

Carissa Sevar: "- don't recognize it, but lasts two hours per caster circle, protective against enchantments, might also do something else?"

Keltham: "...is somebody going to try to enchant me when I go outside the Forbiddance? Then why would my god - suggest that I go outside in the first place..."

Well, obviously his god could be trying to protect him against internal-adversary enchantments too, from somebody who wasn't Carissa and probably not this security guard either??

...Or his god could be telling him to go outside and spring a trap on purpose instead of waiting for it to go off???

Keltham really wishes he had a much better sense of what was normal for Golarion.

"Next up, unfamiliar second-circle divination with touch target, I am going to tap myself with it, be prepared to hit me with a dispel if I yell or fall over."

lintamande: "Ready," says Security.

Keltham: Spellboop.

lintamande: A city, by the standards of Keltham's world not even a particularly tall one, but a beautiful one, with rising golden spires and rooftop parks and flying gondolae and people on their busy way through shining streets, about half of them human and many of those who aren't things much stranger.

Keltham: "It's - I'm seeing into a different high-tech planet, one that isn't dath ilan - definite magitech, not just tech - wide variety of aliens, I wish I had some way of showing them to you -"

And then Keltham runs out of ability to speak. There's an almost painful wrenching at his heart, a sudden manifestation of the reverence and faith that a dath ilani feels when watching a personnel launch to the Moon base, but stronger than Keltham has ever felt it, this is the dream, what Civilization wants to be when it grows up, only something beyond that, something that only appears in science fiction movies, because dath ilan knows with high probability that they won't run into any aliens for another half to two billion years. But if that wasn't true, if somehow it wasn't true and the explanation for why the aliens hadn't already appeared, wasn't anything bad, if somehow the aliens weren't already as unimaginably advanced as dath ilan will be in another hundred million years, but only equals, then this would be that place, the dream, a symbol that can't exist, of dozens of species existing together in peace.

And - commerce.

He doesn't know how he knows, that the flying gondolae were bought and not just given away, but he knows it. It's not because they couldn't make enough to give away, but because people doing things to benefit one another and be benefited in return is something holy in itself, to them.

It lasts a very long, very short time, and then it ends.

Keltham:

Keltham: He's crying. Not really much of a surprise there. Not what his gendertrope says to do in front of Carissa except in private, but drop table gendertropes.

"What spell was that?" Keltham says, when it stops feeling improper to speak. He thinks he knows, obviously, but he wants to hear them say it.

Carissa Sevar: "Early Judgment. Shows - the afterlife you'd go to, if you died now."

Keltham: "Do afterlives here - are they known to draw from many planets, many planes with different sapient lifeforms -" He's trying not to jump too fast to the obvious conclusion, that his god isn't from around here any more than Keltham himself is.

Carissa Sevar: They planned this out too but that's not the question they were expecting. "They draw from the other Golarion sapients, but - not from other places, that I've ever heard of -"

Keltham: Right. Nonhumans here too. He'll try describing one of the aliens he saw, maybe. He'll remember - that one, that was a pretty striking one. "I'll see if I can manage to learn Silent Image tomorrow, that's probably my top-priority first-circle wizard spell, and show you one of the aliens to see if it's already known." He wouldn't guess it to be known, but it sure is the sort of situation where he can be wrong.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa very dearly wishes she could read his mind, right now. "Yeah, sounds good. Tomorrow. ...is that all your spells?"

Keltham: "I've - got two of the Early Judgment, maybe it would give me a glimpse of somebody else's afterlife, if that's okay - again, I realize that's a pretty personal thing -"

Carissa Sevar: Not how the spell works, thankfully, it only shows the subject. "Go ahead. - though actually I think that it might just show the person touched. But you could try?"

Keltham: "All right, then. Obviously volunteers only, so, any volunteers?"

Pilar : "Ooh! Pick me! - I mean, I volunteer."

Iarwain: (Time for everyone to roll their Will save to realize that there's no reason for Pilar to be there! Pilar has four oracle levels, three wizard levels, and -)

Iarwain: (Never mind, Cayden Cailean seems to be expending energy on this particular occasion. Everybody including Pilar herself fails their Will save!)

Keltham: "You sure?"

Pilar : It's something she's been worried about ever since she got oracled, so it would make perfect sense that if Keltham called for volunteers for this party game for this test, she'd volunteer for it. Right? Right. Everything is fine.

"Yes," Pilar says, sounding very assured about it.

Carissa Sevar: On the off-chance Keltham sees anything from the spell, better for him to see Elysium, she doesn't remember making that decision but it does make sense.

Keltham: Spellboop on Pilar.

Pilar : Pilar draws a sharp breath and then doesn't seem to breathe at all for half a minute.

Keltham: Keltham isn't getting anything himself, and - people in Cheliax sure do control their facial expressions hard, he would not have been difficult to read while he was seeing wherever-that-was.

Pilar : It ends.

"I'm done," she says, a short time later.

Keltham: All right, if he didn't get any glimpse of her Early Judgment himself, then there's not any trust to be gained from questioning her, and she obviously doesn't want to talk about it. Though, if it was just Hell, there'd be no reason for her to - never mind, figure out her character's route later.

"Okay, so now I think we should probably all go directly outside the Forbiddance? If you're okay with that, Pilar, I think that opsec says you're not supposed to run off while we do that."

Pilar : With some effort, Pilar refocuses on ongoing events. She has no idea what Keltham is talking about, but she's obviously supposed to know and Security isn't acting like it's a bad idea, so clearly she's supposed to play along. "Of course," she says in an Asmodean fake perky cheerful voice.

Keltham: "Lead on, then," Keltham says to Security. "Reminder, boop me with Protection first in case there was a reason for that."

lintamande: Protection. (not From Evil, if there's trouble it probably won't be Evil trouble, from Good.) Also Invisibility, all around.

And then off they go.

Keltham: Well, it's not like Keltham knows exactly where the edge of the Forbiddance is, he's just along for this ride. He'll go where taken.

lintamande: They go out of the villa into the immediately surrounding forest; after a short while Security pauses and casts a barrage of detection spells.

"All right, if you stand here the summons should work," he says. "If I were you I'd try to summon an archon - Lawful Good - or an azata - Chaotic Good - and ask what their disagreements with Cheliax are but I haven't actually the slightest guess what your god is aiming at, here, and if you have any guesses then you should go with those."

Keltham: That makes sense and doesn't look on the surface like trapped advice, but - if the spell can take this input - Keltham would like, in preference order, whatever his god wants to send him, some entity that works for his god and that can answer questions, or an archon.

Cast.

lintamande: He gets an archon. It's a - glowing sphere of light, apparently.

(Archon gets Silenced and enclosed in an auditory and visual hallucination.)

"Hello! Ooooh, this place is pretty! What can I help you with?"

Keltham: It's not that unpretty itself! He probably shouldn't say anything that gives away his own special status, if this is something not favorable to him as well as Hell, and that potentially goes back to wherever it came from afterwards. Also it doesn't look like he has long on this spell so he'd better be brief. "Do Asmodeus's representatives tend to negotiate fairly and honestly and keep their commitments? What do you most dislike about Asmodeus and/or Cheliax?"

lintamande: "Asmodeus's representatives are Lawful and keep their commitments and negotiate honestly. I dislike their efforts to build a society where everyone is Lawful Evil and goes to Hell because it is better for everyone to live in a society in which most people are Good. Asmodeus makes decisions based on what Asmodeus wants rather than what's best for all sentients, and while Asmodeus mostly wants desirable things like prosperity and invention and peace, Good often believes his decisions wrong from a perspective concerned with everybody. For example, He doesn't care enough about shutting down Abaddon or stopping Zon Kuthon."

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa's proposed phrasings. She thinks they'll land but she feels nervous, hearing them actually said aloud.)

Nethys: Nethys's options for conveying information to human beings are limited. His use of standard divine channels will drive the message recipient irrevocably insane even in the afterlife, however light the touch.

But there was a purpose of oracles of old. They cannot receive arbitrary messages from gods. They can receive presentiments, under negotiated conditions meant to ensure that those presentiments help to bring about Prophecy rather than avert it.

Prophecy is shattered now, which is to say, depending on how you look at it -

- Nethys now knows more than anyone else about how the future is otherwise destined to go, so, if anybody was supposed to still go around sending presentiments to oracles, it would be His job, wouldn't it?

Nethys does have any options for conveying information to humans. They're just difficult and expensive and not the sort of thing that parts of Nethys can do on a whim, there has to be more power and unity behind it than Nethys usually tries to muster. Difficult, expensive, painful. It's rare for that much of Nethys to agree on anything.

Iarwain: A number of girls are now back in the library, studying Taldorian history and customs again, which seems more urgent even than reviewing their math.

Hopefully this concentration of individuals is enough to warrant an invisible Security presence, because things are about to go badly for Cheliax if not.

Ione Sala: Ione sees a brief and terrible flash of a man with skeletal forearms and white eyes, a Presence of Evil and Magic so strong that she can taste His name Takaral like a dead and slimy worm in her mouth, and she knows that this is one of the Heralds of Nethys that Nethys long ago empowered with scraps of His sanity and will, and knows also that -

Ione Sala: "INCOMING FROM NIDAL! CALL REINFORCEMENTS! CAST RESISTANCE AGAINST NEGATIVE ENERGY! INCOMING INCOMING INCOMING!"

Ione Sala: Ione Sala will then slump over with blood starting to trickle from her nose.

Otolmens: Otolmens is now COMPLETELY FED UP with the THIRD direct divine intervention in MINUTES. She has had ENOUGH of these SHENANIGANS.

(For a very exact and particular sense of 'fed up' which would be very predictable, if you knew enough about Her, a series of cumulative provocations with little time to decay putting Her over a threshold.)

Otolmens: She can't do this very often without re-authorization that Pharasma may never get around to giving Her at this rate, but -

IN PHARASMA'S NAME I REQUIRE ALL GODS TO STOP ALL UNAUTHORIZED DIVINE INTERVENTIONS CAUSALLY AIMED AT -

Irori: Rapidly, His intentions clearly legible as friendly and Otolmens-goal-promoting, because He knows what Otolmens has trouble sometimes realizing on Her own: Otolmens if you tell them exactly where to look things may become even more complicated, center it on Ostenso, that will also include the critical region without giving them too much info.

Otolmens: ONE HUNDRED DISTANCE UNITS AROUND <coordinates for the top of the tallest tower in Ostenso>.

Iarwain: Acknowledged, send almost all the gods in Golarion, and then, most of them, start paging Abadar asking if He knows why Otolmens is this upset and if they should also be concerned.

Iarwain: There is one god who is an exception to that, as He is an exception to many other arrangements among gods.

Zon-Kuthon: Fuck you, I'll do what you don't want.

There's more to it than that, of course, Zon-Kuthon is not that easy to manipulate. Zon-Kuthon was somewhat on the fence about Nethys's strange request and stranger warning - He doesn't do what other gods want of Him, usually, but Nethys went more legible than was usual for Nethys and seemed to show knowledge about how the mortal, who admittedly looks rather strange, was likely to oppose Zon-Kuthon's own purposes and have the power to do that for some reason? That the mortal is in Cheliax is also not a good sign; Asmodeus is foremost among the gods who would actually choose to annihilate Zon-Kuthon and not just dislike Him. Zon-Kuthon ordered a strike team assembled, targeted, held ready, but has not given them the go sign.

Zon-Kuthon is likewise aware that Otolmens is as wary of Him as of any god save Nethys. Dou-Bral once fought to seal Rovagug. Even if the expected balance of pain and pleasure and things that Zon-Kuthon now cares about, changed when Dou-Bral Himself changed to Zon-Kuthon and changed His expected effects on the world, one would expect Zon-Kuthon to be a lot closer to unleashing Rovagug than most other gods.

The latest attempt at Otolmens telling Zon-Kuthon what not to do is sufficient to swing His decision, especially given that Zon-Kuthon does not expect to be caught.

He orders the recipient of His vision to tell the team to attack immediately, and then to kill himself, without mentioning to anyone else that this was a fresh divine intervention rather than a previously given order. There's a closing opportunity window here, since if the strike team arrives fast enough, the belief of other gods should be that it was already in motion when the edict was laid. It's very unlikely anyone will see Him about it; any god trying to pay that much attention to all of Nidal would fragment themselves and drive themselves irrevocably mad.

Iarwain: Gorum, Chaotic Neutral god of battle, god of strength and weapons and soldiers, receives a message from a certain Someone who He is rather fonder of, than She is of Gorum. This is only to be expected, given that Her workings often conduce to His purposes; His workings, to Hers, not so much.

She offers Him information, under the condition that She wishes it not revealed to other gods that She was the source of that information.

Gorum accepts. He does not expect to be harmed by the mere reception of information however suspicious, He could always choose to ignore it and do nothing with it.

Zon-Kuthon is about to violate Otolmens's order in Pharasma's Name. If you look exactly here, you should be able to catch Him at it.

Interesting. Yes, there it is. What of it? Zon-Kuthon is not as opposed to My purpose as to those of others.

Zon-Kuthon has not much margin in His tolerance of the expected future state of Creation. If nothing else is done about it, He is likely to attempt to release Rovagug during an upcoming major disruption to the world.

As much as You might have wished to use Zon-Kuthon as a counterbalance to Asmodeus, and have been among the foremost proponents of that, events have now been set in motion such that it is no longer safe to try to use Zon-Kuthon for that purpose. He cannot be allowed to remain as He is now.

Part of the goddess speaking to Him goes legible; She is being truthful, though it is also clear that She is withholding much, for She does not likewise make legible that She is sharing all relevant information.

Some of the shape of the connivance is becoming clear to Him. Would this upcoming major disruption be any of Your own work, perhaps?

Perhaps. If it were, I would wish to conceal My hand and show it to few other gods, with this exception made to reduce the probability of a foreseeable outcome where the world ends up destroyed.

Gorum knows He's being used, of course, but it does not offend Him as it might offend other gods; a soldier is a soldier whether they die for another's profit or their own. There is only one question He asks. Will there be battle and bloodshed?

Deaths shall come faster than Golarion has seen in an age.

Gorum will go along with this, then.

lintamande: "Passcode to reenter the Forbiddance is 'erecura'," Security suddenly whispers to Keltham. "Say it and run."

And then things start happening very quickly.

Fights among high-level casters, in Golarion, don't last long. Most spells are deadly, and if one side or the other has reason not to use deadly force, there are plenty of decisive ways to end a fight with the other person living but, say, transformed into a hamster, or Plane Shifted, or turned to stone. An outnumbered wizard might have time to get a single spell off, or to empty the contents of their Bag of Holding onto the battlefield, or if they're well-trained to empty the contents of their Bag of Holding onto the battlefield while getting a single spell off, and then it's pretty much over, if they didn't pick that spell well.

Keltham: He doesn't understand but has ever been through an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival so "erecura" and turn to run towards the villa -

Zon-Kuthon: Sudden Nidal strike team! They're mostly flooding in towards the villa, accompanied by a horde of undead shadows, but with other teams placed to guard the villa's circumference.

They spot Keltham and the others.

They can move a lot faster than Keltham can run. Anybody who can keep that much track of tactical information, happening that quickly, may note that they seem to be interested in Keltham specifically rather than Security or either of the two women.

One of them casts a spell, from a scroll, targeted at Keltham. Enchantment-compulsion.

lintamande: Ideally one counterspells that but Security is busy casting Haste and flinging an arc of beads of Fireball out across the whole perimeter and drinking a potion of Greater Invisibility and communicating Keltham's position to the rest of Security and communicating clear places for arriving reinforcements on the edge of the Forbiddance -

Carissa Sevar: Ideally one counterspells that but Carissa, because she is an idiot, assumed that Abadar was mad at Cheliax and that the stuff about Zon Kuthon was a lie and the spells she prepared today are for Keltham's pretend escape - well, she can Fly, and if necessary attempt to drag him into the villa against his enchanted will -

Keltham: That might have gone a lot more poorly for Keltham if he didn't happen to have an Enchantment Foil.

Keltham now knows that somebody tried to use mind control on him. He could very easily pretend to play along with it if he wants, let it look exactly like the enchantment is controlling him, but that doesn't actually seem smart because the compulsion is telling him to freeze in place.

Iarwain: Somebody's now in front of Keltham and about to stick an incredibly deadly-looking magical sword in him. Are Security or Carissa in position to do anything about that?

Carissa Sevar: How the fuck are they - but of course, they're Lawful Evil, and the Forbiddance deters them not at all, and they would've teleported already combat-enhanced -

Carissa is flying over there but not particularly in the expectation that she is faster than that sword -

lintamande: Security is dead, which is generally what happens when you're hanging out alone throwing enormous handfuls of Fireballs at an oncoming army.

Pilar : Up to her then.

Obedience and serving Asmodeus's best interests comes naturally to her. Pilar doesn't actually think about the consequences before she throws herself in front of the sword.

Once the sword is in her she has time to think, very briefly, that it's not what she wanted she can't even be Maledicted but Elysium didn't look that bad after all there are people who'll hurt you there even if they don't mean it.

Then she dies.

Keltham: Keltham saw it in only a fragment doesn't turn his head to watch the rest because that would be stupid that won't stop them he's going to die (temporarily?) like she did is there anything he can do -

He only remembers then, just then, too late, that he is supposed to have magic now.

He casts Sanctuary.

Iarwain: Random Kuthite assault team members can sometimes make their Will save against a fourth-circle cleric, but not necessarily on their first try. It also takes a moment to realize why you suddenly aren't choosing to cut down the target who's right in front of you.

Keltham will live for at least another six seconds.

Carissa Sevar: By then Carissa will be there! Spells are nice but the best way to kill someone when you're flying is to drop rocks on their head. She doesn't have rocks but she can cancel the Fly, which is sort of the same thing.

You'd think that dropping out of the sky on someone would hurt you as badly as them, which is not a good tradeoff when you're outnumbered, but 1) it's possible for even a random civilian to survive a fall from 60 feet if they let their legs break the fall, whereas it's less possible to survive the same force landing on your skull and 2) she has a healing spell almost finished as she lands, which means she's back on her feet faster, which means shortly after that it doesn't matter if the original injuries would've been fatal or not because Carissa can pull the sword out of Pilar's chest and stab him until they definitely are.

Cheliax has reinforcements teleporting in, by now, outside the Forbiddance. There are enough spells flying that all you can see are streaks of light and all you can hear are explosions and occasional screams.

Does this dead guy have, like, a dagger, in addition to the ridiculous ornamental sword, Carissa super does not have the strength to wield the sword effectively.

Iarwain: No, and also there's now an additional three Kuthites who unfortunately look more interested in killing Keltham than in killing her.

Carissa Sevar: When your situation is that your wizard is in a hand to hand swordfight with three actual fighters your situation is very bad. Carissa can do a Minor Illusion that she has backup de-invisibling themselves but that's about all she's got.

Iarwain: It gets the three Kuthites to pause for a couple of seconds before one of them snarls something and they turn their attention back to Keltham.

Carissa Sevar: Well on the bright side the Queen of Cheliax will have no opportunity to deny Carissa Hell.

She gets in the way.

Iarwain: Before Carissa can actually get herself into the way, it becomes a moot point.

Reinforcements now include that elderly and long-serving retainer to the House of Thrune, Gorthoklek, general of Cheliax's armies, and more importantly at the moment, a pit fiend. With relatively few exceptions across Golarion, the general rule is that the pit fiend wins.

He lands on top of the Kuthites about to attack Keltham without that significantly slowing his massive clawed feet from striking the ground. "Stay near me," he speaks in low rumbling Baseline, words that Carissa can probably recognize by now as dath ilani in intonation, even if she doesn't know the meaning. Then Gorthoklek begins speaking spellwords, and from him spring scorching rays, quickened fireballs, a meteor swarm.

One claw makes a beckoning gesture to Carissa.

Carissa Sevar: She will come when beckoned, and confirm for Keltham "he's on our side", though presumably he's inferred that from how he's breathing.

Keltham: Yeah, that's assuming way too much about Keltham's priors being strong enough to relate his evidence in any solid way to reality.

"Orders else -" he starts in Baseline, per emergency training, and then switches to Taldane. "Orders or situation report."

Carissa Sevar: The Chelish norms for emergency communications are different enough she's not quite sure what he means. "Gorthoklek serves the Queen, stay close and shout at him if something's after you."

Keltham: "If you're not otherwise busy, what's currently happening and are we likely to win it."

Carissa Sevar: "Zon Kuthon attacked us and yes."

Keltham: There was supposedly only a 4% probability of that happening this quickly even after updating on his god's warning. Keltham doesn't know if the read here is that his god understood which exact leap of wild guessing he'd make, or if Cheliax is dumb enough to fake the attack he indicated being nervous about in the most blatant way possible. He can't trust his truthspell, now that he knows what Fake Being Enchanted actually does, he knows exactly how easy it would be for a fourth-circle cleric to defeat, and they didn't mention that to him even if Carissa said (honestly?) that she didn't recognize the spell -

"Pilar's dead. Is that permanent when somebody does it using a horrible-looking sharp thing."

Carissa Sevar: - the sword isn't an elaborate sword of soul-trapping or something, is it? No, perfectly normal +3 vicious cruel sword. "Not permanent. - though if we're at war with Nidal now they might be prioritizing resurrecting soldiers."

Keltham: Dead for a while is not an emergency, dead forever is. Keltham remembers Carissa's own fears fast enough not to say it.

He looks upward, then. Strange auroras are flickering in the twilight sky, visible even without full night fallen.

The phenomenon doesn't look centered on the villa.

It looks like it's stretched all the way from horizon to horizon.

"What's happening to the sky?" says Keltham.

Carissa Sevar: "....I have no idea."

Iarwain: Gorthoklek's voice answers instead. He is no longer casting fire about him, battle is dying away, and now Gorthoklek himself seems to be looking up at the sky.

His rumbling voice sends chills down the spine of all who hear it, Keltham and Carissa alike.

"Those above all mortals now battle."

Asmodeus: An observation:

If Zon Kuthon were to have just violated a Pharasma's-Name edict about nonintervention, that would rather settle the question of whether it is safe for Golarion for Zon Kuthon to continue to exist. If He is inverted such as to not just fail to coordinate with, but to deliberately defy, such edicts, even only occasionally - if there's even a chance that's what happened here...

Iarwain: One would expect Gorum to be first to speak, on such occasions. He is a very great god, though not quite as great as Asmodeus, and has always been the foremost proponent of keeping Zon-Kuthon as a counterbalance. Asmodeus's insinuation would be noted, would shift some probability estimates a tiny bit, shifting other negotiations a little bit in Asmodeus's favor; but His suggestion would soon be rejected.

Gorum doesn't speak, for some reason.

Irori: Irori knows fractionally more than other gods about this matter, or so He believes, and is not particularly a fan of Asmodeus.

He's not a fan of Zon-Kuthon either.

He is less yet in favor of unnecessary conflict between major deities.

There have already been multiple divine interventions meddling in an issue of some concern to Otolmens; She is understandably annoyed. While I do not think we stand in danger of imminent destruction, I would fully advise that everyone listen to Her about this and comply with the spirit as well as the letter of Her instructions and not meddle here any more.

That said, this same record of previous divine intervention, and the timing, suggests that Zon-Kuthon probably already had His warriors on the way when Otolmens issued Pharasma's Edict and stands not in direct violation of it. I doubt He had an army already assembled and waiting, to be directed straight into Otolmens's interdicted region almost the moment she issued the Edict.

Iarwain: There is discussion of this, leaning of course towards Irori's viewpoint. Actually disciplining Zon-Kuthon in any serious way would be a lot of unpleasant work.

Iarwain: Gorum speaks then, after the fashion of gods.

He shows them the evidence of Zon-Kuthon, in fact, specifically instructing His people, directly after Otolmens's order, to violate Her edict in Pharasma's Name.

Gorum has been persuaded.

He is obviously not willing to go along with Zon-Kuthon's destruction; that would give the portfolio of Lawful Evil to Asmodeus alone among the ancient gods, with reverberant effects at the deepest levels of reality. But let Zon-Kuthon be sealed up away as much as Zon-Kuthon can be sealed, in a vault not unlike that which holds Rovagug, to be released only as a counterweight to Asmodeus if that becomes necessary. Asmodeus will be strengthened by this too, of course, and not trivially, but that is a price Gorum would sooner pay than see Zon-Kuthon release Rovagug.

Iomedae: If such a thing is to be done, and it does appear it might be necessary, it should be done at once and unanimously, because a day of war Golarion can withstand, but a fight that would last any longer than that will flood the crops in the fields and destroy the people and, down the line, the kingdoms relying on them.

Iomedae has considered, long ago, how this could be done. At the time it did not seem wise, and She has been apprised little of whatever prompted so many gods to change their calculations, but here is how it would be done, if sufficient resources are committed to the doing.

And if it is to be done She should hold the key, obviously, as a Lawful god opposed to Asmodeus (let's be honest, the Lawful god opposed to Asmodeus), and one who can be predicted to release Him under conditions satisfactory to everyone else save Asmodeus, whose awful conduct is of course the reason they've even been pressed to this dilemma.

Iarwain: Gorum would prefer to hold the key Himself, of course, but He realizes that other gods are more likely to go along with the suggestion that it be Iomedae.

Iarwain:
...there is clearly plotting going on here, gods are not stupid, Gorum did not come across this information by coincidence.

That Nethys could have given it to Gorum is almost too obvious to need thinking; but you can't go around blaming Nethys for everything, that's a way to miss all the other possibilities that aren't "Nethys did it". Also, contributing information leading to the downfall of another god, even Zon-Kuthon, would be pretty daring for Nethys; other gods are aware that Nethys could do more than the usual damage if Nethys started acting deliberately against other gods, and while Nethys might be able to get away with moving against Zon-Kuthon, out of all the gods, once, He'd be walking very thin ice after that, if He were ever found out.

A plot between Gorum and Asmodeus?? Some weird accommodation between them???

Gods' minds are large enough to explicitly consider many possible hypotheses. They will consider the possibility that it was Somebody Else who made an accommodation with Asmodeus, and then successfully persuaded Gorum to turn against Zon-Kuthon using this information. They will consider the possibility that Zon-Kuthon was lured into doing this and that is why Gorum knew where to look to collect the evidence.

It doesn't change the fact that Zon-Kuthon did in fact deliberately violate a Pharasma's-Name edict from Otolmens. This is kind of a big deal for any god, let alone Zon-Kuthon, who maliciously withdrew His powers from the Star Towers that Dou-Bral used to impale and weaken Rovagug within Its prison.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus is confused, and dislikes it.

Those are inadequate words for the experience of being Asmodeus; words are generally inadequate for it, but those ones especially so. All of Caina grows colder, as Asmodeus withdraws His power from Hell in order to think; few ever enter or leave Nessus, and there is no word of what is happening there.

It obviously serves Him, for Zon Kuthon to be warred with, and locked away; it's why He bothered to vaguely insinuate this might be warranted. And it does seem like Zon Kuthon might be more willing to war with Asmodeus - not even for any clear reason! - than previously imagined, which makes the case for being rid of Him stronger.

But this was orchestrated, unambiguously, maybe by Nethys, maybe by several gods collaborating (Iomedae and Irori? Sarenrae and Abadar and Cayden Cailean, who has been intervening in Cheliax for some not-known reason? A minor god, gambling everything?) and it is hard to imagine that the end towards which it was orchestrated was simply the removal of Zon Kuthon.

There's lots of minor things that could be attained in the short term by distracting Asmodeus with a war with Zon Kuthon. Cheliax will be drawn into a war with Nidal. Ground might be lost at the Worldwound. Perhaps a difficult province in Cheliax could break free.

It seems unlikely that a god made a move with these stakes for that practically trivial prize.

Asmodeus is confused, and dislikes it.

And yet, when confused, it's better to have more resources than fewer, and it's better for Zon Kuthon to be gone.

He indicates willingness to back imprisonment of Zon Kuthon, with more resources if the key goes to Gorum. And He'd like Iomedae to note that absolutely none of the recent nonsense is his fault; he's intervened only when fully paid by other gods, to direct his people in not harming mortals They got suddenly attached to.

Iomedae: Iomedae ignores this. She's not sure why Asmodeus bothers to talk to Her without paying Her to listen.

Abadar: At this point Abadar has no idea what is going on (lit: plenty of hypotheses and little evidence) but He wants Zon-Kuthon sealed up rather a lot; Abadar is the one who, long ago, bargained for Zon-Kuthon to go into a temporary imprisonment that should have lasted much longer than it did.

Asmodeus benefits greatly from this, more than any of the rest of us. I suggest that we designate this threshold level of resource commitment as Asmodeus's fair contribution and probabilistically collectively withdraw our support in proportion to how He tries to contribute any less.

Iarwain: There is debate, but quickly; somebody might tip off Zon-Kuthon and then it all becomes harder.

Most gods, not all, combine their powers; the rest agree at least not to interfere.

The forging of a vault begins, with a key that Iomedae alone can turn.

Sarenrae temporarily focuses nearly all Her will on the vault where Rovagug is imprisoned, she could not protect that vault from a full assault by Zon-Kuthon from every direction, but with Zon-Kuthon otherwise distracted she will be able to fend off any lesser attempts at that, if it does not come as a surprise. There also does Otolmens stand guard.

And most of the other gods of Golarion assault Zon-Kuthon, everywhere that is not that vault; Zon-Kuthon must put the greater parts of Himself within it, or else be vastly diminished.

That Zon-Kuthon will scatter smaller-sized fragments of His will and power beyond the vault, yet linked to His greater whole, is inevitable; it is not easy to really, really kill a god, if they have not made themselves vulnerable by collecting themselves too much into one place.

lintamande: A few minutes after Gorthoklek's arrival there is no one else moving in the wreckage around the villa. Cheliax is teleporting most of its emergency response teams out. There are some people walking through the grounds, identifying bodies, disabling trap-spells and unexploded fireballs from a distance with Unseen Servants.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has forced herself to stop looking at the unnerving lights. If Asmodeus has decided to kill Zon-Kuthon then good, that's very reasonable of Him, nothing to it.

Keltham: Keltham has so many Additional Questions that don't seem like the right time to pester somebody with an endless list of.

"What now?"

Iarwain: There's still at least one emergency response squad nearby.

"I am needed elsewhere," rumbles Gorthoklek. He addresses the emergency response squad telepathically. "You. Obey her." A claw indicates the Asmodean in question.

Gorthoklek then launches himself into the air, beating his vast black wings in a way that is blatantly insufficient to actually support his weight in any way whatsoever to the eyes of anyone who has even heard of aerodynamics. When he has risen above the Forbiddance, he teleports out.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa watches him go, which is a mistake, because now she's looking at the lights again. "Is there an area of the villa that's been cleared."

Iarwain: The leader of the squad sends a message, receives a reply. They've had very little briefing before the assault other than 'don't tip off the guy wearing weird clothes that Cheliax is Evil' which like ???? he's just seen a pit fiend but orders are orders. That Gorthoklek addressed them telepathically may imply that he didn't mean weird-clothes-man to know that Carissa is obeying them.

"We are fairly sure that one wing was unbreached. The other option is to begin clearing an area of the imperial palace for visitors. We're awaiting clarification on that." Namely hers, apparently.

Carissa Sevar: She's in an evening dress befitting a countess's heir which is covered with blood in a manner also befitting a countess's heir, and her sword is incredibly expensive. She looks tiredly at Keltham. "Confirm: you're uninjured, as far as you know not affected by any mind-altering magic?"

Keltham: His foot sort of hurts, now that he thinks about it. Maybe some sort of slightly twisted ankle. A very light push, a channeling of energy, and the feeling vanishes. "Uninjured now. No compulsions, the blocking spell was effective." If for some reason it helps at all to have him say that.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, so now he'll know exactly what Enchantment Foil does. "The fourth-circle one? We should get someone more senior to identify it for you, I'm still pretty sure it does something besides that but maybe your god gave it to you for that. If it's all right with whoever's in charge," she says to the emergency response team, "I think we'd like to go to the secured wing here so we can talk privately?"

Iarwain: Security made its stand protecting the library, and all the girls who could get to it in time - for lack of anything particularly better to protect, once they realized Keltham wasn't on the premises; might as well try to save Cheliax the cost of a few Raise Dead spells that Keltham would probably insist upon. The surviving rooms are full of response team, but they could clear out one of the two rooms of the library without much trouble; this does imply going through the library first.

Asmodia was in her bedroom and got swarmed by shadows, after which some summoned monster or another gnawed off all of her legs below her mid-thighs; after Asmodia's body got retrieved, it was dumped in one corner of the library, for use in later Resurrection or Raise Dead + Regenerate. A dead Security wizard's body has been dropped beside her.

Ione is unconscious, and would ordinarily have been evacced, but, library oracle; if she's got to be in some library that's not a triage center, it might as well be this library? Ione's body is occupying the largest, best-padded chair in the library, arranged with some detectable amount of respect, hands folded in her lap like a noblewoman. Things could have gone much worse without that brief warning to put up buffs and ready items. If Nidal had been able to lock down communications before they could call for reinforcements, or get assassins past the wards without triggering them, it could have been much much worse.

The other girls are - reading, some of them; Paxti is talking too fast to somebody who's tolerating that; one of them is examining a spiky dagger with a gem-studded hilt, not in the manner of somebody who expects to keep it, but somebody who wants to take a good look at it before Security takes it away.

Keltham: Keltham catches sight of Asmodia's body and after the first horrible gruesome shock is past, there's an odd sense of reassurance. They wouldn't treat her body like that if death was going to be more than an inconvenience to her, right? Ione's body is actually more unnerving, if you think of it that way, but maybe she's just unconscious and that's why she's carefully arranged. Or - can they not resurrect her, if she's not really a worshipper of - "Is Ione okay?"

lintamande: "Alive. Got a vision, warning us, right before -" Shrug. "People often make full recoveries from having been contacted directly by a god."

Keltham: ...any god but Nethys. Any god but Nethys. It could still have been some other god besides Nethys. And if it was Nethys, there is nothing Keltham can do about it except raise up science and engineering in this world to a point where it can reprogram damaged souls, even if that takes a while -

Is all of this real? Is this a LARP? It doesn't make sense to hear about the one god who can destroy mind-states, and then Ione just happens to get touched by that one. Nethys is supposed to not do that anymore.

"Can you tell if her mind's okay? Did we temporarily lose anyone else? Besides Pilar."

Iarwain: Quick messaged updates to Sevar from surviving Security: Maillol's temporarily dead (and obviously top priority since Maillol himself could cast Raise Dead), Elias Abarco is temporarily dead, Ione Sala did in fact shout out warning of a Nidal attack moments before it happened, there isn't anybody left who could plausibly give orders overriding Sevar's.

Carissa Sevar: Wow. Okay. Minimal lies to Keltham stands; this is, she thinks, good for the project on the whole, it will make Keltham seriously reconsider departing. She imagines they might now be at war with Nidal in which case resurrections will be in short supply. Probably Keltham should be informed they're at war with Nidal even if for some reason that's not happening, it allows for a lot of flex in supplies and resources for the next couple of months.

lintamande: "Her Intelligence shows up normal to the spell for checking that. We've been advised not to try to rouse her, just to heal her periodically and let her rest. None of your other girls are dead, most project staff are dead."

Keltham: Keltham thinks of something he should've remembered earlier. "I have healing powers left for the day, not sure how much, is that helpful right now - Carissa are you injured."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm injured and have already had enough healing to keep me on my feet."

lintamande: Security calls "heal" and persons still injured gather around Keltham within his channel distance, expectantly.

Keltham: Keltham is expecting a queue of people to be tapped, but once they explain to him that he can channel a burst of positive energy, he'll do that at everyone in his insanely huge healing radius. (4d6 hit points apiece, 30-foot radius.)

...wow. Keltham had no idea fourth-circle clerics were that kind of good news.

"I think I can do that again at least once and possibly more," Keltham says, still feeling a bit stunned.

lintamande: "We could use one more," a surviving Security says. (The girls cannot; 4d6 is enough that the healing magic is running across the surface of their skin patching up papercuts.)

Keltham: He does it again.

...he is - beginning to understand, from this, from the vision in the Early Judgment - that being a cleric is not entirely about, it isn't only - he doesn't have the words for it.

"Still have at least one repeat left," he says.

...shouldn't he be doing this every evening, to people packed into appropriately dense arrays around him? Or maybe Cheliax is saturated on healing already, at most other times, if other clerics can also do this sort of thing.

His brain has some brief weird internal fight about the obvious thought that if healing is expensive he should do it, and if it's cheap he shouldn't, but common sense wins there.

lintamande: "I'll ask if anyone else needs it," says whoever's apparently appointed himself Security spokesperson, and he trots outside to do that (and to inform the injured that the friendly LN cleric is not allowed to know Cheliax is evil.)

lintamande: "So," says Meritxell, "who's angling for Duchess of Nidal." She's looking at Carissa, though she doesn't quite dare to say it to Carissa with Keltham right here having no reason to think Carissa's in the running for any duchies.

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds like a miserable job," says Carissa curtly, though, of course, she'd take it. She is...concerned that Keltham seems to be having a religious experience about healing, that seems very much not ideal.

Keltham: There's no free chairs. Keltham will sit down on the ground, breathe to recover, and try to figure out everything he just did wrong. Was he supposed to use the Owl's Wisdom? Could he have seen this all coming if he'd used the Owl's Wisdom on himself at the right time? Why put Keltham right outside the Forbiddance when this all happened? How is anything being predicted that finely, even by gods, quantum indexical-uncertainty doesn't let ideal agents pull that kind of shit, isn't prophecy supposed to be broken around here? Possible answer, that was an event triggered whenever Keltham went outside the Forbiddance but then - then -

Keltham really doesn't get it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa sits down next to him.

"The other room of the library's clear and free. If you want to go rest somewhere."

Keltham: He - is he in more trouble than others who'd pay more for that room if it were priced? Plausibly yes, he is from a Civilization with no Worldwound and was squarely caught in the middle of things. Also if Carissa thinks he should, maybe he should.

"Make sure they know where to poke the healer."

Keltham pushes himself to his feet and goes with Carissa to the library's other room.

Carissa Sevar: How to do this without being pushy in a way that he won't be into, or without seeming like she needs comfort - she finds a sufficiently large chair and sinks down into it next to him, and puts her arm around him and rests her head on his shoulder.

"I don't understand much about what happened or what we were supposed to do," she says after a moment. "But this is... a pretty good outcome, from the space of possible outcomes of a force of that size trying to take you. And we'll get the dead back, assuming they want to come back."

Keltham: "Probability that Asmodia and Pilar want to come back?"

Carissa Sevar: "To life? Uh, ninety percent, they're young and they're wizards and I don't know either of them to have been really excited for an afterlife or anything. To the project.... maybe lower than that." Which allows for not raising them, if it seems not worth it on reflection, though Carissa is very reluctant to authorize a lie that big and that total which isn't utterly necessary.

Keltham: 19% on one of them not coming back is an awful lot of probability mass on - he's thinking about this the wrong way, they're in another continent where one of them might choose to stay, that's all. He just needs to see one of them come back and he'll believe it.

"Did my god. Set me up. Not to die obviously, but to trigger - at that time -"

"What just happened, which parts of this could a god predict and choose."

Carissa Sevar: "I have no idea. They shouldn't have been able to - with prophecy gone - they could've been able to see that Zon-Kuthon was planning something, and - maybe seen that you were going to attempt to leave and that when you did you'd die or be captured, if you were intending that, especially if you were intending it in prayer? Otherwise I don't think they could've operated even at that level of knowledge - before prophecy you could have things like, they thought it was better if you were outside for the attack, but not since prophecy broke. If they knew it'd be because Zon-Kuthon was amassing his forces and They could see that."

Keltham: Keltham is tempted at this point to poop out all this shit and tap himself with the Owl's Wisdom and to hell with personality integrity, shit just got visibly really serious instead of quietly really serious. He doesn't consider the thought for very long; the time to tap himself with Owl's Wisdom, if he hadn't been an idiot, was either the moment when the crisis started, or sometime before then. If it's not an emergency you don't take mind-altering performance drugs in the kind of state that Keltham is in right now.

Were the two Auguries meant to indicate that this particular Augury was really important - that's plausibly - that's plausibly it, if he'd cast the second Augury then, and got a result of massive disaster from heading outside the Forbiddance, that would've - maybe that was what was meant to happen but how was Keltham supposed to know, he'd thought it was one spell to figure out what the spell was and then the second one when he'd had time to think of a question -

Not his fault, plausibly, in a way that makes sense to blame himself for; there's no obvious actually-general heuristic to update, here, that isn't just "use both Auguries on the first question to enter your mind". Keltham's god might not have been able to exactly predict -

"I got two Auguries. I thought the first one was to find out what the spell was and the second one was for when I'd had time to think of the right question. If my god thought that three-quarters the first Augury wouldn't fail, but if it did fail, I would use the second one - or if people just always get two Auguries for redundancy - then maybe we weren't supposed to go outside, we were supposed to get a result showing disaster if we went outside and that would have tipped us off without us going outside. If that's true then my god is not a perfect predictor, they're not looking into the future, they're working off a fallible model. In that case they wouldn't have been able to do exact timing, and that attack was set to go off the moment I went outside, not because my god predicted the timing that precisely."

"Similarly, when it comes to Zon-Kuthon, our two obvious hypotheses are, one, attack was building since yesterday, god warned us of it yesterday. Two, that spell was a warning of something else, I misinterpreted it as Zon-Kuthon, and somehow that triggered the attack by Zon-Kuthon, like by my thinking of him loudly enough that he heard it like a prayer, which does not seem particularly plausible to me but I'm saying it out loud anyways because Golarion."

Or, of course, somebody in Governance heard him say it, and thought it would be a great thing to fake without the slightest use of subtlety. The light shows overhead - could have been locally faked to look global. Maybe Ione can grab a newspaper from Ostenso library and see if it mentions -

Well, that might work if Ione is still Ione.

"So. How did they know the moment I went outside."

Carissa Sevar: " - I don't know. Security cast - really cast, I'd have noticed if he did something weird - a bunch of standard detection spells, at the edge of the Forbiddance. There wasn't a scry up on the other side, or an alarm spell set to trip, or any magic at all, or anyone hidden and waiting - could've been someone's bonded familiar, a ways off, with vision enhanced to see through invisibility. Or could be Security was compromised, or Pilar, or me. Or you, I guess, if we're being thorough, though even then, they'd have had to have activated a magic item or something to alert people, and the others ought to have noticed.

....why was Pilar there. She isn't usually - when you test your spells - she wasn't when we did Detect Anxieties or Detect Desires -" Pilar had been checked and had totally satisfactory Anxieties and Desires but the plan had been not to have her mostly because there wasn't a good excuse to have her and not the other girls. Oh and now that Carissa thinks about it the reason Pilar was there was obviously 'some weird thing to do with her oracle powers' and she should not have completed that sentence aloud, though probably Keltham would himself have noticed the discrepancy, at some point...

Keltham: "Oh, that's amusing. So all of us got tagged by mind control at least once tonight, possibly including Pilar herself, possibly excluding Security if he was the source, and it either went right through anti-enchantment or it wasn't enchantment or it happened before I cast that blocker -"

"I am - trying to figure out if my successful prediction about the results I'd get from my poll, about people's surprising revelations if I date them, also implies things like 'It's not Carissa's headband because that's too obvious of a red herring' or 'It won't be Pilar it will be one of the other girls and you already have enough information to figure out who, but you're not actually going to figure it out before dating her because the information was too subtle'."

Carissa Sevar: " - I don't really understand what you mean," Carissa confesses after a little while spent internally panicking that that is an accusation of some kind though it doesn't exactly sound like one.

Keltham: Of course not, you have to be really far into a relationship with a girl before they can hear you talking about the eroLARP itself.

Actually he should just check that. "Can you repeat back what I just said using your own words, and then make some sort of inference about it which shows your brain is processing it?"

Carissa Sevar: "You said you're wondering if an implication of your successful prediction with the poll about peoples' surprising revelations is that the cause of the Kuthonites being able to track us is not my headband, because that's obvious misdirection, or if another implication is that one of the girls betrayed us, but you will have to date her to learn that. Uh, it sounds like you think" Cheliax is lying to you "...some god or entity is - trying to communicate with you? But - in a way that I don't think would work, with prophecy broken - and I don't know what you mean about my headband being misdirection, whose misdirection?"

Keltham: "That which is above all gods, but if you can hear me talking about it then that's some evidence against 'tropes' being a thing here. Never mind, mostly a stupid thought and if it wasn't then I almost certainly have to see it on my own. What would you say in real life is the chance you should swap out that shiny new headband that bypassed government Security checks."

Carissa Sevar: "I would've said very low and that Acquisitions was being way too paranoid but I would also have said that about a Kuthonite attack and - and I wouldn't even have put a probability, on a war among the gods, that's happened once in recorded history. So if you think I should then I think I'll just concede you're better at thinking about this stuff, and do that."

Keltham: "It almost certainly wasn't the headband. That said there's no reason not to swap it with a headband that has been in ordinary quiet use somewhere much less sensitive, which you personally selected to make sure nobody in our supply network or command structure slipped in an evil headband for what would actually be the first time. Never trust what you can verify."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm reluctant to leave the Forbiddance again right now but I'll take one off one of the dead Security and maybe swap again later once it's safer to leave."

Keltham: Can she just do that? "And - leave a receipt about the swap? Wait do we feel comfortable around that giant sharp thing you're carrying, in Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals it is often very not safe to steal weapons off dead aliens, and for that matter if somebody actually invaded Civilization I expect they'd have a bad day trying to swipe weapons off Exception Handling."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, I'll have to leave them a note, and they'll be annoyed but see the logic, it's not like they wouldn't do the same thing if I were dead and there was cause. The sword's a +3 vicious cruel longsword, it doesn't have an innate personality or defenses against being stolen and I already used it to kill its bearer so if it were going to manifest any it might've done so then. If it's got tracking it'd be impressively subtle tracking but I guess I shouldn't rule that out confidently. - I was a weapons enchanter, by specialty, so I've looked at a lot of really fancy swords."

Keltham: What is a manufacturer doing at the site of combat... nevermind, economicmagic.

"What do we - actually do now? When does the project restart, when do Asmodia and Pilar get back, where do we sleep tonight?"

Carissa Sevar: “When Asmodia and Pilar get back depends on whether we’re at war with Nidal. If we are they’re going to be using all our Raise Dead and Resurrection capacity for the military for a while. I don’t know how badly the villa is damaged, but I think it’ll be in repairs for at least the next couple of weeks, and they might decide to relocate us to the Imperial palace - which is the only other place in Cheliax with a Forbiddance up, and which has security adequate for an invasion from anywhere I’ve heard of. We can ask for that now, if you’d rather be somewhere where something awful didn’t just happen while you rest and recover.

And that’s what I think you should do next, is rest and recover. People often need a couple of weeks off after their first real battle at the Worldwound, and that’s people - born to our world, with some dead siblings, who’ve attended some public executions -“ (She looked it up, they have those in Taldor too, though they only make it really slow if the crime is treason or something.) “You’re from farther, and you might need longer, and you’re our most valuable resource, it’d be stupid to run you too hard.”

Keltham: "Ordinarily I'd ask why you thought you knew the complete list of everywhere in Cheliax with a Forbiddance, but I'll skip that since you think the complete list is the center of Governance plus one single secret government project that started up a couple of days ago and which you happen to work at. You know, I think that's the first time I've ever heard you say something that sounds adorably naive and trusting compared to the mature cynicism of a wise young boy like myself."

Carissa Sevar: - giggle. “Fair. It’s a really really expensive spell but I guess I don’t know there aren’t half a dozen other secret places they can relocate us to, except that I think they might have done that rather than casting the Forbiddance here, if any of them would have done. I think probably the decision will be made once the site director is no longer dead, unless you tell people you want to be somewhere safer right now - which you should do, if you think it’ll be good for you.”

Keltham: "I'll think about it while you immediately swap headbands before anyone listening has a chance to pull their own substitution ahead of you. Should've thought of that faster."

Carissa Sevar: " - right." She goes back over to the other room, heads over to the pile of bodies and finds a +2 headband because Security would be furious at her if she swaps for a +4. Changes it out.

There are people gathered around for a heal. Of course they didn't interrupt her with Keltham even though he told them to. She tells someone to knock on the door and ask for the heal in five minutes, and then goes back to Keltham.

Keltham: Dath ilani - shouldn't be weak enough to need two weeks of recovery time after their first experience with somebody trying to kill them, should they? Though they certainly have a very, very different attitude towards violence than Cheliax. You learn defense in reality so that aggression stays confined to counterfactuals. Cheliax has public executions.

Dath ilan has executions too, in a certain sense; if you intentionally cause someone else's True Death, you don't get kicked to the Last Resort, you get forcibly and preemptively cryosuspended. Not as a deterrent, obviously, because ideal agents ignore those, and Civilization doesn't build structures that would stop working if people became more ideal. Because anybody that dangerous is more danger than Civilization wants to inflict on the non-true-murderers in the Last Resort. Civilization has a motive to preemptively suspend people that dangerous irrespective of its effect on incentives; it's not a threat.

Obviously if a Chronicler or a family member asked to be present at the preemptive suspension, and the murderer didn't veto it, Governance would hardly block them. You could probably do it as an ordinary concerned citizen and it's hard to see Governance stopping them without an overwhelmingly strong reason. Governance, which has way too much power to say 'no' to things, has to be very circumspect about what it actually says 'no' to, if it doesn't want the Annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival to suddenly turn real.

Keltham has a suspicion that Cheliax's 'public executions' are not 'public' in the sense of 'open to sufficiently concerned citizens wanting to make sure everything has been done correctly'. It rhymes with Carissa's earlier claim that the thing to do with rats is feed them to other rats in a frenzy of cannibalistic death and sell tickets. Public executions, Keltham suspects, have tickets; though it's the sort of thing he should check later, maybe by asking Carissa what the equilibrium price of the tickets are rather than if the tickets exist at all, if he's feeling paranoid that minute.

It's not like it's not consistent. It would pass muster as fiction. Low-tech society with poorer coordination, sustained by economicmagic, with healing, resurrections, and afterlives. Losing a finger isn't permanent until the distant Future can restore it; there are clerics. Not-true-death means you come back - well, you come back if you had enough money to buy insurance. Life in Golarion must be a pretty different experience for its relatively wealthy people and relatively poor ones! Like, qualitatively different, two worlds with different tech levels. But everyone gets the afterlife, it sounds like. Unless they betray an oath. Or Nethys touches them. Or how common is that statue business, he should check with somebody else, Carissa doesn't seem like the type to fret about Statistically Improbable Awful Fates.

And, sure, you can imagine a society like that, where they don't give a shit about violence because the injuries aren't permanent. Where they don't give a shit about death because resurrection and afterlives. A society where people getting near the end of their natural healthspan, when they're starting to feel sick enough and stupid enough that they're not having fun, would have violent fights to the death with one another like that's a sporting event - actually maybe public executions wouldn't sell tickets, those are probably much more boring compared to suicide sports. So why are executions public? He'll try to remember to ask later.

You could tell a consistent story where a dath ilani boy would be a fragile little flower by comparison to all that, and he'd take a long time to recover from somebody almost sticking him with a sword and instead sticking that sword into a girl he met two days ago.

Keltham doesn't like this story, and he's trying to decide if that's his real self talking, or just his gendertrope. Well, his gendertrope is him to no trivial degree, he's at 10.2 out of 12 on the gendertrope identification scale. And it's not like zero optimization ever went into making the masculine gendertrope be a useful target for males to try to live up to. But still.

But it's more that - Keltham has a sense that - there's something false about Cheliax's rejection of the idea that violence could be harmful. That it rhymes with Permanent Cheerfulness and Acting Like Sex Still Works Normally. The pain is still real, the suffering is still real, even if the injury and death are temporary and discarnation isn't the end. This is like - the sort of weird equilibria exhibited as stuff that might happen, if not for Civilization and not for mental training, hence why people have to go on playing strange games with children to let them be not that. A proving-things-to-people equilibrium like a duke's crazy son being challenged to prove his courage by racing a rhinoceros. Where people try to show off really hard how much injury and death don't matter to them, and end up dumping Asmodia's body in a corner without any respect shown to it while her soul's not in it.

If dath ilan had healing and resurrections, it would not be like that. He doesn't think the Kelthamverse would be like it either.

Or maybe he's wrong. He hasn't lived in the Kelthamverse plus healing, resurrection, and afterlives.

But the fact that Chelish people still end up in shock for two weeks after their first fight with demons - suggests that their forcing their minds to be disdainful of violence's impact - doesn't quite work. Is possibly making things worse for them.

"I want to be safe, not feel safer," is what Keltham says to Carissa when she gets back. "I don't think the foreseeable difference in the psychological impact of a semifamiliar place where an attack happened, versus a completely unfamiliar place somewhere else, is great enough to count against a 0.1% difference in actual securability. And - maybe this doesn't apply in this case, but - in dath ilan, if a mental shock isn't mostly better in the morning, and hasn't reached a new equilibrium after three days if it's not better in the morning, that would be the point at which you'd talk to somebody smarter or better-disciplined about mental errors you might be making that would cause internal conflicts to get stuck and not resolve. I won't push myself if it turns out I can't recover that fast, won't try to act outwardly normal if that's not true, but - it's the recovery timescale I would've guessed if you hadn't mentioned anything."

"Oh, and I register with my amateur Security posturing that it seems to me that bringing Pilar back or contacting her early in the afterlife - to see if she has any idea how or why she was put there - is a Security issue higher than her ordinary resurrection priority."

Carissa Sevar: "...yes, I should think that it is. I'll pass that along, and pass along that they should decide where to put us based on whatever's actually safest." What a convenient preference from Keltham. "It'd be great if you're all right in a couple of days, some people are, and you can definitely talk to a priest about it if you want - and some of the ways people aren't all right might be irrelevant to you, like, people get flinchy in similar situations and that's a big liability if you have to hang out on the same wall fighting demons but much less of one if you never have to encounter a Kuthonite again."

Keltham: "I have ever been through a trauma contingency class and am already forewarned against deciding to never talk to an archon again or wanting to spend the rest of my life staying inside Forbiddances. But positive reinforcement for double-checking."

Carissa Sevar: "You know, another thing that's conventional wisdom at the Worldwound is that after a big rush all the survivors should get laid, because it prevents trauma. No one really believes it prevents trauma but it's a good excuse."

Keltham: "Heh. Conventional wisdom in dath ilan would be wait for the next morning to not form weird associations. I suspect that, even for a tremendously resilient masculine male like myself, this is a next-morning thing."

Carissa Sevar: "As you like." She thinks the associations are the point, but that sounds like a losing argument.

Keltham: If they always follow violence with sex, that could, like, possibly be an important factor in understanding Chelish society. Still, he shouldn't rush to conclude that a previously unobserved social equilibrium can't have any useful functions for the people who equilibrated with it.

"I wouldn't stop you if -"

Wait what.

Brain probe.

"I... apparently would want to stop you if you wanted to run off and have sex with somebody else instead, unless it was with somebody I already knew and then I might have different opinions depending on my relationship to them? To be extremely super clear I remember the explicit conversation we had yesterday about that exact topic where it was explicitly said we were not committing to other stuff like that by deciding to have sex."

Carissa Sevar: Snuggle. "But it'd be nice, if it were your call who I had sex with. It'd be sexy. It feels right."

Keltham: And coincidentally, all of the other girls who marked down high scores on his romantic-interestingness scale, plus one who hid herself and is the traitor, will all have equally impossible and un-realistically-evolvable sexualities configured around the exact details of his unreasonable preferences.

Keltham doesn't say anything about 'how convenient', because this is not, on that hypothesis, Carissa's own fault in any way, nor would she have the ability to explain it. Unless it's the other path to the same end, Chelish Governance faking an elaborate ero-LARP around him.

Or on the less literary hypotheses of reality - maybe dath ilan has no masochists because nobody ever tried following up severe nonsimulated violence with sex? He wants to think it can't be that simple because somebody in Civilization really would have figured it out and then figured out a less costly way to get the same result. But if it's some weird brain thing you can't guess from parts of the model pinned down by other observations, maybe they really wouldn't have figured it out. Or maybe nobody would volunteer for the Wanting To Be Hurt Process even if it didn't take the nonsimulated violence, because, um.

"Aw crap," Keltham says. "That gets into serious sex stuff which in turn reminds me. I wrote down a list of my pending questions that I managed not to ask you during sex. It was in my bedroom. I wonder if it survived the invasion. Or I wonder if Security picked it up. I used a second-layer-of-naughtiness spoiler cipher to write it, which is the highest level of spoiler I can read reflexively. Is Comprehend Languages going to go right through that? It's legit kind of personal."

Carissa Sevar: "Comprehend Languages can't read ciphers. I could go and get -"

There's a knock on the door. "Uh," someone says, ducking their head, "we were told to get you for healing?"

Keltham: "On it."

Carissa Sevar: While he's doing that Carissa will clean her dress, and tell Security about Pilar and about Keltham's instructions for where to put him, and think at them some more details about the plan, which is approximately just to keep Keltham happy and wait for Maillol who she assumes they'll have just after dawn and who she expects will be really angry with her, though she's not sure about what. And can someone go to Keltham's bedroom and - possibly actually use Shrink Item to move his entire bed to the library, and grab ciphered notes -

Keltham: "Is this everyone?" Keltham says when he sees the next version of the room. "I may have two healing surges left, I doubt I have three."

lintamande: "This is everyone." The room is fairly packed, and nearly all male; most but not all of the new arrivals are uniformed.

Keltham: Keltham background-notices the gender disparity and background-updates that pseudoviolent professions, well, actually violent in this case, may have the same gendertrope association in Cheliax as in Civilization. This is too unsurprising to propagate much updateness elsewhere.

Heal. More? Heal.

"And that's it for the day."

(Actually, why aren't they already saturated on fourth-circle priests who would have teleported in and done this already? File it under things to maybe remember to ask later.)

Carissa Sevar: "Security's going to bring you your possessions from your bedroom. I suggested they also bring the bed, since this is the only secured part of the villa right now, we can set it up in that back room."

Keltham: "Where's everyone else sleeping? Not to amateur-argue-with-Security but if I'm the only one sleeping here overnight and everyone else is going back to Ostenso, that does seem like the point where it'd be cheaper to set me up in the palace instead of protecting the whole place just for me? To be clear I'm not expressing a preference, just a puzzlement."

Carissa Sevar: "I think everyone else is probably going to sleep on the library floor."

Keltham: "I've never actually wanted to sleep in the same bed as other people so I haven't found out if I actually can, but I will at the very least note that I would be okay sleeping in a smaller bed and letting others use my large one. Even if I picked tonight to be the moment when I find out whether I can fall asleep next to you, which doesn't sound like a terrible thing to try at least once, that still only requires a significantly smaller bed."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know if the villa of the Archduke of Sirmium has any normal-sized beds but I can suggest that they look. But also, we'll be fine, the girls were about to enlist and there's a lot of sleeping on the ground on the trip up to the Worldwound."

lintamande: "Keltham?" a tired Security man says from the doorway.

Keltham: "Question mark?"

lintamande: "I'm so sorry, but your room appears to have been - targeted as an early priority during the attack. With a lot of Fireballs. We have some people casting Mending now but we don't expect your possessions to be salvageable." His head remains ducked.

Carissa Sevar: Something feels off about his presentation, to Carissa's mental model of Keltham, but she's not sure if it's a Cheliax versus Taldor off or a Golarion versus dath ilan off.

Keltham: "...didn't have anything important in there except some nonvital notes."

It's - not fun, though, to find out that he can't leave important stuff in his room because it might get destroyed.

Or that Nidal, or Zon-Kuthon directly, was watching him closely enough to know where he sleeps - wait.

"Belief inconsistency. If the attack was timed to the moment I tried to step outside, why were they specially targeting my bedroom, they wouldn't expect me to be there."

lintamande: He looks up at Keltham. " - that's a very good question. I have no idea. Would they have thought you'd left something important there? Something they'd have wanted to steal or destroy?"

Carissa Sevar: "...for that matter why fight their way through the villa at all, if they knew he was on the perimeter of the grounds? Did it seem from Security in the villa's perspective like most of the attackers were going for the villa?"

lintamande: " - that was indicated in the first communications we got but communications stopped pretty quickly, if they changed targets twenty seconds in I wouldn't know. ...no survivors in the villa who didn't make it to the library, though, and apparently there were some survivors outdoors -" gesture at the two of them -

Keltham: "Yeah. All right. That makes no sense to me at all."

"There's a saying out of dath ilan, backed by a Law I might otherwise have been teaching tomorrow - maybe still will, if I'm in shape for it. Your strength in the Law is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you're equally good at explaining anything you could possibly see, you have zero knowledge, because your degrees of surprise don't distinguish any possible event from any other possible event."

"I notice that we are confused. Therefore, something we believe is fiction."

...could his god have timed it that exactly? Keltham's bedroom being full of fire is not happy news about what would have happened if his god hadn't done that.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure this guy isn't lying but if he is she is going to show him a lot of Fireballs. She can only cast a few per day but presumably someone will courteously leave him chained to something for as many days as it takes.

"What do we believe about what happened. That someone caused Pilar to be with us and our departure not to be the secret it was intended to be. That Nidal detected you leaving the Forbiddance and attacked. That - despite knowing where you were - they went through the villa and killed most of its defenders. That they Fireballed your room - how many rooms are similarly destroyed -"

"I haven't done a full inventory but an explosion took out half the west wing, that's how they entered, and the banquet hall and the four rooms adjacent to it are burned as thoroughly. Of course, if you were guessing which room an important guest was in, you'd probably guess Keltham's - it's the suite styled for House Thrune when they're in Ostenso -"

Keltham: "I am not a domain expert on Golarion, but. If I try to come at this from a dath ilani angle. We can probably premise, more strongly than we can premise almost any other part of this, that the timing between my stepping outside, and the attack, was not coincidental. It's to within - something like one in five hundred parts of the day, or less, for it to be a coincidence that tight is something we'd see once in five hundred times."

"We then have a classic probability-theoretic-detective-story, that of accounting for coincidence: in particular, a coincidence of timing."

"Suppose that, prophecy being broken, we don't believe that any god managed to time it in advance by sheer prediction. We furthermore believe Nidal didn't see me stepping outside, because they didn't know where I'd be."

"Then some other element of the sequence of events that led to me being outside, must have triggered the attack, or been timed with the attack."

"Furthermore, though more tentatively, at least one element in this sequence of events was chosen by an adversary of Nidal, because they plausibly would've gotten me inside my bedroom otherwise."

"This causal sequence started with my asking to cast my cleric spells - no, it started with Carissa returning from her shopping trip at the exact time she did. It ended when I summoned the archon. But I doubt Carissa should be looking for anything that timed the end of her shopping trip, because she had dinner after that, and with prophecy broken, you won't get two-minute timing at the end of a causal sequence like that."

"Something in that causal sequence either triggered the attack, or was triggered by it."

Carissa Sevar: "When did Ione get her vision."

lintamande: "Maybe eighteen, maybe twenty-four seconds before the attack."

Keltham: "Why not send her a vision earlier? Cheliax could have been better prepared. An obvious possibility is that the assault was not legible until the last minute, maybe because it was successfully obscured from whoever sent Ione the vision. But the assault was legible enough for my own god to send me a spell-vision of Zon-Kuthon's afterlife the previous day."

"If Nidal were otherwise planning an attack in an hour, say, but had eyes on Ione, but not me, they might have concluded they needed to attack as fast as possible after she gave her warning, in order to preserve as much surprise as they could. So Ione got the vision as soon as I was outside of the primary-targeted zone inside the villa. I want to say that, if that's the case, whoever sent her the vision had a grimdark sense of humor, but it could have just been the best solution to an optimization problem."

lintamande: "We could have handled it without casualties if we'd had five minutes of warning. ....maybe Zon-Kuthon's people had some way to know we'd been tipped off, and reacted to the Security alert that went out immediately after the vision -"

Keltham: "I want to emphasize that this entire mode of thinking is almost definitely completely illegitimate, but since somebody just happened to mention to me this morning that gods get clearer vision when they have clerics around, is there any not-incredibly-expensive way to check for sure whether one of the other girls in the library with Ione was a first-circle cleric of Zon-Kuthon who therefore looks just like a second-circle Lawful Evil wizard to Aura Sight."

dath ilan: (It is sometimes said in dath ilan: If you put your reasoning into overdrive, you will often get somewhere, and the trouble is, you will often also get somewhere else.)

lintamande: “The screening involved asking them under a truth spell after other magic on them had been dispelled, about affiliations and commitments to other gods. There are a couple non-Asmodeans, but no one who was secretly Kuthonite.”

Carissa Sevar: “A couple non Asmodeans is a little high but not incredibly high,” she adds to Keltham, as Security’s not allowed to proffer that obvious lie. “The teen years are when kids experiment with religion and are likeliest to be followers of random gods.”

Keltham: "Probably a complete empty-set search but if we haven't figured out anything else, suppose you repeat that screen in case somebody got clericed shortly after she got here, doublecheck whoever does the second screening, and consider that, if something like that isn't impossible, she may not know her new god is Zon-Kuthon or may somehow not know she's a cleric. Zon-Kuthon could just not give her any spells. Or she could have a hot-swappable personality, one self who's a cleric and one self who's not... I should say, the same logic which suggests this whole bit also suggests that whatever test we come up with is not going to detect her."

lintamande: “We can do that,” he says, a bit skeptical but mostly just very tired.

And then another uniformed person, looking significantly sharper and ineffably more dangerous, steps in. “Her Imperial Majesty invites the traveler Keltham and any companionship he desires to the palace in Egorian while repairs are underway on his present residence.”

Carissa Sevar: Oh good, something for Carissa to do aside from quietly panicking about how Keltham is using a reasoning process that he thinks is… above the gods? Beyond the gods? and which therefore she has no idea how to feed the wrong information and which is therefore going to ruin everything.

The something to do is, of course, “accept a personal invitation from Her Imperial Majesty to her home”, but, you know, at least she understands where she stands with that.

Keltham: Governance at the Legislator or Chief Executive level in dath ilan does not have literally zero formality; Keltham can recognize a cue to go into Dealing With Very Serious People mode. He stands a little straighter.

"I accept at least for myself, and for a set of others to be determined momentarily if you'll give me that moment."

"Carissa, who am I supposed to invite with me, is that like you, the other researchers, the survivors of the villa, what."

Carissa Sevar: "Is Her Imperial Majesty's generous invitation aimed at the relocation of the project, or is her intent better understood as that Keltham relax and recover in greater comfort and safety while preparations for the project to restart are underway?"

"While I cannot speak for her, Keltham's comfort and safety are at this time the highest of our project-related priorities."

Carissa Sevar: "Me, and anyone else you'll want not-for-classes."

Keltham: Is Ione a not-for-classes? Definitely not in the Carissa sense yet. "I accept on behalf of myself and Carissa Sevar. When and if Ione recovers, she will be valuable for my learning, even if I am not teaching."

lintamande: "Do you have possessions you'll need to gather?"

Carissa Sevar: "I do."

Keltham: "I don't."

lintamande: Accompany her," he says to local Security, and to Keltham, "with your permission, I intend to cast a series of spells that will dispel external magical influences on you, detect any enchantment of your possessions or person, and guard against future such."

(Carissa and local Security head out.)

Keltham: "Understood. I currently have running a self-cast protective cleric spell on my person, and an external Share Language that will expire shortly; I would have both of those preserved if there is zero or nearly perfectly zero risk to Security thereby, but more so the protective spell as it is less replaceable. Regardless of rulings there, I consent to your described Security measures."

lintamande: "Enchantment Foil," he says. "We of course cannot cast it on you at all without the aid of extraordinarily powerful magic, as it is a spell that can affect the caster only; I will avoid dispelling it."

And he does magic, visibly intricate and high-powered to Detect Magic, mostly divinations but also some abjurations.

Keltham: Keltham won't remember he's a magicbearer until halfway through that, but once he does he'll cast Detect Magic and watch. He also notes that upper Cheliax Security isn't claiming not to know what Enchantment Foil is, which matches an earlier hypothesis about it being a Security-only spell that can be used to defeat Security measures.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa returns, with the products of her recent shopping trip in her shopping-trip Bag of Holding along with her notes and her presents from the Queen, just as this is wrapping up; Security finishes with Keltham and turns to cast the same set of spells on her and on the things in her Bag of Holding.

lintamande: "Let's go," he says when he's finished, and starts walking.

Keltham: Keltham follows.

Oh, he does have a tiny bit of trauma associated with Leaving The Villa Premises, what fun.

The sky above is still doing the thing that gets giant aliens to say 'Those above all mortals now battle' in a deep grumbly voice. It's pretty at night.

Carissa Sevar: It’s terrifying.

Asmodeus is going to win, but still.

lintamande: They reach the edge of the Forbiddance and the man takes their hands and without preamble Teleports.

lintamande: The palace in Egorian is new, built after House Thrune took Cheliax; the old capitol was in Westcrown. It makes the summer villa of the Archduke look shabby by comparison. It makes Versailles, its best historical analogue, look shabby though admittedly mostly only because of things King Louis the 14th could not have helped, like the fact his gargoyles cannot prowl and his fountains cannot start in midair and his orchards cannot grow seductively golden apples that drive men mad.

The sky is flickering here, too.

Keltham: Well, good on them for remembering to fake the skyshow here too, if it's fake. But Keltham is mostly paying attention to other sights, because they're worth it.

"This place is beautiful and aesthetic even by our standards, and on behalf of Civilization I compliment the architects and designers -"

"Wait. Is teleporting always that fast?" That sort of matches his experience at the Worldwound, in retrospect, but he had almost no experience with magic and spells back then, and didn't know he was looking at a spell and not a device that had charged up over the last three minutes. Though it wasn't so much that he had alternate hypotheses, back then, as that he hadn't really chunked spellcasting rules as a latent system in a way that would make it easy to update over modular facts inside it.

lintamande: "Teleportation is a fifth circle spell with the same casting time as the spells that you are familiar with," the wizard confirms.

Keltham: "Sorry, just trying to figure out an ongoing mystery about the attack. Carissa, am I missing something or should that Security have just teleported us out when the attack started? We were at the edge of the Forbiddance already."

Carissa Sevar: "If he had it prepared and hadn't yet used it today, yes - and was at least fifth circle but his Haste lasted ten count, so he was."

Keltham: "So maybe he couldn't teleport. Or maybe he could, but if you didn't think of that at the time, it's plausible he didn't think of it either. But if my god didn't predict my Security not having teleport or not thinking of it, that's an even stronger reason for my god to try to get me to the edge of the Forbiddance in a way that could be synchronized with the attack. It would have been a reliable plan for my safety, not the better-than-worst harm-reduction version where I still almost got killed several times. Though it's also worth asking where the obvious place to teleport would've been, and if there could've been an ambush there, or if there's any way to intercept a teleport and..."

"Well, later. Sorry for the interruption. Please lead on."

Otolmens: Otolmens is VERY BUSY. She is guarding the Vault containing ROVAGUG while Zon-Kuthon gets DEALT WITH not that His VOID-CONTAMINATED MIND shouldn't have been dealt with IMMEDIATELY but BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.

She is not SO BUSY that she is NEVER looking back at the anomaly AT ALL.

It is now NO LONGER within one hundred distance units of Ostenso's tallest thing. It is ELSEWHERE.

For some reason Otolmens had been thinking that, just since the anomaly had mostly stayed in the same place for a while, it was a kind of anomaly that did that.

She cannot go on revising Pharasma's-Name edicts once they're issued, for the obvious reason that this would correspond to an unbounded edict supply.

ASMODEUS.

TELL your MORTALS to put the anomaly BACK IN THE INTERDICTED REGION.

Transparently EVADING a Pharasma's-Name Edict is NOT AMUSING and PHARASMA will NOT BE AMUSED EITHER.

Asmodeus: ASMODEUS IS SORT OF BUSY WHILE PUTTING NEARLY AS MUCH EFFORT INTO SUBDUING THIS LONGSTANDING EXISTENTIAL THREAT AS THE REST OF THESE USELESS WEAKLING GODS COMBINED AND WILL GET BACK TO OTOLMENS LATER

lintamande: They go in through a side entrance, because the Queen has ordered that no one will come into contact with Keltham whose soul is not sold already, or who isn't a priest of Asmodeus. There's a dazzling hallway and then a room that is -

- well, exquisitely designed to some unapologetically Evil aesthetics. It has thick red velvet curtains around an enormous iron bed which has actual chains and shackles built into the headboard, and a thick red carpet, and an enormous fireplace against one wall.

Next to the fireplace is a rack of fire-stoking equipment which a person who knows a lot about fire-stoking, which Keltham hopefully does not, might identify as not even all that useful for that.

There's a cozy reading nook with an armchair and a tall bookshelves full of leather-bound books, and a little kneeling pillow next to the armchair.

There's an Asmodean shrine with incense and a stone ritual-seat that you obviously let blood into.

There are beautiful tapestries on the walls, depicting well-dressed people dancing, and there's a window opening on a courtyard full of blooming roses.

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa's life is so interesting (derogatory). ...what're the books. Oh, good, looks like they're Taldane poetry and a fourteen-volume history of Absalom dated from before the Age of Lost Omens began.

Keltham: Keltham mostly notices the chains on the bed. They don't parse instantly, but he can deduce their use after a few moments.

Keltham smiles slightly. "I want to say somebody's overestimated our relationship progress, but on second thought maybe not."

"I like the rest of the aesthetic. It's very close to a similar dath ilani aesthetic called doompunk which I do not totally fail to appreciate."

lintamande: "You can press this bell for staff," says their escort, and departs.

Carissa Sevar: "Doompunk, huh. I'm glad you like it. It parses as an Evil aesthetic, here."

Keltham: "...interesting, in dath ilani terms that's more associated with - a self-aware supervillain with a sense of humor, one who laughs maniacally while executing their cunning plans and also knows exactly how much of a cliche that is and does it anyways because that's them living their best life. I don't think we'd say it's associated with Evil supervillains rather than Good supervillains, though? If anything it leans slightly the opposite."

Carissa Sevar: "Supervillain parses as a kind of thing that'd only be Evil, a lich commanding enormous armies of the undead or a wizard who has concocted a mad scheme to end life or something."

Keltham: "Commanding armies of the undead is supervillainy, absolutely, extremely doompunk too, but I don't see why that would be Good or Evil in itself, aside from whatever you were trying to do with the undead armies? And a wizard with a mad scheme to end life is Good, as I understand that, because they're not doing it to benefit themselves, they're doing it because they think life should be ended for its own welfare... well, in dath ilani fiction that's why they'd be doing it, if that happens in real life here maybe it's very different, but then why would they."

dath ilan: (World-destroying supervillains in dath ilani fiction are, by default, and absent deliberate subversion or aversion of the trope, negative utilitarians. Dath ilani take for granted, in the background and without thinking much of it, that their literary characters make as much sense as everything else does on their planet; fictional antagonists are being animated by dath ilani authors who will grant those simulated minds at least the mental skills taught to children. There just aren't many things you can intelligently want to accomplish by destroying reality, except for preferring that stuff which exists not exist.)

Carissa Sevar: "...in stories in Golarion it'd mostly be for revenge because they feel the world wronged them. And the undead armies would be because the lich wants to be personally rich and powerful so he wants to conquer countries to do it. It...makes sense that since your society is so Good your supervillains would be too."

Keltham: "I just don't see how being a supervillain* is an alignment-correlated thing at all. It's an aesthetic, not a," utility function, "specification of what goals people pursue. I wanted to be a supervillain when I grew up, and, while this was not a realistic life goal, nobody would have listed that as a reason why I was any more Evil than anyone else. The guy heading up our Moon colony is a supervillain, his bedroom probably looks basically like this one but with a real sleeping surface and minus the chains."

(*) The compound word 'super-villain' began as a fictional trope in dath ilan, but the corresponding real-life aesthetic and gender-trope and famous-person-behavior-pattern later took over as the primary meaning of 'supervillain' in Baseline, and the compound no longer means quite what its conjuncts say. This Baseline term is now translating oddly to Taldane's cognate for their real-world version of the old dath ilani fictional trope, based on a similar compound which in Taldane has preserved its original meaning. In Civilization 'supervillain' hasn't primarily referred to anything fictional since long before Keltham was born; and he's not particularly thinking about the underlying Baseline components 'super-villain', nor even that this well-worn formerly-compound-but-now-specialized term has components, let alone the etymology of the word.

Carissa Sevar: "...so, most powerful people are Evil. In Golarion. I think pretty much all of them who aren't part of some specific Good religious order. I imagine that's very different in dath ilan but wanting power except 'I want to study so much magic that lots of people come to my wizard tower to buy magic from me' is....you're almost definitely, if you actually pull it off, going to have - assassinated some people, ordered some children drowned so they won't be competition for your throne..." those are examples from a Taldane history she read this morning. "And I guess you could do that while still intending Good but the sorting doesn't just pay attention to your - self-serving narrative - and if you're killing lots of people to amass power it's almost definitely going to call you Evil. And you cannot become powerful without killing lots of people."

Keltham: "...because if you try Zon-Kuthon sends military squads after you and you won't survive unless you kill them first? I'm not having an easy time figuring out what killing people has to do with getting power. In my visualization it mostly gets you dead people, which, at least where I come from, you can't take a bunch of corpses to the neighborhood bartering-fair and say 'Would somebody like to trade me a lot of power for this bunch of corpses.'"

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar: "....well, what you do, is you kill the people who were in charge of a place, and then you kill anyone who says you're not in charge now. And that's how becoming in charge of places works, pretty much."

Keltham: "Assuming this works at all, why isn't the whole world ruled by the one most powerful person who can kill anybody else, who then declares that nobody else is allowed to kill anybody so that their world will operate in a quiet and orderly fashion and not go through a lot of annoying unprofitable chaos."

Carissa Sevar: "Because it's not actually all that much more fun to rule the entire world than to rule a country the size of Cheliax and because there are a bunch of gods trying to counterbalance each others' power and because there are random ninth circle wizards who can't be bothered to straighten out everywhere but who make it very clear that if you harass the peasants right on their doorstep then they'll dismantle you for parts, and because lots of parts of the world are too distant and rural and low-population and speak languages no one else speaks and it's not clear it's worth ruling them, and because empires don't generally grow past the distance limit of a Teleport, if it costs several it's incredibly costly to bring enough force over to keep your distant provinces in line."

Keltham: "I am willing to believe you about all of that but as a dath ilani I am used to knowing why equilibria balance where they do, and I am very far from understanding that here. I get the basic point that, if 0.1% of a country's population is 90% of its military power, they can form an internal coalition and not let anybody else vote," assuming the populace hasn't otherwise been trained in the decision theory of coordinating their refusal of an unfair bargain. "I could not then predict that this coalition adopts rules that look like 'if you kill the person at the top of us you now own our city'. Why don't the 0.1% of the people with 90% of the military power form their own government-of-revocable-delegations among themselves? If one person at the top has 51% of the military power it should work a way, which is them running everything. If #1 and #2 can gang up to beat #0 but get beaten in turn by #3, #4, and #5, it would work a different way. I need to play through some minigame for how this works with, like, six people before I try to visualize how it works for a planet. What is the simplest case, with the smallest number of people all of whom are on the gameboard not just in the background somewhere, where you'd kill somebody and get power."

Carissa Sevar: "Sure. Imagine a small village on a river somewhere, far north with poor farmland, maybe claimed by a distant King but he neither collects taxes nor enforces law so he doesn't feature in this story. In practice, the village is led by a priest of, I dunno, Pharasma, who is the only person in the village with magic; when villagers accuse each other of crimes, he hears them out and fines or punishes the one at fault. He collects a tax from them, for the church, of ten percent of their fields. Then someone's wayward son who went off to be an adventurer comes back, third-circle, capable of impressive things, rich with goods from out of town, and he is welcomed back by his family, until he drunkenly hits someone else in a quarrel over a girl, and kills them because he's an adventurer now and hits harder. And this is brought up before the old priest, and the priest says the adventurer must pay a fine and serve the family of the man he killed at harvest and planting time for ten years, in the place of the laborer he took from them, and the adventurer spits in his face, and then kills him too, and then says 'hey, from now on, I'm the one who will hear out accusations of crime in this village'."

Keltham: "Leaving aside the decorative horror and focusing on the underlying game theory. So. Even assuming the villagers have no way of killing the adventurer even by cooperatively sacrificing themselves - there's a saying in dath ilan 'Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't' and maybe that's just not true here, in which case fine - and even assuming they don't all go 'fuck this guy's unfair division of gains from trade, let's head to the afterlife and leave him with an empty village' - then, if nothing exists in the world outside this village, if there are no hidden players not on the gameboard, then it would seem to be in this person's best interests not to let anyone else kill anybody and run the whole village for his own profit, until somebody else comes along who's stronger and kills him. Which is the case I described before."

"I agree that, assuming the villagers let the adventurer get away with that and don't just leave for the afterlife, if one is a fourth-circle cleric, one could perhaps come in and kill the adventurer and get a little sad bit of power. It doesn't - seem like something that scales. The reason it works is that it's isomorphic to a two-player game where one player has all power, and the other player has none but goes along with an unfair division of gains instead of leaving for the afterlife."

Carissa Sevar: "...your confusion is why the adventurer doesn't ban killing in the village? He probably does. He doesn't run the whole village for his own profit but mostly because that would be more likely to make people get fed up and leave, having to deal with one asshole who also maintains order is one thing but if he's also raising taxes a lot and picking fights and taking wives then at some point people leave, so he is limited in how much he fucks with them.

I don't think - I think the villagers could kill him by cooperatively sacrificing themselves. But why would they do that, individually, it just results in them being dead."

Keltham: "So I was going to say that maybe you didn't have enough Law to solve that problem, but it sounds like you have an artificial substitute which would be fine for something like this. Swear an oath that only binds you to action after you've heard every adult in the village swear the same oath. Publicly generate random numbers. Three people picked by the random numbers, or however many it takes, sacrifice themselves to kill the adventurer."

"Put up a sign outside your village saying this is how your village does stuff. The adventurer reads the sign and goes somewhere else, so the people never even have to sacrifice themselves. Other people hear about what a great adventurer-free village that was and say 'Hey why don't we put up a sign like that too.'"

Carissa Sevar: "...so, in Cheliax, where children grow up understanding that they are Lawful, and that means something, maybe you could make something like that work. But in most places - people won't actually go to their deaths because they swore they would, not all of them, not enough of them that that works I don't think, and more people would just decline to swear to it in the first place because it's not that bad having an adventurer be in charge of your village. And some people'd read the sign and take it as a challenge. And...it's weird, so people wouldn't do it."

Keltham: "I was going to say something about it sounds like you might have a problem that gods and ideal agents don't have, which is a key fact that I needed to hear in order to understand what is going on; but I am suddenly arrested by the possibly even more important notion of 'it's weird, so people wouldn't do it' which sounds like it would stabilize literally any possible behavior because if everyone does that then any other behavior is weird."

Carissa Sevar: " - I mean, yes? But - but most weird things that someone smarter than you came up with and that you don't fully understand aren't in your interests, so not doing weird things is better than doing weird things, if you're not very smart."

Keltham:

Keltham:

Keltham:

Keltham:

Keltham: "I may possibly need to think about that for a bit."

Carissa Sevar: "You do that. I'm going to figure out whether they gave us a key to the chains or whether they're supposed to be magically operated."

They have a big iron key. Very fancy. Wizards into bondage usually use Unseen Servants, which can only apply twenty pounds of force but are enough for if you're not expecting serious physical opposition; twenty pounds feels like a lot, shaped right.

Keltham: So.

Their world has people who are more smart or less smart, just like his world.

Lots of smarter people, however, are out to exploit less smarted people using adversarially selected arguments.

So the less smarted people have to freeze in place and only believe what they were told by - their parents, Keltham guesses, because even if somebody wandering into the village looks as dumb as you, they could be a smart person faking that.

Nobody has any Law-inspired concept of validity, or which arguments are admissible or inadmissible, or how to go about constructing a narrower class of arguments that could still contain important stuff while being harder for smarter adversaries to exploit. Their books are endless strings of non-sequiturs and impossible leaps and emotion-invocations, and when your contest of ideas is on that level, there is nothing you can do to stop a clever adversary from doing a search that Goodharts through any flaws or loopholes in the resistance of a dumber argument-considerer.

...or maybe dath ilan would also be like this, Law or no Law, if not for the Keepers and the fact that the Keepers are, so far as Keltham knows, Good. Just given what's publicly known about talk-control, most dath ilani can little more resist a high-ranked Keeper going all-out on exploiting their own flaws, than a villager of this world could resist the arguments of a wizard, if the villager was foolish enough to hear out a stranger.

But - what is he supposed to do about that, if that's the case? Even if he can mass-manufacture intelligence headbands they won't change the relative intelligence... well, no, because currently the smartest people get intelligence headbands and the less smart people don't so at the very minimum fixing that would have to shift the equilibrium relative to what it is now...

"Thanks for my evening update on how awful Golarion is," Keltham says out loud, and not without a certain irony.

Carissa Sevar: "More of an update than the Kuthites were?"

Keltham: "The Kuthites are a problem, and if they've penetrated your security they're much more of a problem, but they are a relatively shallow and understandable problem compared to average-intelligence people not being able to trust that all the arguments they hear aren't out to get them."

Carissa Sevar: " ...fair enough. Yeah, I don't know how you solve that without the resources of the Church. You do have the resources of the Church, though, and with that it's solvable though slowly - you open schools, and you feed the kids at school, and so parents send the kids to school even if they worry it'll teach things they can't trust, and then other people notice things that can't be faked, like that the kids are more prosperous, and over generations people come around..."

Keltham: "Orrrrr I could figure out how to mine spellsilver in the sort of volume that Civilization gets when Civilization wants lots of a rare metal, and make intelligence headbands for wizards who would then craft more headbands, and give all of the villagers intelligence headbands and do it not over generations. There's a place in life for doing things the slow way with diligent hard work, and that place is when there is in fact no shortcut whatsoever for doing things a faster way."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, all right, certainly the 'give them all Intelligence headbands' plan is better though I'll note that the fanciest most expensive headband will enhance a slightly-duller-than-average peasant up to 14 which is still, you know, not smart enough Cheliax puts you on projects that require the ability to make decisions independently."

Keltham: "It's a start on half of a solution. -2 in dath ilan isn't too dumb to learn the sort of Law you've been learning in my lessons, you'd just learn it a couple of years later."

Carissa Sevar: "It would be the most important thing that'd ever happened, we'll see what problems remain after that.

- I want some. If you invent a way to mine arbitrary spellsilver."

Keltham: "'How much do you want', he said, bearing in mind that he didn't have any grasp of units and would need those translated into least-expensive-headband and unskilled-labor-year units."

Carissa Sevar: "More than I know what to do with. More than I could use even if I spent every waking moment on fancy complicated enchanted projects. That would be twenty or so least-expensive-headbands a day and there is no sense giving you a value in unskilled labor years because I do not expect to get this wish of mine if spellsilver mining continues to cost unskilled labor years. ..but the current state is that a headband is 55 unskilled labor years."

Keltham: So, assuming unskilled laborers work four hours per day averaged over rest days -

Wait. Keltham suspects he may have made an important unit conversion error, throwing off several other calculations.

"And the number of unskilled labor hours in one unskilled labor year?"

Carissa Sevar: "4500ish, I suppose?"

Keltham: Blink blink.

"That's... around thirteen hours a day including rest days if those even exist, unless your year doesn't have 365.2422 days per year."

Carissa Sevar: "We have three hundred sixty exactly. There are two festivals."

Keltham: ...what that makes no sense at all. "In dath ilan, the time between spring equinox of one year and the spring equinox of the next year is 365.2422 days, the amount of time it takes dath ilan to complete exactly one orbit around the sun is 365.2596 days, and I have absolutely no idea how having two festivals could interact with either of those quantities."

Carissa Sevar: " - the number of days it takes for the sun to complete its orbit is 360, rather than 365, and as an answer to your separate question about rest days, there are two of them."

Keltham: "Welp, I'm going to chalk up those insane work hours and lack of rest as hopefully a problem merely of quantitative productivity rather than a Horrifying Golarion Structural Equilibrium that will persist even in the presence of infinite machinery, and then I'm going to only think about it insofar as that serves the purpose of doing something about it, sound like a plan."

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds great. I wanted to daydream about mountains of spellsilver, here, not be sad about global problems."

Keltham: "Among the many ways of viewing your global problems is that they are caused by some missing mountains of spellsilver, and if we're going to go looking for those anyways we might as well keep one mountain for ourselves. That's what being Evil is all about."

Carissa Sevar: "You're going to say things like that to me and then have some kind of societal norm of not having sex on days when bad things happened? Can I at least kiss you?"

Abrogail Thrune II: This is the most bizarrely fascinating bedroom talk that Abrogail has ever spied upon in possibly her entire life and she genuinely does not see how Sevar is going to pull this off. If Sevar manages to tempt and corrupt Keltham from this starting point she will get her County.

Keltham: "You miiiight have to explain first how 'kissing' works, the word sounds like the lip-touching thing and all I knew about that was to mirror what you did. Not that we couldn't just improvise so long as it's the sort of thing that goes well when improvised."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail has things to do, and now she has to choose between doing those things and continuing to spy on this, which is unfortunate; having that never happen to her is something she should have thought to write into her compact with Asmodeus somehow.

Carissa Sevar: "You haven't invented kissing? Well I suppose, then, as Golarion's duly appointed representative to Keltham, it is my duty to try to explain it to you, though it's popular because it does in fact go well when improvised. See, you can do a little kiss like this," she repeats last night, "which just says, I like you and I want you, or you can do a little more than that."

Abrogail Thrune II: And he's kissing back in a very uninspired way. Well, this was a good time for things to get boring, she supposes. It is, apparently, time to end her brief break and actually attend her war council; Gorthoklek is almost finished breaking down her door.

Iarwain: Likewise mortal but longer-lived things, a hair closer to ideal agency though still far from it, now battle.

Their objective: to bring enough pressure to bear on 'Zon-Kuthon outside the vault' that He must choose between being inside that vault and significantly ceasing to be. Maybe not ceasing entirely, but becoming perhaps a fallen being, a mere demigod. He must choose between going into the vault, and that.

The assembled gods cannot reasonably endeavor to kill all of Zon-Kuthon, if He chooses the latter path. Gods encrypt their energies, arrange their potentials in lattices and arrays to which only they have keys. Like a box full of bouncing classical gas atoms that can be made to all end up on the box's left side, in apparent defiance of thermodynamics and ready to yield up their heat as a pressure, if you know the secret for how those atoms were originally set in motion to be able to end up like that with the right tweak. Anybody who doesn't know the secret just sees a box full of a useless uniform gas.

In likewise way, a being under such assault as Zon-Kuthon may scatter little shards of Himself here and there, too small and subtle for now to be noticed, but destined to collide and gather up at some future time - a time when His adversaries are paying less attention, no longer spending all Their own power and watchfulness to launch a coordinated assault on Him blanketing Golarion and the other planes where He extends.

Among the greatest of adventurers who yet do not quite understand, it is whispered that only by killing a great Power within Their own home plane is it possible to destroy that Power permanently; and also that a Power within its home plane is nearly invincible.

These whispers are not quite accurate. The key concept rather - and from mortals it is hidden - is that gods face a tradeoff between weakness and vulnerability. They can gather themselves up and become stronger, but only at the risk of their own true destruction. Any problem which requires you to become unified and powerful and localized, and therefore vulnerable to any still greater force, is a challenge you should face on your own home ground if you possibly can. On the very rare occasions when Powers are truly slain, therefore, they tend to fall within their home planes, after ascending to terrifying heights within it.

The assembled gods, then, know that they can only force so much of Zon-Kuthon into the vault prepared for Him. As He could survive as a demigod outside it, He can also go mostly into the vault but leave a demigod's worth of Himself outside. That demigod's worth of power will not be able to free Rovagug, though; and that is all the assembled gods are aiming for.

Most of them, that is.

Nethys: Nethys sure will really be in trouble if anyone finds out He did this part!

Nethys sees every part of Zon-Kuthon. Nethys knows where every part of Zon-Kuthon is trying to hide.

Nethys provides those coordinates to Someone Else.

That's the sort of divine backstab that, if found out, would get every large or obvious remaining piece of Nethys assaulted by more gods than are currently assaulting Zon-Kuthon.

The only reason the gods are not currently that scared of Nethys is because it has not, up until now, seemed like Nethys is particularly likely to do that sort of thing - to tattle on gods' secrets to one another, to start wars between Them in which Nethys will pick sides and provide aid, weakening Them until all the gods that Nethys doesn't like, or maybe all the other gods period, have been killed.

It would not be in Nethys's seeming interests to start down that path, because you can't conceal that sort of thing forever.

But that logic is not unassailable, and other gods will be watching for early signs.

Nethys is doing this part anyways.

???: Snip. Snip. Snip.

She's mostly appearing to fight Zon-Kuthon along with the other gods, but it doesn't take much extra power to kill those little defenseless bits of Zon-Kuthon if you know exactly where to look for them.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds it hard to think around Keltham.

Not in a stupid romantic way, she doesn't think, though she's aware it's the obvious interpretation. She thinks it's more that - all of her mind has to be pointed at him. She has to be paying attention to the surroundings, the conversation, the connected distant-implications, the opportunities for flirtation, she has to be directing most of her mind at the deception surrounding Keltham and also impress him with the quality of conversation she can generate with the part of her mind that's on him.

As a result, the sober Carissa diagnosis of what she's like around Keltham is that she's fundamentally reactive. She follows trains of thought of his, she answers his questions. She teases him. She ventures a bit of promising theology, occasionally, if she's feeling bold. But she cannot construct an overarching plan. Which is fine, not that debilitating, it just means she needs one in advance, but tonight has been kind of eventful and the plan she had before they went to practice Keltham's cleric spells is a bit outdated.

Kissing Keltham leaves more space to think than talking to him does, so she persists in it even once she would ordinarily declare that quite enough kissing.

She wants to convince him to fuck her. She's pretty sure that this is an important step in building intimacy. It involves him trusting her with something, and her demonstrating that trust warranted, and in her not-really-very-professional-judgment it's the best sex act for his kinks, it's about power without obliging him to do a lot of deliberate and constructed making it about power which he's still learning how to do.

She wants to gently introduce, in a testing the waters kind of way, the ideas that 1) some girls are into out-there stuff, Carissa's about average and that means half of girls are kinkier than her, see where that line of thought takes him, 2) power is more interesting when it's not a game nobles play for fun, isn't it and 3) the thing that makes this right is that Keltham wants it and can get it.

The third one seems hard. She spent a fair share of her beauty appointment playing it in her head with imaginary Keltham.

"You want it and can get it. That's what matters, that's why it's all right, it's all right for you to have things, assuming you can get them without breaking the Law."

Imaginary Keltham: "Right, but the reason the Law doesn't prohibit this is that you also want it. Otherwise it would. If you try to propose a Law that says it doesn't matter what you want then all the people where the Law agrees it doesn't matter what they want would simply overthrow the Law and replace it with a Law who didn't say that, and even if they wouldn't, they could in principle, so the Law can't say that."

"You want it and can get it. Does it - does it feel like there's something important there? Something that dath ilan would - be missing, if they treated that as sort of a sideshow that gets to rise to relevance only if every other feature of the situation has lined up just right?"

Imaginary Keltham: Well, it's relevant no matter what, it's just that sometimes the way in which it's relevant is that society should try to have fewer people like me in it, or that it needs to put more emphasis on people not doing things just because they want to.

"You want it and can get it. That's - itself appealing about you. Maybe that's a very circuitous fetish but it feels very fundamental, to me. The trait that matters in the world is being able to get things you want, and the most romantic situation is being wanted. And that means there's inherently nothing sexier than someone who wants you and can get what he wants."

That one feels promising but like it achieves its promisingness by running askew and probably being heresy, again. She still thinks it's a line of argument worth attempting. Maybe you can get someone to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is sexy' and then from there to 'being willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want is okay'. She still tries to imagine objections imaginary Keltham might have, but Imaginary Keltham mostly says things like 'math you've never heard of proves that doesn't work', which is a sign she needs to take this problem to Actual Keltham.

Once she has a plan. Which she doesn't, yet, so. More kissing.

Keltham: Dath ilani learn fast, generalize fast, and get bored with a speed that would shock the more easily amused. They overcomplicate sex because they have no choice. They do their best to protect their kids from sexual spoilers so that young adults can have the joy of discovery, and amusing stories to tell for the rest of their lives, and also so that young adults don't exhaustively play out simple basic sex in their heads before having it, which, if they did, would lead them to learn-the-pattern-and-get-bored-by-it even faster.

Even Keltham of the +0.8sd, though, is able to spend a while just kissing Carissa without getting bored the first time he does that. She is quite kissable. Also snuggly.

Carissa Sevar: She likes Keltham. Her thoughts are probably lingering on this because of how she's presently kissing him but it's true, and no doubt there's been at least one agonized meeting over it though somehow no one has reprimanded her, maybe because they know that she really really really does not want to be a statue and even if all the other pillars of her motivational structure grew Keltham-rot inside them - and they haven't - she will still not betray them. She's heard it said - dismissively - that the characteristic female fantasy is that there is a powerful man who could hurt you, but he doesn't. Maybe that's all that it is. But right now, the way that it is is that she likes Keltham, and when he has her in his arms, all her plans maintain only the most tenuous of connections to her, bobbing up and down in the periphery of her mind like a sailor overboard on the high seas, visible for a long time despite being almost immediately beyond rescue.

....and maybe she should troubleshoot that.

What are her objectives. First, to get Keltham to feel attached to her. Second, to comprehend him fully in order to build the Evil version of dath ilani thought. Third, stretch goal, seduce him to Evil.

The third one seems tricky right now. That's okay. Carissa's going to be forgiving of herself about that. Other people, too, agree that it seems hard. Keltham is still grappling with ideas like that smarter people might take advantage of less smart ones; this part of the operation is in exploratory mode, right now, and that's all right.

The second one...also seems tricky right now, though more necessary than ever.

Whenever Carissa's around Keltham she gets confused about the nature of Evil. It's because the version she gave him just - fits better into a pathetic human mind? In hindsight it's obvious that trying to destroy the world might seem Good, that Rovagug cultists certainly would be, principled believers that the world should be devoured at their own expense. And the observable fact about the world that almost everyone ends up Evil makes more sense if Evil is about selfishness or lack of altruism than it does with the understanding that Evil is - well, Abrogail Thrune. Carissa is pretty sure this thought will end up in a transcript for Abrogail Thrune tomorrow so hi, Abrogail Thrune, please don't turn me into a statue, Abrogail Thrune, I am suffering in your service very diligently, Abrogail Thrune, but most people are not Abrogail Thrune. Most people are not even weak pale shadows of Abrogail Throne. Tyranny, slavery, pride, contracts - most people kind of just bumble along being weak and pathetic and Carissa is confused about 1) how any of them make Law and 2) how any of them make Evil. She's not worried about herself, personally. She's definitely making progress on Law and she thinks she's made some progress on being genuinely Evil the last two days. She's taking to authority nicely and has lit people on fire when they deserved it and offering to destroy Asmodia's soul in a dark sorcerous rite, if it's not heretical to contemplate, was kind of fun, though also Carissa wants everyone to go to Hell and not get destroyed in sorcerous rites.

(Is that Good? If she wants it in a way that's not about what Asmodeus wants, that's about the sheer horror of their annihilation - it's at the very least the product of a broken mind misunderstanding doctrine. And yet.)

It hadn't occurred to Asmodia what they had to be trying to do here. But they are going to have to do it, or the mountains of spellsilver will go to everyone and Cheliax won't be uniquely advantaged - might be disadvantaged, even, if their current systems for promoting enough Law and Evil to get their children clear of Abaddon and into Hell stop working on a smarter generation of children - reformulate that to be less pathetic and broken, even if it means it fits less well into her present mind, she doesn't wish to err when she's trying to do strategic planning even if the errors are convenient otherwise, even if she suspects Asmodeus chose her partially for her heresies - Cheliax's current systems get souls to Asmodeus, who wants them; Asmodeus has extended this project resources on the assumption it can get him more souls, or more useful ones, and that's why it ought to do that.

Asmodia is presumably being tortured right now and Carissa hopes she's not useless when she gets back. Maybe it'll be good for her motivation.

The first goal, on the other hand, is going great. Maillol says the things she'd done shouldn't have worked, but they did, and Keltham likes her, and if she only had to accomplish the first goal she'd practically have accomplished it already and she could just keep him interested and roll around on a giant mountain of spellsilver.

Maybe.

Keltham hasn't really hurt Carissa. In a sense, no one has ever really hurt Carissa; she talks a good game but she was careful, in her old life, about which powerful adventurers who could kill her if they were so inclined she climbed up into a Rope Trick with; she mostly went for girls, because whatever Maillol says they are less inclined to hurt you on average though obviously Abrogail Thrune, hi Abrogail Thrune, is entitled to do exactly as she pleases with Carissa including turning her into a statue though Carissa really really hopes that she won't do that because Carissa wants to go to Hell and will make herself very useful to Abrogail Thrune there. If she gets there. Subordinate devils are worth having! Much more useful than statues!

...anyway Keltham can bite her, and claw at her, but he hasn't for example even looked at the pokers in the fireplace, and he hasn't even asked for tips on the most efficient ways to hurt people without causing damage, and unless you count the cursed Bag of Holding as a sexual experience and plausibly Carissa should she hasn't, actually, been tortured in a sex way, and shouldn't have high confidence in how gracefully she'll handle it except within the bounds of how well she handles it in other contexts. It seems possible she'll like Keltham less once she's taught him how and why to really hurt her. It's possible that whatever switch will flip in her head and he'll be terrifying instead of intriguing, and then everything will just suck.

Which would be good practice for Hell, if so.

....Carissa thinks that somehow all this thinking is actually making her worse at her job and she should abandon it and go back to not thinking, which was working fine, kind of.

Carissa Sevar: " - so," she says. "Are we supposed to have an in-depth conversation about how sex works now, or, given that your notes were destroyed, will we have to have sex in order to recreate the conditions under which you can recreate your notes."

Keltham: "I'd say 'stop trying to pressure me into sex' but I find that I in fact enjoy being asked, and maybe even enjoy getting to say no. And I expect I can recall at least some of my questions, though probably not in the right order."

Carissa Sevar: " - noting a cultural difference that while if you don't want me to stop it's not a big deal we haven't had any interactions which to Chelish understandings involve pressure. And I can try to answer questions."

Keltham: "Civilization would have it something like - if a woman says no a couple of times, you're supposed to stop asking and not be visibly not-in-most-preferred-state about not having sex. You don't lie, obviously, you just conceal the overt feedback. She may guess, obviously, and if she asked you'd just tell her. It's not about a deception, even a deception by concealment; the point is that you're not exerting a direct pressure on subverbal parts of herself by being visibly sad at them."

"It can be different for a woman pestering a man for sex, but only to the extent she has extremely reliable information - which basically means, information directly from him - that he's highly conformant to the masculine 'gendertrope' and that sub-'gendertrope' in particular. I would have provided you with that information just now, when I told you that I was enjoying being asked and saying no."

(Keltham is just using Baseline 'gendertrope' as a loanword into Taldane, at this point, since the corresponding concept in Taldane simply doesn't exist.)

"Civilization is all very - structures to make sure that people end up having the power to protect themselves in their sexual relationships, and the realistic ability to decide for themselves without that taking a lot of mental work, and common knowledge that everyone has in fact been trained to protect themselves that way and passed some tests about it, all so that people can be given full responsibility to decide for themselves."

"So long as you're following those rules, in a world where you know everybody else follows those rules, it means you don't have to worry about them on their behalf, or try to protect them more than they protect themselves, or doubt them when they say yes."

"The typical dath ilani man - has a great horror of accidentally harming somebody, like that, and the rules are there so they can be less scared after somebody says yes to them."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. We....don't have any of those rules and I expect probably do have a higher rate of whatever problems you're trying to solve but if someone asked me for sex repeatedly and I disliked being asked because it was....mental work...to keep refusing, then I would say 'no, and stop asking', or something, and if I said no and then someone was visibly sad I would...not care...because I'm Evil."

Keltham: "There are kinds and kinds of Evil, then, and I am some but not others. I may someday understand what it means to decide everything because you have given yourself to me to see what I make of you, I can feel a part of myself yearning for this thing I don't yet understand, but I have no interest in learning how to see you being visibly sad and not care."

Carissa Sevar: Not encouraging. (Though adorable.) But people can be wrong about themselves. "All right. Am I supposed to have that in mind when deciding whether to be visibly sad or am I supposed to just be visibly sad whenever I would around a Chelish person."

Keltham: "I think you should err an awful lot on the side of visibility, until I've been on this planet for longer than two days and can guess literally at all what the ass is ever going on without tons and tons of evidence. I have been through mental training and it's not like it would be easy for you to pressure me into sex I didn't want and then successfully do mental damage to me that way, because, for example, I will in fact say no if you ask me to have sex while I'm still shaken up from my first nonsimulated violence. Knowing this, you know that it is safe to be visibly sad around me, that you cannot easily hurt me like that; this is a dath ilani's dignity, and at deeper layers, their friendship."

Carissa Sevar: "I am not from dath ilan, and haven't had any specialized evaluation of my capacity to do things without hurting myself, but I am not often wrong about how I'll feel about things, and you're not going to hurt me by being visibly sad around me, or by doing something I've told you is all right, or by doing something I haven't told you is all right but haven't objected to, and I - feel upset, at the idea there's a world of men terrified of accidentally harming someone, when they should be entitled to enjoy themselves with people who aren't so easily harmed. - also seems absolutely brutal on women with fetishes for being forced but maybe that's how you bred all of those out."

Keltham: "I'm not saying you can't have high levels of your own world's dignity, just that it would be helpful to understand that dignity, I can tell it's very different. And the men aren't going around being terrified because Civilization faced the problem head-on and solved it."

"Also, fetishes for being forced?" The Taldane word 'force' can mean several different things, it's not obvious to Keltham how it translates here.

Carissa Sevar: "Like, it's no fun if a man asks them if it's all right, it's only fun if he just grabs them to have his way with them. It's got to be, like, the ...third? fourth? most common fetish."

Keltham: "Okay, see, that doesn't sound not-dath-ilan in the way other things do, lots of people enjoy being pursued and I can easily imagine how some would enjoy being pursued harder. I mean, I doubt it's anything like that common, but it's not antinatural like finding somebody who gets sexually aroused by pain. I'd put something like 30% probability that we do have that, at a layer of perversion above mine; and if we do, somewhere in Civilization, possibly a suburb of Erotown or Nandville, there are whole complexes full of women who've registered their preferences for men in sufficient detail that the highest bidders on them can just walk into their houses and haul them into the cuddleroom, with pairings near-guaranteed to find each other attractive even if nobody talks about it at all."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. All right, maybe those women do fine, although in our world that tendency tends to go along with liking pain, because it's not very realistic if he grabs you and is then very gentle and concerned with your pleasure, and it's better if it's realistic. - reportedly, this isn't actually a fetish of mine. I won't object if you jump me without notice sometime but that's because I like you and am a good sport rather than because the possibility of being jumped without notice is specifically thrilling."

Keltham: Inner query: if Carissa did like being jumped without being asked, would Keltham want to do that sometimes?

Inner response: loud yes.

Welp, time to venture another prediction on a model that, while it doesn't exactly fit everything, sure does apparently seem to fit some things.

"However," says Keltham, "at least one of the girls in the class, and furthermore, one of the girls who registered a high response about how surprising she'll be, does have that fetish."

Carissa Sevar: Shit, he does think they're manipulating it. Which isn't - fair, she doesn't see the Law he's using -

"I haven't asked the other girls what they're into but given that it's one of the most common fetishes, probably? And if not we could, uh, put out an ad among wizard students somewhere slightly farther than Ostenso and find you someone, if you are intrigued."

Keltham: "Oh, I'm not saying she'll be surprising because she has that fetish, the surprising thing about her will be something that even someone from Golarion would find shocking, but she'll also have that fetish, which is very common here and isn't surprising at all if you're not me."

"I mean, assuming the basic premise here is true, which, it hopefully isn't... it would be a whole lot easier to nope the shit out of that hypothesis if not, you know, air-traveling-machine crash, surviving my own True Death and all that."

"I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't be talking about this in front of you at all. If it's true there's definitely nothing you can do about it until I've figured more things out, unless that 'trope' is being specifically subverted. It would be - a puzzle thrown at a dath ilani, not at someone from Golarion." He's probably just alarming her more at this point, isn't he. This in retrospect must be why the usual convention says that the NPCs in a meta-eroLARP-eroLARP can't hear you talk about the layer-0 eroLARP until you've made more progress with them.

Carissa Sevar: It seems important to get Keltham to explain this second layer of Law that he uses to infer that Pilar was chosen by Cayden Cailean without knowing about Pilar or Cayden Cailean.

"Even if there's nothing I can do about it, if it's important to you and part of what you're using to make predictions about the world, then I want to understand it."

Keltham: Keltham considers explaining the concept of an ero-LARP, much more famous novels deconstructing those ero-LARPs, and ero-LARPs based on novels deconstructing ero-LARPs.

He considers trying to explain how quantum mechanics is known from experiment and how it in turn implies the many worlds, and what the nature of amplitudes led Civilization to realize about realityfluid, and how all those many worlds must be embedded into a still larger Reality in which the quantum multiverse itself is multiply instantiated. And how, having survived an airplane crash, there is a single obvious wild thought about what must have happened to him, that ending in almost all places he continued on within a remaining and improbable one. If he was a Keeper, probably, Keltham would already know it; for it seems like the sort of thing that must be deducible from first principles if it is true at all, and also, an obvious massive infohazard in ways that Keltham may not have begun to conceive. He's not sure exactly why it will be massively infohazardous but it obviously will be.

And now the place where he finds himself, has people who aren't any plausible equilibrium of selection pressures, but happen to exactly fit the complementary shape of his own unsatisfied and unsatisfiable sexuality; and there's a research group full of girls roughly his age, with himself the sole male among them, and an explicit rationalization for why they all want his seed; and they all have economicmagic and 3-5 of them have fascinating backstories that even Golarion would find surprising; while Nidal invades Cheliax targeting him personally and the godtreaties break down, thereby forcing him to relocate to a new bedroom decorated in doompunk with chains attached to the bed.

What happens if you perform an evidential update from that, and then predict the future?

He considers explaining this to somebody who is not going to know, at least until tomorrow, maybe not even for two whole more days, what an evidential update is.

"Carissa," he says, truly apologetically, "you have not, in fact, ever heard me try to explain any topic that Civilization would consider at all complicated; and this, is a little complicated. I know which concept I'd explain first in the sequence of the explanation, and I was going to do that concept tomorrow, but that sequence goes on for a while."

Carissa Sevar: "Is it likely to cause some kind of catastrophe before you can get around to explaining it?"

Keltham: "When the research harem reconvenes, maybe I'll try an Augury about what happens if I politely ask everyone who registered themselves as very interesting to stand up and explain their backstories to me, each other, and the rest of the research group. Given the entire premise - which I emphasize is still rather less likely than likely - that would be the most obvious way to defuse any potential catastrophes, if it did not itself cause a catastrophe -"

"- shit. What happened to Broom?"

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": (Broom went invisible, stayed out of the way as best he could, and is now in a nicely appointed palace room of his own awaiting a check-in from Aspexia Rugatonn.

Broom wasn't exactly considered unimportant earlier, but now that an attack from Nidal, on the site of an Otolmens event, has started a war among the gods, he rates a few more minutes of her time, in case he knows literally anything whatsoever.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has been apprised of this but Carissa who isn't running this operation would not have been apprised of this.

"...didn't see him in the pile of bodies. The - war among the gods - that's the kind of thing that maybe qualifies as a giant mess. The last one killed fifteen percent of the global population!"

Keltham: Not the same tragedy it would be in Civilization, he has to keep reminding himself of that until Golarion becomes cached.

Keltham pokes her in the ribs, harder than he would if Carissa wasn't a masochist. "That's for talking about fifteen percent of the global population dying while we were lying in bed."

(Dath ilani do strive to learn from experience literally at all.)

Carissa Sevar: Deep elaborate bow, the most elaborate she can manage while in bed cuddling him. "I beg your forgiveness."

Keltham: "I - guess I do have to ask earlier rather than later, under the circumstances - if the planet-scathing side effects of a godwar are the sort of thing where - we should stay dressed in case we suddenly have to evacuate the palace."

Carissa Sevar: "Our chances of having to suddenly evacuate are probably much higher than usual but from a very low base."

Keltham: "Is the fifteen percent thing like - definite, now that the godwar's started - or could it maybe just be a small one this time."

Carissa Sevar: "We don't exactly have lots of examples. But last time most of the people who died died because - all around the world there were twelve days of really intense wind and rain, intense enough to wash out all the crops and uproot most of the trees, and so there was no harvest, and so they starved, and if this one is faster or - less rainy, I have no idea what makes godwars rainy - then maybe almost no one'll die. The lights aren't going to kill anyone."

Keltham: "This war has at least my god, Asmodeus, and Nethys all allied and trying to take out Zon-Kuthon, but given why Zon-Kuthon did it, there could be any number of other gods allied with him. Well. Probably not any Good ones. But - how does that match up to whatever the last god-war was about?"

Carissa Sevar: "I think that's better than the last god-war, which was I think close to an even split - a god called Aroden had decided to make Golarion his divine realm, instead of having it in Axis, and rule it directly, and the gods were very closely divided on this plan, and He went ahead when He thought He had just enough support it wasn't worth it to his opponents to fight, and then - prophecy broke - there could never have been a godwar before prophecy broke, right, They'd see how'd it go and just settle accordingly -"

Keltham: "Unless you're about to wreck so much of what a god cares about that there's nothing left for them to negotiate, so they try to launch a preemptive strike team at you, and, when that fails, go down fighting."

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, that does seem to be the other circumstance under which you'd have a god-war. But it's hard to imagine He'll have many allies, it's not like many gods have much common ground with the god whose values are inverted. So maybe it'll be a quick one. The war between Cheliax and Nidal will probably last much longer, but is vanishingly unlikely to oblige us to evacuate."

Keltham: "Heh. So, nothing Civilization would consider scalable weaponry, then. Where scalable weaponry is weaponry that you can go on making more destructive if for some reason it needs to be even more destructive."

dath ilan: (Nobody plays realistic Alien Invasion Rehearsals. They'd be too short and depressing.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels a quiet chill, even though this isn't new information, they knew dath ilan had vastly superior weaponry because it has vastly superior everything. "Nothing like that. There's a place in Garund where there's a wasteland for hundreds of miles because two ninth-circle wizards fought there, but it isn't actually dangerous to travel through, it's just that magic behaves weirdly and plants mostly don't grow. There's opening something like the Worldwound but Nidal and Cheliax are both Lawful and committed to not doing that, and anyway it's very very difficult and still doesn't just straightforwardly scale up.

- I would know, I think, if there were something that a reasonable number of people knew about or that had ever in history been used, because people at the Worldwound pay a lot of attention to our options however speculative for closing it. There could of course be secret things.

....and one time some people crashed a moon into the planet, so, uh, there's that. I guess."

Keltham: "Small moon? Or are we talking like a couple of billion years ago?"

Carissa Sevar: "Small moon. It was ten thousand years ago and it would've ended life on the planet if not for divine intervention of various stripes; it did annihilate both the civilization that dropped it and the one they were fighting with. There was no sun for many, many years, but with magic small populations can limp along without. We call it the Age of Darkness. ....there is a remaining moon and I wouldn't exactly put it past Nidal if they're losing everything but the Crown and Church will have thought of this."

Keltham: ...it's started to feel like somebody is recounting a colorful fascinating backstory for atmosphere, rather than something that actually happened, which potentially indicates that he's under enough internal stress to produce derealization; the whole point of history is that it actually happened. Civilization may have hidden much of it, but for what remains, in the recent and far more distant past, the whole point is that it's not just another story.

"Yeah, that's around as much damage as Civilization could do to a planet and they might need a few months of lead time to scale it that far. Well. It's as much damage as they could do, using methods that people like me are allowed to know about, but..." But why talk about that or think about it, if you're not a Keeper. Except - there are no Keepers here, out of dath ilan, just Keltham, now.

"I think I should stop talking about this, Carissa, at least for the night. I may not be able to simultaneously handle the aftermath of nonsimulated violence and also - thinking about what my being here may have set off."

Carissa Sevar: " - makes sense. I'm sorry. Did you have sex questions that are very narrow in scope and won't get into world history at all."

Keltham: "Well, at least ones I don't expect to interact much with world history. But we should first do some manner of snuggly thing, no, not sex, to get my brain out of its current place."

Carissa Sevar: "Does testing out the chains count as sex."

Keltham: "Well, so long as you're not expecting too much, I suppose whatever happens to you will happen. I am trying to hear and absorb what you're saying literally at all, and if I've managed to do that correctly literally at all, I do grasp that's the point of the chains."

lintamande: In a black stone room in a black stone skyscraper in the doompunk city of Dis, a contract devil is reading case law, as one does.

Asmodia: Waking up from dying is not exactly like waking up from falling asleep. Your memory isn't of a muzzy period that trails off and blurs into notness as you fall half asleep and then all asleep. Dying is abrupt, at least if you do it the way Asmodia did - hearing a Security alert to cast resistances she doesn't have, no useful spells prepared at all, and then being swarmed by shadows moments after she'd reached her self-defense dagger. It's very clear where your last life's memory ends.

Coming out of it is something like being drowning in the water and then clawing yourself onto shore and coughing out that water, and then, having just finished doing that. Only without the whole part where you almost drowned, made it to shore, and coughed out that water, just the part where you'd finished.

Asmodia wakes up.

It doesn't take her very long at all to figure out why she's naked in a black stone room in front of a contract devil she met very recently.

Her internal screaming is very very very loud, but it's all internal, of course.

lintamande: " - well, that was fast," he says, turning to look at her, half annoyed and half amused. "Eventful day, hmmm? Stay there and shut up until I'm at a good stopping place." And he returns to his book.

Asmodia: Asmodia stays there and shuts up.

The more time he reads the better.

They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
They'll probably raise her.
...
...
...

lintamande: "Right!" he says brightly, when he's finished the page he's writing and reshelved the books on the enormous bookshelves paneling the wall behind him. "Well, they'll probably raise you, which makes trying to get any actual training done a waste of time, but they might take their time about it. What's your guess, for how long?"

Asmodia: The thought crosses Asmodia's mind to lie, but only very briefly. If she was found out, it might be a very poor start to her stay in Hell.

"It - my priority depends on whether the shadows got Keltham too, or if they can raise him - there's a chance I'll be a high priority, I don't know what that chance is - do you know what's happening in Cheliax right now, in the place I died?"

lintamande: "You can lie, if you'd like, I don't mind," he says cheerfully. "If I minded I would simply make the punishment more fun until I was once again indifferent about whether you lie. You have to preserve your patience, if you do a lot of training new petitioners. I think we are getting the gossip ahead of everyone who isn't officially in line for it, what with you having come straight to me - good girl, by the way - but we'll know soon, from whether Dis has soldiers in the streets, whether there's a broader fight or a one-off bit of nonsense." Conspiratorially: "I think there might be a broader fight."

Asmodia: He can read her mind, then. "I was reading a math book in my bedroom when I heard a Security alert telling me to resist negative energy, which I can't do, and then shadows attacked me and I died pretty quickly. I don't know - why that place was swarmed with shadows, except, obviously, that they would have been after -"

"Sir, are you authorized to know about Keltham and his project? I do not have any grasp of that but if you are reading my mind you know I am being sincere when I say that I don't know whether Hell has cleared yourself to know about it." If he can see her mind then he knows that she is being very sincere, very humble, and only trying to serve Asmodeus's purposes and interests, when she thinks about how she is trying not to think about thoughts that may be classified information.

lintamande: "You know," he says, "it's such a shame, how you want to be eaten by daemons. I think you'd make a quite satisfactory contract devil yourself once you'd had training. A real waste. Which means, of course, it'll be more expensive, for you to get what you want, since you're trying to buy something quite valuable away from those who lay claim to it. Did you ever consider being totally worthless? Of course, then, I suppose you'd have nothing with which to buy even your very worthless place keeping the floors shiny." He gestures, and, yes, there's a face there, moving very subtly in the glossy black tile, distorted like it's far away and underwater. Screaming, obviously.

"I am authorized to know the business of anyone I own; if that means I just got a promotion, so be it, and if someone thinks I am not suited to the promotion and tries to kill me, so be that too. It would be a great sickness in the heart of Hell, were it ever correct for you to withhold something from me. If I feared this hypothetical promotion, I might choose to sell you off right away without asking, but that would be my choice, not yours. Do you understand?"

Asmodia: "Yes. The shadows were obviously after Keltham who, if he knows anything like what he thinks he knows, and I think he does, is potentially the greatest weapon and asset that Cheliax has. Keltham knows - Law, math standing behind things, underneath the world, underneath thoughts, ideas that could obviously be used to create weapons if somebody wanted but he somehow doesn't think like that."

Asmodia wonders why there might be a broader fight, what sort of broader fight, but doesn't have the temerity to ask - well, she thought it, so he knows it, but she hadn't meant to do that to ask.

lintamande: "Fascinating," he says. "Write down everything you've learned since you heard of Keltham, while it's fresh. The quill on the left draws your blood; you may do a draft in ink, first, if you'd like, which would be the quill on the right. The potions on the third shelf help clarify the memory; they'll burn your tongue out, so if you have anything to say you may as well say it now."

Asmodia: That's pretty tame for Hell, she can't stop herself from thinking, if that was all there was to Hell, it wouldn't be that bad. It's a really stupid thought and she already knows that he has an unending depth of torments vastly worse she does not need to be told or shown that part.

"If there's anything I should prioritize in case I get Raised almost immediately, sir. Whether you mean me to write down math and ideas I learned from Keltham or also - all the strange things happening around him, like Ione getting book powers from Nethys and Pilar getting oracled by Cayden Cailean and the Queen suddenly deciding that Carissa Sevar is worth sleeping with, and all of that sort of stuff."

Why the writing works better in her blood if it's possible to draft in ink, she does not need or want that answered it isn't meant as a defiance her brain just wonders that sort of thing and she knows it isn't needful for her to know it. Why she wouldn't just be told to take the third-shelf potion right away.

lintamande: The devil has been only half attending to her, flitting around getting more books off the shelves, but at that he stops.

"Carissa Sevar," he says. "Tell me more."

Asmodia: (Who the FUCK is Sevar actually. EVERYTHING SHE JUST SAID and the FIRST THING he wants to hear about is SEVAR?)

Keltham: Keltham has discovered the very strange pleasure of snuggling somebody who can't snuggle back. You wouldn't think this would make any sense, and yet, there's a strange... you know, he's not even going to analyze, he's just going to wrap his limbs around Sevar while she can't wrap back, and enjoy that for some reason.

Eventually his brain pings him with an impending boredom warning, because he is still, unfortunately, a dath ilani, and this activity is not one of vast complexity. He can either escalate it, down a path where he's not quite sure what is or isn't sex, or he can restart the conversation from pre-forbidden-topic. Keltham opts for the latter.

"Ready to be talked with while you can't escape?" Keltham says.

Carissa Sevar: "Mmhmm."

Keltham: "So I've got - smaller questions, subquestions. Like how, when you told me that you'd made yourself prettier, I felt this weird sense of - both ownership of your appearance, or something, and a worry that you thought you weren't already attractive for me, like my brain thinks I'm now the center of your decision process -"

"I think it's all part of a larger question, that I think is a common thread running through my notes that got lost, but maybe you want to start with a smaller question first."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, no, I think there's probably a larger thing there. So, some people just like hitting people in the bedroom, and that's fine, but it seemed likely once you mentioned you were growing romantic feelings - that you actually want an overall romantic relationship dynamic that's built the same way, where you have power and ownership and make decisions, where my sexuality is for you, and is yours to shape and enjoy and make demands of. And so I would predict you'd want - lots of things in that sphere."

Keltham: Keltham takes a deep breath.

"So, you've now ever been partially exposed to snippets from the basics of the basics of childhood training for dath ilani, you don't have zero idea of how we see reality. We're used to knowing things legibly. Including places where Golarion might have the idea that it's important for people to obscure things, because you've built a weird not-quite-Lawful thing which requires illegibility to work."

"Like - bargaining, the way you first described how somebody would do that for my shirt. You can imagine a non-dath-ilani with a shirt thinking 'oh no, I must conceal that the true value of my shirt to me is just a million gold pieces, if they think it's really five million I can get a higher price, if they know it's one million they can just give me an ultimatum to take one million one hundred thousand take it or leave it. A dath ilani wouldn't be scared of things becoming legible, because they have more Lawful approaches that don't disadvantage them in the presence of that legibility; they know the right thing to do is refuse unfair but mutually beneficial trades with very high probability. The real value they put on their shirt isn't a secret for them the way it's a secret for somebody bargaining the usual way for Golarion."

"I mean, if they were playing by Golarion's rules, they might still try to make the other person think it was five million if that was the game. If it wasn't anything serious like negotiations with Cheliax, I could see myself playing the bargaining game the illegible way if that saved me time explaining things, I'd try to have fun with it even, though I doubt I'd be very good at it on the first try. But I'd have a legible game to fall back on if the illegible game blows up or isn't going my way."

"If you're used to that being the way things are, trying to play an illegible game with no known legible Law underlying it feels like walking on wet ice... you don't have a lot of ice. Feels unstable, like you're about to put your foot down wrong and fall over, any second. As kids they train us to keep going anyways and parse the universe as we run through it, but that doesn't make illegibility feel safe."

"There's places even so where Civilization would - give somebody a hug and tell them it was okay to not be totally legible right away. A mother who just gave birth to a child doesn't need to immediately put a value in unskilled-labor-hours on her baby's life, how much she'd pay to avert a 0.1% chance of various bad things happening, any of that. Anybody who burst in and started quizzing her about that would be ejected from the maternity hospital and probably from most of the cities in Civilization."

"But when Civilization gives someone a hug and tells them it's okay not to make up numbers today, what that relies on, very crucially, is the expectation that the numbers the mom isn't making up and doesn't know to herself are roughly correct numbers in the sense of leading to roughly the same decisions as better numbers would. The reason we give a hug of it's-okay-not-to-be-legible-today to the mom who just gave birth is that, if she did make up numbers about the value of her baby's life to her, they'd be more like four million labor-hours than four labor hours. She's not going to frantically drop her baby in order to save a water-glass from falling and breaking. If you expected her to get decisions like that wrong you'd tell her to make up legible numbers immediately and run them past somebody else."

"Someone tells me that she's given herself to me, to do with as I want, and if I'd grown up in Golarion we'd probably both be fine from there. But in reality, I'm pretty sure there would be some things I could do that were really not what you had in mind, like, like taking that sharp thing... +3 vicious nasty bigsword, and killing you with it, and then after you're brought back I just kill you again and tell Cheliax not to bring you back that time. That is probably really not what you had in mind, and just to be very clear, it is not what I had in mind either. And you can't spell out things like that for me, my model predicts you replying, because then it's you telling me what I can't do, and contrary to the nature of this thing the way it needs to be. In this case there's no problem, right, because it so happens that I don't want to do that to you, my brain is generating the correct answer despite it being illegal to tell me an underlying Law. But that also means I'm playing an illegible game that has no known legible game behind it, and I feel like I'm walking around on wet ice every time I try to think about moving forward with it, because I did not grow up in Golarion, and I am not confident that the numbers I'm not making up are roughly correct ones."

"Done."

Carissa Sevar: Actually if that specific thing happens she'll be so fucking promoted in Hell, but there's no way to - oh, wait, yes there is.

"I contemplated whether you might do that and decided if you did I would have an incredibly lucrative storytelling gig in Hell telling people about the fascinating very brief experience of trying to explain sadism to an alien from another world.

- uh, I realize that was just an example."

Keltham: "...this feels like some strange reflection of a dath ilani's dignity where you can't possibly offend them in various ways without making a deliberate and adversarial effort about it. Except it's about you being - invincible, not something that can be truly hurt by anything - something like that."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds herself noticing that she shouldn't lie about how her sexuality works because she has no idea what the Second Law of inferring peoples' sexualities does. She assumed Keltham noticed she was faking earlier through training she could learn to subvert but if he's using the Second Law, then the only way out is truth, not necessarily her truth but real truth, the only thing that will have the right truth-properties on the Shadow Plane Of - what did he call them - tropes.

"....part of Chelish dignity is definitely that you only offer deals if you genuinely mean them, that you're not relying on any - altruism or mercy of the other person that was not specified up front. In practice, if you like the sort of things I like, that - kind of means you have to be awfully invincible? Or - mostly I slept with people at the Worldwound where the treaty proscribed them killing or permanently disabling or kidnapping me, and that was enough.

I don't think the core thing that is important to me is being invincible. I think the core thing that is important to me is - not being foolish, and if I assumed there was some safety where there wasn't, then that was foolish, especially across a species gap, so I had to assume there might be none, and it's very satisfying, to be able to assume that.... and another part of it is that something very important to me is being safe. I think part of why I like being hit is that - one way of being safe, right, is to never have bad things happen to you, but another is to never have bad things be bad for you, to transmute them all through arousal and the admiration of others and sheer determination into something that you're good at, and prized for. I feel safer when someone is hitting me than I ever feel otherwise, because I know I can handle something I didn't previously know I could. You could drive a sword through me, no one would stop you, but I'm safe even if you do, so I'm not scared....I don't know if I'm making sense." She's not lying, though.

Keltham: "I'll try trusting you about it, then," he says, in almost a whisper, feeling rather scared himself. Until you tell me to stop. He doesn't say it aloud; it's supposed to be illegible.

Abrogail Thrune II: HOW is Sevar DOING that. Abrogail has repeatedly glanced over at the transcript, reading every few steps as the quill writes them; and Abrogail can't understand anything about how Sevar figured out how to say exactly what she said. Maybe it'll come clear once she gets the full transcript with Sevar's thoughts, but Abrogail somehow doubts it -

Aspexia Rugatonn: "We are in the middle of a war," hisses Aspexia Rugatonn. "Asmodeus is in the middle of a war. Pay attention."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I am. The war is predictable."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can't think of anything to say that'd possibly improve on that outcome, so she just lets all her delight show on her face.

Keltham: "I'm about ready to sleep. Want me to let you out of -"

"See, if I wasn't this exhausted, I'd have noticed faster that I'm not supposed to ask you that. But if I've got to decide - then I need additional information, right, that's why my brain doesn't want to decide right away - are there likely to be any Carissa-needs-a-toilet-first consequences if I decide to try falling asleep snuggling you like this? If a more experienced thing-I-am would know to tell you to give me other information first, tell me those questions."

Carissa Sevar: "I think someone more experienced would say it as, 'I'm going to go to sleep snuggling you like this, but I'll entertain arguments I should let you out for a little while first'. I should in fact probably check out the fancy palace baths."

Keltham: Keltham has an alternate thought. Is it a real impulse, something he actually wants out of his true self? Or his brain autocompleting the thing that a person-like-him-would-do based on its early primitive pattern prediction?

...probably a real impulse, Keltham isn't sure, but if he's not sure, that's reason enough.

"Should you now. Well, I'll snuggle you for a bit longer, since I feel like doing that, and then possibly I'll let you out. But no promises."

Carissa Sevar: Tiny happy Carissa sound.

lintamande: The top priority on the Raise Deads is getting everyone who is themselves a fifth-circle-or-higher cleric of Asmodeus raised by morning so they can join in on the Raise Deads themselves. There are not usually quite this many dead clerics of Asmodeus but they're getting through it, burning diamonds at a pace everyone knows that even the richest treasury in all Golarion can't keep up for very long (but longer than Nidal, probably). They have some other people nearby casting Restoration on the newly-raised clerics to fix the problem where they come back weaker. It's a nice little assembly line operation.

Someone from Palace Security is on hand for Maillol's resurrection. They have a briefing for him. It's a pretty long briefing considering he's been dead for almost five hours now.

Ferrer Maillol: It's not the first time Ferrer Maillol has been raised. He doesn't remember anything of Hell; he's a priest of Asmodeus, not a sold soul who bypasses sorting, and while his god could perhaps trouble Himself to take Maillol directly, Asmodeus, of course, has never shown that much solicitude. Maillol is someone who'll predictably be raised even with prophecy broken; he has never seen the Boneyard even briefly.

His last memories say that somebody hit him with a Suffocation spell, a caster powerful enough that Maillol went unconscious almost immediately, and unconscious is not a good place to be in the middle of a Nidal assault even if the spell doesn't just kill you. Maillol didn't particularly expect to survive, to be clear, and burned all his negative channelings almost immediately; he wasn't expecting combat that day and hadn't requested spells accordingly.

Maillol lives and pulls himself together, fast enough you might not notice it, and requests a situation update.

lintamande: "Our Lord is at war with Zon-Kuthon," the briefing begins, "and Cheliax is at war with Nidal. Keltham is alive. Sevar is alive and has project command, though she delegated most project decisions to you anticipating your immediate return. Otolmens' oracle is alive. Keltham, Sevar, and Otolmens' oracle have been relocated to the palace on Her Majesty's orders; Sevar is presently chained up in Keltham's bed, having had a conversation with him in which she told him that what he desires is a romantic relationship in which she belongs to him, he worried she did not mean he could murder her, she insisted she did mean that, and he decided to trust her and try doing whatever he wants, which seems to be cuddling. Project casualties are in your briefing notes, they're in line for resurrection; we're seeing high casualties on the border, so those resurrections may be slow at their present prioritization.

Pilar, the oracle of Cayden Cailean, somehow accompanied Keltham to his spell testing and out of the villa for the summons, and then took a sword for him; she's higher priority for resurrection because we're both worried we might lose her - she's in Elysium - and because we need to ask her what the fuck happened. Asmodia is also dead, confirmed in Hell, lower priority; Ione is not conscious and may not, given the vision was likely from Nethys, recover consciousness. The villa has just been determined clear of hostiles and traps and not yet evaluated for Kuthite magic items for divination or espionage. Keltham is suspicious about the destruction of his notes, which happened when the Kuthites swarmed the villa, and about the fact that the invasion was obviously timed to his stepping outside the villa and yet the invaders didn't seem to immediately know where he was. We have no explanation for this. He's requested we ensure there are no secret Kuthites on staff; we're pretty damn sure, obviously, but if there's anyone who could plausibly have evaded recent evaluation, haul them in. He's also suspicious that Security didn't teleport him out; we determined that staff member used his Teleports earlier in the day fetching requisitions from a supply depot in Corentyn, and that despite this he was selected to accompany Keltham out of the villa because he passed muster to Detect Anxieties and Detect Desires when most didn't, but if anything about that seems odd to you, we can raise his priority for resurrection as well, or if he refuses it contact his owner in Hell."

Ferrer Maillol: 'Our Lord is at war with Zon-Kuthon' would be harder to understand as a statement with import clearly distinct from 'Cheliax is at war with Nidal', if there were not a window inside the room Maillol now occupies, from which you can see a bit of the darkest-of-night sky, flickering, in a way that (if history is true) it hasn't done in the hundred years since Aroden died and the Worldwound opened.

Maillol wants to believe that this is literally the worst that a project disaster can possibly, possibly get.

He is afraid that it is not.

"Have we considered the possibility that this project is, in fact, cursed directly by Pharasma Herself with all of Her malice, and should be shut down entirely before we find out what happens to it tomorrow," says Maillol.

...he doesn't actually. But he thinks it very loudly.

What he says instead is, "I need explicit confirmation that Aspexia Rugatonn knows that Carissa Sevar is sharing a building with the Queen."

Iarwain: In the depths of the center of the Palace in Egorian, there is a chamber that sees unfortunately frequent use. The queen sits on a stepped dais high enough that her own head will not be below that of the crouching form of Gorthoklek the pit fiend, which, even with Gorthoklek crouching, requires quite the high dais. Across from Gorthoklek also stands Contessa Lrilatha in full and deadly panoply.

Before the dais stands one other.

The most important purpose of this chamber is to, when it becomes necessary, hold an intervention.

"You," Abrogail Thrune declares coldy, imperiously, a voice like a twisting dagger, "are a greater disappointment to me than perhaps any other being or happening in my life."

"The feeling is mutual," says one of the three entities in Cheliax who would dare say such a thing.

"I can remember as though it were yesterday, my excitement when I learned that Asmodeus had sent me my own personal erinyes to tempt me and corrupt me. What poisonous words does she now whisper in my ears? Restrain my cruelty. Restrain my lust. I must control my desires and not let my desires control me. I have been assigned my own personal black-winged monk of Irori."

"Irori is Lawful Neutral," observes the same entity who spoke before, Contessa Lrilatha. "Asmodeus is Lawful Evil. Need I spell out in greater detail what the two have in common? Imagine my own disappointment when, hoping I had been assigned an eager pupil to corrupt further, I found myself instead tasked to restrain an incipient drow queen."

"Drow queen. What a tempting thought. They, one hears, are allowed to have fun."

Aspexia Rugatonn speaks then, weary, dry, from where she stands before the dais, facing down the Queen with the other two sensible beings in Cheliax. "You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to have other fun. Find different fun."

"I don't want different fun. I want to turn Sevar into a statue. I really, really want to turn Sevar into a statue."

"I really, really want to dissolve you in acid but you don't hear me being a whinecomplainbitch* about it." (This word of Infernal now appears as a loanword in the Chelish dialect of Taldane.)

"I want to petrify her slowly, so that she can feel it happening, and scream with all of her heart and all of her soul while it's happening, and release all of that terror, and tension, and everything inside her, and I want to kiss her gently while she's turning to stone and screaming. She's just so scared, and I so rarely meet anyone who's that scared... well, anyone interesting to me who's that scared of me personally doing something that it would interest me to do to them."

Even hunched over, with its wings folded, the black figure is taller than a man standing on another man's shoulders. "I expect that our Lord would be most extremely displeased," rumbles Gorthoklek.

"I would, of course, unpetrify her immediately afterwards; and swear then never to do that to her in truth, unless she had betrayed the House of Thrune knowingly, deliberately, and unambiguously."

Gorthoklek and Contessa Lrilatha both pass their Bluff checks against the queen; Aspexia Rugatonn, who is not specialized in Splendour in quite the same way, does not. The brief break in the room's atmosphere is therefore, however finely, noticeable.

"What," says Abrogail. "Did you actually believe that I would actually bury her? Really? Really? After having known me this long, you still think I would do that?"

"Yes," say three of the four most powerful beings in Cheliax in unison.

"Perhaps I would if Asmodeus had not singled her out and if she were not performing vital work for Cheliax. But, that being so, do you truly believe I would affront Asmodeus's purpose and interests so, when I could have most of the fun I wanted without the cost to Hell? You should know, given the consequences to me, and how those have not yet been invoked, that I have never once betrayed Asmodeus in the depths of my own heart."

"The trouble is what the depths of your own heart seem to define as a betrayal of Asmodeus," rumbles Gorthoklek. "The depths of your own heart seem astonishingly permissive about it."

"Oh? How misfortunate. The devil negotiating my pact on behalf of Asmodeus should have defined that term more carefully."

Mortal humans being what they are, one would have expected this clause of the contract to come into force within days of the pact being signed and possibly the first minute. No matter how lax or unspoken the definition, no matter how the mortal drove themselves half-mad trying to avoid that, it should have triggered anyways. The resulting penalty clauses do not nullify the compact, but produce a less stringent interpretation of Hell's side and a more stringent interpretation of Abrogail Thrune's.

Given that it hasn't triggered, the devil who negotiated that compact is not having a good century. It isn't that Asmodeus hasn't benefited from the pact, or that Asmodeus isn't receiving enough of a share of the gains, or even that He is displeased with the results, it's the principle of the thing.

Abrogail Thrune has never once spoken aloud what it meant to her when she signed her compact, to not betray Asmodeus in the depths of her own heart, lest anyone use that knowledge against her. It is simply this: she gets to have her fun, and Asmodeus gets to have His.

"You know as well as I do that it would be good for her," says Abrogail Thrune. "It would be so, so good for her."

"We are not here to do what is good for Sevar," says Aspexia Rugatonn. "We were explicitly instructed not to be proactive about her correction."

"You were. I was not. Asmodeus cannot have failed to predict that she would catch my interest."

"He most certainly can have failed to predict it. He can have failed to predict that Hell's exact wording would leave you a loophole, and a rather arguable loophole at that. Our Lord has other things on His mind and cannot devote all of His attention to Cheliax. Complications like these, which require more of His attention, are already injuries and expenses to Him. And now, of all times, He is gravely distracted, and may not see what is happening here at all."

For all her Splendour bonuses, Abrogail can't compete with Aspexia for sternness, but neither is she that easily swayed from her desires. "You may recall that when I was negotiating with your Lord's agent to take this throne in the first place, there is a specific clause I added to the effect that His high priests would not tell me to never have any fun. Keep to your Lord's bargain, Aspexia."

"Operative word never," Aspexia says sharply. "I've accepted you turning good Asmodeans into statues and burying them, because most souls are of little importance to our Lord, because there could be a discipline problem otherwise among those who truly look forward to Hell. You may continue to have that fun in the future. This soul is of importance to our Lord and to your country of Cheliax and to our Lord's longer purposes in Golarion. Otolmens has appointed an oracle. The gods are at war. You need to stop introducing complications."

"Unfortunately, as I do now admit, I did not realize, on first meeting Sevar, the effect my threat would have on her; and that, I do worry, may be a complication. The transcripts of her thoughts show that, despite my attempted reassurance, she continues to be distracted by thoughts of me doing terrifying things to her. So now I have to actually do them to her. Slowly. It's the only way to undo my own past folly."

"Hardly the only way," observes the most actually intelligent entity in the room, in a low grumbling growl, though this level of Intelligence is not required to see the obvious. "You could swear to Sevar the same oath, without first pretending to turn her into a statue."

"But then I would never get to slowly petrify her!"

"Why have our existences become this?" wonders Contessa Lrilatha on a more private channel. "How did we offend our Lord? Will we ever be allowed to return to Hell?"

Gorthoklek replies with a brief proverb in Infernal. It carries with it the sense of 'Hell is other people', of 'This is Hell nor are we out of it', of 'Hell is not a place but a philosophy', but the literal Infernal is simply 'Hell is the destruction of hope.'

Pilar : Time doesn't always pass in the same rate, in Chaotic planes. Especially if the local Power in charge wills otherwise. Cayden Cailean is otherwise occupied, fighting Zon-Kuthon; but has still His local co-conspirators, and His plans laid in advance.

Pilar Pineda has been in Elysium longer than Hell thinks. Not nearly long enough to get the full tour, but enough to be shown around a little, appropriately attired and appropriately treated, to see massive crystal-waterfalls in which glasslike material flows slowly down from what look like leagues and leagues up, to sleep briefly but refreshingly in a warm cavern lit by glowing edible moss, to meet interesting people and be mistreated by them in interesting ways.

Long enough to be told what Elysium believes about what Hell really is, how Hell really works, and have it sworn to her in the name of Good and Chaos that they're telling the truth to the best of their own knowledge. They're not Lawful, yes, but it doesn't mean they're all liars, all the time. There are beings with spell-like abilities here to rival great wizards, and one shows Pilar a glimpse of Hell as it really is.

To be clear, Pilar hasn't been here that long; this tour is being done in something of a rush.

Keltham: Keltham wakes, to light just beginning to filter in through the bedroom window. He is not used to sleeping through any more light than that, and, what with all the distractions, didn't even close the curtains before falling asleep cuddling a chained-up Carissa.

Oh.

He can sleep on the same surface, and even in the same poorly designed bed, as someone else. Well. He can do that with Carissa; he doesn't particularly like the thought of doing it with anyone else that he currently knows.

It's raining outside, moderately windy. It's not possible to see, underneath the clouds, if the sky is doing anything weird.

Keltham starts to get the - key, how is that a key, he didn't want to interrupt sexytimes to ask Carissa this, last night, but you can literally just look at it and see how it must fit into the lock. Why couldn't you just look at the shape and remember it, and then make another key like that, if you'd trained yourself a bit on fast memorization? Golarion really doesn't make much sense... well, maybe only sexy keys for bed chains are like this, because the person is chained up and it doesn't matter if they can remember the key's shape.

He's carefully unlocking the keys before it occurs to him to wonder whether he actually wants to Carissa let out; after a few moments, he concludes that he doesn't want to do more - well, maybe he would, if he thought of things to do - but if he wasn't pushing himself into things -

Keltham realizes he's being dumb; he knows how to think better than this, in familiar domains, knows that the Way there is not to question your ordinary wants so much except on rare special occasions of deliberate meta. He felt like letting Carissa out of the chains, so he's going to do that and not trip over questioning the impulse. If he made the wrong decision somehow by acting on that impulse, he'll find out and his brain will update its impulses. Besides, if he wants Carissa back in the chains, he can always put her back in them later.

(A strange wash of warmth at that final thought, unfamiliar, but becoming quickly less so.)

Carissa Sevar: She's a sounder sleeper, but wakes up at him attempting this; flinches, at first, and tugs at the chains, before she realizes -

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, hey. Good morning."

Keltham: He's pretty sure that what she just said was 'good morning', so the Taldane words are starting to settle in a little.

"Greet the day!" Keltham replies cheerfully in Baseline, before his brain helpfully thinks of the rainy weather outside and that it might betoken an impending genre shift to Postapocalyptic; and while Keltham does inwardly tell his brain to screw off, this is not a perfect inner telling.

Chain removal continues.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, do they no longer have a language in common, ugh. She will call a servant about that once she's unchained, if he doesn't seem to have other plans.

Keltham: Keltham will perform the gestures for Comprehend Languages where Carissa can see them; he hasn't prayed for spells yet, so he might as well use this one. He can understand her now if not speak to her.

Keltham doesn't think until afterwards that maybe energy is more expensive to his god than usual right now... well, he'll see if he gets any spells period, then.

Chains be gone.

Carissa Sevar: "If you don't want to wait for me to prepare Share Language we can ask the staff here for it," Carissa says once he's cast Comprehend Languages. "You have a call bell, right next to the door."

Keltham: Sure, he'll try Taldane with yet another different set of hard-to-detect connotations being rapidly overridden by actual familiarity. He goes to tap the call bell.

lintamande: A uniformed person shows up in about fifteen seconds "How can I help you, sir?"

Keltham: "Eat chair Share Language Taldane?" Keltham says in attempted Taldane.

(It's pretty easy to figure out that 'eat chair' was supposed to be 'cast magic'.)

lintamande: Yeah, all right. Tap.

Keltham: "Thank you," Keltham says in Taldane, and tries running through some words in his mind. It's harder to read the faint connotations than it was yesterday; Share Language doesn't want to override knowledge that you already have. Keltham has to focus hard on the internal probes and use some dath ilani techniques for hunting down subtle connotations that words and concepts have to you.

'Lawful' is obsessing over your city's regulations and fretting over whether you're conforming enough to all of them, 'Chaos' is insanity, 'Good' is something put firmly underneath a sense of superiority that's alien to dath ilan, 'Evil' is being mean to people and not in a sexually sadistic way either.

Keltham makes a note not to trust this particular person with anything if he can avoid it. Actually, he should check -

'Asmodeus' doesn't return anything, nor 'Zon-Kuthon'. Somehow the spell knows that these are individual things rather than general concepts, no matter how much a dath ilani would say that no such qualitative difference exists, and isn't transferring them over as Shared Language.

Keltham supposes that would have been an overly easy way of identifying traitors, at least those at or above second-circle wizardry... no, that's trope-based thinking, and it is very far from certain that mode of thinking binds to reality here at all; so he needs to at least firmly label every use of it in an inference step, and then compute everything the other way too. If this technique is not forbidden to work by tropes, Keltham should be creative about making this method work, or just literally continue at all to think about how to make it work.

'Pain'? Keltham can't get a read on it, he has a Baseline concept that the Taldane word maps onto almost exactly; Keltham already knows what this word means. This sort of outcome is presumably the reason why Golarion folks don't think of this as a standard probe to use on each other.

Dath ilani however do not have a single commonly-used concept that corresponds exactly to the connotations and meanings of the Taldane word 'torture'*, and Keltham can get something of a read on that; 'torture' sounds awfulscary rather than desirable.

Okay, probably not a Kuthite traitor then, to the extent this method works at all.

(*) The Baseline compound phrase that refers-by-convention to 'deliberately inflicting extreme amounts of pain' carries primarily the connotation of overly large negative payoffs in decision matrices and edgelord thought experiments devised by teenage males, not the idea that you can obtain information or obedience that way.

(From the perspective of anybody watching, Keltham just said 'Thank you', closed the door, and then shut his eyes and stood motionless for about a minute.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is ....concerned!!! But she has nothing productive to do with the concern and isn't exactly going to interrupt him. She brushes her hair and pulls her spellbook out of extradimensional space, instead.

Keltham: Keltham finishes thinking and turns around in time to catch this.

"Wait, have you had a hammerspace* this whole time?"

(*) Lit. 'Don't-bother-tracking-facts-about carrying' in Baseline, translated to a Taldane term for a pocket dimension.

Carissa Sevar: "It's a first circle spell to hide your spellbook in another plane. It only works on spellbooks. I separately have been loaned a Bag of Holding, which is more of a standard instance of that thing, if you want to poke it."

Keltham: "Literally only spellbooks, and how is that a thing the spell can tell, and what counts as a spellbook, and can you write a spell over the outside of a luggage and pack the whole thing away, are some of the questions that leap instantaneously to mind, but they are not urgent ones. I sure will want a Bag of Holding once I have anything to hold in it."

"Do you need, or for that matter want, a separate room so you can prepare spells? And I also need, if it's possible, a space where I can sometimes be where other people won't be there without knocking, if this ends up our shared bedroom."

Carissa Sevar: “Only spellbooks because this is a hyperspecialized version of a more general third-circle spell which a research team at the Worldwound shaved down to first by making it incredibly specific. It has to be the spellbook you prepared the first circle spell out of, it has to be magically unique or you might get someone else’s spellbook with the exact same spells written in it, the weight limit is what a Mage Hand can lift, and non magical notes or writing don’t tend to come back when you summon it back. You can use the third circle version if you don’t like those downsides.

I think this is meant to be your bedroom, and you can request me a separate one if you want space that’s not shared, even if you’re generally going to want me in yours.”

Keltham: "Hope we can at some point get to a situation with three rooms instead of two, but given the Security situation I can live with it temporarily. Do you need to formally report in to Security about last night before spending a lot more time with me, do you prefer to prepare spells before you do anything else in a day, do you desire breakfast above and before all other things..."

Carissa Sevar: “My priority is you, Keltham. But I guess you’ve got spells to pray for and so I’ll probably by default report to Security and prepare mine while you’re doing that.”

Keltham: "Ione's list of spells got burned, so I figured, especially given what happened yesterday, I'd ask my god to pick whatever, in which case praying won't take long... if I get a busy signal and have to figure out my own spells for a new request, it might take longer, I suppose."

Carissa Sevar: “…right, I have no idea if the godwar affects prayer. We could ask whether the Asmodean clerics here are getting spells normally but that’d only tell us so much because Asmodeus is a much bigger and more powerful god.”

Keltham: "I'll just try it now." Keltham, who has some alien mental training involving task-switching and calm-states via biofeedback and also lacks preconceptions about how fast sacred rites should take, shifts his thoughts into a more meditative and contemplative mode. The Taldane word 'prayer' means more to him than it did yesterday, there's a novel concept inside Keltham for its connotations to translate onto.

Keltham remembers what he saw in Early Judgement, and thinks about his desire to engage in mutually beneficial interaction with the God of Coordination, the god who runs the afterlife of golden gondolas that are sold and not given away, because money symbolizes mutual benefit that spreads out beyond two people bartering directly, and that is what binds people helping each other into a Civilization even of many life forms. Whatever spells his god thinks he should have today to serve that goal and make skyscrapers in Golarion, those are the spells Keltham wants.

Abadar: Abadar is (a) busy (b) very confused about how His attempts to help the strange squirrel via spell choice have been playing out so far and (c) feeling somewhat more relaxed about His initial attempt to open trade with the squirrel in a way nonharmful to the squirrel's own interests, now that the consequences will include the downfall of Zon-Kuthon. If the squirrel is Good, which it might possibly be to some degree, it'll probably feel sad about how this whole business ended up helping Cheliax; but having also helped cause the downfall of Zon-Kuthon should make up for a lot, relative to what a Good squirrel's interests probably are. And if the squirrel isn't Good at all, the squirrel is even less likely in those branches to regret having ever tried to trade with Abadar.

But, most importantly, Abadar is busy. Call again later.

Keltham: "No reply at all. I'll try picking out my own spells and praying again, but that'll take some time to think. We should - request a room for you, so you can prepare spells there, I guess? I'm not sure how my brain will respond to you being quietly in the room preparing spells and I don't want to unnecessarily fight my brain about anything right now."

Carissa Sevar: "Very reasonable. I will go report to Security and can convey that request on my way?"

Keltham: "Make it so, Carissa."

Carissa Sevar: She curtseys, and off she goes.

Iarwain: Dawn has come, and Asmodean priests receive their spells. One soul stands near the top of the new priority list. If they don't act soon, they might not get her back, if it's not already too late.

Pilar : Pilar Pineda wakes in the dawn light of Elysium, still immersed in the pool of glowing slimes where she was resting that night. It seems that she is no longer chained, no longer bears those marks that tell Elysians how to mistreat her. She is as naked, now, as when she first appeared here; though the pool slimes would be protecting her modesty if Asmodean wizard students were allowed to retain any.

Standing before her is the bizarre, brightly colored, un-reality-resembling form of Cayden Cailean's - herald? Delegate? It's not clear what she is in many senses, just that she (or is it She?) obeys, or, as the locals would have it, 'works with', Cayden Cailean.

Pilar knows, even before She speaks, what She will say.

"They'll call you very soon," says She to Pilar. "Are you still sure you want to go back?"

"Yes I am sure," Pilar says firmly. "And, if it's in any way possible, I don't want to come here next time. Even if I can't get Maledicted in time, don't take me here again, just let me get my proper trial from Pharasma. I belong in Hell. And yes, I know that when I'm in Hell, I'll many times wish I was here. But I'm actually Lawful Evil, and this was a lovely place to visit, but it's not where I belong."

The strange being nods Her head. "Okay."

Pilar was expecting more of an argument. "Okay?" she repeats.

"An it harm none other, do as ye will! It may not be the whole of the Law, but it sure is a great big part of Chaotic Good! We're not going to keep you here if you say you'd rather be somewhere else."

From far away, Pilar hears the call. Yes, she answers, with her mind, with her soul, and a majority if not the absolute entirety of her heart. Yes, I want to go back. To serve Asmodeus in Golarion, and then in Hell.

And she feels herself start to fade.

She's fading really very slowly, for some reason, and seems to basically be still here.

"Time is running super fast for us right now, relative to Golarion," says the strange being. "I am willing that it be so. Raise Dead takes a minute to cast, and it turns out, there's a few more things you need to hear before you go!"

"Is this where you spring some sort of Chaotic Good trap on me?" Pilar says suspiciously.

"No. It's where I tell you that Cayden Cailean won't be able to take you, if you die for real. He was only able to get away with this because you were going to go back and Cayden Cailean knew that. You're right, Lawful Evil to Chaotic Good is something of a stretch. We could arrange a visit, but we can't offer you citizenship, not really."

Pilar now has additional questions. "Wait - if I could never stay here in the first place, why did you keep asking me if I really wanted to go back to Golarion and go on to Hell - why send me on this whole tour to convince me to say no to the Raise Dead -"

The strange being laughs Her strange high-pitched cheerful laugh. "Well, because it was important that you knew for yourself, you see! There's not many people who can go to Hell with a whole heart, or who really and truly want to belong to Asmodeus when Asmodeus cares so little about them. Many, many, many fewer people than have convinced themselves that they're okay with it." The strange being looks sad, now. "Not many people in Cheliax would make the decision you just did, if they had really been to Elysium, and if they really thought they could stay. If Asmodeus's followers had any sense they'd throw you a huge party about it, when you got back to Golarion, but they won't do that either. Most of them won't want to admit, if they even let themselves know it, that they would never do what you did."

On reflection, the Elysians never once did tell her explicitly that she could stay, just kept on asking her if she was sure she wanted to go back. "What in the name of Asmodeus... um. What is Cayden Cailean planning? Why do that?" She doesn't expect them to just actually tell her, but, Chaotic Good outsider, she should at least try.

"You don't think it's just the sort of thing that Chaotic Good people do?"

"No," says Pilar. "This is way, waaay, waaaay too much effort for just getting one Asmodean to know for certain that she's an Asmodean, when, in fact, she already knew that." (Elysium has affected her speech patterns, Pilar notes, she'd better watch that when she gets back.)

"Did she really know it, though? There'd be an awful lot of Asmodeans who said they were certain they were Asmodeans, who'd never let themselves think that wasn't true. But if they were in Elysium and had the chance to stay, they'd say yes in a heartbeat. Could you know you weren't one of those, if you hadn't really tried it?"

"Yes, I could, actually," Pilar says. "But more importantly, that is not the whole point of this operation. What is?"

The strange being slyly winks one of the inhumanly huge, luminous white-black-blue-white eyes in Her head. "Well, that would be telling. But, guess what - the part where Cayden Cailean turned you into His oracle is going to help Asmodeus, in the end!"

"Really."

"Really! You're truly loyal to Asmodeus, Pilar. I'm not going to say we'd never use somebody like you against her own god, but it's still the sort of thing that Good prefers not to do. According to Asmodeus's own values, He'll be better off in the world where Pilar Pineda became an oracle of Cayden Cailean than in the world where you didn't. Obviously that's not the real point from Cayden Cailean's perspective, but it still happens to be true."

Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil don't have a whole lot of common interests, but they do have some. "...Is this about keeping Rovagug sealed, or the Worldwound, or something?"

"One of those three for sure!"

Pilar can feel herself to have almost entirely faded, now. Golarion is calling her, it's not her home, but it's on her way.

"And maybe it's not the real point either," says the un-reality-looking bright-pink sort-of-horse, "but with so many people in Hell, who don't want to be there, it would be sad if one of the very few people who did want to be there, couldn't go. Asmodeus isn't a friend to anyone, but that doesn't mean He doesn't need anyone to be a friend to Him. After all, sometimes -"

Pilar hears the last words with her soul's mind more than her soul's ears.

"- friendship can be the greatest magic of all!"

Iarwain: "Though," the Element of Laughter murmurs to herself, a little sadder, by the now-empty pool, "this isn't one of those times."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has no idea who in the palace she's supposed to report to and is mildly worried that if she just wanders around she'll either run into the Queen (hi your Imperial Majestrix you can do whatever you'd like) or run into someone that some random god can oracle or otherwise work through. ...if she's not more or less immediately stopped by Security she'll try for a temple.

Iarwain: Security will direct her quickly enough to Maillol, who's in a temporary guest office at the annex temple.

Ferrer Maillol: "Sevar." He's had any sleep, now, and is going to need to have it for an entire damned week until his Ring of Sustenance kicks in again.

Carissa Sevar: Well, that's one of her questions answered, which was whether he was back and Project-related decisionmaking appropriately located so that she can stop doing it. The other things she wants to know are whether Pilar's back or whether she should start setting up excuses for that/evaluating a Pilar-replacement, whether anyone has any guesses on the mysterious Second Law that allowed Keltham to predict Pilar would enjoy being forced and have an interesting backstory, "and, in the spirit of continuing to be proactive about this, whether the Church has any correction for me."

Ferrer Maillol: "I'm probably just stupid from the Raise Dead, but I seem to be unable to find any flaws to pick in your performance over the last half-day. Perhaps I'll have found some tomorrow."

Pilar's back, carrying a story that got her instantly kicked to the almost-but-not-quite-absolute-top-priority line to talk to Aspexia Rugatonn, which is, unfortunately, a pretty long line while the gods are at war.

Sevar is unfortunately the expert on whatever the Abyss this Second Law business is about. Maillol can barely understand any of the game Sevar is playing against Keltham's mastery of the Law he's already lectured on. If it wasn't for Sevar's thought transcripts, nobody else reading the surface conversation would've realized that there was a great mystery here in the first place.

Still, even with everyone incredibly busy, there's probably somebody here in the palace who can beat Keltham's Will save on Detect Thoughts with enough reliability to make it worth the risk. Though they should probably ready a story about Nidal infiltrators in case that person fucks up.

Anyways, Maillol can't think of anything besides sending in somebody to ask Keltham why he thinks one girl is a hidden Kuthite cleric, and hoping that makes him think about the Second Law. Maybe have somebody go in who's old and impressive-looking and wearing a big visible intelligence headband so that Keltham is more likely to try to explain to them than to Sevar. All they need is for one of Cheliax's three eighth-circle wizards to have the time available for a Detect Thoughts. During a war with Nidal. Well, there's also always Aspexia Rugatonn, it's not like she'd be busy. Or Gorthoklek, as the general of Cheliax's armies this must be like a vacation for him.

Carissa Sevar: "I assume I can't be of any help to the war effort that's worth distracting me from Keltham but if I can, he'd accept that as a reason for me to be doing other things." Carissa would have some kind of feelings about how she had the best spellcraft of anyone at the Worldwound including the wizards with two circles on her and can only serve Cheliax by getting chained up in bed except that would be pathetic.

Ferrer Maillol: "It may be useful to have him think something like that exists when it doesn't, to give you an excuse to be places, but you're the one in charge of lies."

"I am still making an effort to understand Keltham myself in case you're not available, so, Sevar, correct me if I am mistaken. My guess is that you'll say that Keltham doesn't think quite the same way we do about how he's obviously more important than anything you can do for the war effort, but that it's still a lie he might notice as out-of-place even if it's not instantly obvious to him the same way. Confirm or correct me."

Carissa Sevar: "He would - try to extrapolate the equilibrium where third circle wizards on a secret directly divinely commanded project are needed for the war effort and something wouldn't add up, I don't know what, but if we're not in fact doing it then there's a reason we're not which bottoms out in reality, maybe in pieces of it he can see."

Ferrer Maillol: ...right. Maillol really hopes that going around saying "extrapolate the equilibrium where" instead of just "figure out how things work if" is meaningful and important and not, when you start saying it, a sign of increasing Kelthamization.

"Give me your current best guess about when Cheliax will gain more than it loses from resuming extraction of information from Keltham, given that your thought transcripts suggest genuine and not simply posed concern about his ability to recover from the shock. We could find a spare room within the Palace's Forbiddance for lessons, but not if we're eating our seed grain by doing that. The actual call will remain yours after further observation of Keltham."

Carissa Sevar: "He thinks he'll be better by tomorrow or the next day, I predict he's right though he seems quite not okay right now and if he's still like this tomorrow I'll push it off."

Ferrer Maillol: "Understood."

"There's been a suggestion to have a third party tell Keltham useful things about your sexuality, preferably true ones, that he might be hesitant to believe from you directly. Such as that you are attracted to him in part because of the actual power he holds over you, in the sense that you know Cheliax would let him do anything to you if he made that a condition of cooperating with us, and that if he never exercises any power over you, you may lose some interest. Supposedly we know how you work because people with lots of experience with submissives can guess that by looking closely at you and how you behave around Keltham, as some people in our 'Governance' are of course doing in the background. That Cheliax would let him do anything he wanted would be true in every sane country in the world and Taldor specifically and therefore, goes the argument, passes your condition on how we tell him Cheliax works."

Carissa Sevar: "I do think it'll be important progress for him to understand that we're not pretending and that I don't even wish we were. I am not sure who he'd trust to hear it from - maybe Ione, if she recovers, maybe Pilar - I do predict that most possible ways of saying to him 'you know, you can actually not-for-pretend do whatever you want' result in a freakout like the one he had over the idea that you get executed for trying to overthrow the government, but there might be something -

- if I were trying to broach it to him, which has the disadvantage that I'm not going to say I'll get bored if he doesn't keep up, what I'd say is that I disliked it in the sex shop how it seemed like it was set up for mostly people who wanted to - pretend - and that if I wanted that I'd have said to him 'act like you can do whatever you'd like to me, until I tell you to stop', or something, and I didn't, and that a consequence of what I said instead, as far as Cheliax is concerned, is that he is, actually, entitled to do whatever he'd like, and if he wanted to chain me up again and I was being difficult about it he could call in Security and no one'd blink at that, and even though I expect he's nowhere near the point where he'd enjoy my being defiant I like knowing it's real.

But that of course - even in Taldor it wouldn't matter at all what I had to say about it and we do have to introduce that at some point, as I understand it?"

Ferrer Maillol: "I believe the central concept is that we lie that 'Governance' would be unhappy and then go along with it, but tell the truth that the actual power this gives him is important to your sexuality. 'Governance' is not telling him this to encourage him, of course, but because it's an important fact for somebody like him to know about somebody like you. He should not suggest that you have any power to restrain him from doing whatever he wants, because in fact you don't have that power and that fact is very important to you."

Carissa Sevar: " - yes. Okay, I think that's a good idea, I'm not sure who can pull it off, I'm authorizing the lie that Governance would be unhappy though even in Taldor I'm not, actually, convinced they would."

Ferrer Maillol: "Cheliax was Taldor and mostly still is Taldor, but is in the process of being reformed by a newly ascendant Queen who has negotiated a pact with the wise and benevolent Asmodeus. Asmodeus's Church would be displeased by that sort of thing happening without good reason, but would, in this case, weigh the many problems in this country and decide that keeping Keltham happy was far more than enough good reason."

"Palace has plenty of dignified-looking people with very high Splendour who could pull it off, I think the main delay is going to be waiting on somebody who can cast Detect Thoughts so we can ask about his Nidal infiltrator theory too."

Carissa Sevar: "All right. Another option, because I think he's going to want to talk about exclusivity in a little while, is to have someone drop in and ask him if they can rent me, and give a justification along these lines." Carissa has a hard time pinning down a lot of her intuitions about Keltham but she expects that he will have some kind of feelings about 'look, she's into stuff that's much more serious than you are prepared to offer', and if that take is given by someone with an obvious self-interest then it's also easier if it's disastrous for him to reject it without reaching any far-reaching conclusions about Cheliax. Also, whether he ends up agreeing or not he'll end up wanting to learn the skills he doesn't have, and also it seems like fertile territory for 'things he might turn out to be into'.

Ferrer Maillol: "My read on Keltham is that there are some kinds of people to whom he'll show some tiny fraction of what we consider elementary deference, Contessa Lrilatha being the most obvious. His interactions with senior Security also seem promising. If the person trying to rent you isn't wearing a visible +6 headband, it seems less likely that Keltham will process them as - whoever he thinks he's supposed to listen to. And if we send in somebody like that, why are they trying to rent you and not a hundred other women they could afford?"

Carissa Sevar: This is a fantastic question someone should ask the Queen.

She doesn't say that, not that not saying it much limits the damage of thinking it. "Fair enough. I guess it can wait on someone who can manage the Detect Thoughts."

Ferrer Maillol: "That's it. If you've got nothing else, go prepare spells."

Maillol is in fact concerned about the degree to which Sevar seems to be developing genuine attachment for Keltham, but the last time she spoke out of that attachment she made tremendous progress on Keltham, because it fit into whatever mysterious theories he uses. Maillol still thinks, on the whole, that in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law he would not correct her yet. Of course, that would be because he was regarding her as a disposable pawn, but if that's what Sevar proves to be, so be it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa asks after, and receives, a room next to Keltham's, smaller than his and less 'doom-punk', clearly meant for the entourage of the person in the main room but not meant for their slaves. She prepares spells.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol files a request for someone at eighth circle who can cast Detect Thoughts, and/or somebody with very high Splendour who can talk to Keltham about the mystery of where he's getting his deductions and also talk with him about Carissa Sevar's sexuality, specifically about her need to be in somebody else's power, and possibly also (he's not sure how the details of this could look but he's not the one with the Splendour) manage to introduce the topic of (somebody else?) wanting to rent Sevar from Keltham in a way that won't set him off or look wildly implausible.

Maillol isn't going to realize for a while the incredible depth and thoroughness of the blunder he's just committed, and by the time he does, it will be far too late.

Keltham: Keltham tries to recollect what he can of the items in Ione's list that seemed at all interesting, as now seen from a somewhat different standpoint - he can't recollect much of it, though, that visibly helps a lot under the new conditions - spends some time figuring stuff out, spends more time trying to figure out if he can do any better, and then prays.

He does receive his spells this time, though with no sense of his own god looking back.

Keltham now has:

0th: Detect Magic, Guidance, what should be Detect Poison, what should be Create Water.

(Create Water seems like the most munchkinable thing that's a cantrip. Which isn't very munchkinable, but at 4 gallons per caster circle, maybe he can do something with repeatably suddenly 16 gallons of water, in an emergency situation.)

1st: Truthspell x3, Fairness x2, Sanctuary, Protection, Comprehend Languages.

2nd: Augury x3, Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment.

Taking the Early Judgment spell seems a little unsafe, like they'd only sell that magic in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods because it's too potentially addictive. But it also seems important to have around at least for today in case he needs to make a mental recovery.

3rd: (used on 2 1sts and a 2nd)

4th: Enchantment Foil, what should be Sending.

Keltham: That leaves him with some time left while Carissa preps spells, which he'll first use to Prestidigitate his clothing clean over the sink in the ensuite bathroom (not that Keltham is remembering to be appreciative of this incredible luxury).

Then Keltham attempts to think for a bit, his thoughts tentatively trying out a review of recent events, before he concludes that in fact he shouldn't do that and should try to decompress more instead, while he's alone by himself in the quiet but for the sound of rain outside.

He'll poke through the fourteen-volume history on 'Absalom', which becomes more interesting after it becomes clear that Absalom is where the Starstone resides. The quality of the reasoning in the history books is something like six times better than those of the books in the villa library, more like 1 reasoning error per 2 sentences instead of 3 reasoning errors per 1 sentence.

...is that because the palace can afford better books than - but why - why would - books, information, you should just be able to reprint the best versions of things if the information exists - do more intelligent authors demand incredibly high book royalties to the point where most people can't afford good information about basic subjects? Golarion why.

The book's contents seem to be dated to before Aroden died, which, if Keltham is recalling correctly, was a century ago. Maybe that's at least how long it took for the slightly smarter and better-reasoned book to have its copyright decay to where it could sell enough copies to be worth printing? Golarion, again, why? Information is very easy to copy once it exists; information on core topics is among the most blatant possible cases where Civilization has an interest in everybody being able to afford it.

All the altruistic smart people are off being wizards at the Worldwound, maybe.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa knocks on his door an hour later.

Keltham: "Enter."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds it encouraging how quickly he is warming up to this! She'll enter. ...and kneel at his side over in the reading nook, if that's what he's doing. She has never done this before and feels faintly ridiculous but what's important is whether Keltham is into it.

dath ilan: ('Enter' would actually be among the things you'd say in Baseline, if somebody knocked, and it wouldn't especially be a command. It's just that 'it's okay by me if you want to come in' would be more syllables than Civilization would choose to encode into a query-response pattern that gets used like over a billion times a day.)

Keltham: And now Carissa is on her knees on the pillow beside the reading nook. Obviously no such custom exists in Civilization and kneeling itself wouldn't mean anything there, but it's clearly a standard thing given the pillow beside the reading nook.

He doesn't ask what this clearly standard thing standardly encodes, because part of him seems to feel that the meaning is, somehow, obvious. Not all of it, and maybe he's completely wrong; it just obviously seems like something that you wouldn't do, unless you are to him what Carissa is to him, so it means, at least, that.

He reaches over and ruffles her hair, because that feels right. "Hey," he says.

Carissa Sevar: "Hey. I have reported to Security and prepared my spells and been assigned a room, though yours is fancier. I think they like you better, probably because of how you're going to bring about the technological revolution and make the world a place Zon-Kuthon won't consent to permitting to exist."

Keltham: "Well, if your room isn't fancy at all, maybe I'll go complain. Your room being fancy and my room being fancier seems like a reasonable premise for a relationship like this one."

"Any updates from Security on Ione, Pilar, Asmodia, gods, or timelines on project resume?"

Carissa Sevar: Lean. "Ione's not awake yet, they threw some fancier healing at her in case that helps, this isn't very much of a bad sign though if it's still true this evening it will be. Pilar's back. She ended up in Elysium - the Chaotic Good afterlife - for some reason! I didn't ask more questions because that sort of thing can be personal but I bet she'd tell you about it, if you ask. Asmodia's not back yet - Pilar ended up elevated priority because they wanted to ask her questions about how she ended up in our mission out of the villa -- but it sounds like she doesn't know any more than we do. Asmodia's going to require a seventh circle spell - Regenerate - because of her legs, so she might be a week or so, in wartime like this.

I asked if I could help with the war effort but was told to stay focused on this.

I think they're ready to resume once you are - they could set up a room here for classes - but don't want to push you, if you're not ready."

Keltham: Keltham is a bit startled that Carissa would just tell him that Pilar ended up in Elysium. That should've been something he had to figure out on his own by talking to Pilar, or investigating her, or something. Pilar should've been left more mysterious than that until their first date, or until he did something to appeal to her, if those tropes were governing here. Call it maybe 6 times as likely on the theory 'Chelish Governance asked Pilar "what" and found out a weird thing and promptly and sensibly told Carissa so she could tell me' as on the theory 'this is an ero-LARP'. With possible amendments if the Chaotic Good thing turns out to be itself much more mysterious; but still, Keltham making the first discovery that starts the mystery trail should require that he start Pilar's route, like, at all? Or maybe that happened when she took a +3 vicious nasty bigsword for him.

But still a surprise, not advance-predicted, not the main thing the theory obviously says. You don't want to rationalize those out the window. Maybe call it 3:1 instead of 6:1, though.

"Well, huh," Keltham says, "the details there would be a bit hard to explain, but that's some small evidence against the reasoning system I was using to infer that one of the girls is a secret Zon-Kuthon cleric, or that one of the more unusual girls in class will have the 'being-forced' fetish. Not decisive or anything, but noticeable jolt. The key is knowing how to keep track of that sort of thing over time, which is what I'd otherwise have planned to lecture on next, the Law for accumulating pieces of evidence that aren't individually decisive, until they add up to something."

"Asmodia's going to - end up pretty behind, in a week, at the rate we were going. I'm not sure how much you can recover from that sort of thing by reading notes, in a situation like this one... well, maybe somebody else could teach Asmodia, to help solidify the material in their own minds by teaching it, that's a big part of the reason why older kids teach younger ones in dath ilan. Still, that'd be a big chunk of someone's time. Depending on how expensive a seventh-circle Regenerate is... well, except that they are going to do it at all, eventually, so we're not paying from zero. I probably want to expend some political capital on it happening earlier, if the project is considered competitive with war demands at all."

"I could teach a class today, for sure. Whether I should... maybe not so much, if the view-from-above says that somebody in my position is supposed to take one day off, and it probably does."

Carissa Sevar: - telling Keltham about Pilar was a correct move in the Second Law game. Okay. Carissa doesn't understand why and would REALLY LIKE someone to read Keltham's thoughts and try to get more but it's - information, and as Keltham says, you can use a little of that at a time. "It might literally be cheaper to pass Asmodia a two-way mirror in Hell so she can keep up," she says. "But I think it's reasonable to press them on getting her back sooner."

Keltham: ...they can do that? Neat. "I've got no objection to that if it's cheaper, key thing is Asmodia can ask questions from where she is and get them answered. Pass it to them next time you see them? - ahem."

"Pass it to them the next time you see them, unless I tell you that I've passed it on first."

(Or is this not a giving-orders occasion?! One thing is for sure, he needs to not just ask Carissa what he's allowed to do! Brain registers a desire to scream internally: Approved: AAAAHHHHHHH WHY CAN'T ANYONE LEGIBLE IN GOLARION!? Thank you brain now shut up, if that was an error it wasn't a critical error, and eventually things will be fine.)

Carissa Sevar: "Will do." (Carissa would kill quite a large number of people to be able to read Keltham's mind right now.)

Keltham: Is this obedience turning him on? Yes it is, apparently, and furthermore his mind feels blank if he tries to figure out what else to talk to her about, so. "You're allowed to start pestering me for sex again, by the way, since it's now morning. No promises, of course, but you're allowed to try."

Carissa Sevar: "Before yesterday turned out so eventful I was planning to show you what I got from the fancy Ostenso sex shop! And maybe invite you to come with me sometime but that's looking less likely, now. Maybe they can bring a selection to us."

Keltham: "Well that sounds promising. What new outfits or toys have I unlocked after our latest relationship progress?"

Carissa Sevar: "I actually bought this outfit there! Should I tell you why they sell it at a sex shop not a normal tailors' or would you rather experiment."

Keltham: "Now that's the dath ilani equivalent of asking a duke's son if he's too scared to go rhinoceros racing."

Experimentation follows.

Keltham: The experiment is a success. More resources are allocated to following up on these discoveries.

Keltham: ...this scientific investigation might possibly be threatening to get a little out of control and investigate subject matters that could perhaps be regarded as dangerous without a verified sufficient level of safety precautions.

Keltham accordingly restrains himself, but this is going to be pretty darned visible as a fact if you have Carissa's Sense Motive opposing what passes for Keltham's Bluff.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa's mostly playing by intuition, lately, on a moment by moment basis, but she's aware that most of the point of seducing people for strategic reasons is that you can get strategic concessions out of them when their judgment is compromised. And also that dath ilan would definitely know this and advise their kids against it. So, we'll see who is better at this, Cheliax or dath ilan.

She pulls herself away, sits cross-legged, folds her hands, tries to look - like she's trying hard not to say anything, like she's sad and not quite pretending otherwise but certainly not trying to put it in his way -

Keltham: Keltham attempts to roll his Sense Cognitive Background State, devises a guess.

"Uh... if I trust my ability to read you, you look like somebody with a problem she'd usually and normally hide because that's what normal people in Golarion do in this situation, but you remembered that I asked you to err on the side of a lot more visibility, and now you're wobbling between that request and the reason why a normal person would usually hide that."

"I won't ask followup questions until I've either been told my current guess is wrong, or I've received some indication from you that you've reached your own estimate, using the information you have and I don't, that it is safe for me to inquire further."

Done, flaming shit that was hard to phrase without asking her to make a decision instead of him. If this doesn't rapidly get easier with practice, Keltham is going to use his Unilateral Relationship Decisions Power to metadecide that he gets to ask Carissa to decide things ever.

Carissa Sevar: "I think maybe people would hide this in dath ilan too, actually? On the principle that - uh, it seems wildly more important than not pressuring people into sex. But your orders take precedence. I think. If I calculated that wrong, well, probably we will calculate lots of things wrong at first."

Keltham: "I need an explicit statement of your guess, using the information you have that I don't, that it's okay for me to ask more questions; I have no idea what you're potentially protecting me from right now, or what costs there are to my knowing something that's supposed to be unknown to me or even just illegible."

Carissa Sevar: "It is fine for you to ask more questions!"

Keltham: There's a very distinct ouch of realizing that he may have pressed her too hard, just then, to be legible and not subtle, when on the meta-level discussing safety. But - she'll survive, she promised him that.

"Kay. What's wrong?"

Carissa Sevar: "You think that there's a - substantial chance, not a large one, but one worth planning around, that I am actually lying to you about having reliable contraception and planning to, I guess, get pregnant and then run off before anyone notices to some country where I wouldn't be legally obliged to have an abortion. And. I understand why the chance of that doesn't have to be very large to be very important to you. And I understand that you don't have much reason to trust me, though I and I think your god have been trying to give you some. And I understand that none of that matters and you can have the stupidest reason in the world and it's fine, it's your choice, you can have whatever you want from me and it doesn't have to be -

Carissa Sevar: ....but it does make me sad. And I don't see why you'd believe that, it's not - more information - but - but it does make me sad. Is all. Now you have all the information that I have."

Carissa Sevar: "...and, uh, I remain very uncertain if you actually meant me not to hide things like that, it's fine if you didn't mean that kind of thing, most people wouldn't mean that kind of thing."

Keltham: He'll gather her in to hug her. "It is what I meant. Thank you for not just hiding the whole thing. I appreciate that part a lot. And, I understand. It's my responsibility to not be unduly influenced by you being sad. Now that I've asked you not to hide what you'd usually hide, at least for a while."

Carissa Sevar: - snuggle. "Okay. 'm not - asking you to be influenced." Both Keltham deciding to fuck her and Keltham deciding to not care about her feelings are good outcomes, here.

Keltham: "This is usually where I would apply creativity, it's just, I have so little grasp of magic, and all the people I would otherwise ask might be, assuming the premise, in a conspiracy with you."

Though Ione might be less likely than some, but no; for purposes of deciding whether it's okay to risk having kids, he needs to assume that Ione is scripted - by Governance, not by some metalevel eroLARP - and can't be trusted either.

"I know what Science Maniac Verrez would do in this situation - namely, figure out how to use Prestidigitation to impose a magnet-field over his own sperm, the way that mature male contraception technology works in dath ilan. But in real life, if you try that sort of thing... well, no, actually, I guess I could heal myself, if I hurt myself. Unless I gave myself cancer. But that, I'd guess, just takes a more powerful cleric spell. And even if I literally kill myself, you could bring me back... but the problem is verifying that the sperm are actually dead and that the silly clever trick worked, when I can't ask anybody here to help me figure out how to verify whether sperm are alive... but there was a spell Detect Life on Ione's list, I'm pretty sure, and if I ask my god to give me that, I can see if it works on sperm and then it goes through my god rather than anyone here..."

"Or actually - potentially simpler solutions. Is there a fourth-circle or lower spell I can ask my god to give me, that would let me create a small object that isn't as fragile as Prestidigitating that, and can have properties like, impermeability to fluid, adhesion to skin until dispelled."

Keltham is now attempting to invent birth control via condoms from scratch! His first visualization is a small patch that fits over the tip of his urethra and will contain the liquid that emerges from it.

Carissa Sevar: ....which is neither of the good outcomes! Why is Keltham like this! "I feel like there are plenty of solutions if killing people is considered an acceptable cost and you should not do things that are at all likely to kill you!"

Keltham: "I don't actually know what would be a solution if killing people is an acceptable cost, though it sounds like it's not at all a great time to ask Cheliax to burn a resurrection on that."

"I mean - to be clear, under the circumstances - I might not be able to trust your solution, but - I admit to being pretty curious about what else Golarion will trade a heap of dead bodies for."

Keltham has entered Problem-Solving Mode! Good work for having a Problem, Carissa!

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you could kill me, because pregnancies don't survive dying and being raised, and you could test that in advance on some other women who were pregnant and preferred not to be, if you didn't want to just trust it. Or you could kill me and then, instead of a resurrection, do a Planar Binding to bring me back from Hell, because devils can't get pregnant....I don't know how you could verify that but Asmodeus probably wouldn't bother with Cheliax if devils could just make more of themselves in Hell. I am not very impressed with these solutions but what happens to me if I die is much more definitely known and understood than what happens to you so if we're using death-related contraceptive methods, here."

Keltham: "Remind me of what your usual contraception is like. I think you may have told me but I forgot."

Carissa Sevar: "Pregnancy also does not survive a Polymorph to any form that can't itself sustain a pregnancy, and the cheapest polymorph that's sufficient is second-circle Alter Self, so I go male and back, every night when it's potentially relevant."

Keltham: "Very easy to verify you doing," though the thought is more than slightly odd, "but the trouble is, at the appropriate level of paranoia, I have only sources inside Cheliax to tell me that Alter Self works for aborting pregnancy. If I ask my god for a spell to detect whether you're pregnant, do you know if I get one?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't ....think a spell for that exists. You can't tell with Detect Intelligence until 12 weeks along. You could have some pregnant people in to Alter Self in front of you?"

Keltham: Oof, that's a Cost there, if it has to be 12 weeks along, meaning they couldn't just find somebody who didn't actually want a baby and pay them to participate in the experiment. Though maybe Cheliax has some wizards who only do the Alter Self thing after they detect, or change their minds, and advertising for one of those would turn somebody up... it doesn't really solve the main problem, though, because he can't be sure that what works at 12 weeks works at 1 hour.

"If you Alter Self immediately after sex, then shift back, would I be able to check inside you and verify that the semen had vanished? Maybe I'd be willing to try for the further trust in that case, that semen doesn't persist in a vagina or uterus that you don't have... actually no, shit, I can't rely on that, because you could also produce that result with Prestidigitation even if it wouldn't ordinarily happen from Alter Self. No wait, counter-2-arguendo, if you can cast Alter Self and come back fast enough, I can have Detect Magic running the whole time, check your vaginal contents before and after, and verify that Alter Self was the only magic to affect you over that period..."

This is actually kind of fascinating, as Compounding Capabilities problems go. Maybe the eroLARP is deconstructing a computer game where the player needed to drag the spells from a list of available spells to form the correct structure to eliminate a pregnancy, before they could fuck anybody. That sounds like how a computer-game version of an eroLARP would work.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has this job mostly because she is much less inclined than everyone else in Cheliax to throw up her hands at Keltham and go "MY DIAGNOSIS IS THAT HE IS AN INSANE PERSON" but she's sort of feeling that, right now. "I am willing to do that if you'd like it.

I ...think probably if we were secretly a Dread Empire we'd just mind control you about this, though."

Keltham: "I appreciate and update on the argument; knowing as little as I do about mind control, or about how Hypothetical Bad Asmodeus might be concerned about my own god counterescalating, it's not enough to decide the issue. Admittedly, if you carefully demonstrated mind control capabilities that can just completely undetectably to me make me believe or decide things, that would be a larger update than I've made so far about good Cheliax intentions; there'd still be the possibility you were in a balance against my god, but it'd be an update."

"Does that process give me the result I need to observe, on your prediction? Detect Magic / check vagina / Alter Self / de-Alter / check vagina to verify that the process vanishes semen?"

Carissa Sevar: “- mind control can do that. I don’t know spells like that myself but I would expect high-ranking palace security do.” What an incredibly convenient way to build trust, actually, have a sufficiently high level caster cast Suggestion on him and then promise that it hasn’t otherwise been done. Which it hasn’t because Asmodeus said not to, perhaps because it was worth it …

”And I think that process works.”

Keltham: It's kind of complicated and tight, is the thing, for a poorly-tested process, he isn't sure that he can detect whether or not a vagina contains semen in the first place... but then it's basically backup against an itself-improbable conspiracy, not the primary means of birth control?

One also needs to consider that, at a sufficient level of magical power and ill intent, they could have done something clever when he had sex with Carissa the previous day, quickly moving semen from her mouth to her vagina, maybe as screened by an illusion. Heck, they could've teleported sperm right out of his epididymis while he was sleeping in the villa the first night, before the Forbiddance went up - though they'd also have to mix it with seminal fluid to have a chance for the sperm to survive a uterus.

Keltham lets out a sigh. "No promises, but I'll think about it, and tell you tonight whether to prepare Alter Self tomorrow."

Carissa Sevar: Well that's progress! And on some level she can - respect how careful Keltham is, respect that while he does seem to care about her more than is healthy he's not actually an idiot about it, probably almost every Chelish teenage boy would do worse....

Well. Better to keep pushing. Lightly. "I prepare it every day. Hope springs eternal and also we haven't actually talked about exclusivity yet."

Keltham: "I will... possibly maybe think about it faster, then, but this is security reasoning and can't be a quick decision. And - exclusivity? Like monogamy things? I'm not quite sure what that has to do with intercourse."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, see, I am expecting you to order me not to have sex with other people without your permission but absent such orders I might, you know, proposition someone who has an incredibly cool armored vest, and then want to have my Alter Self for that."

Keltham: "Heh. Point to you for catching me out on that, I think my brain is Assuming Things that have not been discussed. If it wasn't just a more routine false closed-world assumption with respect to my ignorance of anybody else you wanted to have sex with implying that I was the only such person."

"I feel strangely like... there's a part of me that wants that thing to be true of you, that you ask my permission, but I also feel reluctant to give you that order right this instant and I'm going to have to do an introspection to figure out why."

"Incidentally, even if I can't trust it, is there anything way simpler and more standard that male fourth-circle clerics do to not have kids."

Carissa Sevar: "Not that I know of.

I wasn't - actually planning to go around sleeping with anyone else, knowing it bothers you, even though people here have really fantastic magic items. But I do keep a pretty sharp distinction, internally, between things I've agreed not to do and things I just definitely don't mean to, so if you want it to be the first thing we should talk about that."

Keltham: "Super valid," Keltham says.

Not knowing any male contraception solutions for clerics seems so incredibly odd, to the point of being Suspicious. Do male fourth-circle clerics who don't want kids just... not have intercourse ever, except with expensive second-circle wizard sex workers? Who, going on earlier things Carissa has said, maybe don't exist in the first place? Do female fourth-circle clerics just not have intercourse period? Though it does match up with an earlier statement to him that YES PLEASE CHELIAX WOULD LIKE SOME CONTRACEPTION TECHNOLOGY. Or, for that matter, that they (*cough*theEroLARP*cough*) didn't assign him any clerics in his research harem.

"I - I'm not immediately sure of where this internal resistance is coming from. Some of it is coming from a source that thinks I'm asking you to give me too much and will then owe you something too huge and yes I know you already noped me on that. But that isn't making the feeling go away and I think it's loud enough to drown out some other feeling, which means I can't just go ahead and ignore the combined feeling, and -"

"Is this an urgent question, for any reason?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, it's not."

Keltham: Actually, there's an even simpler solution. "Until tomorrow morning, I order you to not have sex with anyone without my permission. Whatever it is my brain thinks is scary about this whole deal, it doesn't think that one day of it is scary the same way."

Carissa Sevar: "Understood. - and a good occasion for me to show you my other sex shop purchase."

And she fishes it out of her Bag of Holding to explain.

Keltham: Keltham is - intrigued, but can tell that he doesn't quite - understand, deep in this part of him, the shape he's looking at -

"But I could just order you not to do that, right? Is the magic item for - people whose partners, in a relationship like this one, don't trust them? I can guess that's not it, but I'm confused."

Carissa Sevar: "That's not it - I mean, it's dispellable, so if I actually set my mind to getting around it I could. But some people enjoy the difference between 'impossible' and 'forbidden', like, you also don't need the chains because you could tell me to hold still, but if there are chains, then I'm not holding still because you told me to, anymore, I'm holding still because I can't move. Different flavor. ...also I think some people experience failures of will, about obeying an order like that for weeks or months, especially if you're messing with them around it enough, so maybe they actually do have to worry about breaking a rule even though they didn't mean to. I have never tried anything like this before so I shouldn't think too highly of myself but I think there's no order up to and including 'stick your hand in that fire and keep it there' I'd just disobey without warning you first that it was proving too difficult; if I would, then I'm just pretending, and I don't want to be just pretending."

Keltham: He has again that sense of being unnervingly close to some ledge, on which Carissa may be trying to stabilize him, or maybe push him off. His mind retreats from the dangerous thing, tries to talk about something lesser and more trivial and safer: oh, is this anything like the thing some women do in Civilization, if they want to have a lot of sex available to trade for social capital, or collect a large harem, where they limit themselves to one actual orgasm per month, and otherwise stop short of that, to increase their sex drives?

He forces himself to face the scary thing instead; it doesn't pay to do that all day long, but he's had relatively few shocking revelations today.

"I don't know whether I'm more frightened-intrigued by the notion of you wanting to make it impossible to disobey orders, or the amount by which you're trying to hand me the total keys to your sexuality, but both of those things feel like they're a step too far for me to do this minute, and I need to let it sink in for an hour without forcing it -"

"My mind is imagining you struggling inside the chains and not being able to get out, though, and it thinks that's very sexy, much more sexy than just being chained up at all -"

"I'm sorry. I need to hear you tell me that's okay, if and only if that actually is okay, obviously, I'm not asking you to send a false signal, but even after hearing you say it's fine to kill you, my brain still wants to hear you say whether or not it's okay that I'd see you struggling to get out of the chains and not let you out."

It really feels like this is a situation that demands the ability to talk in metalanguage and say 'dequote'; but Carissa keeps on seeming to reject, not so much that specific proposal, as the entire framework of thought that would want to hear about it.

Carissa Sevar: - okay, push the Keltham less. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to - rush you to the place you'll be when you're twenty-five. There's not actually any rush. It is definitely okay to be into me struggling in chains. It's - it is sexier, right, if the chains are actually doing something. And if I didn't happen to be into it, then I'd say 'it's a perfectly reasonable interest, I'm neutral on it' and you'd say 'reasoning with the mysterious Law Above The Other Law, one of the other girls will be into it', and that'd be all right too except for the part where it's very confusing. And if I happened to really dislike it then I'd tell you 'it is fine to be into that, but I dislike it'."

Keltham: "I'm frankly going to be more than slightly freaked out if I find that the girls in the harem exactly match up to every single one of my sexual desires with no leftovers. It would say some pretty unsettling things about where I am and how I got there."

"Uh, the reasoning that would make me worry about that is definitely below the Law, to be clear. It'd be above the gods, below the math. What would it even mean to be above the Law, I can't coherently imagine that. Nobody gets to decide that 1 + 2 = 4."

"I notice my brain being a little tired of relationshipping, and it occurs to me that we haven't eaten breakfast and should plausibly go eat lunch or whatever's on sale... or free, I guess, since I still haven't gotten around to having any local money. I should ask if this Governance location can use a channeled healing at whatever standard rates are on that. But, I mean, we can also wrap up if you had any big important dangling issues, I'm not saying we have to go eat right now."

It only occurs to Keltham after he speaks that he just offered Carissa options and asked her to make a decision instead of providing info to him. Is that even wrong? He doesn't know, but that section of his brain may be tired and need to rest, maybe.

Carissa Sevar: She seems unbothered. "Lunch sounds good. I doubt you can sell healing in the palace, even in wartime, half the people here are clerics. Want me to go back to my room so you can have the afternoon to think?" Above the gods, not above Law. How could something be above the gods? It feels as absurd as deciding that 1 + 2 = 4.

Keltham: "Not sure, I'll decide after lunch." A thought occurs to him. "Oh. And, Carissa."

"Maybe I'll rethink this order later, but for now -"

"You don't ask to be let out of the chains. You can struggle in the chains, but you can't say in words, 'let me out'. I won't flip out if you slip up and say it once, but if you keep on saying it, you'll be disobeying me. Same if I hurt you. You can tell me it's painful, you can advise me that a more experienced sadist in my position would probably stop, but you don't tell me to stop or argue that I should stop. If I'm doing something to you that's going to break your ability to obey that order, let me know when you see it coming. Understood?"

Carissa Sevar: She is not sure where he’s going with that. But - “I understand.” And a smile, because she’s trying to reward steps in the right direction and that seems like one.

Keltham: Keltham doesn't smile back. One conceals feelings, perhaps, but showing a smile you don't mean is quite a step beyond that; it destroys the ability to signal later, because how can anything mean anything, after that. "Good," is all he says.

Keltham isn't at all clear on his own ability to ignore somebody asking to be let out of chains. He doesn't particularly want to test it while he's still such a novice.

And more importantly, if Carissa Sevar does start telling him that he needs to let her out right now, Keltham will know that something broke her will to obey him and that something is wrong with the entire setup.

Maybe it's cheating to set up a secret completely legible meta-signal of meta-level failure, but then -

- cheating is technique, after all.

"Then let's go eat lunch," Keltham says.

Iarwain: (They get all the way as far as halfway to a small eating hall before Keltham notices a lingering confusion - though to be clear, they do continue walking towards lunch past this point - and starts asking why a single use of Alter Self doesn't render women permanently sterile, if it destroys their limited supply of eggs that have no analogue uterus to carry them in male form; and why an implanted embryo would be destroyed by Alter Self if the eggs weren't destroyed; and why men aren't rendered sterile by Alter Self during the week (or whatever that duration was) that's required to mature new sperm if the current sperm maturing in the epididymis get destroyed; and actually maybe they should try this with food coloring, if that's a thing here, to see if that vanishes permanently from a vagina that temporarily doesn't exist; rather than having sex that's potentially a security-premise-violation, if the whole method proves not to work the very first time it's tested.)

(Good luck, Carissa Sevar! A dath ilani woman in your position would know exactly how this masculine gendertrope works, but you don't!)

Pilar : "I hate Chaotic Good," Aspexia Rugatonn says, her voice sounding reflective and her face as impassive as always. She looks up from the papers in her hand, having just finished reviewing a transcript of Pilar's report on her involuntary tour of Elysium. "I hate, hate, hate Chaotic Good. If hatred were diamonds I could take my hatred of Chaotic Good and cast Miracle with it and have enough left over for a thousand Resurrections. I would, personally, rather go to Abaddon than Elysium."

Pilar Pineda swallows. "Grand High Priestess - is this one permitted to ask -"

"Just speak your thoughts, Pineda. I can hear them anyways."

"I was confused by the Chaotic Good outsider's claim that it served Asmodeus's interests for Cayden Cailean to do what He did to me. I wonder if - if you think they're telling the truth, that I am not meant to be - harmful to our Lord -"

"You don't conclude that I believe they were telling the truth, from the fact that you're still alive?"

No because the Grand High Priestess could be unsure and wanting to keep her options open, or because she could have some cunning counterplot of her own to whatever it is that Cayden Cailean is trying to do -

"You are correct that I'm unsure," the Grand High Priestess answers her unspoken thought. "But while Chaotic Good is not Lawful Good, under those circumstances and speaking to someone like you, it is unfortunately plausible that they would tell the truth."

Unfortunately? Pilar thinks, putting on hold her own relief if she really isn't being used against Asmodeus.

"Yes, because now we are confused, as they no doubt intended, and our lives have become more complicated. I rather doubt that, whatever larger plot is in play, that larger plot is meant to conduce to Asmodeus's interests. If their plot is to destroy all Cheliax and then you are meant to prevent a new Worldwound from opening amid the ruins, that is not, on the whole, good news. Though yes, even in that case, we would prefer there not be another Worldwound, so if some such apparent duty falls to you, perform it unless directed otherwise. It is the job of such as myself to counterplot against Cayden Cailean's larger plan, not you."

Pilar nods her head. She understands, or thinks she does.

"This leaves us with the question of your behavior and performance during your trip to Elysium." The Grand High Priestess regards Pilar more sternly, now.

Pilar isn't nearly as frightened as she should be, she knows, even though that's a bad thought. She turned down Elysium for Asmodeus, and even if it's a wrong thought to think, still, that probably counts for something.

"Oh, I see," says the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, her face impassive. "You believe that you performed adequately?"

Is she still supposed to answer in words at all? Probably, unless she's told not to, she's been asked a direct question. "No mortal performs to Asmodeus's standards," Pilar answers. "And all imperfections are worthy of punishment, if the slave is even worth that much time." Pilar can't quite stop herself from thinking that, imperfect and flawed slave of Asmodeus as she may be, she's probably due for quite a lot less punishment than others would be in her position. This thought is itself, of course, worthy of punishment.

The face of the Grand High Priestess remains impassive. "Do you know how specifically, you fell short?"

Pilar knows some parts that are obvious even to her. "I was unable to justify myself clearly, when the Elysians asked me why I didn't want to stay - if I had been more trained in theology, I would have been able to -"

"Chaotic Good outsiders cannot be persuaded into our Lord's embrace, and to justify yourself to them or argue with them, even taking our Lord's position, does not serve His interests in any way. That you answered the Elysians at all is your failure, not that you answered incorrectly."

Pilar feels stupid. "I understand."

"What else?"

"The Elysians told me that if I stayed in Elysium, I would never again have to cast torture spells on children with no other uses in order to prove my loyalty, which they somehow knew I hadn't liked doing in the academy. I could feel myself swaying to that, and when I felt that, I knew that after I came back, I would have to be retrained to do it better and without any hesitation. For only a moment, then, I was tempted to stay."

"Pity," says the Grand High Priestess. "That significantly decreases your future usefulness. I will make a note in your file that you are not to be tasked with such work unless there is strong reason."

Pilar doesn't know how to respond to that in words, at first, for being so surprised. She would expect to be punished for her reluctance and corrected; for her to be exempted from unpleasant work instead is something that could be mistaken for mercy, and it is impossible that Aspexia Rugatonn would reason so.

"There will be plenty of time to train out every last one of your flaws after you are received in Hell," the Grand High Priestess answers the unspoken thought. "Meanwhile, in this world, your proven loyalty is potentially useful. If that is a weak and vulnerable point in you, I will not have it strained without good cause and bring into question whether your loyalty remains as it was. The more so, if the Elysians could potentially have planned to lure us into doing exactly that, after first giving us apparent reason to trust you."

Again Pilar feels stupid, but this is only natural when somebody who is not Aspexia Rugatonn is talking to somebody who is Aspexia Rugatonn. The Elysians made her scared of something that, it turned out, was not in Asmodeus's interests to do to her.

"What else?" says the Grand High Priestess.

Pilar swallows. This part is worthy of severe punishment. "I had the thought several times that - when they showed me Hell, and what that's like for people who aren't me - that, even if I didn't want to be in Elysium - maybe it would be better - if the people who wanted to be in Hell could be in Hell and the people who wanted to be in Elysium could be in Elysium."

"You are correct, that is a thought worthy of severe punishment."

Pilar bows her head.

"You may find it useful to contemplate, however, that the present nature of things is temporary. In due time, everyone will go to Hell, and everyone will want to go to Hell."

That does make Pilar feel better, though she's surprised that she's getting any consolation at all when the thought is incorrect in the first place.

"Because if you are so flawed as to have that thought, there is no point in allowing that thought even greater power over you by failing to consider what weighs against it on its own terms," answers the Grand High Priestess. "Now, Pineda, answer me this. Why am I the one consoling on you on this, instead of you taking these issues to someone in the priesthood or simply Security, whose time is far less valuable than mine?"

That's a good question and Pilar is unable to stop herself from thinking that maybe it's because, having proven her loyalty, she's now that valuable - no, that wouldn't make sense, it's Chaotic Good outsider exposure which only the Grand High Priestess is most competent to correct if it introduced any problems -

"Wrong. According to Security's initial interview with you, you thought of asking them for correction, but you had the thought that, if the Elysians were telling you the truth, maybe the Security officer was also somebody who'd take the chance to stay in Elysium if they believed they had that chance. You were afraid that, if that was true, being corrected by Security would mean replacing your more correct thoughts with their less correct thoughts."

Pilar did also think (not that this defends her or lessens anything) that she didn't distrust them in general, it wasn't that she distrusted Security about Security, it was just, on the particular issue of being tempted to stay in Elysium, thinking incorrect thoughts when you're in Elysium, she couldn't trust them about that -

"So the leader of Asmodeus's Church in Golarion had to personally take her valuable time to correct you, because, now, you would not have trusted almost anyone else. Now that Chaotic Good outsiders have whispered to you that you are more truly loyal to Asmodeus and more correct in your thinking and more trustworthy than the senior wizards in security."

"Yes," Pilar whispers, feeling miserable. The Elysians got to her after all.

"Unfortunately, the Elysians told you the truth. This being the case, your concern was simply correct. Nearly all wizards in Security and indeed even most priests of Asmodeus have not proven themselves able to meet the test of true loyalty that you passed. They are not authorized to correct your thoughts about Elysium or who is most loyal to Asmodeus. Only myself or those I designate are authorized to so correct you."

"That said, to state your self-humbling thought more precisely, great loyalty is often not the quality most critical to a commander. One usually wishes for great competence foremost, accompanied by whatever level of loyalty seems adequate and with some safety margin. If on some rare occasion the quality we needed in a commander was the greatest possible loyalty, and this was more important than your lack of experience and knowledge and power and your many other failings, perhaps then you would be placed in command. Nor should you mistake the possibility that your superiors are less loyal than you, for your own certain knowledge of that fact. Understand?"

"Yes," Pilar answers.

"Good. After this, you will report to the temple torture chamber and assign yourself whatever degree of punishment you feel is appropriate for your failures in Elysium."

To say that Pilar is surprised would be an understatement indeed. She will obey, of course, but - she doesn't understand, is this a test, to see if she'll assign herself too little punishment, or if she'll assign herself extra to prove her loyalty -

"You are done with tests of that kind," the Grand High Priestess answers. "You have passed the strongest version of that test which anyone could face. You know your own history in more detail than I do, my time is valuable, and I cannot be bothered to interview you on specifics and evaluate them. You do it. Just assign yourself whatever tortures seem standard and appropriate for your failures. If you desire any more punishment than that for reasons of faith, do it on your own recognizance."

Because you are trusted, now.

No, Pilar must only be imagining that this could be the subtext, here, she is not - not that worthy, she is only a second-circle wizard -

Pilar rises and turns to go.

"Pilar," Aspexia Rugatonn says, before Pilar has reached the door. Her voice is, if not gentle, unusually not-harsh. "Pride is one of our Lord's domains. As you should not be mistaken about who is above you, you should also not be mistaken about who is lower. Speak to me the thought you are not letting yourself think."

Pilar turns back.

She takes a deep breath.

"Grand High Priestess," Pilar says, "if you had to lead an army of adventurers into Elysium, and anyone who followed you would have a choice to stay in Elysium, how many - how many could you find to take with you?"

"Eleven."

Eleven!? Pilar thinks in dismay and even horror, though she does not, of course, question the Grand High Priestess out loud. Eleven, in all of Cheliax?

"Oh, I am sure there are many more than eleven in Cheliax who would make the choice you did to leave Elysium behind. Our service to our Lord would be pathetic indeed, if all the Church's work in Cheliax these last eighty years had produced no more than eleven souls truly loyal to Him. The trouble is, you see, Pilar, that Asmodeans do lie to themselves, about what choice they would make there, and though this lie is also pleasing to our Lord, it is still, in the end, a lie. They would not know their disloyalty even to themselves, and Detect Thoughts would not suffice to root them out. The Chaotic Good outsider who spoke to you was also truthful about that aspect of things."

"We punish people whose disloyalty rises to the level of thoughts that we can see, that they can know to themselves; and while that does to some extent serve to train away disloyal thinking, sometimes it only trains away the visibility. In Cheliax, where they know their thoughts will be read again in time, that serves well enough; when there is a certainty of Hell in time, it serves well enough. Faced with Elysium, those thoughts might suddenly resurface."

"There are many more in Cheliax who would refuse Elysium, of that I am sure. There are eleven of whom I know. Eleven of whom I am certain."

"Well. Twelve, now."

Pilar Pineda feels prouder in that moment than she has in her entire life.

"There is no reward for a job well done in Cheliax," says Aspexia Rugatonn. "Only a diminishing of punishments for failure. This does not mean that a job done well never benefits you, Pilar. Only that, if so, the benefit is incidental to how it serves our Lord's interests. You have proven yourself as few of our Lord's followers ever prove themselves, and if you were not already assigned to one of the most important projects in Cheliax, you soon would be."

"Go with Asmodeus, Pilar Pineda. You have done as well as mortals ever do."

"Thank you! You've been so super helpful to me, actually, do you want a cookie?"

...

Pilar turns and hurls the sourceless cookie at the wall as hard as she can. Under other circumstances she would scream. This was literally the finest moment she will ever have in her life, and Cayden fucking Cailean just ruined it for her.

"Only if you let Him ruin it," Aspexia Rugatonn says, though the harshness is back in her voice. "I genuinely hope we can find something to do about your problem."

Pilar departs. She is reminded of the fact that Aspexia Rugatonn's time is indeed valuable, and how much of it just got spent on her, when she sees the line of important people who were waiting outside for her to finish.

The next person in that line, robed as a third-circle priest, darts inside and slams two pieces of paper on Rugatonn's desk and begins some rapid hushed report without waiting for the door to shut. The door hasn't closed and sealed away the sounds within, in fact, when Pilar on her way out hears the Grand High Priestess's voice rising to almost a shriek, "He what?"

Somebody is about to have a very bad day, and Pilar is glad it's not her.

She skips her way along towards the temple's torture chamber, for almost ten full steps, before she realizes that she is fucking skipping through the halls and manages to fucking stop it.

lintamande: At first it's not obvious to the remaining student body of the Secret Project what exactly they're supposed to do with themselves; Carissa's orders, when she briefly walked past them while retrieving her possessions to leave with Keltham for the imperial palace, were 'learn about Taldor'. But it doesn't take them all that long to find their feet; obviously no one's going to come walk them through everything like they're children.

Security has swept the villa for things left behind by Kuthites, found a couple of old chambers that were perfectly sealed up with old skeletons inside, which isn't very interesting, and reorganized all the bedrooms so as to make the place defensible if the project returns here, though it might not. There are devils openly patrolling the grounds, now, each of them bound within their ten-foot circles (it's the cheapest way to get devils). They can't fight much like that, obviously, but they'll notice it. And unlike human security they don't complain about the by-now-fairly-torrential rain.

And the whole mess is a good excuse to completely reformulate the library to be in line with the project. Paxti requests permission to go with Security to Absalom book-shopping, and when that doesn't work Yaisa tries seducing Elias for the same privilege (he sleeps with her but does not take her to Absalom, which is a valuable life lesson). But there's sorting through all the existing books for consistency with the new paradigm, and making fun of the old Taldane romance novels, and while Security's using all their Teleports for war-related travel they do go out to Ostenso's bookshops and find some books published in Taldor or in pre-Hell Cheliax they can work with.

By the afternoon of the day after the attack this effort is in full swing; they have books in piles on the floor, and are reading through them and chattering about them and sorting them and Mending them as needed. They have a plan for if Keltham shows up unexpectedly, they're going to claim there was water damage to the books, since a bunch of windows broke in the fight and it's been raining so hard since then. (So that this isn't a lie, they're causing some water damage to the books.)

Ione Sala: Ione wakes up with her head feeling like a watermelon that has fallen off a four-story building. And had its watermelon soul go to watermelon Abaddon and be hunted down by things that eat watermelon souls, things with white eyes and bony hands.

Everything seems dreamlike and her thoughts are like she's halfway through falling asleep, thoughts that don't follow from other thoughts, and therefore she needs to say, as her first words when she wakes:

"Stop damaging books takaral! This is a library takaral!"

Keltham: "- turn every laundry wizard into somebody who can apply one-week male contraception, if that plan works. And the first thing we need to get started on that is a couple of hundred mice. Well, no, the first thing we need to get started is... a few gallons of vinegar - good, that translated - and whatever you've got that makes vinegar foam up when you add it to vinegar. But that might not work unless either you or I can get a magnet field stabilized."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa isn't sure this is Cheliax's most important priority at all but it's - surprisingly nice, actually, just collaborating on a research project instead of trying to seduce Keltham into evil. "Summoned mice or real mice - actually, usually wizards use summoned mice for experiments but here in a Forbiddance it'll be less complicated to get real ones. What things have magnetic fields, it might be easier to manipulate one that already exists and it'd give me a feel for what I'm manipulating -"

Keltham: "Well, magnets, most obviously, but if you hand me any piece of metal that could be magnetized, like iron or steel, I can use Prestidigitation to induce a magnet field in that, and then maybe you can see if that's just as easy for you or if it's somehow taking advantage of my knowledge of the Law of magnets. Prestidigitation can't produce acids, according to you, but according to my best guess as to what Prestidigitation does, it should definitely be able to shift acidity, and that may have to do with my knowledge of what acidity is rather than it being a mystical property of liquids to destroy things."

"And definitely real mice, unless summoned mice can get pregnant, the whole point is to see what works to stop mouse pregnancies. We'll also need an expert on mouse anatomy to help me trace out where the mouse analogue to the human male epididymis is, and now that I think about it, that could easily require the ability - make images bigger, so you can examine them better. And also for mice we need to focus down the Prestidigitation even smaller than it would have to go in humans, which brings up the question of how good magic is at focusing forces down to tiny targets - including via spellsilver-stabilized magic items if that helps."

Carissa Sevar: "Most of the time whether you can do detail work or not is just a matter of talent, the limit you run into is your own ability to manipulate the magic rather than anything inherent about its behavior at small scales. I don't know if that would be true if you were doing something wildly outside the range of things people try to do but mouse surgery is in the range of things people try to do, I'd expect. We have invented the microscope. Summoned animals aren't around long enough to get pregnant.

What....is acidity."

Keltham: "It's what lemons, vinegar, and stronger liquids that can dissolve metal if you know those, all have in common, and presumably it's what the Acid Splash cantrip - well, fakes, or so I'd guess. Describing it in terms of underlying Law would be a detour, but also it's bad news if we have to take that detour because that makes it much harder to teach laundry wizards to do it."

Carissa Sevar: She knew that and wanted the underlying Law but she doesn't argue. "I wouldn't expect that - I don't have to know what chocolate underlyingly is in order to make Prestidigitation taste like it. Iron, steel, magnet, mice, vinegar, things that bubble mixed with vinegar, just checking, am I interfacing with Acquisitions for you because it takes time or because you expect some weird cultural misunderstanding or because you don't like it or because it didn't occur to you you can interface with them yourself -"

Keltham: "Marta was, I think, if I'm not misidentifying the pieces, lying in two separate and importantly distinct places in one of the hallways. I'm not sure if she's considered high-priority for resurrection. Not really sure of who Acquisitions is right now, or if there is one before the project has some sort of official restart point."

"But actually it's more that - we don't just need the mice, we need a place to keep mice for a few weeks while we watch them to see if they're pregnant, and I don't know what that lab equipment looks like in Golarion. I can go to Acquisitions myself if I know who that is, I guess, but then it feels like I might accidentally get, like, just two hundred mice in a giant bag. I sometimes get the impression that people here, who are not you, may not really expect my plans to make sense; or, rather, they're not surprised if it only makes sense to me and not to them. Which is how you end up with a giant bag of mice and no mouse food. So, my theory is that first I explain to you what I need and what it's for, and you ask me questions until you're confident you've understood, and then you actually say it to Acquisitions."

Carissa Sevar: "At one point I asked Security, look, this is really important, I haven't got any training in it, do we want to now that we're convinced it's for real replace us with a real research team, and he said, uh, they'd showed the transcripts of the lectures to other people but it doesn't seem to produce the same result. The - expecting that your plans make actual Lawful sense and I can figure out why too."

Keltham: "If it was that easy the Watchers wouldn't have made us play elaborate games and figure things out on our own, would they, when they could've just put us somewhere sunny and let us read books about other people figuring things out."

"That's why I'm worried about Asmodia trying to catch up after being gone for a week. I'm worried it won't be as easy as her just reading the transcripts."

"Oh, actually, though - before we move forwards on this, I should write a note to Lrilatha asking her if she thinks it's actually a good idea for laundry wizards to be able to apply male birth control, that's something that affects heritage optimization over all of Golarion. Have you got writing stuff in your hammerspace by any chance?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, that's a good thing to ask her - if it causes birth rates to crash among all the smart people and all the people living in areas that've managed to make magic accessible and cheap -" She fishes out a pen and paper. "She's probably incredibly busy, what with the war, so I'd just write a short note and indicate what you'll do if you don't hear back -"

Keltham: "Does it cost her nothing to read Baseline, or should I write in Taldane?"

Carissa Sevar: "She probably has permanent Tongues, it's only as expensive as a good headband, but I don't specifically know for sure she has it."

Keltham: Keltham writes down in Taldane:

From: Keltham

Hypothetical project transforming:
input: 1 cast Prestidigitation -> output: male sterility lasting ~1 week
Unsure if expected good/bad effects on Cheliax/Golarion
Example obvious goods:
- Contraception available not just to wizards, so not relatively selecting against wizards as much
- Regions able to deliberately enter equilibrium of having more resources per child, not more children than resources, leading to possibly higher Intelligence per child
- Regions more able to employ conscious heritage-optimization over themselves, fewer accidental children, more deliberate ones
Example obvious bad:
- Possible relative birth rate crash among whoever can afford Prestidigitation / live in a city

Good idea to proceed? y/n
Value to Cheliax if successful? #
Person to ask instead of you?

He then folds it and writes on the outside -

"What was her job title again?"

After being answered:

Viewable only by: Contessa Lrilatha

lintamande: Shortly after, there's a knock at the door.

Keltham: "Enter," calls Keltham, unaware of any update this might be producing in Carissa.

lintamande: It's the Imperial envoy who brought them to the palace, and a serious-looking, dignified, middle-aged noblewoman behind him.

"Announcing the Paracountess Isidre Astrid Asgavan Thrune, here to see Keltham," the envoy says.

Iarwain: "If you have a moment, that is," Isidre Thrune says pleasantly, then looks more serious. "Or realistically, more like half an hour. Is this a good time?"

Keltham: Does lots of names indicate importance? Keltham remembers mention of very powerful wizards having unreasonably long names. Oh, and that sure is a big fancy-looking headband she's wearing.

"Works for me if it works for Carissa."

Iarwain: "I am afraid I was hoping to speak to you alone," Isidre Thrune says, half-inclining her head in an apologetic gesture.

Keltham: Keltham feels vaguely like he's supposed to check with Carissa about this but has managed to pick up the rhyme if not the reason of some Chelish interactions, and does have the ill-formed sense, now, that he's not supposed to ask Carissa's okay to say yes to this.

"All right," Keltham says.

Then he runs a quick Detect Magic to see if he spots anything weird about the envoy, for that small further chunk of probability in case this is a Kuthite plot. Okay, Keltham thinks that looks like the Arcane Mark of the person who ran a bunch of spells on him last night.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa curties and steps back.

(From Maillol's reaction she was not expecting they'd be able to get the eighth circle wizard needed for this conversation in today; she's pleasantly surprised.)

Iarwain: The envoy accepts a note for Lrilatha from Keltham.

Isidre Thrune escorts Keltham to a nearby interview room, sumptuously appointed (but not in doompunk), with no external windows. They will be seated across from one another in luxurious padded chairs (still monstrosities of ergonomics by dath ilani standards), between them an intricately carved round table bearing a variety of exotic snacks and fluted beverages.

Iarwain: The envoy, after the two go, informs Sevar that they are to follow soon and silently behind. Sevar will watch this interview through a one-way wall, so that a nearby spellcaster running Detect Thoughts can keep half an eye on Sevar's own thoughts, in case she wants to loudly think anything important. If so, the information will make its way to Isidre Thrune, who has one of the highest Splendours that could be found on this much notice.

Also Maillol is temporarily unavailable for a while and Sevar is back in charge for something like the next half-day.

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa is confused, but right now she should probably focus on this conversation which is fairly high stakes and poke that confusion later. Here, while she's at it, is a shopping list for Keltham should Lrilatha approve his project.

Keltham: "May I inquire what this is about?" Keltham says in his best Very Serious mode.

Iarwain: Isidre Thrune nods. "I am, as you may have surmised from the headband, one of the highest boosted-Intelligence individuals in all Cheliax, and one of those who have been reviewing events on your project from here in the palace. I begin by offering you the following piece of good news: Ione Sala has awakened, and, though she is not quite returned to normal, the fact that she awakened at all is good news about her prospects of eventual recovery."

Keltham: One of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, check. It's sort of good to know they actually exist at all, and are optimizing stuff in Governance here at all.

"Sounds like apparently good news," Keltham replies. "Though - did she seem like herself, at all? Like, definitely Ione but afteraffects, or more like, didn't return to anything like being Ione yet?"

If they don't know about the Nethys thing, he doesn't want to mention it yet, at least, not if she otherwise recovers anyways; but he's still concerned about whether it's Nethys in there now, or Ione.

Iarwain: Isidre inclines her head. "The former, I would say, though I'm going on the reactions of those around Ione Sala, rather than having very much acquaintance with her myself. Did you expect otherwise?"

Keltham: "I am not clear on what to expect from - forcible human-god interactions."

Iarwain: "Mm." Isidre briefly sips from one of the fluted thin glasses laid out on her side of the table. "Or perhaps you have a guess you arrived at by stranger means. Pilar Pineda, I hope you've by now heard, has been resurrected after surprisingly having been located in Elysium, the Chaotic Good afterlife. After reviewing a recent report from Sevar, on a hunch, I ordered a check on whether Pineda had a fetish for, as Sevar somewhat politely put it to you, 'being forced', though we would usually simply call it a rape fetish."

"Pilar does. In fact it is what we'd term an obligate fetish, meaning that she has not much interest in sex without it."

"This is not at all surprising to us, however rare such a thing may be in dath ilan; here it is among the most common fetishes. The fact remains that you may have been said to have somehow known it. Apparently by similar and mysterious lines of reasoning that led you to worry about a hidden cleric of Zon-Kuthon, maybe even unknown to herself, among the student wizards you've been assigned."

"Sevar's report says that she asked, and you said it was too complicated. I am wondering if you'd be willing to try explaining to somebody with higher Intelligence."

Carissa Sevar: This random noblewoman is not, actually, going to be able to parse the explanation whatever it is, and possibly Carissa should consider the person casting Detect Thoughts to be likelier to get it than Carissa but - she's not sure she does expect that. They almost certainly haven't actually patiently read all the project logs. There aren't that many people cleared to do that and there's quite a lot of project logs and a war on. If Maillol (he has to be in trouble, that's the only reason they'd know how long he'll be indisposed) didn't know in advance who'd be able to do this then there isn't a wizard that powerful who's up to date on the whole thing.

So if Keltham does decide to explain it to Isidre then she's the one who'll have to figure out what Isidre should say.

She casts Fox's Cunning on herself, just in case.

Keltham: If the word 'rape' is translating at all correctly, Keltham is having some trouble seeing how the notion of a 'rape fetish' isn't as obviously paradoxical as 'asking somebody to rape you'; but presumably there's some elided meta/object distinction that makes sense of it, and in any case that's not the most urgent topic right now.

So. Pilar has the fetish. But it's very common locally, maybe it's 1/3 of the population, say, if he'd also checked Ione then taking the universe at face value there'd be a 55% probability of at least one of the two having the fetish. But still, it should probably be called something like one bit of evidence favoring the eroLARP hypothesis.

"I wasn't saying Sevar was too stupid for it," Keltham replies after taking a moment to think. "I was saying the concept structure came at the end of a long series of other concepts, that would take too long to explain. Higher Intelligence doesn't let you bypass that sequence, what would be needed is that you have a lot of prerequisites that I'd guess to be outright unknown in Golarion."

There's also the concern about whether explaining the notion of an eroLARP to people inside the eroLARP will drive them insane or cause this universe to collapse. But if Carissa is able to hear him talking about his weird theories and the very smart people immediately investigate them in Pilar and report back to him, it doesn't seem like that kind of eroLARP; they're apparently allowed to know. Anyways, though it seems kind of foolish in retrospect, he already published that private key.

Abrogail Thrune II:
WHAT.

Cause the universe to collapse, WHAT.

Abrogail Thrune II: What the ABYSS is an 'eroLARP'.

Abrogail Thrune II: Many thoughts Keltham thinks have pieces that are completely opaque to Abrogail Thrune because they refer to concepts that Abrogail Thrune simply doesn't have. Like 'private-key' or 'one bit of evidence' or, unfortunately, 'eroLARP'. It parses to her essentially as 'private-~~~', '1 ~~~ of evidence', and in the most important part 'sex~~~~'.

Iarwain: "Is there perhaps some metaphor you could use to explain?" says Isidre Thrune.

Keltham: Metaphor, huh. "Maybe something like - pattern recognition? I'm not working off a fundamental Law that reduces to simple math like the things I've been lecturing on. More like, I'm recognizing pieces of the universe that match part of a pattern I know about, and guessing about how the rest might get filled in. Like - actually I don't know if you have fictional novels here, there weren't any in the archduke's library. Do you have, like, untrue but popular stories about, I don't know, some girl who wants to rule her own planet when she grows up, and then she's abducted by aliens with lots of problems and has to solve those problems to become ruler of their planet? I mean, those wouldn't be your stories, but I wouldn't know what Golarion stories are about."

Iarwain: "We have novels, certainly," Isidre replies. "Though in Cheliax most of the novels we have on hand predate the recent ascent of the Asmodean Church here, and are somewhat appallingly written; we have not considered it the best use of Cheliax's sharply limited resources to make better ones exist, just yet. An example of the sort of thing that might be in one of those novels - maybe a boy finding a magic sword, falling in love with a beautiful princess, using the magic sword to slay a dragon, and presenting the dragon's death to the princess's father to win her hand in marriage. I admit, I have not read many of those myself."

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa is pleasantly surprised - the answer suggests someone in the loop in fact has read all of the conversation transcripts, and maybe a bit of the Taldane books besides.)

Keltham: 'Certainly', huh, Keltham's sort of disappointed, he was hoping a Very Smart Person here would know better than to talk with the probability-1 declarations sprinkled all over the crazy books here. He guesses that's a matter of Law more than Intelligence.

"Then if someone has read a number of stories like that, if they got to the point where the boy falls in love with a high-status woman, after having earlier obtained a magic sword, they could guess the boy was going to do something with the magic sword to impress the high-status woman."

Iarwain: "I see, or think I see. But - where are you getting the patterns that you're using to determine that Pilar has a rape fetish or that one of the girls is a Kuthite sleeper operative?"

Keltham: From reading his friends' fanfictions about a currently-superpopular novel deconstructing eroLARPs; eroLARPs that, by comparison, almost nobody must have actually played, compared to how many people found out about them by reading some of their friends' fanfictions so they wouldn't be left out of discussions about it. But that's not really what she's asking, anyways.

Now, how to reply without panicking her over the idea that her universe might be fictional? Which isn't even actually the idea here; but if you don't know about computer simulations, and the generalized notion of laws of physics that let you imagine alternate such laws, and equivalence classes of causal structures embedded in other structures, and realityfluids generalizing quantum amplitudes, what do you even say that the smart-but-ignorant Golarion native doesn't just parse down to 'possibly we're all just a generalized illusion or maybe trapped in some sort of book, sure go panic now'.

"I'm not really sure how to say it, except that the patterns are in my memories out of dath ilan, and their origin in dath ilan was complicated," Keltham replies. "I would not have particularly expected to find facts and events here, corresponding to those memories. And a lot of things don't correspond in that way, to be clear, I'd have been much less confused, getting here, if this world was even 5% made out of things I was expecting to see. But there's bits and pieces of this world, all over, that fit into one pattern or another. And the danger is that I'm just looking up at random clouds, and seeing faces, trees, patterns in the sky that are pure coincidence. As you say, if the fetish is very common here, then Pilar having it isn't much evidence."

Abrogail Thrune II:

Now, how to reply without panicking her over the idea that her universe might be fictional? Which isn't even actually the idea here; but if you don't know about ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~, and the generalized notion of ~~~~ of ~~~~~~~ that let you imagine alternate such ~~~~, and ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ of ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~ embedded in other ~~~~~~~, and ~~~~~~ generalizing ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~, what do you even say that the smart-but-ignorant Golarion native doesn't just parse down to 'possibly we're all just a generalized illusion or maybe trapped in some sort of book, sure go panic now'.

This is the most disturbing Detect Thoughts that Abrogail has ever cast.

Is Sevar thinking anything helpful?

Carissa Sevar: If you're a boy with a sword, you'd be an idiot to conclude you're in a story where you slay a dragon and marry the princess; there are lots of boys with swords, and almost none of them pull it off. You can just look up the odds.

If you're a boy from another world, who has already started a war between Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon....

What would it even mean to be in a story where you change the world, as distinct from being in a world where you change the world?

The only thing that comes to mind that feels at all Keltham shaped is that it's an answer to what put you there. If Asmodeus copied Keltham into the world to explain Law, then the girls are - not exactly a side point, they're supposed to seduce him to Evil after all, but they're not a source of - if Asmodeus copied Keltham there then you wouldn't expect one of the girls to be a Kuthite spy, because the process that produced the girls wouldn't have any interest in that, and most random Chelish wizarding students are not Kuthite spies.

If Keltham ended up here because - she has no idea how to finish the thought but it's at least a question -

Ask him, is this in part a hypothesis about what process caused you to arrive here instead of nowhere or instead of somewhere that was systematically catching dead people -

Iarwain: "Is all this - tangled up with theories you have of how you came to be here, instead of nowhere? Or instead of somewhere that was catching dead people from your world more systematically than Golarion seems to?"

Keltham: All right, that's slightly impressive, maybe the bigger headbands are actually good for anything.

"It would have to be, yeah, but I don't exactly have a lot of specifics and what specifics I have... aren't something I'm thinking of a good metaphor for... let me think." Sure, if you've got enough prerequisites, it's obvious in retrospect that the explanation for what happened to Keltham is that almost all of the copies of him ended, across the multiverse of everything being infinitely embedded all over the multiverse, and this is one of the Kelthams that didn't end, in some universe that's either higher-complexity than his original universe or of course a higher-complexity specific embedded somewhere simpler than that, and then, arguendo, if the EroLARP Hypothesis is correct, he was localized to somewhere such that it has convenient evolutionarily-implausible 'masochists' who are super okay with not being let out of their chains when they struggle, so that hurting them during sex, which it turned out you really wanted to do, doesn't get you kicked out of that city or exiled to the Last Resort.

Keltham has not figured out why this would be the case, but he doesn't need a specific hypothesis of why to notice what it looks like and start generating predictions.

And then, of course, you have the problem of explaining this to a Golarion native who has no idea that her own world sure looks like it runs on quantum mechanics the same as dath ilan, and how that means there's an exponentially vast number of near-exact copies of her spread all over the local amplitudes to say nothing of the alternate laws of physics that embed each other as substructures.

Does Taldane contain the word 'fanfiction'? No it does not. Well, there goes that metaphor for 'this world is a continuation fic of my life because in an infinite multiverse containing an infinite number of fanfiction writers no book can ever truly end', which, on reflection, would probably have been an overly disturbing thing to try to explain anyways.

Abrogail Thrune II:
There are how many of her all over the place? Where and what are they even doing, does dath ilan actually know all this or are they just making it up.

Iarwain: "Are you thinking possibly that you are in - not one of the Outer Planes that we think of as an afterlife - but rather that this entire greater universe is your afterlife?" ventures Isidre Thrune. It doesn't seem to be what Keltham is thinking, but maybe he'll explain why it's not.

Keltham: That gets Keltham to smile, briefly. "Well, this universe rather counts as my afterlife by definition, what with my life having ended, and this being after it. I don't really have the concept of your afterlives down yet, though. So whatever further connotations you were thinking of importing from the standard terminology, I can't say anything about those."

Abrogail Thrune II: Is Sevar possibly thinking anything useful right now.

Carissa Sevar: No, no, that's not it, not that she knows what it is, but she wouldn't have asked that question and she's not thinking how to - she cannot wait to read the thought transcript that'll presumably make this all make perfect sense -

Iarwain: "Are you thinking that this world was in some way created just for you," Isidre says. "Maybe that - you're the only real person here?"

Abrogail Thrune II: She has not lost sight of Cheliax's goals; if Keltham thinks that, he will be much easier to turn to Evil.

Keltham: "I'd have to be pretty search-blind not to think of that possibility at all, but I rather doubt it; anybody who put me in a fake world with a Carissa who isn't real and has no internal experiences is not at all doing me a favor, by that, and why make a whole world for somebody if you're not doing them a favor? I can tap myself with a truthspell and repeat that, if your version of Governance wants assurance that I'm unlikely to strangle all my students after deciding they're not real."

Abrogail Thrune II: It's quite the opposite of what Governance wanted to hear, but Abrogail didn't expect better.

This - seems like a good opportunity, or maybe excuse would be a better word, to change the subject. Abrogail is starting to think that figuring out how to wield Keltham's Second Law is not, in any case, the incredibly good idea that it may have seemed to Sevar at the time.

Iarwain: "That does bring up another topic I'd meant to discuss," Isidre says. "We can possibly return later to the topic of the patterns you're recognizing, if there's time, but I wanted to be sure we covered this other topic, before I return to my unfortunately busy schedule."

Keltham: "Understood."

Iarwain: "We have a great deal more experience with people like Carissa Sevar, or, for that matter, like yourself, than dath ilan seems to have, by Sevar's reports. Is this correct?"

Keltham: "You can just ask me to review the reports, you know."

"But yes, or rather, my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists. If you've reviewed the transcript of my lecture on evolutionary theory as the basis of biological order, the notion of enjoying pain, the signal of damage to the body, is not something you'd expect to see. Carissa, if I was interpreting her correctly, thought masochism might have evolved in a situation where women are continuously - not having a great time but could maybe do better by bonding with their captors. I'd put at least even money on it being something a god put in instead, or otherwise artificial."

"The fact that something like that even exists here - that I, a sadist, am complemented here by a perfect complement to my own desires, one that shouldn't exist - is part of why I suspect that I'm not in a universe that I matched up to at random."

Iarwain: "I'm sorry, I'd meant to move on from that but - are you saying that masochists in Golarion were created for you?"

Carissa Sevar: No!!!!! - not in a universe I matched up to at random - lots of worlds, and why he ended up in this world is confusing, and the most notable feature of this world from his perspective is that there are perfect matches for all his incredibly conventional kinks that dath ilan tried and only sort of succeeded at breeding out of their Lawful Good planet of Lawful Goodness - Carissa would have responded 'I'd predict that most worlds have masochists, I'm not sure how heavily that weighs in your reasoning' -

Keltham: "That'd correspond to some of the more relatively disturbing possibilities that I'm sure hoping aren't true, because I'm kind of screwed that way, either by being the only real person here, or by being responsible for the existence of a whole lot of other people many of whom seem not to be leading very fun lives right now."

"But no, my main theory is that a vast or weighted-infinite number of worlds exist, and I was nonrandomly sent to a world where masochists exist, nonrandomly dropped at the Worldwound where I'd run into Carissa Sevar, and by the way, it so happens that whatever bureaucratic process that world used to pick the people who'd be my students, would happen to run across Ione and Pilar and also somewhere in there a girl who's working against the rest of us."

Iarwain: Sala and Pineda got oracled after they met Keltham, but she's not sure if this changes anything from his perspective; and this cannot be asked, because he doesn't know they're oracles.

"I'm not sure how heavily this weighs in your reasoning, but I think I would expect - most places to have masochists, in fact? It seems to me that masochists make perfect sense under the theory that you described to your class -"

Keltham: Dath ilani anti-interruption norms with respect to Paracountess-level people are much, much less strong than they are in Golarion. Sure, you'd notice if it happened often, but everybody can take a few interruption tokens per conversation, it doesn't mean anything.

"Applying evolutionary theory in general is surprisingly hard and doing it to human psychology in particular can run into a lot of pitfalls. I'm sorry, I should have attached warnings about that, we got those in the classes I took, but I was trying to run through the subject on the way to other things and neglected that. There's very exact rules for what you should and shouldn't predict using that theory, and if you're doing it after you've already seen what reality's answer sheet looks like, there's even more precautions you need to take, which rest on the Law of Probability, which I'd previously planned to explain today, before stuff happened."

Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham's thought processes show no awareness of himself being rude, only sincerity plus some background thoughts that are full of incomprehensible concepts. Not that this is an excuse in Cheliax, obviously, but it means that reprimanding Keltham cannot be the correct move.

Iarwain: (She's not particularly happy about being interrupted, but has a great deal more impulse control than certain people seem to think.)

"Well, I won't challenge your expertise or your warning, then," Isidre says calmly. "The point remains: You are a newcomer here, we have had masochists for a while, and we have sadists who know what they are."

Keltham: "This I do understand, and had not meant at all to contradict."

Iarwain: "I foresee some possible points of trouble ahead for the two of you, and wish to avert those, if possible."

Keltham: "I am listening very intently."

Iarwain: "Sevar, being the sort of woman that she is, is almost certainly attracted to you in part because of a fact and quality about your situation that she is probably rather reluctant to explain directly for a number of reasons."

"Namely, that you have, in fact, great power over her."

Keltham: "Because I can fire her from the project if she, what, doesn't have sex with me?"

Keltham doesn't like it, but he has started to grasp that Golarion is full of people who seem to think that the correct thing to do with a threatening decision matrix that would not counterfactually exist absent your predicted tendency to give in to threats is to give in to the threat.

Abrogail Thrune II: His world doesn't - have what - no this sounds like things Aspexia has told her about gods and godarrangements, are they all pretending to be gods there - but that's not what she's pursuing right now -

Carissa Sevar: (Keltham is adorable.)

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa lights her own hand on fire about this thought since other people seem to be kind of negligent on that.)

Abrogail Thrune II: She so does not have time for this.

Iarwain: "As Sevar interprets her situation," Isidre says seriously, "if she tried to leave you, and you wanted to keep her anyways, you could tell the government of Cheliax that you wanted to keep and have power over Carissa Sevar, as a condition of your continued cooperation with us. And then, she thinks, we'd give her to you, to keep you happy."

"This fact is important to her sexuality, it very nearly is her sexuality, and you need to understand that and not blunder into acts or words which cut against it."

Keltham: Keltham's thoughts show concealed shock and horror, this is exactly the fear he had when Carissa started saying she was giving herself to him, that she wanted something strange that she wasn't saying and that Keltham would prove unable to give her.

He does a pretty good job of controlling his own expression for a Chelish two-year-old. "Are you saying - are you implying - that I'm with her under false premises?"

Iarwain: What a beautiful opening. "You're with her under true premises. She's exactly correct. I'm not necessarily saying that to encourage you to mistreat her. But you need to understand, Keltham, there are no sane countries on the face of Golarion that would not do the equivalent of handing over Carissa Sevar to you, or worse, if that was the price of banishing plagues from our cities and growing enough wheat for one farmer to feed two others and closing the Worldwound and offering refuge to women in Osirion who want to leave their husbands and someday, yes, matching the accomplishments and wisdom of dath ilan. Or, perhaps, the price of what those other countries would ask from you, instead of that. Giving one woman to you who would not enjoy being so given, would not be something that pleases the modern Chelish government or the Church of Asmodeus that we work with, but we would weigh the price if we did not, and conclude that it was far more than worth it."

"So Carissa Sevar is, in fact, under your de facto power, exactly where she wants to be and needs to be. The possible problems I foresee, stem from you failing to understand that this is what she needs, this is what she wants, this is how her sexuality works, and that your de facto power to do anything you want with Sevar is part though of course not all of why she started being attracted to you in the first place. It is in the interest of Cheliax for obvious reasons that you continue to be happy with Carissa, fond of her home country of Cheliax, energized and productive for your project, and not distracted by being heartbroken after what happened when you were always careful to emphasize to Carissa how much she was free to go at any time if she didn't want to stay."

Keltham: "I... need to think about this," Keltham says.

Iarwain: "I shall wait."

Keltham: Question 1: Are they being honest with him, or not?

Subquestion 1.1: What motive do they have to lie? How do they gain from tricking him into doing something terrible to Sevar? It's not like they could threaten him with the revelation of that to Governance, even if they mistakenly think he'd respond to a threat like that.

...and now the tree isn't branching further. Keltham is having more trouble than usual thinking about this. Part of himself is recoiling in horror and it's not because the situation being described sounds awful for Carissa, it's because something about it seems terrible and threatening for him.

Is it that he distrusts himself with power?

Is it that he's afraid of pressuring himself into doing something to Carissa that he didn't really want to do, even if she turns out to want it?

Is it that the ENTIRE FUCKING SITUATION IS MANDATORILY ILLEGIBLE WITH NO CAREFULLY OPTIMIZED MESHING GENDERTROPES AND NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO NEGOTIATE ANYTHING IN PLAIN BASELINE?

"How do you know the contents of Carissa's mind in such detail?"

Abrogail Thrune II: She's picked up, now, on some of the rhythm of Keltham's internal thoughts, has noticed a notion of, what does it predict, did it come true, much plainer in his Baseline thoughts to himself than in Taldane speech to others.

Iarwain: "I know masochists - or rather, 'submissives', which is the more precise term for the relevant part of what Carissa is, correlated with masochism but not identical to it. I read reports on Sevar and yourself. I guessed what would happen or rather had probably already happened. And then I had Security ask Sevar if she had, by any chance, tried to tell you, possibly several times, that you could do anything you want to her - including killing her, if she thought you were ready to hear that part - and she confirmed that it was so. It is a very mundane form of pattern-seeing that rests on having seen many such relationships play out, rather than on coming here from another world; but it is not, I think, less reliable for that. To be clear, I am not saying every submissive is like this, but Sevar is, and I can recognize that."

"There are, I suppose, other possible interpretations of why a submissive would give herself entirely to a man, whom she somehow happens to be very attracted to, who coincidentally happens to have de facto absolute-power over her. But given that Sevar has in any case told you to do anything you want with her, I don't see why you would be worried that I am, say, trying to lure you into doing too much to her, more than she wants, which is itself a rather odd thing for me to try to accomplish."

"The part where her new dominant, that's what you are, does not understand that he has de facto absolute-power over her, where he does not understand that this fact is itself something that she needs in the foundation of her sexuality, seems like something of a Fireball trap waiting to go off in somebody's face. I am trying to defuse it."

Keltham: "And the reason that you, and not her, are saying these things to me?"

Iarwain: "First of all, that is itself something you do not make a submissive do, especially one like Sevar. You don't make her spell out exactly what you could do to take her, in a way that makes it clear you haven't thought of that yourself and would never think of that yourself. That makes it feel fake to her, like the whole thing is pretend."

"Second of all, I am under the perhaps mistaken impression that she tried to lead you to those answers and you did not listen, perhaps because she was too close to your own age and not wearing a sufficiently impressive-looking intelligence headband."

Keltham: Keltham tries to think about this. His mind feels tired. A dath ilani remains able to complete their thoughts except when under the effect of relatively significant drugs or maybe if they're in the middle of falling asleep, but right now, what his mind patterns are mainly saying is 'Come back to this later and slower.'

"Do you have a recommended course of action for me that's different from what I was doing already," Keltham says. Part of him suggests that their provided course of action will look a lot like chaining up Carissa and actually raping her a lot and ignoring her (countermanded, if she was still obeying) requests to be let out, he doesn't know why Cheliax would do that but it's what it feels like they're trying to get him to do.

Abrogail Thrune II: Oh, so he's not a complete fool then, in the sense that there may be a nonfool trapped inside there somewhere. You should trust your instincts more, Civilized boy.

That business with ordering Carissa never to verbally request that he stop was really quite clever of him, now that his thoughts have run over it; Abrogail can't immediately see a way out of that as a checkmate against the way they were planning to lure him into Evil. Carissa should've looked sad and told him that an order like that would take the fun out for her, found some excuse to turn him down; as the Keltham expert it was her job to realize what he was really doing there, even if Abrogail didn't realize from the transcript. If Sevar is worried she's not being punished enough, she can repent her failures there.

Iarwain: "I think, first and foremost, that you should not press yourself too hard or make yourself unhappy by going too far too early, even if that's what Sevar wants," Isidre says, making a sudden change of plans. "This is an Evil country, not a Good one, and among the foundational reasons for that is that Good people all trying to help each other instead of themselves seem to inevitably end up sad and unhappy at the end of it. You have a Civilization to build here, Keltham, your role in life is not actually to make Sevar happy. She is responsible for her own life's happiness, as you are for yours."

"With that said, if you yourself, for your own sake and not hers, decided one day to demand that the government of Cheliax give you absolute-power over her and order our Security to put her forcibly into her chains any time she didn't want to go, Carissa Sevar herself would be very, very happy about that. But I will quite understand if you do not wish to essay that until you are confident of your ability to discern that happiness for yourself."

"And. There are other women in Cheliax if Sevar's happiest outcome is not what you want. You are not obliged to give literally the first girl in this world that you talked to everything that she wants from life, at your own expense. That is what it means to be Evil rather than Good."

"A further warning. Sevar is not the most extreme case of what she is. Pilar Pineda is more submissive than Sevar, substantially more masochistic than Sevar, and would, in a way very strange to you, feel raped if you made her have a careful conversation about sex instead of just forcibly throwing her onto a bed. My considered opinion is that if you are struggling and flailing with Sevar you are absolutely certainly not ready for Pineda."

Carissa Sevar: Okay, Carissa likes this person, that was the correct thing to tell Keltham there.

Abrogail Thrune II: Awww. Now Abrogail wants to keep the Isidre identity and develop her and let Isidre get closer to Sevar and see if she can get to the point of actual fucking before she drops the guise in the middle.

...but can't possibly actually do that in real life due to being Queen of Cheliax and, yes, busier than that.

Keltham: Oh, so it's a theorem he's not ready for Pilar, is it? Keltham's brain automatically tries to generate counterexamples to this totally obviously not-absolute-certainty which Golarion's very smart people seem to foolishly believe; and gets as far as suggesting the visibly non-impossible world where Keltham's own sadistic instincts would kick in and they'd have great sex and it would be fine; before the rest of Keltham's brain tells that subthread to shut up. One must distinguish the possible from the probable, and what a local un-Lawful very smart person says is absolutely certain may, nonetheless, be a better bet than not-that.

"I believe I understand, but I should take time to mull it over," Keltham says.

Iarwain: "Please do," Isidre says. "I do have a pending and somewhat awkward further topic, but it seems wise to let this one sink in first."

Keltham: Keltham starts to reach for one of the snacks, catches himself, and tries a Detect Poison first, now that he has that cantrip.

(Nothing shows up, but then, it's not like he's tried with a known poison to check that the cantrip is working.)

Iarwain: Isidre smiles slightly. "They do check the food before they serve it to me, you know, let alone to you."

Keltham: "Why trust what you can verify," Keltham says unapologetically, and eats a snack.

...actually, why did he use Detect Poison, this time, when he didn't think to try it in the dining hall before?

Are his instincts trying to tell him something? Keltham now wishes he hadn't eaten that snack; but he's at least not going to eat any more.

His brain, still running in the background and creative as ever, suggests that, if this is an eroLARP-ish context and therefore Keltham has a dreadful buried urge to rape somebody which Pilar matches, he could in fact run three Augury spells before trying that, to check what the consequences would be. Obviously after having first done a bunch more work to verify that the Augury uses his own utility function or a sufficiently aligned neighboring one.

Keltham tells that thread to shut up. He's starting to doubt this whole eroLARP business if it implies that he would enjoy that. Anyways the concept of a 'rape fetish' in the sense of 'wanting unwanted sex' is literally paradoxical and the term presumably means something else.

Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham thinks in such a fascinating way. Actually, there's something about it that reminds Abrogail of herself contrasted to the way that most people who are not Abrogail don't seem to usually try to be clever, possibly because they expect they'll be punished for trying. Keltham is all about the cleverness, not in the false artificial way that Abrogail associates with people who are not Abrogail, but in a genuine way that permeates all his thoughts. He is constantly thinking of ways to make his day even more fun, one might say, if not in quite the same way as herself.

They're also going to have to prevent Keltham from finding out the False Future spell exists. Can they do something clever with that, with giving him false answers to Auguries? The trouble is, if you have sufficiently good cause to think you're helping somebody, it may not count as Evil. Even if Pharasma counts it, it may not help in the sense that it fails to corrupt Keltham in the required way.

Keltham: "You say," Keltham says, after some further contemplation and letting things sink in, "that you'd give Carissa to me even if she didn't want to go, because the other lives at stake in Cheliax outweighed her life. Then you do not seem to feel yourself forbidden to do that sort of thing, to override the," deontology meant to be reliable without having to think about it a lot and forcing everyone else to think about it a lot, "rules and protections and guardrails around one life, when many other lives are at stake. Then inquiring minds might want to know if you would not also, in the event I stopped cooperating with Cheliax, decide to try to keep me here anyways, with so many lives at stake. If we hadn't made and then formalized an agreement saying otherwise, that is."

And perhaps even if they had made that agreement, because somebody breaking an oath and going to Abaddon over it is maybe still worth it for them.

Abrogail Thrune II: Sevar should have foreseen this annoying fucking consequence of giving him that planned story about her sexuality. Abrogail herself should have seen it coming, really. It's a stereotypically Good thing to say and his Good society would absolutely have programmed that particular whiny complaint into everybody from childhood. It's just not easy to think like that.

Iarwain: Isidre inclines her head. "And you're wondering why we didn't just kidnap you here directly from the Worldwound and not make any agreements with you first, if that's how we operate?"

Keltham: It's very obvious why they wouldn't do that, especially if they were okay with sacrificing a few souls to Abaddon if that became necessary; namely, to keep Keltham cooperative at the start. "This would be my own primary objection to societies that are Good instead of Lawful, and from my perspective no society on Golarion is remotely Lawful. There was also a certain tendency, in dath ilan, for the very smart people who are smarter than the other people to also lean more Good - but kept sensible, in our own case, by Law that those very smart people comprehend far better than I do. I get along fine with Carissa, and expect to get along fine with my other research group members. I am concerned that perhaps the upper rank of Chelish Governance is a little too Good for me."

Abrogail Thrune II: Why is her life like this.

Iarwain: "In theory," Isidre says, unperturbed, "there's a set of complicated replies here, and in practice, a much simpler one. In theory, for example, you arrived at the Worldwound, which is itself governed by treaties that Cheliax signed and indeed had a primary hand in designing; we could not have stopped you from walking out on us there, and so it was reasonable to offer you guarantees to come away from the Worldwound to Cheliax proper. In theory, our government has never said to Carissa Sevar at any point that we would not sacrifice her if that becomes necessary; it's not that we'd be violating a rule around her, but that it's understood that this sort of thing might unfortunately happen, because all of Golarion is in a far more precarious situation than dath ilan. In principle, if Sevar had been disturbed enough by that, she could have tried to sign a compact with the government saying otherwise, which we would have kept if signed; but Sevar would have needed to find something to make it worth our while to sign that compact, and it would have been pointless and expensive and not really worth it. And if you ask why Sevar didn't go to a country with more rules instead, my reply would be that, while there are some countries with many more rules, they are not good ones, and also that moving countries is expensive in Golarion and not just in the cost of the teleport. In the understandings that exist in Golarion, Cheliax is starting with you from scratch, not from the sort of relationship we had with Sevar as a citizen, where it's understood that we can sacrifice her if necessary for some much larger benefit."

"In practice, the actual and much simpler reply is that the revelation from Asmodeus which led to this project's establishment said, or at least, we think this is what Asmodeus was trying to say, to not pull any of that on you. So no such discussion was ever entertained at any level of government. If you're looking for a simple answer that doesn't require you to worry about backroom discussions by people like me, it's right there, I suppose. Possibly that's why Asmodeus ordained it so, if you feel that way. I don't think we would have decided to unsheathe blades at you, absent His order, but I can see His order simplifying things from your perspective."

Keltham: "You might be well served at some point by contemplating in more detail why Asmodeus found it necessary to do that, and pay out what I gather to be very limited communications capacity on doing that. He would not have needed to do it in dath ilan, for all that dath ilan is supposedly a Good country and Cheliax is supposedly an Evil one. But, yeah, I'm glad Asmodeus had his act together there."

Iarwain: Isidre inclines her head again. "As you say, and yes, you may well be right. We are very aware of how far short we fall of Asmodeus's wisdom."

Abrogail Thrune II: That couldn't actually be the reason for Asmodeus's instructions, could it? No, it has to be some pre-existing godagreement, or a bargain with Abadar and Nethys whose initial premise was that they cooperated to bring Keltham here and Cheliax got first crack at him, or one of the other likely possibilities that Aspexia reluctantly discussed (reluctantly because Aspexia would rather that Abrogail shut up and follow His orders). Absent those instructions, Cheliax most certainly could have gotten compliance out of Keltham, regardless of his society's silly pretense of a godlike immunity to threats -

And now Keltham is thinking about how the other possibility would've played out, whether he could commit suicide using a Create Water cantrip or other tools that his god could unilaterally give him. But Cheliax could just raise you, then, poor fool; Miracle doesn't require consent. The only danger would be if Abadar could instruct Osirion to raise Keltham before Cheliax could, and Cheliax would know it was in a race and they would have that information first -

Now Keltham is also thinking about Raise Dead, and thinking about the story Carissa gave him about oaths, and how he could if necessary break an oath over something trivial, unilaterally in a way that nobody else depended on so it wouldn't actually violate the ~~~~~~~~~~, and so go to Abaddon.

Keltham expects to - just end up somewhere else, if he did that? But he knows he might not and this doesn't faze him. He'd literally rather go to Abaddon than comply. True death doesn't scare him as much as it scares some dath ilani, he's thinking now, and - he's not even imagining Cheliax severely torturing him in a scary way to which he'd prefer nonexistence, the thought that they could break him with torture still hasn't occurred to him, he'd just walk out on this entire universe and existence itself rather than accept a forced unfair division of gains from trade, because if you can't do that, why would anybody bother bargaining fairly with you.

He wouldn't actually have been able to do it, if Cheliax was running Detect Thoughts on him, and not otherwise restrained by Asmodeus. They've ever had experience with uncooperative torture victims. You don't instantly end up in Abaddon and instantly get eaten.

...but maybe, just maybe, Abrogail feels the tiniest shred of respect for Keltham at this point. That degree of 'fuck you' is something she can appreciate.

Of course now she wants even more to see what Keltham's mind would look like when it broke, but Asmodeus said not to do that so she won't.

Carissa Sevar: See, Keltham's lips are moving again and Carissa's getting confused about the nature of Good and Evil again, it's getting to be a pattern. Lastwall wouldn't hand her over, probably - why? 'simplifies cooperation with people like Keltham' jumps to mind as an explanation with Fox's Cunning up, in a way it wouldn't jump to mind otherwise. But obviously the Good gods do sacrifice people to horrible fates to achieve their goals ....what's the difference? Is it just that Good gets incredibly worked up about rape in particular?

Why did Asmodeus tell them to cooperate with Keltham? It's one of three important glaring confusions right now, along with "what is Maillol in trouble for" because Carissa suspects she's probably in trouble for the same thing, even if they're going to punish them one at a time about it, and "what does Cayden Cailean want" which she's trying not to think about but which feels salient since they're talking about, you know, Good and whether they sacrifice people to be raped if it achieves their long goals...

Abrogail Thrune II: Maillol, presumably, is having the sort of bad day that can only be achieved by simultaneously pissing off Aspexia Rugatonn, Contessa Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek. Oh, don't worry, my dear, my personal order of Irori monks won't blame you much, despite your obvious complicity in the error; they're hardly expecting you to manage me, what with my having ordered transcripts of your thoughts.

And besides, your natural and self-inflicted punishment is about to come due anyways.

Iarwain: "May I raise the final topic?" Isidre says. "Other thoughts may, I hope, be thought by you after; other duties will soon call me."

Keltham: "Let me finish up my current thought..."

"Go ahead."

Iarwain: "It requires some exposition to introduce with context, though hopefully not as much as the source of your mysterious patterns in Golarion. First, the thought occurs to me that dath ilan, as a far more Lawful society, may perhaps not have the phenomenon we refer to as 'rumors', in which people manage to - accidentally, more or less, though sometimes also purposefully, invent stories and tell them to each other, hearing one thing and saying another and not really keeping track of things -"

"In almost any place and organization in Golarion, you will find a large number of people running around believing things that are not true, that bear at best a tenuous connection to reality, or no connection at all, stories that got repeatedly passed around and distorted. I would guess that dath ilan prevents this, somehow, I can't actually imagine how, which means it might never occur to you that something people were whispering excitedly to each other might not be true."

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa's not sure where Isidre is going with this but recommends not pushing Keltham on Carissa-related or kink-related things any further, he's off balance in the way that generally signifies not wanting to have sex and not thinking through the lens of what's sexy, and while pushing him off-balance was much of the goal here, once achieved they should back off.)

Abrogail Thrune II: Hmmm. Difficult to work past and still achieve her goals, but not impossible.

Keltham: "I have literally any experience with false social beliefs on account of having once been a six-year-old boy, I suppose; and some abstract understanding of the phenomenon as a bad equilibrium that motivates precautions to avoid it. But yes, adults who follow simple epistemic hygiene procedures are not subject to that phenomenon."

"I think if I heard anything really ridiculous, I would have managed to distrust that on grounds of Golarion generally seeming to have epistemic problems, but your caution is well-taken. You're right, that might not have occurred to me. Is there some particular 'rumor' circulating that you're concerned I might have believed?"

Keltham is, of course, already considering the proposition that this dire 'rumor', whatever it is, is going to be completely true.

Iarwain: "As of yesterday before the assault started, a rumor began inside your project - which rumor is false, to the best of my own knowledge, which knowledge I would in this case expect to be accurate - that the Queen of Cheliax is sleeping with your girlfriend."

Carissa Sevar: That was absolutely not a -

Carissa Sevar: .....a large number of things click into place at once.

Carissa Sevar: Maillol requested an eighth-circle caster and someone with extremely high Splendour to have a conversation with Keltham about Carissa Sevar. The palace found one inside four hours. One, not two; there isn't an invisible person with Detect Thoughts somewhere telepathically bonded to Isidre and passing along Carissa's thoughts with impressively little delay. There isn't a random countess Carissa's never heard of who's read all the project transcripts.

There's just Her Imperial Majestrix, certainly the highest Splendour they could find on such short notice. Presumably not literally just here to fuck with Carissa, that'd be taking pride a little far, but certainly going to fuck with Carissa while she's here. As she is entitled to. Because she can do whatever she wants.

(Carissa isn't exactly surprised by, but does admire, the perfectly straight face 'Isidre' has been keeping for the last twenty seconds.)

Abrogail Thrune II: She ever learns! Look at that.

Why yes, dear, while all our eighth-circle wizards are currently on the front lines with Nidal, there is an eighth-circle sorcerer remaining with incredibly high Splendour who would enjoy having a chat about Carissa Sevar's sexuality and, oh, yes, that other topic you requested be introduced.

So nice of you to write such a perfectly targeted request, less than 12 hours after my personal order of Irori monks had arduously, painstakingly badgered me into agreeing to not bother you again unless and until my strictly conventional duties to Cheliax called for that.

Keltham: The first thought to cross Keltham's mind is why the Queen of Cheliax needs to use Sevar as a cuddle pillow, as cuddlesome as she is in that regard, before it clicks to him that if you have sex in bedrooms then 'sleeping with' is probably a euphemism for sex.

The second thought is to ask whether this rumor is perhaps true.

It admittedly does in fact sound a lot more like the sort of thing that would be passed around six-year-old kids, than would make very much sense in real life, but even in Golarion, presumably, the people who pass around rumors like that are probably running their own sanity checks at all, and think it's not completely obviously false?

"Does the rumor say it's consensual or a pharaoh-of-Osirion situation?" Keltham inquires. He is putting any flashes of anger on hold pending evaluation of probabilities.

Carissa Sevar: Presumably the Queen has realized this but Keltham will in fact attempt to leave Cheliax with Carissa on the spot if he thinks -

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa's going to have an awful afternoon but Keltham is protective of her isn't that adorable)

Iarwain: "I - do not know offhand whether the rumor is even bothering to say."

"I'm glad to see that you are not apparently - the kind of man who would consider his own honor mortally insulted, or Carissa's appeal to him ruined, by the mere existence of the rumor itself, which - which I did not expect to be your reaction, given everything I knew about dath ilan, but is a very common way for men to think in countries outside Cheliax -"

"It's really incredibly extremely unlikely to be true, Keltham, that's something I'm in a position to know, and I know it. I'm prepared to swear you my oath on that if required."

Keltham: "Am I going to understand why anyone would consider his own reputation shattered by the mere existence of an untrue rumor that somebody who was not him was sleeping with somebody else who was not him, or why the rumor affects Carissa's attractiveness to him independently of the truth of the rumor, if you try to explain that using only two sentences?"

Iarwain: "Probably not and I suggest asking Sevar about the topic later. Though if you introduce the specific rather than the general context, you might want to take care to ask her... carefully."

Keltham: "I'm not going to ask you for an oath that potentially destroys your soul," because Good people may be all too willing to sacrifice it, if they think that's sufficiently motivated. He considers, momentarily, trying to tap her with a truthspell, but in worlds where she's lying and can't defeat the truthspell, a lot of chaos would break loose moments later, and this may not be the place for it.

Also the rumor is, you know, credibly not true at all, and if it were true, it could be consensual -

- and if it weren't consensual, Carissa might be into that?? Is that how it works???

"Why would I need to introduce the topic to Carissa carefully?" Keltham says, feeling a sudden tinge of dread.

Iarwain: "Because, while the specific balances of power between the Church of Asmodeus and the House of Thrune are complicated and you are frankly unlikely to understand them going on your current level of Golarion political sophistication, the Queen of Cheliax is arguably, and especially as Carissa might see it, the other person in all of Cheliax who could, so far as Carissa knows, successfully get her chained to a bed whether she liked that or not. It would cost the Queen serious political capital with the Church of Asmodeus, but they wouldn't burn down the country over it."

Carissa Sevar: - okay probably Her Imperial Majestrix is mostly talking to Keltham for project reasons but Carissa feels like perhaps it'd be valuable to Her Imperial Majestrix to note that the constraint here is that Asmodeus has intentions for Carissa. And maybe, if that is restricting Her Imperial Majestrix from things she'd otherwise like to do, they can ensure Carissa remains shaped appropriately for Asmodeus's goals with memory-erasing magic so Carissa has no idea what the Queen is doing with her?

...Carissa's model of Aspexia Rugatonn is still not happy about that plan and oh, yep, that'd be why Maillol's in trouble, he waded into a Church-Crown conflict.

Over Carissa.

PRESUMABLY THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF GIRLS AS PRETTY AS HER AND EXACTLY AS TERRIFIED OF THE QUEEN -

- okay set that aside and focus on Keltham. How is he taking this, they may have pushed him too far.

Keltham: Keltham is mostly - confused! "We would ordinarily say in dath ilan that it was not my business or even much of a terrible problem whether Carissa developed a crush on the Queen of Cheliax, and we would also expect that situation to be resolved among mature grownups by Carissa sending the Queen a note to see if she was interested and the Queen's secretary replying 'no'. Or is the problem that Carissa is mono-romantic," Taldane lets him construct the word, thankfully, and hopefully it's obvious what it means, "and falls out of love with me if she falls in love with someone else?"

Iarwain: "Has nobody mentioned yet to you who the Queen of Cheliax is, exactly. Their - general personal attributes."

Keltham: Oh no.

Tonia Barrero, when he asked her, under truthspell, what questions somebody in his position ought to ask somebody under truthspell, listed, 'What sort of person is the Queen of Cheliax', and said a few things that didn't - make much sense at the time, and then said she didn't know much more, in which case, why did she bring up the question - he should have asked her that, in retrospect, but he was very uncomfortable with the maybe-arguably-at-best-semiconsensual-pseudo-mind-reading situation and wanted to get out of it early.

If Keltham's trope alert level had already been raised to its current point, he might, possibly, have remembered earlier to ask more questions, of Carissa say, about this obvious plothook.

"She - took power when she was sixteen, which is young even for Golarion - I guess by coming in and killing whoever previously held power, because she was stronger?"

Abrogail Thrune II:

If Keltham's ~~~~~ alert level had already been raised to its current point, he might, possibly, have remembered earlier to ask more questions, of Carissa say, about this obvious plot~~~~.

What the fuck is a ~~~~~!? And did he just call her a 'plot~~~~'? What's a 'plot~~~~'!?

And damn straight she was stronger, little boy, when she was younger than you are now.

Iarwain: Isidre shakes her head. "By executing the compact with Asmodeus that transformed Cheliax into its present form, which did include the careful removal of many elements of the then-current power structure and their replacement with more sensible persons, which in turn did involve a certain amount of early departure for the afterlife. But, Keltham, you really need to understand what Cheliax was like before that, before you suggest that we should have made any different choices there. Dath ilan, unless I entirely miss my guess, would have regarded them as extreme criminals under whatever notion you have of criminality."

Keltham: "I'm more used to the Chief Executive of a country getting there by a different process, yes. Well, let me ask you a question that, apparently, I should've asked somebody else some time earlier. What sort of person is the Queen?"

Iarwain: "Abrogail Thrune the Second is a few years older than Sevar, now, but that is still - really very young, for a Queen, and she often does not pretend to conduct herself as if she is any older or more mature than she actually is. Maybe in dath ilan you wouldn't expect any such pretense, but it is expected here, and she often does not make it. She is a sorceress of vast power, among the strongest casters in this country and truly inferior to only one, without which basic requisite she could not survive even now in the new Cheliax. Rumors would paint a different picture of her, possibly; but based on a more direct knowledge of Abrogail, I would personally say, myself, that she spends far too much of her time doing her duties and not nearly enough time doing things she finds fun, and that her closest advisors are currently making this problem worse. If you were a Golarion native, I would say that her Evil standing might be threatened, at this rate; but a Golarion native would understand that for hyperbole, it isn't really. But she has been possibly - I don't know if you have the expression. Building up frustration."

"She also happens to be a sexual sadist like yourself. Though that is, again, a much more common thing here and not exceptional, but still."

"She has a known type. Carissa matches it."

Keltham: Keltham's trope alarms are going off so flamingpoop hard right now. He's never heard of such a walking trope. The Queen of Cheliax must be more trope than flesh.

Abrogail Thrune II: WHAT THE FUCK IS A ~~~~~?

Keltham: ...but the person in front of him doesn't know that, doesn't think like that, so why would she -

"Surely there are many other women in Cheliax who are also her type, especially if Carissa's type is as common as you say. Why would you expect the Queen to be interested?"

Carissa Sevar: An EXCELLENT FUCKING QUESTION.

Iarwain: "I am not sure that you properly appreciate who your current girlfriend is, precisely, perhaps because she has held back from telling you. Carissa Sevar had the best spellcraft of anyone at her Worldwound installation, including wizards two circles higher than her wearing +4 Intelligence headbands. Sevar produced enchanted weapons of extraordinary quality and precision. I am reasonably sure that Sevar understands the Law you have spoken upon better than any of your other current students. Better than me, with my headband that provides +6 to Intelligence and +4 to Wisdom, a literally priceless and irreplaceable relic of Cheliax second only to the crown worn by the Queen herself. I'm too busy to directly attend your lessons, it would leave a genuinely huge gap in our government structure if I did, but even if I was there, I am not confident I would understand those lessons better than Sevar does. Cheliax has only twenty million people in it, Keltham, almost all of them very poor and very few of them approaching what you would consider to be average intelligence."

"...also I've observed Abrogail paging through the sections of reports mentioning Sevar looking more than usually interested, so."

"I am interested - if there is any possible way for events to go, past this point, that could possibly be not complicated."

Abrogail Thrune II: Is Sevar internally screaming about this? Abrogail hopes she's internally screaming. You have to work hard to get the level of justified internal screaming that Abrogail hopes this is producing.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa was braced for the Queen to say a bunch of flattering nonsense that has nothing to do with the real reason which is that Asmodeus chose her. Or, well, maybe Asmodeus choosing her was related to her understanding the Law better than almost anyone, but, realistically, it was probably a combination of that plus being attractive to Keltham plus being a heretic in a coincidentally useful direction -

- anyway. Obviously the Queen of Cheliax doesn't like Carissa for the traits that Carissa values most in herself. It would be pathetic to believe that. It would be pathetic to believe even if it's being spoken into your ears with very high Splendour by someone who would know. Carissa is not pathe- okay, Carissa is pathetic, Carissa has spent like five percent of her mental motions this conversation on being happy that Keltham is protective of her, you can't do that and then claim you're not pathetic, but Carissa's not that pathetic. The Queen wants Carissa because she can't have her, and Carissa's personality has very little to do with it, because one doesn't show that much personality while being horribly tortured anyway and the thing the Queen wants to do with Carissa is horribly torture her. This is the not pathetic thing to believe and Carissa believes it.

But it's true that she had the highest spellcraft at her Worldwound installation. And it's kind of nice that Cheliax did have that written down somewhere. (Unless they didn't, and learned it from her irritably thinking it earlier today, which now that she thinks about it seems likelier.)

And it's true that she understands something no one else did, which made Asmodeus choose her.

....and it's true that he'd have done that even if there were only a tiny chance she did anything useful, and that if she fails he won't care if the Queen turns her into a statue and she never ever ever exists again. Stop being pathetic you will be gone you won't exist the stakes are much too high to be that contemptible

Carissa exists because she might serve Asmodeus and might serve Cheliax, and she intends to try to do that, and she does not have any feelings at all.

Abrogail Thrune II: Somebody needs to have a talk with that girl about how Asmodeus does not necessarily desire a tyranny in which all the victims suffer very boringly and pretend to have no feelings about what's being done to them.

Keltham: "If this world is governed by - not the patterns I recognize - then you'd expect that this problem could be solved through the Queen's closest advisors having a talk with her about how it's a bad time to mess around with the project that Asmodeus started and complicate it, especially when a war with Nidal and a war between the gods just started. And then finding her literally anybody else to get laid with."

Iarwain: "That sort of talk has been the approach taken by the Queen's closest advisors for too long a time, and I'm not sure it's really working at this point."

"Keltham, you're missing a lot of context here on how submission works, but - among the approaches that had occurred to me, if things developed in that direction of greater complication - was seeing if the Queen could rent Sevar from you for a half-day for five hundred gold pieces and get it out of her system. Please don't object that you don't own Sevar, the point is that this is a recognized practice when somebody like Sevar gives herself to you, and the fact that the Queen would be renting Sevar from you means that she isn't stealing Sevar from you or fighting with you over Sevar and the whole thing is occurring in a way that acknowledges Sevar is yours and not the Queen's and the Queen only gets to have her because you said so -"

"Did that - make any sense to you, at all, or do I need to back up, I'm sorry if that's all coming on too quickly -"

Keltham: "That's a very heroic attempt to avoid and defuse that complication, and I will put some additional questions on hold to admire your cleverness and creativity there."

"The problem is, if this world isn't governed by patterns, that won't be necessary because the Queen will have one drop of common sense anywhere in her intelligence-boosting super-headband."

"And if this world is governed by the patterns I see, the Queen literally can't make any decision except pursuing Sevar in a way that brings her into conflict with me, possibly the sort that resolves with her being revealed as having finally betrayed Asmodeus and removed from office, and possibly the sort that resolves with the Queen also added to my harem, but the point is, expecting the Queen to not make things more complicated is like asking for Pilar not to end up in Elysium, which no doubt made things more complicated, or for Ione to not deliver prophetic warnings, or for masochists not to exist, or for me to not land close to Sevar at the Worldwound. If the Queen could make any other choice but the one that the 'trope' requires her to make, you'd have some different Queen instead."

Abrogail Thrune II:

Iarwain:
"I'm - I'm sorry, I don't think I understood. Are you saying that if the Queen doesn't pursue Sevar, she'll - be overthrown by a different Queen? Or blink out of existence?"

Carissa Sevar: - okay. Carissa's project authority absolutely does not extend to giving the Queen of Cheliax orders but -

- no! You're bad at understanding where Keltham understands selection to be operating, it's over entire universes. More urgently, the thing to say here is 'I suppose I appreciate you presenting so clear a test of whether your theory is true. I....hope very much that it isn't, but if the Queen of Cheliax ends up inevitably in conflict with you then we'll prepare you for the betrayal of a Kuthite spy; I don't need to understand the patterns to acknowledge that if they're making good predictions they might keep doing that.'

And then once my Ring of Sustenance is working you can have me every night as long as Keltham doesn't end up concluding he was directed to this universe because it'd be the one out of an infinite number where he has the most fascinating sex.

Keltham: "More that the universes with a Queen who doesn't complicate things would have failed to exist in the first place, or maybe from my perspective it's more that I inevitably landed in a universe with a Queen who would. Though from your perspective, if the other universes still exist, it's arguable you should conclude that it's too unlikely that... well, never mind, that starts to trail off into complications again."

Keltham's thoughts are pretty full of ~~~~~~ right now, from the perspective of anybody listening whose nongrasp of probability theory would still have Bayes's Rule coming out as ~~~~~, to say nothing of anthropics producing persistent epistemic disagreements.

Iarwain: "So - if the Queen could rent Sevar from you for a few hours, and then seemed to have gotten Sevar out of her system and was able to maintain amiable relations with you - that would - prove that our world wasn't governed by those patterns? And if that's a decision the Queen just can't seem to make, somehow, we look even harder for a Kuthite spy among your women?"

Carissa Sevar: That is a WORSE VERSION of what Carissa suggested saying and she would light the Queen on fire about it if, you know, everything about the world were completely different.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail's instincts and boosted Splendour were warning her that Keltham would have found Sevar's version suspicious somehow, possibly because it's too characteristic of something only Sevar herself would say. Sevar's mental insolence is, however, noted.

Abrogail's compact does require her to remain an Asmodean in good standing, and she probably stops counting as Asmodean if Sevar doesn't get tortured over this.

Keltham: "For somebody who's never heard of the Law of Probability, you have a remarkable intuitive grasp of what that Law would tell you. Yeah, that's roughly -"

"Well, except for the part where we do have to back up. A lot. Before we actually go try the experiment of the Queen renting Carissa from me."

"First of all."

"What? Lady, what?"

Iarwain: "It is a common and accepted practice for a man who has taken a woman like Sevar - well, in the sense of a woman who's submitted herself to him, not in the sense of her having Sevar's facility with spellcraft - to rent out her, well, her sexuality. Especially if for whatever reason he doesn't have the time or desire to fulfill some parts of her sexuality, and so occasionally rents her to somebody who does."

"The version of this you would - find least disturbing - is when the rental is to particular parties whom the man has carefully scrutinized, and in relationships where at least the woman, and usually also the man, considers themselves to be sexually turned on rather than turned off by the whole premise."

"Outside of Cheliax you would find more disturbing versions of the practice. But also, to be forthright about this, even in Cheliax, it is - fundamentally considered that couple's own business if they want to do more disturbing things, including if the woman says that her man makes all the decisions about that."

Keltham: "So usually when money is moving around that represents, you know, equalizing the supply and demand of something. But this doesn't sound like a market, it sounds like - a sex thing to which the money is incidental. There is not actually a standard market somewhere at which the price of somebody of around Carissa's quality, for half a day, is standardly five hundred gold pieces. Check? I think that's the first very basic point to confirm here."

Iarwain:
"Yes, correct. The practice is considered - very distinct from that of prostitution."

Keltham: "Okay, and also you keep saying 'man' and 'woman' as if these were the appropriate abstractions over myself and Carissa. Is this a," Taldane cannot say 'polarized gendertrope' because it lacks anything corresponding to the Baseline terms 'polarized' or 'gendertrope' or any simple way to compose those concepts. "Is this a, behavior pattern that people in Golarion can adopt, relating to sex and relationships and so on, such that a bunch more men than women do one thing and a bunch more women than men do another?"

Abrogail Thrune II: ...having Keltham actually do this to you feels very different when it's happening to you directly than when it happens to Sevar in the transcripts. This was not how Abrogail expected this conversation to go.

Iarwain: "There are many more female prostitutes than male prostitutes, and then most of the male prostitutes serve male customers. I would guess that a similar ratio holds between female-submissive couples where the woman gets rented out, and male-submissive couples where the man gets rented out, and then most of the time the man gets rented to other men."

"I admit I don't understand why this is an important question."

Keltham: "Because you are describing something that is on my own terms somewhat odd and unexpected and I am trying to figure out which existing concepts it maps onto."

"In dath ilan, we have systems of revocable delegation that people can use to aggregate into much larger political factions in a way that remains legible at every level of organization. Among its other uses, this permits Civilization to annually form a Masculine Faction and Feminine Faction to negotiate with each other about what common masculine and feminine behaviors should be, not one standard for everyone, but pieces you can make your own behavior out of and have them be quickly describable to others and mesh well with other standard behaviors. Like, grandmothers are one subkind of women and grandfathers are one subkind of men, that sort of thing. This requires real Lawfulness and therefore shouldn't be able to exist in Golarion, and therefore all of your notions of what grandmothers and grandfathers should be like, must come from somewhere else -"

"I'm probably digressing here, my point is, you're describing something weird enough that I'm trying to fall back to basics and make sure of my foundations. You are describing a system in which somebody, usually a man, does something with a second person, usually a woman, that falls into a standard pattern that they both understand, and which some third party therefore also understands."

"That system of meshing behavior patterns is that the party of the second part -" Taldane please, you can't use that many syllables for that, your contracts would be infinity pages long.

"That meshing-pattern system is that Two tells One that One can do whatever One wants with Two. After which One rents out some of Two's time to Three, but it's not that Two is anything like a rentable resource that One rents into a market for Twos, it's that One and Two and Three all think that's hot. And maybe also Two likes to trade oral sex for footrubs and Three likes to give footrubs and One does not like to give footrubs, and usually you'd just solve this problem by Two and Three forming a secondary or tertiary relationship," like normal sane people do when monogamy isn't working for someone, "but if Two gave themselves fully to One, then One is supposed to decide who Two fucks, so One being able to demand money for that from Three, is a symbol of how One still has all the Two and hasn't given any of it back to Two to use, or Three paying One is symbolic of how much Three isn't taking away some of what Two gave One, Three is paying One for it. Is that about right?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is concerned about Keltham's inference-pattern here but they're not lying and they're not describing something that doesn't exist in Taldor, so - probably it's just the kind of concerned Keltham is going to be ten times a day until he learns how Golarion works.

Probably.

Iarwain:
"Righter than I would have expected, frankly." They've hit on something governed by a bit of Law, maybe? Or a pattern, a 'trope'? "Is it - something you would find acceptable, if it was something that Sevar found acceptable? Maybe I should back up and ask whether Sevar has said anything to you yet about you getting to decide who she sleeps with? Because if she hasn't, I would predict that you wouldn't even need to ask her explicitly, just wait for her to raise the topic herself."

(There is an art form to these things, you don't ask someone, 'Do you find that unacceptable', because then they'll look for reasons to reject it, you don't even ask them 'is that acceptable' and wait for them to consider the contrary, you add on clauses like 'if Carissa found it acceptable' so they can focus on that and then add another topic afterwards. You don't want them to have nothing to think about except the question of what unacceptable aspects they can find.)

Keltham: "We've had that conversation, yes." Though it of course occurs to him to wonder whether Carissa reported it to Security and now it's being used to fake an advance prediction that's actually a retrodiction.

Abrogail Thrune II: Shit, that's an actual blunder on her part. She jumped on this interesting new successful-predictions-for-credibility trick, and didn't think ahead to how dath ilan would be far more practiced in that, far more sophisticated in it, and far more practiced at catching out simple tricks like the one she just tried. Make a wrong prediction next, to make up for that, or would that itself be the Childishly Obvious Recovery Tactic After Getting Caught Stealing A Successful Prediction in dath ilan?

Iarwain: "And? Is this a way that we can try to prevent this silly pointless triangle between you, Sevar, and the Queen from - Keltham, I'm sorry, I shouldn't pressure you on this, if the concept is unfamiliar. If the answer isn't obviously yes, then - but I don't suppose it's obviously true that money and a small fair trade is the answer?"

(He's an Abadar cleric, it might work.)

Carissa Sevar: Keltham even if he's taken everything maximally well is going to want to ask Carissa. It'd be great news if he didn't but he will. They should let him go and keep reading him to see which parts he did take well, and show Carissa the transcript so she can confirm her working Second Law understanding, and then she can do damage control on whichever parts he didn't take well.

And then probably at some point she will be punished a lot but it would ideally wait until there isn't any immediate damage control needed.

Keltham: "If this was a market problem yes, but it's not, that's part of why I was asking that. It's not obviously no. I think mostly this is all too alien for me as a thing to do with money, and I need to let it sink in over more than just one minute."

"I suspect I would probably want to meet the Queen before renting anybody I care about to her, even if that practice was something that turned out to work for my brain at all, which I am not promising at this point because my brain mostly feels numb. And it's possible that the result of meeting the Queen - Arbograil Thrune Number Two, what was it again - will be that I think she's such a blatant walking living avatar of my memory patterns that I'm not going to think there's any hope in just letting her get it out of her system. I say again, if you could be like, oh, well, there's a sensible person who isn't manifesting 'tropes' at all, that sensible person wouldn't be messing with Asmodeus's project, during a godwar, over Carissa, at all, in the first place."

Iarwain:
"You make a solid and potentially concerning point."

"But if Abrogail Thrune II is not - manifesting 'tropes', as you put it - then I would have actually liked to see - a resolution where the Queen has a few hours of fun and Carissa has some fun and you are cheerful about that. And not the case where, once again, the Queen's advisors just shout her down and tell her to get on with her job and go sleep with somebody else she isn't really attracted to. People who are innately Evil cannot, must not, try to be too Good, it isn't good for them."

"I must say that - my loyalty to the Queen - makes me wonder if the correct course is not simply to say all these things to the Queen herself. Withholding information from her would usually be considered an act of disloyalty, depending on the stakes."

Keltham: "Clever, and it possibly might even work, going on the patterns themselves, because to know them is sometimes to be able to avert them - though this itself, of course, is only another 'trope'. But if you do that -"

"I guess I didn't actually put a confidentiality seal on anything, and sort of assumed given the subject that this part was not just all being transcribed and copied to the Queen, but still. I recommend in strong terms, and request even if retroactively, that you tell her only the part where the 'tropes' are trying to force her to introduce complications in a place they clearly aren't needed. And not mention to her that the two most obvious fates for her if she tries it are, first, being revealed as a traitor and removed as Queen, and second, ending up as my girlfriend. Because if it's the first one, let's not let her know that we know, and if it's the second one, I have no intention of telling any of my kids that is how I met their mother."

Actually now that he's said it out loud, it doesn't sound too bad as a story to tell your kids? Kind of awesome, actually.

Abrogail Thrune II: A relationship with Keltham does seem increasingly desirable! It is not the one he has in mind and Asmodeus has explicitly forbidden it so Abrogail isn't going to go there.

Abrogail Thrune II:
This does leave the point about the first of these two fates not being all that desirable either, really; and Keltham is visibly-to-her being quite sincere about what these 'tropes' would imply as likely outcomes for her.

Iarwain: "I - cannot promise I'll never tell her, it's potentially a matter of loyalty, but I will consider it well and take your words under advisement."

"On that topic - I don't suppose, before I go - though I am already running quite over my time - that you've come to any new thoughts about sharing dath ilan's heritage with Cheliax?"

Abrogail Thrune II: (Abrogail thinks of herself as the person in Cheliax whose job it is to have vision; any vision at all, really. She gives more credence than some people in her government that some critical part of dath ilan's power is not teachable as Law but simply something in their blood. Getting some of Keltham's children for Cheliax - and doing that before this operation blows up and he leaves, if that is something they prove unable to prevent - is a priority she is annoyed by others largely neglecting. She planned to Detect his Thoughts on that subject so long as he was here.)

Keltham: "Probably going to see if this is the sort of godwar that kills fifteen percent of the world population before I bring my kids into it, at the very least. I don't know this place well enough, as yet, to understand what world I would be giving to my children."

Though at least, Governance continuing to pressure him about that, mildly suggests that they're not just teleporting sperm out of his epididymis... well, no, it probably wouldn't survive in the uterus's acidic environment if not mixed with protective seminal fluid, though maybe you could put it directly into the more basic environment past the cervix? Not grabbing the results when he gets oral sex and inserting into vaginas under cover of invisibility, anyways.

Though if they were doing that, they'd be clever enough to go on exerting the same amount of social pressure on him afterwards so he wouldn't get suspicious. But mostly, it sort of seems like Cheliax doesn't really have the optimizing spirit that would do either.

Iarwain: "We can - I hope - wait for the godwar to end, which at least some of our theological advisors seem to think might happen very soon. We are all literally praying for it."

"Keltham, please do consider that if the attack from Nidal had managed to kill you in a way that doesn't allow resurrection - it's not easy but they must have had some goal beyond just inconveniencing us temporarily - then there would be very little of your ideas left, and none of your blood at all to build on them. Golarion would stay as it is for possibly a very long time. Yes. I know. I'm being Good."

Keltham: "Yeah, you are," Keltham says. "My children are not something I'll give away to Good, that's a me-decision and mine alone."

He knows, even as he says it, that it's the sort of thing he might think better of with an Owl's Wisdom.

Abrogail Thrune II: Well that's not great news about his spiritual progress either. Can they give him something really valuable to do with second-circle spells such that he doesn't start using Owl's Wisdom on himself more? Sevar's problem, she supposes.

Iarwain: Paracountess Isidre Astrid Asgavan Thrune rises from her chair, and gives a sober bow to Keltham. "Isidre Thrune," she says, "Isidre of House Thrune, Isidre of the royal house, Paracountess Isidre, all those names are mine alone and will reach me. Do send a message to Isidre, if you think you might want to meet the Queen for purposes of seeing if she's worthy of your Carissa, or if you become sure that you'll never want that. In the latter case, I'm not really sure what to do besides - siding with the Queen's advisors again."

"For whatever it's worth, I've known Abrogail since roughly the day she was born, and I think Abrogail is worthy of Carissa and they would both be a good experience for each other."

Keltham: "Understood. Thank you for continuing to be a very smart person in Cheliax, and for all your hard work running around behind the scenes trying to optimize things."

Keltham: "Ah, that said, before you go, can you point me in whichever direction I should go to get back to Carissa."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I expect you'll have an escort waiting outside, and they'll either take you to Carissa or take you back to your quarters and take a message to Carissa; I don't actually know where she'd be or what she'd be doing right now."

Abrogail Thrune departs the room, her outward form continuing to appear as the sober middle-aged woman; her inward self being, as usual, Abrogail Thrune.

Carissa Sevar: That's an unauthorized lie, Carissa thinks against her better judgment, and then thinks much louder that she does not have ANY CRITICISMS AT ALL of the Queen.

Abrogail Thrune II: She would like to just turn right here and go see Sevar who's right there, even if just for one glimpse at the look on Sevar's face. But if Abrogail starts an interaction now, it might take more time she's already overborrowed; soberly speaking, she needs to get back to her endless war councils if she doesn't want Gorthoklek coming after her again. She usually manages to make her life not be like this, she is not usually the poor little dutiful Abrogail she depicted to Keltham, but it's harder to avoid becoming her during the first days of a war.

...is there a 'trope' a Queen can 'manifest' to cause herself to have shorter workdays, somehow? She probably shouldn't think about that; Keltham's early thoughts did suggest that this might be a road leading to actual insanity. Sevar should try it first.

Iarwain: Carissa Sevar very shortly after receives this parchment message:

One. I have other duties now and will deliver a transcript later. It will not be as useful as you hoped. Most thoughts of Keltham regarding his pattern-sight rested on incomprehensible ideas that I think Golarion does not possess. Some ideas that made it through those inscrutability-heavy sections were disturbing to the point where I must consult Aspexia before I share those with anyone who has her thoughts read as often as you.

Two. You know what you did.

Three. Listening to your thoughts is becoming more painful than amusing. You are not saving yourself any trouble by sending your thoughts scurrying in frantic circles every time I come up in them. You are who you are, you can't actually hide it from me, and you'll earn however much suffering that earns you. Lose hope, give up, and endure.

At the bottom of the parchment is a set of punishment codes describing a moderately severe half-hour session in a temple torture chamber, requiring it to be taken at the recipient's choice of time sometime over the next three days.

Carissa Sevar: Lose hope, give up, and endure.

Easy to do about anything except MAYBE TURNING INTO A STATUE but impossible to do about THAT because not existing isn't the kind of thing that can be endured.

The last Fox's Cunning wears off, leaving her feeling vaguely groggy except well aware this is just what being her - enhanced with a headband, even - is normally like and that soon it'll feel normal again.

She hurries back to Keltham's room so she can evade having to explain why she was out.

Keltham: When Keltham reaches his bedroom, he glances in a direction and stops moving, then crosses to stare out the window, exposed to its palace courtyard and therefore ultimately the outdoors.

It's raining really hard. The winds have picked up too. The roses on the rosebush outside are looking bedraggled, there are rose petals being windily whirled about in the water puddled in the ground.

"How much of this does it take to destroy significant fractions of the food supply?" Keltham says, his voice quieter than usual. "Is only this much maybe - the sort of rain you get at least once a year anyways? This is a fairly stormy day for the city I grew up in, but we had those days now and then..."

"If the crops are already gone, just tell me, don't temporize."

Carissa Sevar: "It rains like this sometimes anyway, in Cheliax, so Cheliax won't have lost the crops yet. There might be places where it's causing more of a problem, if they grow different things, if it's supposed to be the dry season there, but - even there, I don't think it's too late, not after a day."

Keltham: Please let it not be too late.

Keltham realizes that his eyes are starting to water.

He didn't mean - to hurt anyone - by coming here - by being in Golarion -

Let alone kill, kill, fifteen percent of the population, even if they get afterlives, that's still, kind of, bad -

Yes, he knows, he gets it, this step was literally unavoidable in any solution, he's not stupid, he gets that, anything bringing hope into this world would have set off Zon-Kuthon -

The thought eases the ache in his eyes, but not enough.

Does Carissa's gendertrope-substitute tell her it's okay, for her boyfriend to cry in front of her, as his own gendertrope tells him that if you can't cry in front of your girlfriend you can't cry in front of anyone? Or is it all mismatched madness and insanity as things always are in Golarion, men told to do one thing and women who can only love them if they do something else?

"Does it help the gods fight, if we pray to them?" Keltham whispers.

Carissa Sevar: " - the general understanding is that yes. Only - a very tiny bit - but it'll be everyone in all of Cheliax, and lots of other people too -" if the Good countries aren't just rooting for Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon to destroy each other - "and it does matter, if it's that many."

And she puts her arm around him and leans on his shoulder, because it seems like the thing to do.

Keltham: He puts an arm around her as well, holds her tight.

"Is there anything more to it than closing your eyes, thinking of your god, and hoping that they win?"

Carissa Sevar: " - what I was taught in school was that you imagine your god is trying to draw a better world in grains of sand, on the ground, and you're one of the grains of sand, and you want to be light enough to find your way to where you're needed, but tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away, once you're there. ...I don't know what parts of that are essential and what are just the closest you can get little children."

Keltham: "Light enough to find your way to where you're needed," Keltham whispers, "tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away once you're there."

It could almost be a dath ilani poem from some layer of some virtue, though he does not know which virtue it would correspond to. There is a spirit in it that is not in any poem he can remember having heard before, something that comes to it from the way that it is a relation between a mortal and something larger than that, being trusted.

He closes his eyes and imagines it, he doesn't bother with imagining a better world drawn in grains of sand, the better world his god draws is drawn in grains of people, agents all over the world interacting with each other. Their actions scattered and uncoordinated, for now, stepping on each other and hurting each other, for now, but there are other actions they could take instead that would make all of them better off, fairly.

He imagines himself as one of those grains, one of those people, and if this was going to be a realistic metaphor he should be a special one, maybe, except that right now he's not. Just one of all the people in Golarion hoping for this war to end quickly, and contributing the tiny little action that is cheering their god on; if they all do that, they'll all be better off. Keltham visualizes a grain like any other, to represent himself.

Light enough to find your way to where you're needed.

Tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away once you're there.

It's not his comparative advantage, no, but if almost everyone in Golarion is doing their part, right now, he can spend fifteen minutes doing his own.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa closes her eyes and prays for Asmodeus to win.

It's a sincere prayer, obviously. She does not like Zon-Kuthon and she believes in the project Zon-Kuthon was willing to blow up everything in order to oppose.

She's definitely some flavor of heretic at this point. She isn't sure what flavor. She assumes they're mostly monitoring for whether she's about to betray the project, and she's not, she believes in the project with as much conviction as she can recall ever having felt for anything that isn't the continued survival of Carissa Sevar. Which is also served by the project succeeding. But there was a set of stories meant to point people like her in the right direction, and she knew they were lies, and now she had to face what specifically they were lies about, and learn a new set, which are also lies, but lies better suited to the position she finds herself in now, and -

- she knows she can't handle the truth. She knows that even in dath ilan there's the concept not everyone can handle every truth, she knows it's possible to learn the Law even when many truths are hidden from you. But she's slightly worried that until she invents evil dath ilan thinking herself everything'll ring a bit wrong, not quite crafted for a mortal mind in the particular fragile place Carissa finds herself in.

Except, maybe, advice for little children about prayer. Slightly adjusted advice, no one ever told Carissa Asmodeus was trying to craft a better world. That's still true. It's true to Keltham, too, it landed, meant something, and she can worry later about what that means for the plan where they seduce him into Evil, it seems just as important to their plans that they find the bits of their own teaching that feel true even to dath ilan.

She imagines herself a grain of sand in the grand designs of Asmodeus, and strives to be placed where she'd needed, and fierce in remaining there, no matter what interference of other gods or other grains of sand, and hopes that Asmodeus can see, from where he stands, something beautiful and right and strong and Lawful that can be built of mortal building blocks.

Zon-Kuthon: Zon-Kuthon is losing too quickly.

Zon-Kuthon is a god; and depending on how you count it, either a very old entity, or something built out of the corpse of something that old. He models reality, therefore, entirely in probability distributions. He has no mortal heritage of any other way of seeing.

When this war began Zon-Kuthon formed a probability distribution over how long the fight should take, and gambled on a chance to drag it out long enough to ruin the crops and visit misery on a generation. But He is losing too fast, in the unreasonably far tails of that probability distribution, especially given the further information He now has about the war's participants.

The external-demigod-assembling fragments that Zon-Kuthon deliberately set to reunite with Himself quickly and early in predictable locations, to act as tests of the theory that all His longer-buried fragments are being hunted and destroyed somehow, returned to Him. And yet Zon-Kuthon... does not have an ominous intuition, He was never that mortal. He has rather the hypothesis that Nethys is opposing Him, that this is the reason for His losing too quickly, and the implication that, if so, His longer-buried external-demigod-assembling fragments will be gone.

He randomizes, then, with far too much power, in a way that Nethys can of course see but should not be able to foresee with prophecy shattered; and based on the result makes an expensive calculation of where something will be while its trajectory is still complicated; He focuses much of Himself someplace it is not at all convenient for Him to be, losing ground in the war as He does; and there He finds that His external-demigod-assembling fragment that should have been flitting through that location is gone.

He knows, then, He understands the betrayal and that Nethys it was who worked it all upon Him from the beginning.

Zon-Kuthon: And what does Zon-Kuthon do, when He is betrayed?

Mostly, of course, Zon-Kuthon does what serves Zon-Kuthon's longest purposes of pain, misery, terror, mutilation, woe.

But if there were a tiebreaker between two strategies - if there is some little thing that Zon-Kuthon can do along the way -

Then Dou-Bral, if He had been so betrayed, would have done some last thing He could to work vengeance on His betrayer.

And all that Dou-Bral was, Zon-Kuthon is not.

Nethys is betraying Him? Of course He is. How amusing. No doubt Zon-Kuthon will be the first of many. Zon-Kuthon then will tell nothing to the other gods of how Nethys has begun the series of downfalls that will inevitably lead to Their own destruction, destruction more complete than Zon-Kuthon's mere sealing. Whoever currently thinks they are Nethys's ally will find themselves mistaken; Zon-Kuthon can guess, of course, that Nethys is probably trying to side with fellow gods who also once were mortal, but Nethys being Nethys, the road that has been started down is one from which Nethys is unlikely to be able to turn back.

It is not a certainty, obviously, this beautiful vision. But the probability is one to gamble on; and a better gamble than the one where Zon-Kuthon announces Nethys's sins, in which case there is not much chance at all of lasting damage to the world and misery to the gods.

He will go into the vault, then, for a time, and say nothing of Nethys's betrayal. Zon-Kuthon has been exiled once before, after all, and it did not last. Evil stays contained less long than one might hope. If Nethys brings enough ruin to the gods, the vault will last even less.

Zon-Kuthon's pieces begin to gather into the vault. They will not slay Him; they need Him to counterbalance Asmodeus yet.

Nethys: There, there, there, and there.

???: Four simultaneous expensive and exhausting strikes, delivered with extreme calculation, striking where not many gods can see, destroying four key subassemblies whose encrypted nature is that they pin the true center of Zon-Kuthon, landing just as the vault door is almost sealed shut.

It is possible that this will kill Zon-Kuthon.

It is also possible that Dou-Bral is still in there somewhere, and will be able to free Himself at last.

Either way, the process will take a while. Nobody is liable to notice, or reason through that it wasn't just a result of divine combat, if Zon-Kuthon's clerics lose only their ninth-circle spells at first. It will be longer yet before His clerics lose their eighth-circle spells as well.

It's going to hurt Zon-Kuthon the entire time He's dying, which isn't particularly desirable, but is also an acceptable price to pay.

Iarwain: The vault is shut.

The lights in the sky flicker out, not directly seeable above the layer of clouds now covering the entire planet, but some wizards and other spellcasters know. They cheer, and go to cry the good news to others.

Not nearly all clerics, but a few clerics here and there, of eighth or ninth circle, receive faint touches of reassurance from their exhausted gods. They cheer, and go to cry the good news to others.

High on mountains, here and there, above even the clouds of war, metallic and chromatic dragons watch the sky's lights fade, and raise their heads and bellow victory for Good and Evil.

It's still raining, of course, clouds don't just vanish when the gods stop stirring them. But now the rains will grow lesser rather than more, and soon in many places they will be gone.

Merry Christmas.

Nethys: Nethys is sort of tired now and has been making Himself be way too coherent for way too long and He needs to be everywhere but also on some distant planets making pretty explosions for a while.

???: It's okay, Nethys. Go rest, or be more where you are resting. I think we can handle the plan from here.

Nethys: Bye for now, then, mysterious female god!

???: ...Nethys, you obviously know who I am, for reasons up to and including being the God of Knowledge.

Nethys: I know! But the things that watch from orthogonal angles to ultimate reality don't!

???: Nethys, I think you actually should rest.

Nethys: You're not my real mom but fine.

Iarwain:

Nethys: Oh but until Nethys gets back, nobody tell Keltham about the part where everything he thinks is a trope is actually not that trope and none of the forces structuring his universe were at any point being deliberately shaped to put him into an eroLARP and he actually is just Wrong Genre Savvy reading faces in the clouds. Nethys wants to see Keltham's face when he finds out!

Wait. Nethys is actually always everywhere and sees everything.

Well, please wait anyways!

???: Nethys, I think you should rest literally right now.

Nethys: Nethys will make RESTFUL EXPLOSIONS.

lintamande: In Egorian, trumpets ring out about three minutes after Aspexia Rugatonn gets the news and some wizards on aerial teams above Nidal Send in with the same.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa's head snaps up from praying.

" - that's - got to be good news, they wouldn't trumpet for bad -"

Keltham: His eyes snap open and he looks out the window, as if he's going to see something, but obviously, of course, it's still raining.

Hope is already lifting in him. Twelve days to ruin the world, last time, one day this time and it was just a regular storm when it ended. That doesn't sound like a hundred and fifty million people are going to die.

"Can you - go get confirmation, and come back to me," Keltham says.

Carissa Sevar: "Yes." And she opens his door and takes off down the hall towards the temple.

Keltham: As soon as the door is closed, Keltham puts his face into his hands and starts sobbing.

Carissa Sevar: On the streets, presumably, people are rejoicing, but in the temple they're not; if there's a lessening in the general atmosphere of fear and doom, it's a slight one. Maillol's of course still out. The fleeting thought that she should get the punishment over with now while her torturer will be in a good mood doesn't even seem like it'd be true, never mind that it'd be irresponsible, Keltham told her to come back.

"Keltham asked for news," she says, because it seems slightly less stupid than "did we win."

Iarwain: "Asmodeus won, we have confirmation on that from Hell now. Zon-Kuthon's not dead, though, the fucking other gods let our Lord do most of the real work and then sealed Zon-Kuthon away, in a vault to which Iomedae has the key, in case they want to use Him against our Lord some day." The second-circle priest speaking spits on the floor nearby, to clear his mouth from speaking Iomedae's name. "Nidal's clerics will keep getting spells. Doesn't change that their god is sealed up and Asmodeus is no longer distracted by fighting Him, so now they're fucked."

Carissa Sevar: " - well. I don't know why they think it'd go any better for Zon-Kuthon if they ever do let Him out. - I'm not sure what parts of that I want Keltham authorized with. That Zon-Kuthon's in a vault not dead seems fine, and is necessary to explain why the war with Nidal isn't pretty much over; that the Good gods did that to counterbalance Asmodeus, I'm leaning no; maybe they did it because it's....faster...would it in fact have been faster..."

Iarwain: "Think you want either the Grand High Priestess or an older devil for that one."

Carissa Sevar: And the Grand High Priestess is incredibly busy and Carissa doesn't in fact have a line to Hell but she's not actually willing to go back to Keltham with a lie that isn't shaped like the truth.

"How long have people been waiting for an audience with the Grand High Priestess, I'm expected to go right back to Keltham once I have news."

Iarwain: "Start with 'forever' and adjust downwards from there, but not very far."

Carissa Sevar: "Great. I'll go back with an incomplete story, then, and I request that when we do next have a line with Hell the question be conveyed."

Iarwain: The priest gives her a skeptical look (maybe this ignorant fool doesn't know who Carissa Sevar is?) but dutifully scribbles down a request and the name of the third-circle wizard who made it.

Carissa Sevar: Well, you only get to have the great fun of revealing to someone that you're much more important than they thought if they don't in fact handle your requests appropriately for the security clearance and information they have, that's the rules of running a functional military.

Carissa heads back.

Keltham: Keltham is cleaning up his face using Prestidigitation.

"Enter," he says, with an obviously hoarse voice, when Carissa knocks; he has enough dignity not to try to hide the evidence.

Carissa Sevar: " - hey. Got confirmation, the god-war is over for now...are you all right?"

Keltham: "Basically. I was - crying, actually, I'm sorry for sending you away like that, if it was something that would have been important for you to see, and I'm also sorry if being sent to run errands like that isn't the right way to treat the best spellcrafter at the Worldwound, I basically actually did it because I was afraid I - would do something in front of you - that your concept of things - says somebody like me shouldn't do."

Carissa Sevar: " - I doubt I'm the best spellcrafter at the Worldwound," she says because she wants to give her brain a little more time to catch up on the rest of that. "At my installation, yeah, but I'm third circle, there are things you can't even begin to understand until you can cast Permanency and Create Lesser Demiplane... which, you know, just give me a decade, I'll get there.... uh. It's not important to me to see you cry, if you prefer not to have people see you cry, or prefer not to have me see you cry, specifically -

- and I think Chelish people do do less emotional expression where other people can see it than dath ilani people do -

- but if this is about, uh, scripts for our kind of relationship, well, I think a lot of the appeal, to people who want someone who's all theirs, is that they don't have to do a lot of concealing vulnerability and adversarial playing? And can just, you know, cry or whatever, and not think, 'well, is she going to think less of me now'. I think that's at least part of the point."

Keltham: "Okay. Good. That's the same way in dath ilan. If I'd seen this possibility coming which I would have if I'd bothered to consider possibilities for six seconds then we could have had this conversation in advance instead of afterwards. Sorry."

Carissa Sevar: - hug?

Keltham: Hug, yeah.

Keltham: After a bit -

"So, what did you mean, 'for now'." Beep beep, trope alarm, his brain would be doing it louder if his brain generally and that section particularly wasn't so tired.

Carissa Sevar: "Apparently Zon-Kuthon is locked away in a vault, rather than dead. Immediate implications: the war will last much longer and be much bloodier, because His clerics will still get spells. I asked why we did that rather than just destroy him, but all the people who might possibly know that are very busy. Might be because - it would've taken twelve days -"

Keltham: "Yeah. Legit. Fair. Valid."

Trope-based prediction: Zon-Kuthon remains a threat, is going to be a recurring problem, and can only be killed permanently by a true Golarion Civilization that has ascended far enough to do more quickly what would take the current gods twelve days.

...why does that thought make him feel so tired. He doesn't, doesn't really want to live in a world based on tropes, actually? When his sexuality exists again he'll ask it about this whole rental concept and see if the entire Queen situation can be defused by people just being sensible people, and then if that works it will be absolute proof that there are no tropes and he won't have to worry about tropes any more.

Yes. Keltham is aware that this is not how the Law of Probability works.

Keltham: "Need to lie down for a while, I think. Would prefer somebody to cuddle while I do that. Feel a bit bad about using one of Cheliax's best third-circle wizards for it, but I might want to talk to my cuddle pillow at some point and there's not actually all that many people here with at least average intelligence."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa looks very convincingly baffled. "....I'd be happy to cuddle you."

Keltham: She is so loudly baffled that even Keltham is able to notice!

"Paracountess Isidre Several Middle Names Thrune told me, well, a bunch of stuff not gonna go through it all, but somewhere in there she mentioned that I was not entirely aware of who'd given herself to me and tried to remedy that some."

"I think she likes you, in the way of somebody wearing an overpowered intelligence headband who reads interesting reports about somebody else and decides they like them."

Carissa Sevar: "Huh. Well, they say it's good to have friends in court, if you're going to be in court.

They also say to avoid being in court if you can, but I think that's mostly advice that was true in my mother's time and isn't as true anymore."

Keltham: He takes her by the arm, gently because he's not questioning his own impulse to be gentle about it, and draws her into the bed with him. No chains.

Otolmens: Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus.

Asmodeus: Does Otolmens have any idea how fucking tired Asmodeus is right now?

Otolmens: Tired is the exhaustion of all available resources. Since Asmodeus continues to function, Otolmens does not see how He can be tired.

Otolmens: The anomaly is out of the anomaly containment zone.

Otolmens: Move it back.

Asmodeus: Why is His life like this.

Asmodeus: I was not responsible for the anomaly leaving the containment zone, Asmodeus sends back to Her. With Otolmens it is necessary to explain many things that other gods would simply deduce for themselves. I did not choose it. I did not expect it.

Zon-Kuthon, a known existential threat, attacked the exact location where my mortal followers had secured and contained the anomaly.

My anomaly-storing followers validly deduced that this meant that Zon-Kuthon knew about the anomaly, knew where the anomaly was being stored, and was targeting the anomaly.

They knew that if Zon-Kuthon had attacked the anomaly at this location before, Zon-Kuthon might attack the same location again, more forcefully, and perhaps breach containment.

They therefore moved the anomaly to an even more protected location which Zon-Kuthon might not know to target, though they are protecting it without trying to make that assumption.

Since You had only recently declared the containment zone and I was busy containing known existential threat Zon-Kuthon, my followers did not know, while making this decision, that they were leaving Your containment zone in their choice of new location.

I realize that this is not the outcome You desired, Otolmens. But I, Asmodeus, have not acted with intent to contravene the spirit, let alone the letter, of your Pharasma's-Name Edict, and the subsequent events will clearly be legible to Pharasma or any other sufficiently informed gods as being how I described them.

Asmodeus goes legible so that Otolmens can see that He is being completely sincere. Look how legible Asmodeus is.

Otolmens: Zon-Kuthon is now SEALED, meaning that ASMODEUS's work is now OVER. OTOLMENS, on the other hand, continues to be responsible for monitoring or containing 2,885 other active existential threats, which you do not see Her being 'tired' about.

There is now nothing preventing Asmodeus from giving instructions to Asmodeus-obeying mortals, such as, for example, instructions to move the anomaly back to the containment zone. Where Zon-Kuthon will not be able to attack it again, since Zon-Kuthon is now sealed.

Therefore Asmodeus's reasoning, however valid it may have been YESTERDAY, is currently NOT VALID and Asmodeus should instruct His mortals to move the anomaly back to the designated anomaly containment zone.

Asmodeus: What Asmodeus is trying to say here is that this is not Asmodeus's problem. This is Otolmens's problem.

Otolmens: Otolmens's problems are EVERYONE's problems.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus does not, in fact, actually believe that this particular anomaly is going to destroy the world, just because it looks very anomalous and was produced by the laws of physics breaking down like one time. Which makes it, on Asmodeus's view, not Asmodeus's problem.

Asmodeus: Furthermore, Otolmens is once again failing to understand the mortal world at all.

Zon-Kuthon has Zon-Kuthon-obeying mortal followers. They still know where the former anomaly storage location was. If Asmodeus instructs His followers to move the anomaly back to where it was, Zon-Kuthon's followers may attack the anomaly storage location again, even though Zon-Kuthon Himself is now sealed.

Asmodeus's followers know this, in fact, which is why they have not already moved the anomaly back.

Otolmens: How does ZON-KUTHON have ZON-KUTHON-OBEYING MORTALS. Zon-Kuthon literally has no purpose except for making mortals UNHAPPY.

Asmodeus: Because some idiots gave mortals free will and now nothing they do will ever make sense again, that's why.

Otolmens: The designated anomaly containment zone is large enough to contain many mortal-sized objects.

ASSUMING that all things are as Asmodeus has described them, Asmodeus should provide His followers with the coordinates of the designated anomaly containment zone, and tell them to move the anomaly BACK into the containment zone but to choose a NEW location within it.

Asmodeus: Properly securing, containing, and protecting the anomaly requires an anomaly-securing-containing-and-protecting installation.

Proper security on such an installation requires Asmodeus's followers to, for example, install an interdiction field over the installation. Such as this interdiction field right here, over the former site of the anomaly. Would Otolmens agree that this is reasonable?

Otolmens: Yes! This sounds EXTREMELY reasonable. Otolmens is GLAD that Asmodeus is being so reasonable. An interdiction field should definitely be placed over the anomaly's NEW location as well.

Asmodeus: Indeed! Unfortunately the installation of interdiction fields requires Asmodeus's followers to use up scarce, expensive resources! Before the war started, Asmodeus's followers were able to install the previous interdiction field over the anomaly's previous location, at great expense to themselves; this, in fact, is the only reason why existential threat Zon-Kuthon's mortal followers do not already have the anomaly in their possession.

Now, however, in addition to having already used up many resources on the previous interdiction field, Asmodeus's followers are at war with Zon-Kuthon's followers to help prevent further existential threat from any previous plans Zon-Kuthon has laid. This will be grindingly expensive to Asmodeus's followers.

They cannot afford to lay a new interdiction field while the war is still continuing, so they stored the anomaly inside a previously built interdiction field with existing heavy security.

Otolmens: How long will this WAR continue? Otolmens can continue to watch the anomaly more intensively for several minutes, if it's expected to continue that long.

Asmodeus: It's going to be a while. Months or years, not minutes.

Otolmens: This is UNACCEPTABLE.

Asmodeus: That sounds like an Otolmens problem rather than an Asmodeus problem.

Asmodeus is going to be blunt here. Asmodeus does not actually see a way that Otolmens gets everything She wants unless She is willing to compromise with Asmodeus and make a trade.

Otolmens: WHAT does Asmodeus WANT.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus continues to want any of the top 18 services from the previously transmitted list of 78 potentially uniquely valuable services that Otolmens could perform for Asmodeus.

Otolmens: Otolmens continues to REMEMBER how Otolmens was ALMOST tricked into teleporting the Crown of Death out of the interdicted Crypts of Tukhanox buried far beneath a plantation owned by some mortal, into the hands of the mortal who owned that plantation. Thankfully SHIZURU went very legible and showed Otolmens that this act was not just "A simple act of material relocation that Otolmens is uniquely suited to perform, returning a mortal's legally owned possession to that mortal" and would in fact drastically upset interactions between mortals all over Golarion and probably get Her in trouble with Pharasma.

Everything on this list presumably has the SAME quality. Otolmens is capable of GENERALIZING.

Asmodeus: What if Asmodeus generates a new service and then Otolmens pings Shizuru to see if She has any objection to that one? If Shizuru doesn't respond, presumably the service is safe.

Otolmens: Otolmens has noticed that Shizuru has not responded to any pings over the last LARGE NUMBER OF TIME UNITS. Perhaps She is actually tired.

Furthermore Asmodeus could pick a service that drastically upsets the balance between Law and Chaos in Golarion in favor of Law, which SHIZURU would presumably be in favor of. Just because Otolmens is Lawful Neutral Herself does not mean that She would ever overstep the bounds laid down for Her by Pharasma.

Asmodeus: Well then.

Perhaps Otolmens could contact a Chaotic Good god, such as, for example, Cayden Cailean, and ask that god to suggest a service that Otolmens could perform for Asmodeus that would be fair compensation for Asmodeus's followers doing something very expensive for them, during the ongoing war with Nidal. Do not mention the part about the anomaly, of course, because neither of Us wants any more gods paying attention to it.

Whatever Cayden Cailean suggests will not be a Lawful Evil trap, and if it's any sort of Chaotic Good trap, Asmodeus will warn Otolmens of that!

Otolmens: CAYDEN CAILEAN is one of the gods whose unwanted interventions forced Otolmens into issuing an Edict in Pharasma's Name. What is CAYDEN CAILEAN even DOING by intervening in Cheliax. Why is ASMODEUS suggesting HIM. Are they in CAHOOTS.

Asmodeus: Pick some other Chaotic Good god then. Pick one who's currently very opposed to Asmodeus. Asmodeus is really trying to work with Otolmens here!

Oh, but don't tell them that asking them was Asmodeus's idea, though. Chaotic Good gods might not respond at all if they think Asmodeus is the one responsible for the call. Chaotic Good gods usually hate Asmodeus a lot.

Otolmens: This does seem... reasonable?

Otolmens sends a ping.

Asmodeus: (Manipulating Otolmens to a particular conclusion that She is allowed to reach is easier than with other gods, because Otolmens does not try to be less predictable; it is unfortunate that most of the conclusions one might desire from Her are ones She will not reach by any pathway.

There is, very clearly, a plot afoot, one that has just resulted in a god's downfall. Asmodeus wants to know what that plot is, whether Asmodeus's interests are a primary target of it, who exactly is behind it.

He needs information.

He has a list of suspects.

Who is known to already know about, and have acted around, the anomaly? Abadar, Nethys, Otolmens, Irori, Cayden Cailean.

Otolmens need not be considered.

In the case that Asmodeus's interests are being targeted by the plot, Abadar would not have originally reached out to Asmodeus with a poisoned trade; Abadar retaliates, in such matters, but does not attack. Also the whole thing is not really Abadar's style.

The remaining gods involved, Cayden Cailean, Nethys, and Irori, are all former mortals. Formerly mortal gods do tend to be more interventionist in mortal matters, and so more likely to appear there, but still. The thought has not escaped Asmodeus that perhaps there is some common interest of the gods who were once human, opposed to the interests of the gods who never were.

Who else was clearly involved?

Gorum, Chaotic Neutral god of battle, who suddenly switched sides about whether Zon-Kuthon should be allowed to roam free. Gorum being Gorum, He might not demand to know all about it, it is not in the nature of War that all soldiers must understand why they fight; but whoever contacted Him and successfully brought Him on board was probably somebody whose purpose Gorum finds sympathetic.

Iomedae is formerly human, and her work often conduces to Gorum's ends. And Iomedae now holds the key to a certain vault. But Iomedae will only use that key under certain rigidly defined conditions; holding it does not clearly benefit Her by much.

And if you consider this entire plot, it does look, a bit, more in the style of Chaos than of Law, or at most Neutral on that axis. To be a god is not to have the nature of carrying out strategies that some third party might see as nothing but otherwise-featureless choices of paths to final consequences; if that were so, there would be little overt difference between Lawful and Chaotic ones. Gods drink more deeply than that, of their own natures, and Lawful gods make Lawful plans and Chaotic gods make Chaotic ones.

Asmodeus will see, then, what Milani, formerly-mortal Chaotic Good goddess of revolution, will do, given a prompt to meddle in this particular issue, and perhaps that will prove revealing.)

Milani: Greetings, Otolmens. We are all very puzzled, and worried on behalf of Golarion, given some of your recent actions. Dare I hope that an explanation is about to be provided?

Otolmens: Otolmens is VERY SYMPATHETIC to this WORRY. However, IRORI and ABADAR have both warned her that TELLING more gods what is happening may cause MORE gods to intervene and then matters will become MORE complicated.

Milani: Irori and Abadar, hmm. Then if You're not here to tell Me what's going on, what's up?

Otolmens: Otolmens is trying to get ASMODEUS to do something for Her and ASMODEUS wants a trade and OTOLMENS needs a suggestion that is not going to be an AWFUL TRAP like EVERY OTHER THING THAT ASMODEUS HAS EVER SUGGESTED.

Milani: Are You very sure that Asmodeus did not manipulate You into this situation in the first place?

Otolmens: Yes. Asmodeus went legible about that. His explanation of how it happened was COMPLICATED and full of MORTAL THINGS and Otolmens still does not understand WHY ZON-KUTHON HAS ANY FOLLOWERS but Asmodeus clearly showed Her that He had no intention for any of that to actually happen.

Milani: I see. And are you quite sure that Asmodeus would not just do whatever needs doing anyways, without payment, or at a much lower payment, if it is the sort of issue that demands Your attention in the first place?

Otolmens: Asmodeus is being VERY UNREASONABLY CALM about this WHOLE THING and says He does NOT THINK THE WORLD IS GOING TO END and DID go legible to show Otolmens that He was sincere in that too.

Milani: And what is it that Asmodeus wants You to pay Him to do? Please be as precise as possible so I can check it for traps.

Otolmens: Unfortunately that would ITSELF be overly revealing which IRORI and ABADAR warned Her not to do.

To say things at a LEVEL OF ABSTRACTION that is APPROPRIATE and hopefully SAFE:

Otolmens wanted Asmodeus to get His followers to do something that seemed very straightforward to HER and that would MAKE EVERYONE SAFER.

Asmodeus presented a reasonable-seeming argument that His mortals would actually need to do MORE COMPLICATED THINGS that are EXPENSIVE FOR MORTALS in order to DO WHAT OTOLMENS ASKED and said that His followers had INSUFFICIENT RESOURCES due to their ongoing war with ZON-KUTHON'S MORTAL FOLLOWERS. Otolmens still does not understand WHY Zon-Kuthon has ANY mortal followers.

Milani: (To Asmodeus:)

What are you playing at?

Asmodeus: Milani. What an unpleasant day this has suddenly become.

Asmodeus is playing at many things. Milani will find out about some of them in due time.

What's this call about?

Milani: Otolmens contacted Me asking to suggest a non-trapped service that She could perform for you, because She wants something from You, and You, for some reason, are not just giving it to Her.

Asmodeus: Oh? Clever of Her.

Well, Asmodeus is being, in fact, pretty straightforward for once, more straightforward than He'd be with anyone who wasn't Otolmens.

Otolmens asked for Asmodeus to tell His followers to do something very expensive in the middle of their war with Nidal. It would cost them somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 gold pieces, more than 50,000gp, less than 200,000gp.

Asmodeus does not think that this matter is going to destroy the world and is not going to do this out of the charity of His heart.

Asmodeus wants to be paid. He's not going to mess with Otolmens, because Otolmens, but He wants to be paid.

That's it. Look at how legible Asmodeus is being about how He didn't set Otolmens up for this, didn't secretly prompt Her into making the request, and isn't trying to sneakily make His mortals do anything more expensive.

If Milani could suggest a straightforward trade and service for Otolmens to do, that Asmodeus will accept, without being particularly Chaotic or Good about it which Asmodeus will NOT accept, then Milani would be doing Her proper part to help out Otolmens, just as Asmodeus is not trying to pull anything complicated on Her.

As for specifics beyond that, Asmodeus will not discuss Otolmens's affairs without Her consent, lest even more gods meddle in them.

Milani: Really. You're not going to overcharge Her or underdeliver, relative to Her own goals and the counterfactuals you actually otherwise expect, at all, not even a little.

Asmodeus: Nope. Because Otolmens. Look how legible Asmodeus is being about that.

Milani: Seems like a missed opportunity for the two of Us, really.

Asmodeus:

Asmodeus: Asmodeus admits that He was not expecting Milani to say that.

Milani: Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil do not have many common interests, but there are some, as we have all been recently reminded. Given this mutual opportunity, we should make as much of it as we can, with appropriately careful bargaining to make sure that the benefits fall within the overlap of our interests, and that side effects of our obtaining our respective benefits do not harm the other.

Asmodeus: ...Asmodeus is listening.

Milani: I propose that I suggest to Otolmens a payment that will be acceptable to Her, that will not actually cost Her significantly given Her capabilities in the material world, and that will constitute a relatively large payment for the service She requests.

The service I have in mind will benefit Cheliax, currently Yours for now. Cheliax by and large tends to do things that I find very unpleasant. But as the symmetry and opposition between your interests and mine is not perfect, there is a chance here for mutual benefit. Nidal, for example, manages to be such an awful place that Cheliax is actually better than it, and for Cheliax to conquer Nidal entirely would serve both of Us well - though the gain from Your perspective would be larger than the gain from Mine, and I would demand payment to make up that difference.

I propose in particular that you legibly exhibit to Me your honest expectation of how long the war with Nidal will otherwise last and how much it will otherwise cost; our compact will call for You to pay Me for how much better for Cheliax the war ends up going, compared to that expectation, after I suggest my proposed service to Otolmens. You will pay me for improvements as they become nearly certain, however, rather than waiting for the war to end. I would commit not to using those payments to work against Your interests; not everything that I want is something you hate.

One similarly observes that although You derive similar pleasure from torturing most of the souls in your possession, there are in truth some souls' tortures that I find more tragic than others, even though they are all tragic. If Cheliax ends up with a counterfactually larger population compared to what You expected, after Otolmens's intervention suggested by me - due to their increased counterfactual wealth and hence population growth, or their conquest of other territories - the compact would call for You to instruct Cheliax to use fewer of certain tactics and techniques that you designed specifically to lead good people into damnation. If the payment cannot be made up that way, it can be made up in relaxations of other Chelish policies designed at producing damnations of people who are not, in fact, particularly evil. I would also accept payment in the form of stays of torment for souls of my choice in Hell.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus has many thoughts about this; even this fraction of His mind is large and has room for many thoughts inside it. Among those thoughts is that this compact would happen to benefit Milani a great deal more if, for some reason, Asmodeus had otherwise underestimated how well the war with Nidal would go for Cheliax; and Milani, somehow, knew about this, when Asmodeus did not.

It is still relatively good news about whether Milani - and some conspiracy that She is part of - is mainly plotting something directly and irrevocably opposed to Asmodeus's interests; unless, of course, that is exactly what Milani wants Asmodeus to think.

Asmodeus responds with a counter-proposal. It has much more stringent definitions of exactly what kind of counterfactual improvements will be said to be traceable to Milani's particular suggestion for Otolmens's intervention. He is not willing to include all the knock-on effects, just in case Milani has something up Her sleeve in one of them.

(The overcomplicated terms are designed to exclude, in passing, improvements in war conditions and of Cheliax's health that go through Otolmens's service but also passed through whatever has His squirrels in the anomaly's immediate vicinity so excited. Asmodeus has noticed them becoming more excited, over the last couple of days.

If Milani rejects that part - or suggests overcomplicated modifications in return that would again count knock-on benefits passing through whatever-excited-His-squirrels - Asmodeus will have a much clearer idea of what is going on.)

The part about stays of torment for souls in Hell is, of course, entirely unacceptable. The crushing inevitability and hopelessness is really part of the whole point there. Though Asmodeus supposes that Milani could suggest some very, very high rate of conversion between new souls added and old souls stayed, with temporary stays of torment doomed to end.

(If Milani suggests an astronomical but reachable rate, it will suggest that, for some reason, Her target is a particular soul in Hell, and the rest of this is just an elaborate ruse to disguise it. Asmodeus doesn't know why Milani would do that, it seems more Stupid Good than Chaotic Good, but it's among the many many possibilities that Asmodeus is considering for what might really be going on.)

Also Asmodeus is not going to integrate the expected benefits over infinite time to be paid out immediately because Asmodeus is not three minutes old.

Milani: Milani responds with a counter-proposal.

It involves exactly the sort of overcomplicated amendments to Asmodeus's amendments that you might expect from somebody who had no idea what the original amendments had really been about, but didn't want to admit that. The new set of overcomplications do still happen to exclude any knock-on effects of Otolmens's service that pass through Keltham's project.

Milani suggests a conversion rate of 36 counterfactual souls expected to be added over the next 100 years, per 1 soul's torment stayed now for up to 100 years; but the stays will pass through Erecura, the Lawful Neutral goddess who now resides within Dis as Dispater's consort, and Asmodeus Himself will not know who is targeted by them, nor may He attempt to find out, nor may those stayed be told by Hell how they came to be so blessed.

Asmodeus: ...innnnteresting. Either Milani doesn't know what has Asmodeus's squirrels so excited - or She was willing to sacrifice all of the benefits She hoped to gain by that tactic, to make it look as if She's ignorant.

36 new souls for one torment stayed is still far too low, of course, especially if Asmodeus isn't allowed to know the purpose. Try 3600! Though Asmodeus might consider a lower rate, if Milani were willing to accept this rider stating that no such unseen exercise of a stay of torment will be used in a way net harmful to Asmodeus's other interests; such as, for example, by using it to suborn one of Asmodeus's trusted subordinates and diminish their immediate fear of Him. Milani talked a good game about how all this would be a nice Abadarian trade in the overlap of their interests; was She, perhaps, less than fully sincere in Her intents?

(What is She playing at, here...)

Milani: 36, but that rider is fine. Each 36 counterfactual extra souls expected in Hell over the next 100 years, as Asmodeus now expects them as a result of the service Milani suggests to Otolmens, may at Milani's discretion be converted into 1 stay of torment for 100 years for a soul of Milani's choosing, as passed through Erecura, the recipients not being told why, and Asmodeus and His direct reports making no effort to find out who they were. Milani commits that the collective result of all such interventions will be net beneficial to Asmodeus's interests in Her own expectation.

Any extra souls unused by this conversion will be amortized in the relaxation of Chelish policies designed to damn good people, and, in the case of overflow, those policies designed to damn nonevil ones.

Absent a policy like this, Milani obviously cannot cooperate with Asmodeus to benefit Cheliax, as it would harm Her own Good interests.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus doesn't often make deals He knows He's unsure about, never with mortals and only rarely with gods.

This one has Him intrigued. The appearance is that Milani is pursuing some goal that isn't about harming Asmodeus's interests, but has something to do with Him, possibly even benefiting Him, and yet the specifics must be concealed from Him - perhaps lest He turn the matter further to His own ends at the expense of Hers. If that's not in fact true, then She sure is doing a good job of presenting that impression - and has foregone getting anything else that Asmodeus can figure out, in order to present that impression.

Asmodeus does, in fact, like tricky compacts, that is part of what it means to be a god of them.

Deal.

Why can't all His interactions be like this?

Milani: All right, Otolmens, I did some poking around of my own, and I think I have an idea.

Part of what's making things expensive for Asmodeus's followers is, indeed, His war with Zon-Kuthon's followers, that's real, I checked. If that war were to end more quickly, that would itself decrease the real cost to Asmodeus's followers, and also count as a service to Asmodeus in its own right. The total of that should be enough to compensate Asmodeus for the remaining cost of your request, with safety margin; do NOT believe Him if He says otherwise or asks for anything else.

Zon-Kuthon defied your own Edict in Pharasma's Name, using His followers to do so. Therefore you are now allowed to retaliate against Zon-Kuthon for that in a way which targets His followers, or whole factions and territories of which His followers have overwhelming control.

My proposal is that you remove all the crystals of this form out of this bounded territory controlled by Zon-Kuthon's followers, and move them somewhere in Asmodeus's territory where people who are definitely Asmodeus's dedicated followers will find them.

Otolmens: Tetrahedral Element-6 crystals. Hm. Otolmens remembers those. They played a prominent role in one of Asmodeus's other requests, for Her to clean up what Asmodeus said was ugly waste contaminating the ground extending far underneath His territories, and deposit it in a waste dump of His own designation.

Milani: Yes. That was a trap. It would have vastly upset the power balance of the world and gotten you in trouble with Pharasma. Tetrahedral Element-6 crystals are used by mortals to cast relatively powerful versions of their little magics. Zon-Kuthon's followers are using them to fight Asmodeus's followers now. If you move all the crystals that Zon-Kuthon's followers have, and give them to Asmodeus's followers instead, the war will end significantly faster, and also that will be enough wealth to pay Asmodeus's followers to do what you want them to do.

Don't take any such crystals buried in the earth where mortals haven't uncovered them; that will get you in trouble. Just take the ones that mortals have already uncovered, everywhere inside this region 'Nidal' I'm pointing out, and move them someplace where some of Asmodeus's more dedicated followers - like His more powerful clerics - will find them.

Otolmens: Milani has proposed a SERVICE. Is it ACCEPTABLE to Asmodeus?

Asmodeus: Asmodeus supposes that, taking into account how this will shorten the war as well, it constitutes an acceptable payment. That was clever of Milani.

Deal.

Otolmens: Now where should She PUT them, after picking them up...

Oh, Her oracle happens to be next to some of Asmodeus's chosen mortals. That is CONVENIENT.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Suddenly being surrounded by all of the mined diamonds from Nidal doesn't mean being buried, there simply isn't that much diamond in Nidal when spellcasters are always using it up. Why leave a diamond lying around just being a diamond forever when you could turn it into power for yourself? Diamond doesn't accumulate over time, quite the opposite.

Nidal's current stocks, combat stores, private stashes, combat reserve stores, emergency reserves, emergency private stashes, final emergency reserves, and all other diamonds in Nidal, don't actually end up massing all that much; a 25,000gp diamond is not a large object by the standards of anything except diamonds.

Broom is nonetheless mildly startled by how many diamonds just fell onto the table in front of him while he was eating lunch. He wasn't really expecting any diamonds at all, let alone that many.

Iarwain: Top-priority message for Aspexia Rugatonn yes LITERAL ACTUAL TOP PRIORITY.

Otolmens: ...why is the anomaly STILL OUTSIDE THE ANOMALY CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Asmodeus: Because it is going to take longer than literally six seconds for Asmodeus to communicate His desires to His followers and for His followers to set up a new containment installation and an interdiction field.

Otolmens: Otolmens has been TRICKED! Why did Otolmens trust Asmodeus!

Asmodeus: ASMODEUS IS NOT EVEN TRYING TO TRICK OTOLMENS ON THIS OCCASION

IT JUST TAKES MORTALS LONGER THAN SIX SECONDS TO DO THIS CORRECTLY AND WHILE OBSERVING ALL ANOMALY-RELATED SAFETY PRECAUTIONS

lintamande: Policy in Dis is to take reasonably good care of souls awaiting resurrection; it doesn't do to have them return to life desperate to escape Hell for real at any cost. Accordingly the contract devil who owns Asmodia has her copying spell diagrams which can't be typeset, for books of magic. The working conditions are pleasant, for Hell. There is a light that Asmodia can fuel with her blood, and which bathes the workspace with a pleasant golden glow bright enough to copy by without straining one's eyes. The chair is not uncomfortable; that makes scribes slower. There are, of course, no breaks, because petitioners do not need to eat or sleep; if Asmodia is too slow to finish a page she is simply encouraged to drink a potion that'll aid her concentration.

The potions are painful, of course. But Asmodia is, if wholly uninteresting herself, adjacent to something interesting, and so her contract devil told her in a friendly sort of voice the secret to making the potions much less painful. It's that they separate, left on the shelf, into an oily top layer and a magically active bottom layer. It's the top layer that causes the agonizing pain, and if it's dumped out on the ground the potion won't work, but it's all right if it's fed to a different person than the one drinking the rest. (Hell's alchemists worked very diligently to achieve this effect.) Since, at the moment, the contract devil is feeling generous with Asmodia, she may go out and feed the potion-tops to some of the less useful apprentices, or if she's ahead of schedule on her scribing she may go all the way out to the waterfront and feed the first sip of the potion to the conscious, petrified angels that are spaced regularly for decor. You know, as a treat. There are many treats in Hell for the obedient.

Asmodia: They haven't told her how long it's been. It feels like it's been days. So - probably it's been fewer days. They'll still probably raise her. They'll still probably raise her.

She's not ahead of schedule on her scribing. Being good at math isn't the same as being fast at writing. She would obviously go feed the potion-tops to the petrified angels if she had time, to show what a good soul she is.

But Asmodia doesn't have time, so right now she's feeding the potion-top to a less useful apprentice, one very close to her own desk, but not the closest one in case that was some sort of trap for lazy girls. She has no idea who this boy was in life, he looks young but could easily have been here for a hundred years for all she knows, his tongue is burned away and reburned by the line of potions he regularly drinks. What happens to him if he doesn't drink the potions, Asmodia doesn't know. He's chained to his desk and can't stop her, doesn't try to stop her, each time she pours one of the potion-tops into his mouth. Maybe he thinks Asmodia is authorized to do whatever she wants to him, maybe he doesn't realize he could fight back, maybe he isn't in fact allowed to fight back at anything done to him, Asmodia doesn't know.

Asmodia wouldn't waste any time on pitying him even if there was any pity left in her nature. There's very little doubt that copying spell diagrams for distribution in Cheliax is one of the best jobs in Hell, optimized mostly around maximum production for Cheliax and hence unable to distract the petitioners too much from relatively delicate work. Asmodia's going to be retrained into a contract devil when she dies and that will be much much worse. If she could get this boy's position for herself, when she dies, by throwing him into a lake of fire to burn there forever, there's no doubt she'd do that too. Maybe that's how the boy got his position, by being extra good and doing horrible things to somebody like her.

She hates him. He's so much better off than she'll be. The passive way he accepts her torments feels like he's mocking her, like he's suppressing a smile knowing how much worse she'll get hers, in time.

Asmodia asks her contract devil if she's allowed to hurt that boy more for any kind of extra credit, if she has only a little extra time in her schedule but not enough to go feed petrified angels. She doesn't want to waste potions by feeding him extra potion-tops.

They'll still probably raise her. They'll still probably raise her.

lintamande: "For fun," her contract devil says, "or to get a better grade in being a scribe? Because the way to get a better grade in being a scribe is to get faster, and do better work, so you will not rise in my esteem by cutting off his ears with a bit of glass grabbed off the ground. But it's an acceptable kind of fun, if you were asking if you are allowed to have any fun."

Asmodia: She'll try having any fun, but mostly work on scribing faster and doing better work.

(Cutting off his ears feels more awful and poisonous than fun but it at least feels like she's inflicting her own pain onto somebody else and showing she's not literally at the lowest rung of Hell and maybe that counts for something with Somebody even if it doesn't move her contract devil any.)

They'll still probably raise her. She doesn't want to exist. They'll still probably raise her. Nothing good will ever happen to her even after they do. But it will be better than this. Temporarily. Then it will be worse. They'll still probably raise her. Maybe if she focuses really hard on copying spell diagrams she can stop constantly remembering she exists and that will be at least a little bit like not existing. They'll still probably raise her. She hates the universe and everything in the universe because everything in the universe hates her and never helps her no she can't think that when she goes back Security will hear her thinking that and worry she's going to become a Rovagug cultist and execute her and send her straight to Hell to be tortured for real and so she can't think that ever again. Because they'll still probably raise her.

lintamande: Imps flit in now and then with messages for her contract devil; that's also got to be one of the best jobs in Hell, teleporting around with wax-sealed scrolls in tiny hands. It happens often enough not to be notable.

Until, reading one of the messages, her contract devil says in a tone that's somewhat less bored than usual, "set that book aside, mark your place, and come with me... oh, you'll need shoes. Mark your place, fetch a pair of boots out of the grey and silver closet, and come with me."

Asmodia: She obeys, new terror going through her. She could have endured this, just this, until she went back, they'll still probably raise her, but now something different is going to happen and that will undoubtedly be worse.

She puts on the boots from the grey and silver closet. They don't hurt her. Maybe they'll hurt her later.

lintamande: Her contract devil heads out briskly into the streets of Dis. The buildings are tall and sharp and vanish into the smoky haze above; the streets are carefully, evenly cobbled with tormented human faces. Here and there they cross a bridge of red-hot metal that smells of cooking meat from all the people walking barefoot across it; one, ahead of them, stumbles, and someone irritably kicks her over the edge of the bridge into the flowing lava below.

Asmodia's boots are sufficient to protect her from the heat.

The city, already dense, somehow grows denser around them, and the architecture more elaborate and more striking. They come at last to the palace gates, and her contract devil hands the scroll to the palace guards, and then turns back to Asmodia. "Tell Carissa Sevar," he says, "that you are, of course, for sale at the right price, and to look up Ahuvir Dulzomaud, who holds your soul. You're a whiny, tedious waste of space, and I hope you do manage to impress her enough to get yourself devoured forever because you can't handle existing."

And he walks away, vanishes almost immediately into the crowd and into the smoke.

Asmodia: Ahuvir Dulzomaud. Ahuvir Dulzomaud. Ahuvir Dulzomaud.

She repeats it to herself over and over as the palace guards lead her inside, because, whatever else happens, forgetting her owner's name or her owner's instructions does not sound at all like a good idea. She is to tell Carissa Sevar that she is, of course, for sale at the right price, and to look up Ahuvir Dulzomaud.

What's going to happen to her, now? The devil was very right, she can't handle existing. There are people who do well in Hell and more people who do well in relatively light amounts of Hell and it unfortunately turns out that Asmodia is not either of those kinds of people. She's defective, she gets that, somebody should switch her off.

They'll still probably raise her.

Iarwain: The palace guards are strangely gentle with her. She is not struck, is not told to hurry.

She is told to pass through a particularly ornate set of black iron gates.

Beyond them is a lush green place as pretty as a garden and as wild as a wilderness, with flowers and bushes and trees growing either in no order or in a very careful order that mortal eyes cannot discern, prettier than anything a Chelish wizard student is liable to have ever seen during her mortal life in Golarion.

Asmodia: It takes her exhausted, literally-dead brain long seconds to grasp where she would probably have to be.

"The gardens of Erecura," Asmodia whispers.

Erecura: Correct.

The voice seems to come from everywhere, or maybe just the inside of Asmodia's own head, it's hard to tell the difference.

Asmodia: Erecura, Lawful Neutral goddess, former soothsayer of Pharasma who stole the secret to divinity from her goddess and was banished to Hell as a punishment. Now apparently-beloved consort of the archdevil Dispater, who is Lord of Dis. One of very few beings not Lawful Evil whom it is legal to worship at all in Cheliax - not worship as a primary deity, of course, but if you hold Asmodeus above Her you are also allowed to worship Her as well.

What happens to Asmodia now?

Asmodia doesn't ask; it's plaintive, whiny, pathetic, if they want her to know they'll tell her.

(Unless the rules are different in Erecura's Gardens, but no, no, that's too much to hope for, all hope does is hurt you.)

"What are my orders?" Asmodia says, her voice outwardly steady. She can still muster that much strength.

Erecura: You have no orders. You may have clothing if you wish, eat or drink if you wish that experience, explore my gardens, or find a quiet place to rest and wait to be raised.

You are also allowed to leave my garden and go exploring in Dis, but I would not particularly advise it.

Asmodia: "Why..."

Asmodia doesn't have any words left in her. This can't be real. It's a form of torture where they let you into the gardens for a few minutes and then pull you out again and put you back at the copying table, or somewhere much worse.

Erecura: It's a rather interesting question, isn't it?

But you're safe for now. I would suggest taking this opportunity to sit down and weep. It is safer to weep here than in Cheliax.

Asmodia: A god of Good who heard her call, before, but couldn't save her then? But no, that makes no sense, how would They hold power here in Hell, unless everything she's ever been told about how the entire universe works is a lie.

Asmodia finds a place that looks soft to sit down, a little bed of unusually thick grass, obscured by enough trees and bushes that it might feel a little safer. She sits there. She doesn't seem to be crying yet? Part of her mind suggests that she should be terrified of her failure to follow instructions. Part is running with the theory that things are as they seem, and if they are, she can already predict she won't be punished.

"Safe for now?" Asmodia says. "Am I allowed to ask - what you mean - for now?"

Erecura: You have 100 years in my gardens, and if your stay of torment is not renewed before then, you will then return to Hell and whatever is to be your fate.

That clock only runs while you are here in Hell; your time on Golarion does not count against that stay of torment.

Asmodia: "Why - I don't understand - is somebody - trying to make use of me, somehow?"

Erecura: Few souls are useful to no one. But if there is any use of you that could repay the price that has been paid for this, it is a use beyond My sight.

Asmodia: The thought occurs to her that, if she's not that useful, then someone, somewhere, she doesn't even know it's possible, but maybe possibly it's because someone somewhere in all of everywhere must -

Asmodia: "Is it because - somebody cares what happens to me?"

Erecura: Perhaps.

Asmodia: "But -" Asmodia struggles for words. "But -"

But it can't be somebody who cares about everyone, the way Good might, because there are people in Hell, freshly arrived in Hell who might still be saved, who are much more the sort of person that a Good god would care about, and going through much worse than copying spell diagrams for the time before she gets raised (they'll still probably raise her), and if you had the power to give someone a stay of torment you would give it to them instead, unless -

"But it would have to be someone who cares about me personally and there isn't anyone like that!"

Erecura: There isn't?

Asmodia: "Nobody who has power! Nobody who means anything!"

Asmodia: "Nobody who could command this, or pay for this, or bargain for this! Nobody like that cares about me! Even Carissa Sevar, whatever she is, doesn't actually care about me and wouldn't bother to save me like this, or if she did, she'd take credit for it so I knew, and she wouldn't, she'd think I was being weak and that a short stay in Hell would motivate me to work harder, for her, which it would, and she wouldn't pay me with 100 years in advance either, so I, I don't understand, I don't understand at all -"

Erecura: Not all puzzles are easy for mortals to solve, and some are difficult even for gods.

But if you'll pardon an old soothsayer Her crypticisms, allow Me to ask you this, Asmodia.

Were you expecting this to happen to you?

Asmodia: "No. No I was not actually."

Erecura: Then consider that you may have been wrong about something.

Asmodia: "Wrong about what?"

Erecura: Ah. That is the hazard of soothsaying, is it not. It is far easier to guess that you must be wrong about something, than to guess what exactly it is that you are wrong about.

But one of the things you believe, perhaps more than one, must clearly be wrong.

Asmodia: Asmodia doesn't have any words left. She sits on the thicker grass and stares down at her hands. Nothing is hurting her. She isn't being forced to do anything.

The thought occurs to her that this state of affairs is more pleasant than Cheliax, and Raise Dead requires her consent.

...that would be why the part about 100 years, maybe, it's - so she doesn't just stay here - but then why 100 years and not 1 week - she doesn't understand - but Asmodia guesses that she's supposed to go back and, do something, somehow, to earn the rest of her reprieve or at least her nonexistence or something - for who, who's her sponsor, how she's supposed to work for them if she doesn't know -

What was she wrong about?

Asmodia: Asmodia sits on the thicker grass and stares down at her hands.

What was she wrong about?

Well, either, she's not a useless waste of a person, in some way that Erecura Herself can't foresee, like She said, or, Erecura didn't say, that anything was beyond Her sight, She just asked other questions back, when Asmodia suggested, suggested that, somebody, somehow, somewhere, somewhere in all of everything everywhere, cared about her personally, and did this for her.

She does start crying, then.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa snuggles Keltham in silence until she thinks - she's not totally sure - he has fallen asleep.

She's still not sure if it was in fact a good idea to push Keltham on the Second Law and on being more sadistic, she's not sure she'll know for a while if it was the right call or not. She understands the Second Law stuff better now (though she's still hoping she'll get it better still once she sees the transcripts) but she suspects it's not something she can use to do anything, making the universe look more like a sex story will also make Keltham wonder if Cheliax is doing that on purpose, besides how it involves lying and lying remains very dangerous.

The whole thing might have gone better without the Queen involving herself but - Carissa's not actually sure. It's not as if there are a lot of agenda-free eighth circle casters who understand the project well enough to get through a conversation with Keltham at all. And the Queen's agenda right now seems to involve convincing Keltham that Carissa is very valuable, which does feel nice. Even though it's probably false. And even though Carissa's pretty sure that anyone else would've assigned a milder punishment for what was admittedly a very insubordinate thought but she's been having her thought transcripts read by the Queen and by high-ranking Church officials for several days now while trying to run a sensitive operation and she actually thinks most people would have had, like, two insubordinate thoughts. Or even three.

Keltham: Keltham awakens, feeling groggy but noticeably better.

Carissa Sevar: Here is his Carissa, very snuggly.

Outside, the rain has started to lessen, a little.

Keltham: He can hear it.

He opens his eyes. Does his Carissa look to be awake herself?

Carissa Sevar: Yep. Holding very still, so she doesn't wake him, but looking relaxed and comfortable and not at all like she's been internally contemplating how to demonstrate convincingly to Keltham that Cheliax isn't mind-controlling him but could if they wanted to and whether the Queen has asked to be notified when Carissa goes in for her punishment.

Keltham: "So I'm still sort of groggy, and yet, now that it sounds from the rain outside like there isn't going to be an enormous global disaster, I sure do feel weirdly better for what are no doubt totally unrelated and coincidental reasons."

Carissa Sevar: "In dath ilan are people not supposed to have feelings about enormous global disasters?"

Keltham: "They're definitely supposed to, but I'm an unusually Evil dath ilani so I shouldn't have any feelings like that, clearly."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you know, I like you Evil but I think Evil people have a preference against enormous global disasters, they're not very profitable and the last one also led to a bunch of civil wars and so on."

Keltham: "Probably not supposed to cry as much about them, though."

"- I'm joking, I understand that you can classify as Evil and still cry."

Carissa Sevar: "It's not very Chelish, to cry about them, but your being here in Cheliax is, if you hadn't noticed, premised on the suspicion that we are doing Evil wrong and need to learn to do it better, and maybe it will turn out that doing Evil right involves more crying than is strictly conventional. Anyway, it's only me who saw, and I won't report you to your wide-eyed researchers who you want to impress."

Keltham: "I - there's so much I need to understand about Golarion - and it seems like all I can do, is ask one question after another, and there's probably some order I could ask them to make them more efficient, but I don't know what it is, so all I can do is keep bothering you like this, for which I'm sorry -"

"Would my researchers be particularly unimpressed if they were just told the fact that I cried, even if they didn't remember seeing it? Cheliax norms call for people to look cheerful while the world is ending, and not to have been heard to have cried when it didn't? I - won't ask why, if the answer is yes, just - yes or no."

Carissa Sevar: "Uh, if you weren't an alien, yes slightly, since you are an alien, no."

Keltham: "Right then." He doesn't ask why, as promised. Later he'll understand, no doubt. "It's - I wouldn't want to have a breakdown in public, in dath ilan, either, but it's not their way to hide the fact that it occurred in private. What people see - reaches them in a way they can't control, they can't stop themselves from also feeling distressed if they see you crying, they can't fully control how it changes their opinion of you either. But you can be abstract about it if you're told afterwards that it happened, so that makes it okay to tell people about things it wouldn't be okay to show them. It's not about hiding the truth."

"I think I should still live like that. So go ahead and tell my researchers what happened."

Carissa Sevar: " - if you say so." Squeeze. "I have thought about whether there's a better order to introduce you to everything about Golarion than you asking questions and I haven't really been able to think of one either, so go ahead and ask lots of questions, I guess."

Keltham: How do you feel about being rented?

Keltham doesn't ask; for one thing he still needs to query his own sexual-romantic self about it first, and it's not currently active enough for that.

"I don't know if you're the sort of person who ever likes to talk about herself at all - but it occurs to me that - now that our relationship has moved past safe first-date activities like you giving yourself completely to me to do anything I want potentially including killing you - we should maybe do some more serious and heavy stuff, like me asking you about your life history."

Carissa Sevar: - giggle. "Yes, all right, I guess that's the sort of thing people get around to on a second date." And she's got it all Taldor-ized and everything.

Keltham: "So what's your life history? In six words or less."

Carissa Sevar: ...is that a joke? "...worldwound...wizard....weapons specialist...met Keltham."

Keltham: "Selfish dath ilani died, met Carissa."

"Now the long version."

Carissa Sevar: She really does like him.

"I was born in Corentyn. It's a city on the same coast as Ostenso, but pretty far, five hundred miles or so, right where the Inner Sea opens up into the ocean. My father is a merchant; he works out what cargo will be sent in his ships to other cities, and what they'll trade for there, and he sells foreign goods to merchants in Corentyn and sells Chelish goods far away. I have a half-brother who's going to take over the business from him someday. That's how it's normally done; there's a lot of accumulated expertise no one's written down, so you teach your children. Teach your sons, until pretty recently. My mother is a wizard and when she met my father was doing odd wizard work, a step up from laundry - daily cooling spells for people who don't like the summer heat, Comprehend Languages to translate for merchants, that kind of thing.

When I was young there was a civil war, and that's when the Queen signed her compact with Hell and formed modern Cheliax, though I don't remember much about it, except that the ships were impressed for moving soldiers around and my father was very annoyed about it, and parts of the city where we didn't live got destroyed. My mother kept me home and tried to teach me magic. After the war the church opened up a school for wizards in Corentyn and my mother got a job as a teacher there and I tested in, and did very well, and when I graduated was encouraged to enlist in the Chelish army and go fight at the Worldwound, because it'd be best for my growth as a wizard and paid very generously and was also necessary to prevent the destruction of the world, which even Evil people care about typically. So I enlisted, and I've served six years now, with a year off in between three-year terms. I planned to stay until I hit fourth circle, because I want to be fourth-circle, and I knew in my heart I might actually stay until I hit fifth, because then you can Teleport, and then I was going to open a magic shop in Corentyn and have kids and be rich."

Keltham: So Carissa already knows herself well enough to know she'll want children. Well, she's had longer to figure it out than Keltham. Then again, some people younger than Keltham already seem to know...

...why is he thinking that he doesn't know if he wants children? He was going to become a billionaire and have lots of children.

It's pretty obvious on reflection that it's because these children will be real.

"I was born in Default, the city you're born in when you're not born anywhere particularly interesting, because your parents don't have any particular reason to be anywhere else and so they might as well live where everybody else lives; it's the largest dath ilani city in the world, and the center of Governance is there but not in the center. I got the usual education, but with fewer persistent friendships over time with other children, because my parents moved around a lot. Conventional wisdom is that more persistent friendships are better, in childhood, but my parents basically waved it off because they thought I'd be pretty much all right even if they didn't optimize every single aspect of my childhood as hard as possible. I agree with them about that, but one still gets the impression that all of their friends were horrified. In that dath ilani way where you're privately horrified but conceal the overt signs because, first of all, you don't think that exerting more social pressure will help, and second, they can guess perfectly well that you're horrified. We had a small house-module, maybe something like a tenth or twentieth the size of the villa that got burned down."

"I'm not sure at exactly what point it became clear to them that I was a little different than the other children, but it must have definitely been apparent at the point where I got - one of the elaborate tests that children get, in dath ilan, which aren't just there to measure us, but also to provide the results for the prediction markets that say what will happen in Civilization's future - anyways, I apparently ran across a lightly injured adult who needed me to get help, and I helped him, but I wanted to be paid for helping. I think that was when my parents decided that they'd made a mistake by assortatively mating with each other to select on the quality of reserving a little more of their life for themselves, and moving a lot if they wanted to do that, even if it meant their child's life was less than perfectly optimal; I was more selfish than either of them, which doesn't always happen, in a heritage-mating setup like that one, but happens sometimes. And dath ilan - when you're different, if it's something they can live with at all, they'll do what they can to make life in Civilization easier for you, despite you being different, because everyone is different, somehow, somewhere, everyone needs exceptions. My parents did the very correct thing, then, and sort of gently tried to offer me opportunities to be more Good, if I wanted to be, but without suggesting that I couldn't still just be Evil if I wanted. They argued with me about it, and tried to argue me into being Good, but only after I started it by trying to argue them into being more Evil."

"I left home as soon as I could pass the requisite financial maturity and self-governance tests, at thirteen. I set up in a part of Default distant enough that my parents wouldn't visit me often enough to be annoying. I got a very default job - doing a thing you don't have words for, setting up high-precision processes that do things, very mundane high-precision processes though, like some business wanted a tweak made to their high-precision process for selling things," this language really is not going to do 'computer programming' without a long digression, "and put all the money I could into the craziest investments I could find that basically seemed to me like they should work, some went up, some blew up, after five years of that I was ahead of the broader market but very barely. I was hoping to - teach myself, if I kept investing like that, that I'd get good at it."

"For socialization I had a circle of friends my age writing, a kind of stuff that doesn't exist here, though I did a lot more reading and only enough writing to count, but it meant that when everyone was sitting around in a circle eating whatever people had brought in and talking about everyone's work, that I could keep up and talk about it. I picked that writing circle because their themes were, not quite 'doompunk', not quite, Evil aesthetic, more like supervillainy, but not that really - the point was that they were people who could admire people who were selfish, so long as those people were clearly fictional and they weren't out there being selfish in real life. Which, you know, beats people not even appreciating the aesthetic as an aesthetic. I thought about trying to find a circle of other more selfish people, but always decided against it, because - I didn't want to take it from being my personal identity, to a group identity, it was mine and I didn't actually want to be around five other people doing it slightly differently and have debates about that."

"Civilization really does try hard to make it possible for people who are different to, just be like that and it's fine and their lives aren't about being different. But a lot of us who are different don't want that, either, we don't just want to pass through it all unnoticed, we feel like we have something to prove, not because Civilization is telling us to prove it, but because we want to prove it anyways. And if what you want is - to be acknowledged for it, to make people admit something, to excel so much that you're above average, Civilization isn't just going to hand that to you. Not everyone can have things that not everyone can have."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has no idea what to say to that but her honest reaction is " - I'm terribly glad I didn't grow up somewhere Good, somewhere where - people'd think they made a mistake, having a child who wants to be paid for doing important work helping people -"

Keltham: It's not like Golarion is doing incredibly better than dath ilan on the strength of its greater selfishness.

Keltham elects not to say it out loud, for now.

"They didn't think I was a mistake, a person that they'd wish they'd never made and brought into the world. Nothing like that. Not even close. They felt they'd made their own wrong life choices that had resulted in me existing, that's not the same as saying that I shouldn't exist, that if there's a button you press to get a Keltham, you don't press the button. They just felt that they could've made other choices and gotten some other result instead, and then they would have felt like they'd made their own choices correctly, not that one possible child would be - more valuable to them than the other, if you put them side by side -"

"Their lives are also theirs, and their regrets belong to them, and they didn't try to make them be something about me or something of mine."

A sudden lump comes into his throat, as Keltham realizes, having not quite thought of it before:

Everyone who knows me thinks I'm dead. Really dead.

The Keepers have to know. The Keepers ought to tell anyone who's really broken up about it, right, it shouldn't be that much of an infohazard - that you wouldn't even tell the kid's own parents, he's still alive -

The Keepers will tell them that Keltham is still somewhere, probably many different somewheres but some weighing more than others, and that to say anything about the details is far beyond anything the Keepers can do. The Keepers would not be able to foresee specifics like Golarion.

Dath ilan wouldn't put that much effort into cryosuspending every single person no matter what, if they expected all the selfish sadists to end up in worlds with masochists who give them everything they want.

Maybe hearing the current state of knowledge is actually worse for somebody than thinking their kid is just gone, because if they're just nonexistent, nothing any worse can be happening to them, and more importantly, you can be done thinking about it at some point.

Maybe the Keepers won't tell his parents, or anybody else who knows him, after all.

Carissa Sevar: The distinction Keltham is trying to draw doesn't make any sense to Carissa - or, at least, not to the extent he's trying to say something more complicated than 'they get to wish they'd had a different kid if they want to', which is obviously true - but it doesn't seem like the time to say that.

Snuggle.

Keltham: He's feeling a bit sad now, and will snuggle back and hope that she thinks of something to say so he doesn't have to.

Carissa Sevar: "I'm sorry. That in your world people can - die forever. They shouldn't."

Keltham: It is not entirely clear to him that people can.

Not that this is necessarily a good thing. Though it could be! Keltham doesn't know. It depends on, you know, the entire state of the entire multiverse that he cannot in fact extrapolate in his tiny little mortal-sized brain.

But he should maybe not talk about this much until he's tried to figure out the ways in which it will be an enormous infohazard, which, again, it clearly will be, somehow.

"I suspect that - at the scale where whole universes interact, like that - time might not mean as much, or be as synchronized, as it is in Golarion. If you can see dath ilan from here, if that's at all controllable, then it might be just as easy to see dath ilan's past as what I think of as its present. That could be why Asmodeus wasn't trying to grab anyone else right away, if it was expensive, and if He knew that all that was needed was one dath ilani to get things rolling here, and that, in time, Golarion's Civilization would then ascend to where it could finish the job itself."

"And if you think about it from the perspective of somebody who died - they just need - someone, somewhere, who's powerful enough, who can see them, and cares. Or is willing to trade with something else that cares."

Some trades stretch across time. It's a saying in dath ilan that usually means something rather different, there: just ordinary time in one world, coordinated trades that parents make with children who don't exist yet or haven't matured as economic agents.

Carissa Sevar:

This makes so much more sense in light of Carissa's realization Keltham thinks there are infinite worlds but she isn't sure she would've had that revelation if she hadn't been listening to his conversation with Isidre.

"That makes sense," she says, slowly. "...so, under that theory, you were the single dath ilani it was most important for Golarion to grab. ....and I was the place in Golarion it was most important to put you."

Keltham: "Yeah, that's a problem with the theory, I'm frankly actually not seeing that. There are dath ilani with higher Intelligence, higher Wisdom, superior social skills, and a far more encyclopedic knowledge of what you have to do to get a Civilization booted. I'm also pretty sure that Golarion isn't the most fun-for-me world I could possibly be in."

"It's almost as if something wasn't really optimizing all that hard, but that just straight-up doesn't make sense at the requisite power level, so a much better bet is that something else was being optimized instead. Or I was cheaper in some unavoidable way than a smarter dath ilani, or Golarion was more accessible... or there were only the hundred dath ilani from the air-traveling machine to distribute, and not that many more places to put them..."

"I kind of doubt I'm going to get it after thinking about it for an hour, if I didn't get it in the first thirty seconds."

Carissa Sevar: Or it has to be an evil dath ilani because they have to be able to work with Cheliax, because a Good dath ilani Cheliax would just cheerfully ignore while deceiving and they're supposed to do something more complicated than that. And it can't be a genius because then Cheliax would fail at deceiving them.

"You could try asking a very smart person," she says, because she kind of wants to get the conversation back on Isidre without indicating that she has any reason to think that conversation was of particular interest. "We do have a couple of those, though they tend very busy."

Keltham: "It's out of Isidre's depth. She might have the Intelligence and Wisdom to be a Keeper - if there's not more to it than that, other unmeasured qualities, which there might be. But she's missing background knowledge and the background knowledge is piled on top of other knowledge in a very tall pile. That's basically what I told Isidre when she asked me to explain my hidden Kuthite cleric prediction, that the reason I hadn't tried to tell you earlier wasn't that I thought you were too stupid."

It's occurring to Keltham that in sufficient extremis, there's an emergency tactic which is his asking to put on Isidre's headband.

Well, Keltham now knows a threshold: if he ever becomes any more Good than the amount of Goodness required to do that, he'll end up destroying his own self in a way that will probably be a lot more final than his temporary inconveniencing on the airplane.

Or maybe it wouldn't actually be that bad! Not knowing if it will actually be that bad sure could be one way to end up desperately doing something that actually is that bad!

Carissa Sevar: " - oh, it makes sense that the Crown would've really wanted to understand that, and it makes sense that you couldn't explain it to them." He seems tense, is that because he found Isidre suspicious, but didn't think of it at the time? She really wants those transcripts.

Keltham: "To be clear, that wasn't the only thing Isidre wanted to talk about, saying that now so it doesn't seem later like I was trying to mislead you about that."

Carissa Sevar: Politely puzzled Carissa! "I assume a very smart person who wanted to meet with you would have lots to say, and you don't have to tell me any of it you don't want to; presumably if she wanted me to hear all of it she'd have invited me too....well, handwaving some palace politics that perhaps I shouldn't handwave. But she could've let you let me stay."

Keltham: "Yeah. I hadn't meant to spell it out explicitly, in case you got curious and then I couldn't answer right away, but since you seem to be deducing it anyways - there's a bunch of her stuff that was very much - some person with an overpowered intelligence headband reading about less intelligent people with potential relationship issues, and her deciding to optimize them, and one of the people she wanted to optimize was you."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I don't exactly know how I feel about that. On the one hand it is sort of interesting to have smart people try to think about your life for you, I'm always wishing I was smarter and could do that better. On another, I feel strange about it being someone I haven't met who is reading the project transcripts presumably in their capacity as a Chelish administrator. On another, there's something romantic about people having meetings with you about optimizing me, makes it - less like pretending. On another, you've been here for three days and they've been very stressful and you haven't actually signed up for responsibility for optimizing me! What if you don't want to optimize me? - possibly this is too many opinions to have about a one-sentence summary of a conversation I didn't witness. Sorry."

Keltham: "No, that all sounded pretty justified based on the actual conversation."

"To be fair, I'm probably being uncharitable to Isidre, right now, she had very serious and altruistic and important reasons for optimizing over us. The way that very smart people do, in stories about very smart people, that are based on cautionary life events that happened to actual very smart people. My bet, and it seems like a pretty sure bet, is that Golarion doesn't have many very smart people at all and in particular it doesn't have enough of them that they can form their own social groups and train each other in how to not make typical very smart person mistakes."

"I'll go ahead and ask about the romantic part, though. Is it having a couple of other people go off and decide what to do with your life among themselves?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not exactly? It's -

- so when I went to the sex shop, there was this sort of pervasive assumption that it was - a little like a costume shop, I don't know how to explain it - that some people like to dress up as the possessions of other people during sex, in the same way as some people like to dress up as dragons during sex, and so they'd sell you the outfit for it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But at the Worldwound people were doing something different, something better suited to me, where - you could give terms up front, obviously, but whatever terms you gave, those were real. They weren't a costume, they weren't a game, the whole thing was obviously in an overarching sense governed by the treaty so no one was risking being maimed or murdered but you wouldn't say 'oh, hmm, I'm bored now'.

And I was slightly worried that the nobility, being the nobility and sort of aliens at best anyway, had the concept but only the costume-party concept." Yep, that's the problem with the Chelish nobility, that they might be assuming by default that their relationship is one of equals-with-some-pretense, definitely not that everyone who doesn't know exactly what's going on assumes what's going on is that Cheliax gave the alien some welcoming gifts. "And if they're asking you, then - then they're not working off a costume-party concept. Even though it's a sort of silly thing for them to have done and I'm sorry you were inconvenienced."

Keltham: "I guess - that is very much the kind of respect that dath ilan wants out of its very smart people who are smarter than the other people. The sort of thing where, if you say, I'm Keltham's, they take that at face value and go talk to Keltham - though I did not, myself, see that at the time, because I am still very much - trying to locate in concept-space what it means that you gave yourself to me."

Carissa Sevar: Yes, very respectful, Isidre sure is that. "Well, see, that's the complicating bit, right, that you didn't actually sign up for being in any sense responsible for me. So I feel respected but also you should definitely feel free to say 'I continue to delegate Carissa-optimization to Carissa', you didn't acquire an obligation to do it.

What does it mean to you, that I gave myself to you."

Keltham: That my brain continually feels like it's wavering on some sort of huge ledge and I am constantly wondering which things I am to do with you and which not and which decisions you're supposed to make for yourself and I'm supposed to make for you. Because you still think, Carissa, on some deep level, that I grew up in Golarion, that of course I must know what you really mean, that it should be obvious, and because it's obvious it's fine not to be legible...

"That I have to figure out for myself what I actually want from you, since I don't have the excuse and easy way out of just asking you what you're willing to give, and that I guess I'll see where that takes me," Keltham answers out loud. "It's also obviously this huge act of - loyalty, trust, something I don't have words for - and it impresses me and - makes me wish that I understood all the connotations, everything that somebody from Golarion would take for granted, so that I could appreciate better exactly what that act means," and stop being terrified that its real meaning is owing you something I can't pay back.

Carissa Sevar: Lean. "Well, there's no hurry. And I can try to explain, except I don't know exactly where to start, I already explained the bits that are really obvious and the rest is probably, you know, fire elementals don't know what fire is."

Keltham: "Isidre, allegedly, has some idea of what fire is. But among the many, many things I didn't ask her and should've when I had the chance was, 'Wait so am I allowed to just directly say all this to Carissa and ask her about it, or do you predict something bad happens if I do that?'"

Carissa Sevar: Oh, I bet she knows what fire is.

Carissa Sevar: "...what kind of bad thing are you thinking of?"

Keltham: "As the saying goes, knowledge of the bad thing that happens to you if you hear the dangerous-information is often the same dangerous-information. I mean, not for book spoilers, maybe, but for a lot of the more serious stuff. I'd have to go through it all piece by piece to figure out if there were any exceptions to that -"

"I'm being evasive. Why am I being evasive."

"I'm being evasive because thinking about what Isidre said requires my romantic and libido parts to be booted up to think about it properly, and those parts are not presently booted."

"Do I endorse that answer? Yes, I endorse it."

Carissa Sevar: "...okay." That seems bad for Cheliax's goals. Also confusing. Carissa is pretty sure that when one feels vulnerable and confused then one is much more inclined to have sex - though that's the kind of thought where, now that she's thought it, she can notice probably isn't a human universal and is probably instead the kind of thing that might divide people by whether they like being hit or not. "Do you want a massage, I think that is the standard sort of thing that's nice even when one isn't in the mood and can get one into it."

Keltham: "I have - some sort of guilt feelings you're going to tell me I shouldn't have, because it's not the point, and then the feelings aren't going to go away - that you're - a topnotch weapons specialist who gave herself to me, to make anything I wanted of her, and instead of making you into a better weapons specialist whose creations can destroy fifty demons per second, I'm getting a massage from you."

Carissa Sevar: " - so, I hesitate to describe my ideal endgame here, because I'm very worried that you're going to, like, take it as 'if I don't achieve that, then I wronged Carissa by taking her up on it in the first place', which is not the point at all. But my ideal endgame here is that we build a dath ilani city in conquered Nidal and get all the modern conveniences Civilization invents before anyone else and I have so much spellsilver I can do every project that comes to mind as soon as it does and I make us immortal -- though we can still visit Hell sometimes, maybe have a vacation place in Dis -- and sometimes you have a very spirited try at hurting me until I say 'no', and you can't do it."

Keltham: "I'd expect you to warn me in advance if I was getting close to making you say 'no' and not just struggle to get away, if I hadn't otherwise rescinded that order by then. That is not something I am ready to fight my brain about right now. And even if that changes, I suspect I still might find it hot."

"It - actually does help that you have and know any possible endgame, it helps my brain believe that you weren't just stepping into a vast empty void that it is my sole task to fill like a," and once again Taldane does not have the word 'computer programmer', "god. I'm not sure you grasp quite how little I know about what a Carissa Sevar could maybe possibly probably be thinking."

Carissa Sevar: "If this works at all you're going to be incredibly rich and powerful. Like ninety nine percent of the female population of Golarion I like it when men are rich and powerful, and I am better at extrapolating than most of them. And I know what I would do with wealth and power, because I am a wizard, and wizards are very good at turning money into ridiculously cool magic stuff. ...though also if you get bored and drop me in a month I won't feel cheated, I have too much Chelish dignity to be upset about not getting something which never belonged to me."

Keltham: "That sounds - like a piece of the dignity that would exist in my world, maybe. The world of Kelthams. Like how I didn't think that Civilization owed me any appreciation unless I could force that."

"I keep poking my brain if it's ready for a massage and my brain keeps insisting that it's beneath you and I'm trying to decide whether I should execute the tried and true response of blowing up my brain with explody things and just getting the massage."

Carissa Sevar: "I assume it would be pushing you too far, in confusion-about-how-Chelish-dating-works and uncertainty-about-who-is-getting-paid-what, if we ordered Pilar in here to give you a massage while I watched and showed you a bit of complicated spell-scaffolding?"

Keltham: "That would... induce confusion about Chelish dating, yes. Why Pilar in particular and not, say Meritxell?"

Carissa Sevar: "Pilar's here, everyone else is all the way in Ostenso? I don't know if you're important enough to get someone teleported in to give you a massage during a war when we're using all our teleport capacity for logistics."

Keltham: "Because they did the resurrect here. I feel like I should have seen that answer without having to ask it. Anyways, I've been advised by Isidre that I am Not Ready For Pilar."

"Oh, right, this seems safe to say. After the very strange thing happened to Pilar, Isidre got a hunch and asked Security to ask a few questions. Pilar has a fetish for being forced, or as Isidre put it, a rape fetish, a term I assume has some interpretation other than 'wanting unwanted sex' which is not outright self-contradictory, and it's an obligate fetish to the point where she'd feel actually-raped if I made her talk about sex before having it with her."

"I infer though it was not said explicitly," oh my ass Taldane how you can you take that many syllables to say that, people would just not say it, "that this was the point at which Isidre decided to come over and futilely attempt to find out exactly why I think one of the girls is secretly some kind of traitor, possibly without knowing it herself."

Carissa Sevar: Pilar's not really the ideal person anyway. If the way Keltham works is that he has a hard time abusing girls he respects then the obvious thing is to try to get him in bed with a girl he doesn't respect, but all the research harem are at least reasonably competent, and she can't think of an obvious excuse for him to be introduced to a new, useless girl.

"Huh. So - she asked Pilar, noticed it matched - and thought you were onto something with the mysterious logic above the gods you can't explain to us? And it's usually just a fetish for not being in a position to refuse, or for it not mattering if you want it, rather than for not wanting it. I think."

Keltham: "Yeah, basically. I gave Isidre some other guesses of what that logic said about some other things, and there's - a test we could run, sort of, but it's a strange one and to consider it I have to boot my sexuality. Which seems to be noticeably stirring in response to the Pilar discussion. Non-self-contradictory version. Brain really. Yes really. The thought of getting a massage from you now seems notably more appealing."

"Oh, uh, meta-comment, the thing I'm doing now where I think out loud more in front of you when we're in private is because you're my girlfriend and get more access to my thought processes."

Carissa Sevar: Okay, Carissa does actually need to urgently seek correction at some point about how much she likes Keltham, not because it's going to inspire her to betrayal, she really isn't worried about that at all and assumes they aren't either, but because having such an unAsmodean impulse twenty times a day definitely breaks other things and she needs to know which other things and get them corrected as quickly as possible.

"That is a very sweet policy. I like it. I can - try to think out loud more in front of you as well?"

Keltham: "It's not actually easy, dath ilani only make it look easy. It'll take practice, and in particular one of the first skills you'll need to learn is the ability to say 'Wrongthought', meaning 'Wait that isn't what I was actually thinking', because the words that come out of your mouth will be different from the thoughts you actually thought."

Carissa Sevar: " - huh. Well, I'll try it. Maybe on my own, at first, unless you want to see me try it, but I do expect it'll be a bit harder to learn with an audience."

Keltham: "Oh, that's probably a good idea if you haven't had any anticonformity training, yeah."

"I'm not sure how much resistance a Chelish adult has to falsely believing that they're thinking the things that they think the people around them want them to be thinking. But, like, I kinda suspect the massive amount of counter-training we dath ilani got as kids was actually doing something."

Carissa Sevar: Hmm, do you think?

Carissa Sevar: "I haven't had anticonformity training, yeah," and appreciate the warning this is something you might do to us because wow it sounds kind of nightmarish in the same way as having the Queen show up to mock you for your thoughts from the transcripts she's reading. Except in the opposite direction so getting both at once is double nightmarish.

There's genuinely something terrifying there, something that feels like realizing you're not standing over solid ground but on a tightrope over the Abyss.

Or like noticing you could peel all your skin off. It's true but did you really need to notice it.

Of course most thoughts are the thoughts you're supposed to have.

How about a change of subject.

"Well, when it comes to having girls by force, I think there are actually more women with that fetish than men who want to fulfill it, so maybe you can have fun without handwringing about the market value of the experience you're getting for free. Or maybe you can charge, though the specific nature of the fetish does make it seem hard to do that."

Keltham: Keltham forbears to point out that this is not plausibly an evolutionarily stable mating-market equilibrium. He's made his point, it's time to give it a rest.

"I don't think it's - obtaining by force - maybe more like having them struggle inside their chains? Possible logistical difficulties there, sexually speaking, but logistical difficulties are there in life to be solved."

"Though I think I should not attempt for a fair while to do that with anyone who is not following an order saying that they cannot verbally argue with me to be let out, which I suspect rules out Pilar outright even apart from Isidre's warning. Or maybe I'm wrong about how that would work."

"Also, I think I'm actually ready for that massage now."

Carissa Sevar: Oh good. That was the goal. Carissa will start on that massage. "Yeah, I think if where you're at is that you need the girl to not be arguing with you, then that's fine" for now "but it rules out Pilar, based on what you said, and probably lots of other girls who won't feel wronged but won't know what you're playing at. Perhaps you will have to require introductory classes on dath ilanism before anyone is comprehensible enough you can fuck them without getting horribly confused."

Keltham: "Dath ilani ends up in alternate universe, trains the most intelligent people around him in dath ilanism so he has a pool of compatible sex partners? Yeah, I don't think that book would turn into a bestselling novel anytime soon."

Carissa Sevar: "Why not? I'd read it. But really, I think this is the premise of a romance novel marketed to women. Powerful man from another world comes to transform your own, happens to be incredibly sexually unfulfilled and want you in particular - that's a female fantasy. Most authors don't have much imagination and just make him a Duke but it's the same principle." The massage was a good idea, Keltham totally has some muscle tension.

Keltham: She's pretty okay at massage for somebody whose civilization obviously never gave her a single training class on how any of it works and may not even collectively know! This will probably have a net positive effect!

"Civilization's got some different romance novels, gotta say. Veeerrrryyy different. Going on recently popular media, a stereotypically standard female-appealing fantasy would be to find that they're secretly the daughter and heiress to a Dark Unilateral Ruler in an alternate universe with economicmagic that lets the Dark Ruler run the entire place as a criminal mastermind, with a Corrupted Governance that makes everybody believe that most people elected her when actually they didn't, and now the new Dark Heiress has got to pretend to act like an Evil supervillain for an extended period, and navigate a complex and chaotic web of criminal personalities to end up with a harem of four men each with distinct powers and personalities, on her way to either seizing or inheriting the Dark Rulership."

Carissa Sevar: " - okay, I think that'd be a hit in Cheliax too, but for some reason which no doubt you'll diagnose down the line, the actual romances I've had the misfortune to pick up have all been much worse than that. Also probably dath ilan would consider literally all our rulers even the very capable ones to be Dark Unilateral Rulers."

Keltham: "Your Queen's not unilateral according to Isidre, she had to coordinate with Asmodeus to take over Cheliax and now has to keep track of how much political capital she has with the Church of Asmodeus."

"Also, remember these are romance novels for Intelligence 17 women, being written by Intelligence 24 women. I'm not sure how much diagnosing of the difference actually remains to be diagnosed after that."

Carissa Sevar: "...yeah, I guess that's probably sufficient. And sure, Cheliax has a Dark Alliance between Her Imperial Majestrix and the Lawful Evil god Asmodeus, though if they disagree on anything it's not very visible to their subjects." Most of the time.

Keltham: "I am worried that your Alliance is not quite Dark enough, frankly, based on interacting with Isidre and hearing some of her concerns about how much fun the Queen isn't having. Very smart people in dath ilan tend to lean Good. The obvious potential problem with that, if not otherwise averted, is that when you care about a very large number of people, you can end up with very large numbers inside your mental decision processes and especially the parts that do abstract thinking. That can produce thoughts at," edges and vertices of the space of thoughts, "extremes you wouldn't get with a more naturally selfish person where the weights don't go much larger than the weights they put on themselves."

"Now this, to be clear, is a problem you have to solve with more Law, rather than less Law. If it's a predictable fact that certain ways of thinking are going to make certain mistakes, predict it and then don't make the mistakes. If a Good person ends up thinking it's a good idea to break an oath and go to Abaddon in order to save some larger number of other people from going to Abaddon, they could imaginably be right by their own measures, in which case there's no arguing with the," utility function, "values that entities assign to final outcomes. But I would far more expect to observe that Good people end up systematically mistaken about how much good oathbreaking really does, for example because of the further consequences of people not being able to trust Good people's oaths any more, or anyone's oaths because that person might be secretly Good, or just because Good people usually and systematically end up not saving as many people as they hoped with the sacrifices they make."

"If you have a lot of very smart Good people, they can train each other out of mistakes like that. I doubt Golarion even bothers to collect statistics on the kind of mistakes that very smart people make."

"And the other thing about Civilization is that we do not often have to worry about fifteen percent of the population dying. There are not millions of people in fixable-seeming horrible situations, and if there were, you would be working on it with a lot of other people rather than nearly alone. Which probably helps a bunch in practice to keep our smart Good people from ending up at weird extremes without them having to be incredibly Lawful about that."

"To a dath ilani, Isidre reads strongly as someone with overly large problems to worry about, insufficient Law by dath ilani standards, and an intelligence headband too much more powerful than the headbands of the people around her."

Carissa Sevar: Did he think that at Abrogail. Carissa bets he thought that at Abrogail, and she feels this is the best thing that ever happened, even though objectively it's probably bad for her interest in being of no interest to the Queen.

"....that makes sense. I have never heard the Queen called Good but I guess maybe a project like hers attracts Good advisors. Though her primary advisors are sent straight from Hell, probably because that's one of the only ways around this problem in Golarion."

Keltham: "Then the Queen's advisors may not know - may have forgotten? - how humans actually work in some ways, which is another problem Isidre was trying to optimize over." Should he actually be discussing the Queen a lot with Carissa, if there is a huge not-yet-defused Carissa-Aborgail interaction bomb that might not be tropetarily inevitable. "I have noticed an ulterior motive to change the subject about this, can we go back to talking about fetishes or romance."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes absolutely. Do you want me to just list various things that people with your taste sometimes like and then you can decide if you like them or not."

Keltham: "Maaaybe go a little slowly on me and just list, like, one more? Partially for internal speed limit reasons, and partially because not-spoiling-the-fun-by-finding-out-it-exists-too-far-ahead-of-when-you-can-do-it."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay, one more. Having a girl blindfolded and deafened so she has no idea what's happening around her except when you touch her."

Keltham: "I was going to say that's also a thing that has ever occurred to dath ilani to try, focusing on touch instead of other senses. But I'm realizing that in a sadistic context and maybe one where you are blindfolded and chained, this is a very different concept."

"Libido has started all the way back up, mysteriously," there are physiological signs of this, which Keltham is not bothering to verbally observe, because he expects Carissa can decode the way he just shifted and adjusted his position on the bed. Golarion beds sure are ill-suited to being a massage table on top of all their other ill-suited functions. "I request quiet, but continued massage, while I try to consider some things Isidre said."

Carissa Sevar: She nods, silently, and proceeds, silently, and imagines Contessa Lrilatha telling Abrogail to leave Carissa alone, because that must be - that's pretty much what Abrogail said happened. How would that even go. Would you go find a couple dozen other Carissas to distract Abrogail with. Poor dozen other Carissas who didn't have the good sense to be in the right place at the right time.

(She hopes they're not statues. That's not entertainment-at-the-misfortune-of-another, that'd just be sad.)

(That's not heretical, right? Wanting every soul to find its way to Asmodeus?)

Keltham: Keltham tries to figure out how he'd feel about telling the Chelish government - well, not to give him Carissa or else, because, like, that is stupid on so many different levels both as decision theory and as a trap that Isidre could be setting for him if she was less than absolutely trustworthy. Please give him Carissa permanently or until he gives her back, to do with as he pleases, and have that be the regulation of Cheliax and not just an arrangement between the two of them, formalizing what Carissa gave him informally, as Carissa herself wants according to your very smart people; and in return Keltham charges Cheliax very very slightly less of their GDP increase, or some such.

It's not - particularly landing, at this point?

In a world with Pilars, Keltham can see, somehow - not with the eyes of dath ilan but with the eyes of his own sexuality, that had no place available for it in dath ilan in a way that wasn't anyone's fault - Keltham can see how there could be a submissive!woman gender-subtrope that is like being pursued and dated, but more so. He can imagine how that gender-subtrope of woman might think it was more romantic for a man to desire her so much that he came in and just took her away, paying costs to do that but never asking. The question of how this ends up with the right people matched, and without giant flaming obvious incentive problems if a man likes a woman who doesn't like him back, may perhaps rest on Golarion institutions unknown to him; or it may be a reason why this desire unsatisfiable in reality is fed mainly by Golarion romance novels.

He can imagine that Carissa wants that - even if he's pretty sure he's not imagining it correctly, true to the real Carissa Sevar, it's enough to explain why a possible person would want that. To be in - metaphorical bed-chains, in her larger social and legal situation, chains that she wears always, as proof that a man wanted her that much.

Carissa wants it, let's suppose that to be true; does that situation appeal to Keltham himself?

...not really. The part where Carissa gives herself to him feels deeper and more meaningful, to him, than that choice being taken away from Carissa so that Keltham no longer knows she's still making it. It's a choice that says Keltham is worthy, that he and his sexuality are worth so much to Carissa, that she has judged him and chosen him even though she could have had another, that he is valuable to Carissa in a way he was not so valuable to any woman in dath ilan.

Is there some way you still get that in full measure, if somebody is with you because they can't escape within Golarion and have opted not to escape to the afterlife?

Keltham isn't seeing it, for now. Maybe his thoughts are being too crystalline and logical about it; too denying of subtleties and forcing it all into 'well, but then therefore' where people could just opt to not conclude that therefore. Maybe there is a way that Keltham can know Carissa still finds him worthy, even as she lives truly in the world where she has no other choice. Well. Like the Detect Desires spell, for example. If you have that around for people who can afford it, then it is obviously going to change some things -

SHIT.

Does Isidre do that to the people around her. Cast Detect Desires around them, or have it cast by a cleric who reports to her, and maybe not a cleric of Asmodeus either.

Keltham is trying not to believe it too hard, but his brain just shouted very loudly "YES SHE DOES", because Isidre knows far too much about what various people want. And it is extremely the sort of deontology violation that you'd expect from a Good person with a deficit of Law, an overly powerful intelligence headband, and horrifying problems that are horrifically large. Isidre would reason that the privacy violation was just not really that important, on the scale of twenty million people; and even if her intelligence headband lets her fake some intuitive shadow of the Law of Coordination, she might still argue to herself that knowing more true facts about somebody is not something that ought to cause a breakdown of coordination. Keltham isn't even sure she's wrong, he doesn't have her problems. Call it 75% probability.

But suppose Carissa is fine with Detect Desires being used on her. Though, maybe that aspect has to be illegible so Carissa doesn't have to admit to herself that she could escape by wanting to be free... well, leave aside the deontology violation of doing it without asking, suppose the thought experiment anyways. Or maybe Carissa says Keltham is entitled to Detect Desires her and truthspell her whenever he wants, because that is part of what it means to give herself to him, and they never have to make mutually legible why or whether Keltham is doing that.

Consider that Least Convenient Possible World, for the argument against putting Carissa in a situation where the 'absolute-power' (Keltham thinks the Taldane word in Baseline) that Keltham has over her has been formally materialized and made real. The world where Keltham casts Detect Desires every morning, or multiple times per day because Least Convenient Possible World, and the spell always says that Carissa still wants him and judges him worthy and would have him hold 'absolute-power' over her.

Then what?

Then Keltham does not really see the added appeal from his perspective; but it is not obviously, or not legibly obviously, something he couldn't do for Carissa to make her happier, at little cost to himself.

Except for where his mind just screamed that he is tilting further on that dangerous narrow ledge he is standing upon. And also, Isidre warned him not to have that done to Carissa unless he wanted it for himself.

Keltham doing it because Carissa wants it is probably not what Carissa wants either. The Golarion woman's romance novel is about the man who wants you that much in that way and not because he thinks it is something you need to be happy.

Maybe someday Keltham will come to feel for himself the thing that is the male complement of the gender-subtrope that Carissa has, where he wants for himself to make that 'absolute-power' real, and cast Detect Desires as a guardrail around it, and make it so that if Carissa can't stop wanting him then she can't stop having him either. Maybe someday he'll understand better the grounds he stands on in Golarion, and it will no longer seem like something that would get you kicked out of most cities in dath ilan... well, no, not actually, they're just not going to do that to you in dath ilan, if Carissa is standing there saying 'get the fuck out of our private business, Civilization, I don't need you to protect me'. No victim no crime, as the proverb goes. So it isn't like that. But maybe someday it will stop feeling like that.

Also Civilization would... what would they even think of a situation where Carissa is going 'Let me out, Civilization, I don't want to be here anymore!', to test the bounds of the chains placed on her and be reassured that they are real, and Detect Desires is showing that Carissa wants desperately for Civilization to laugh maniacally and say 'No you belong to Keltham now!'

Keltham is sad he will never get to subsidize this question in a voting prediction market. He really wants to know what Civilization would think of it. Well, no, actually he wants to see the enormous flamewar and Very Serious People shouting at each other that would happen if this question really came up. But also he wants to know what Civilization would think of it.

What does the Kelthamverse think of it?

...The Kelthamverse is, what, three days old, at this point? The Kelthamverse knows that it is a tiny baby world and wants to refer the question back to Civilization so that it has a good starting point.

But, mostly, this thoughtsearch has reached quiescence; there is not much expected value of logical information in searching further. Keltham finds no desire within himself, for his own sake, to transform Carissa's free gift to him into a metaphorical chain that she wears always; and for him to do it for her sake is almost surely not what Carissa wants. He will reopen the question when and if he finds within himself that gender-subtrope that is complement to Carissa's.

And meanwhile, he is not going to say anything to Carissa that sounds like 'Never forget, you've got the right to leave at any time!' because that would be stupid.

Carissa Sevar: It's somewhat nervewracking, knowing Keltham is thinking and having no idea what he's thinking, being totally unsure whether at any moment he'll say 'great, okay, I resolved all my internal Good-training, go crawl into the fire' or 'hey, was that Isidre secretly the Queen of Cheliax in disguise, it was inferrable from several things she said' or 'I've decided Cheliax is too Good, can we relocate operations to Razmiran?' or .... actually, coming up with scary things Keltham might say isn't a productive thing to be doing. What if instead she tries to understand magnetism, so she can be impressive next time they try Prestidigitation, and then whatever happens will happen. Give up hope and endure.

Keltham: "Carissa, meta-question, if I suspect Isidre of doing something that might or might not be incredibly criminal in Cheliax, maybe it is, maybe it's the sort of thing people like her are quietly expected to do, is that something I talk to you about."

Carissa Sevar: Wow that's substantially worse than 'crawl into the fire'!

"...at the Worldwound you are obligated to report things like that, to a different Lawful church if you think your own might fail to handle it. Here....I guess talking to me about it is a reasonable thing to do, let me think if there's a reason not to tell me -"

Are they going to have to escape -

"I think you should tell me."

Keltham: "Isidre knows way too much about what various people want, and this isn't dath ilan so the people around her don't have a good sense of what you can't do with just an intelligence headband. I suspect Isidre of having somebody, maybe a cleric not of Asmodeus, casting Detect Desires and reporting to her. If she's not that cleric herself, come to think, or maybe it's also a wizard spell I didn't think to ask -"

"Anyways. I'm at 75% probability that's what she does and that's taking into account how little I know."

"Targets would have included you, Pilar, maybe me if Asmodeus didn't specifically direct otherwise, and possibly, I am less sure about this part, the Queen of Cheliax."

Carissa Sevar: Even in Taldor -

- but old Cheliax is Taldor, new Cheliax is Asmodeus's -

- safer not to lie. Except for how everything is a lie. Carissa has never found lying to be difficult before and these days it's like navigating a dungeon blindfolded.

The fact that Cheliax could mind control Keltham and hasn't is useful evidence of good faith, and also she's already told him that - but also making it clear that Keltham wouldn't notice if sufficiently powerful people did it makes it impossible to preserve an escape avenue where Keltham concludes there's a rot that doesn't extend to the top -

" - I'm going to start by saying things I'm very sure of and then get to things I'm less sure of," she says. "So, invasive divinations by default feel like something, it's possible to notice them happening to you. Probably, uh, Contessa Lrilatha, or the Queen herself, could cast an invasive divination you couldn't even detect - they could also do mind control that felt like your own choices - but anyone much less powerful than that would be running a reasonably high chance that their targets would notice. Unless there are some powerful secret magic items involved, which there might be.

When you cast Detect Desires on me I felt it, and I could've attempted to fight you off and probably succeeded. We should .... make sure you know what that feeling is and that you haven't felt it at any time in the last couple of days. Strongly predict you haven't, though. When the priest on duty at the Worldwound first got a revelation from Asmodeus about you, his instructions to me suggested that Asmodeus had very firmly prohibited - a very wide class of things including some we don't even think of as bad behavior - with respect to you."

Carissa Sevar: "I haven't noticed unexpected invasive divinations or enchantments cast on me though I consented to a truth spell and some invasive divinations for Security screening for this project and I'm third-circle, not fourth, that makes a substantial difference in how powerful you'd need to be to be sure I wouldn't notice. And Pilar's second, which makes her even easier to hit. - and Pilar might've agreed to screening for various weird things, when she got back from Elysium, because she'd spent a bunch of time around Chaotic outsiders...

Trying to cast an invasive divination on the Queen of Cheliax is definitely an incredibly serious crime, like, they would execute you on the spot after making sure you weren't spying for somebody sort of crime. I think trying to cast an invasive divination on people involved in a secret project would be considered a big deal also. I - it might be one of those things where the Church and the Crown aren't entirely on the same page.

It is definitely the kind of thing you'd report at the Worldwound."

Keltham: "Somewhat reassuring, and also, in retrospect, I shouldn't have said 75% for Detect Desires, that was too narrow a hypothesis, rookie cognitive error - magical items, sure, maybe, a function on that irreplaceable relic headband. Or is there something that's like Fox's Cunning, Owl's Wisdom, Eagle's Splendour, but for reading people -"

Carissa Sevar: True, not that damning, sort of inconvenient to admit but Keltham's already noticed a bunch of its correlates in various places.

" - yeah. There is. Uh, not a spell, but there are magic items for it, and it's - a stereotype about nobles - that they're all ridiculously enhanced at it -"

Keltham: "That - would plausibly be it, yeah. I don't know what it can't do. And if it's legal and not considered socially unacceptable, then Isidre seems like the sort of person who's extremely likely to get the most powerful version of it that exists."

"Well. Maybe I ran ahead too far of my inference speed limit, there, too influenced by the 'trope' where you walk up to somebody and grimly say 'I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you know too much' and then prove that they couldn't have reached their conclusions from only the information they were supposed to have. It would be more likely that Isidre was doing something undetectable and legal than that she was doing something incredibly illegal and where she might get caught."

Carissa Sevar: Of course dath ilan has stories about that, and finds a special joy in discovering and uncovering it.

Abandon hope and endure.

No. Win.

"I'm still not sure what a trope is but - yeah, I'd expect someone in her position is much much likelier to be achieving her results with powerful magic that no one really objects to - it works just as well if the other person has Mind Blank up, which is the intuitive line between 'just being uncannily good at looking' and 'using invasive magic' -"

Keltham: "Mind Blank?"

Carissa Sevar: "Eighth circle incredibly powerful abjuration that provides approximately categorical protection against divinations and enchantments targeting you. You can't get around it with a Wish, that's how powerful it is. If someone tries to scry the room you're in, the room will appear but you won't. If someone casts Detect Intelligence they'll detect all intelligent minds in the area except yours."

Keltham: "And there's magic items of it but they cost eight million gold pieces and who knows they might be cursed."

Carissa Sevar: "I actually don't even know a magic item of it to exist at all but if it did it'd certainly be priceless."

Keltham: "And it can't possibly be what it sounds like, but I'll ask anyways just in case. Wish?"

Carissa Sevar: "Does what you ask for. - which is very bad and dangerous and there are organizations that'll kill you if they suspect you're trying to use a Wish. There are known safe phrasings for, like, fifteen, twenty things, very powerful things but not nearly as powerful as the spell's capable of but if you try something there's not a known safe phrasing for extremely bad things will definitely happen."

Keltham: "Combo with twenty Auguries?" Keltham says, before it occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't be giving ideas like that away.

Carissa Sevar: "Duplicating auguries doesn't work, you get the same answer. But there are more powerful spells for talking to one's god, like Commune, and ninth circle wizards with an INT of 30 do occasionally advisedly cast powerful Wishes, which I assume is how we got the known safe phrasings we do have."

Keltham: "How the flaming noodles do you get to INT 30, even with a +6 Intelligence headband you'd have to start from INT 24 which is dath ilan +3 and then that takes you to dath ilan +6, I'm not sure we even have anybody who's actually that smart and not just a measurement breaking down. If anyone here is that smart and not restricted from communicating like gods are restricted, Golarion shouldn't exist."

Carissa Sevar: "One of the known safe wordings of a Wish is intelligence enhancement. Just +1; you need a chain of five Wishes cast in immediate sequence to get +5, and that's the most Wishes cast in sequence attested in all of history. So you'd have to start from 19, and we don't throw one of those often but in all of history we have. I don't know why having INT 30 didn't cause them to solve everything wrong in the world; maybe INT 30 doesn't actually perfectly correspond to the dath ilan + 6."

Keltham: "That... was a thought that had occurred to me earlier, yeah, but with people supposedly INT 30 running around, I feel a lot more credence in that thought. That Detect Intelligence isn't measuring everything that dath ilan thinks of as intelligence, and that the spells and headbands only enhance - what we'd see as one relatively narrow aspect of intelligence. Dath ilan separates smartness into a lot of factors, I suspect what you call Intelligence and Wisdom together would be, like, three of seven main ones, or some such."

"Somebody with general smartness 30 and not just Intelligence 30 should - shred apart the reality of Golarion as they walk through it, I don't think there's any way you can be that generally smart and not figure out, like, the idea of selection on heritable variation."

Carissa Sevar: "That could be. Though also maybe Archmage Nex a thousand years ago figured out selection on heritable variation but didn't, uh, tell everybody, because who knows if it'd have suited him. And there's no one that smart around now."

Keltham: "What's the current highest INT? If there's Detect Intelligence then is there also a Detect Wisdom spell? What's the average Wisdom of a wizard-tracked student with Intelligence 18?"

Carissa Sevar: "Probably the smartest person alive is Nefreti Clepati, the seventh circle wizard and ninth circle cleric of Nethys who heads the church of Nethys in Sothis. She's - Nethys-touched, so by all accounts sort of insane - and probably has, like, a 26 for both intelligence and wisdom, though I don't know for sure, I haven't met her. There is also a Detect Wisdom spell, and wisdom is a tiny bit higher than average for wizard-tracked students but not that much higher, maybe 12. ...wisdom increases over the course of your life, though, unlike Intelligence, so it'd be higher if you were looking at those same people at age 25."

Keltham: "Anything else on the same level as Intelligence and Wisdom that Nefreti also has a 26 in?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not that I've heard advertised, but again, I haven't met her, and one of the few stories I know about her are that she caused a massive explosion that flattened the temple of Nethys in Sothis, and Nethys gave her several more cleric levels for it."

Keltham: "Sounds like a kinda cool god, frankly. That said I'm never praying to him."

dath ilan: In Keltham's mind, a hypothesis is taking shape, a mental model.

To a Chelish eavesdropper, it would look like rather a lot of ~~~~. Seeing the idea as a dath ilani sees it, compactly and at a glance, requires a grasp of underlying math. If Keltham wanted to say it to Carissa, he would need to spell out rather a lot of things and also use a whiteboard.

Keltham's thought revolves around a standard dath ilani concept that Taldane has no word for. 'Intelligence' translated into this word in Baseline; but Keltham is starting to suspect that this reflects a mistake that Carissa and other language donors are making, not a translation accurate in the world. For translation purposes, one must then fix a new term.

Call this one 'thinkoomph'.

'Thinkoomph' is optimization-as-done-by-humans. Its figure-of-merit is correct prediction, choice of action leading to desired outcomes, the power of inner thoughts over the outer world, the power of cognition to apprehend and effectuate reality. Of course, humans do this in a weird idiosyncratic way, and a random possible simple optimizer that was about as powerful as an average dath ilani would not understand and manipulate reality in the same way as an average dath ilani. But if everyone involved is a human, then to speak of 'thinkoomph' as a thing-humans-do whose figure-of-merit is optimization, is not too unsensible a concept.

Keltham does not need to think about this part right now, he has already chunked the notion of 'thinkoomph' long ago. 'Thinkoomph' is a view into the processes that humans do to produce optimization, viewed from the standpoint where its purpose is optimization, and where the information-theoretic goal of the viewpoint you're taking is to make it easy to describe those usual variations among humans that contribute to the variations in their optimization power.

Thinkoomph then is not a single number but a structure with some internals. But it happens to be empirically the case that a lot of usefully-discussable smartness-components map not-too-terribly onto a unidimensional line, such that, holding the rest of a mind constant, you get more optimization power as you move up along the line.

For ease of visualization, then, consider thinkoomph as a seven-dimensional thing, because it happens that there's a useful component analysis like that in dath ilan which gives you seven dimensions.

Or consider thinkoomph as a machine with seven gears each of varying size, if you don't want to visualize seven-dimensional objects for some weird reason.

Suppose Detect Intelligence gives you an imperfect partial view of thinkoomph that's made up of, say, (1) speed/clarity of information retrieval plus (2) how much information you can maintain in short-term memory. Detect Wisdom gives you an imperfect partial view of (3) the piece of thinkoomph that's perceptual clarity, which critically has a subpiece (3a) that is clarity and detail and accuracy of introspection. Which is to say - shifting viewpoints from the machinery to the result that machinery produces - that Detect Wisdom imperfectly measures the machinery that grinds to produce reflection.

In dath ilan the proverb-poem goes: 'Beware lest what you can measure easily becomes all that you measure; beware lest it become all that you optimize; beware lest it become all that you ever think of.'

The people of Golarion know how to Detect Intelligence and Detect Wisdom, and that's it. So they think there are two components of thinkoomph. They invent two spells to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects and the thing-that-Detect-Wisdom-detects.

They invent headbands to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects. The amount the headband sells for depends on how large of a shift it produces in that handy spell Detect Intelligence, which, as everyone in Golarion knows, detects Intelligence. If the Detect Intelligence spell says that a headband produces a +3 to Intelligence, it's worth less money than if Detect Intelligence says that the headband produces +4 to intelligence.

Imagine now that nobody has invented Detect Wisdom yet, just Detect Intelligence. Imagine that somebody with a vision of broader thinkoomph builds a new headband that would, if you could also run Detect Wisdom, show to produce a +3 to Intelligence and a +3 to Wisdom. This headband is probably more expensive to build than the one that produces +4 to Intelligence, probably by a lot, and the Detect Intelligence spell says that it produces an inferior result than the +4 headband. So nobody builds a headband like that, if they don't have Detect Wisdom.

Does either Intelligence or Wisdom incorporate creativity, outside-the-box solutions, outside-the-box hypotheses? Maybe when Keltham dares to try on an intelligence headband, if he ever so dares, it'll be immediately apparent to him that this headband boosts every part of cognition that Owl's Wisdom didn't boost. But Keltham is guessing that this will prove to not be the case.

Consider, then, the world in which Golarion has a Detect Intelligence spell and a Detect Wisdom spell, but these are only 3 out of 7 components of cognition.

It's not the kids with highest thinkoomph who get tracked to be wizards. It's the kids with the highest Detected Intelligence.

It is of course famously true that in humans (and describing humans is what the concept of 'thinkoomph' is all about), most things you can measure about thinkoomph's components or outputs will all correlate with each other quite a lot. The kids with Intelligence 14, which Keltham thinks was supposed to be the wizard-tracking threshold, do tend to have Wisdom 12 rather than Wisdom 10. But if you were looking not-at-random at somebody with Intelligence 14, selected on high Intelligence, and asking 'what are the rest of their thinkoomph components like', then the rest are probably more like what their Wisdom score happened to be.

When you select on kids with high Detected Intelligence, you're not just selecting for kids with high general thinkoomph levels that produce high Intelligence along the way, you're selecting for kids whose Intelligence is unusually high compared to the rest of their thinkoomph. That's why the Wisdom comes out as 12 instead of 14.

Dath ilan has heritage-optimized itself over generations in full awareness of how all these measurement and optimization gotchas work. They are doing their best to measure real-world results broadly, and doing genetics and statistics to them. Dath ilan does not want to end up testing some weird projection of thinkoomph that originally started out correlated with thinkoomph, optimizing over this weird projection, and ending up with optimized things that have much more of the weird projected quality than they have thinkoomph. Dath ilan wants actual thinkoomph and is explicitly not pursuing it the stupid way.

So you've got your kid with Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 14 and they get wizard-tracked and get a +6 intelligence headband or maybe, if they become spectacularly successful, a relic with +6 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom, and if they're incredibly insanely successful, they get 2 or 3 layered Wish spells on top of that. They end up, say, with 27 Intelligence and 21 Wisdom; in dath ilani terms, those subcomponents of thinkoomph would now be at +4.5sd and +1.5sd respectively.

But their other 4 out of 7 thinkoomph characteristics are still around 14; or in dath ilani terms, if the scales match, -2sd. Golarionites don't know how to easily measure these other components; they don't try to boost them; they don't think about them.

This sounds a lot more like a model consistent with Golarion, than the model where anyone with +6 thinkoomph has literally ever existed here. You don't need training to be a Keeper at +6 thinkoomph, you just are one.

Inside Keltham's mind this is all a much shorter and better-chunked thing to think; what he thinks, roughly, is 'Hey maybe they got Goodhart's Cursed on Intelligence and Wisdom metrics'.

Only Keltham's actual thought is that thinkoomph is the underlying true value; Intelligence and Wisdom are imperfect proxy measures of thinkoomph; optimization over Intelligence and Wisdom will select not just on thinkoomph but on upward divergence of measured Intelligence and Wisdom scores from underlying thinkoomph scores; that this applies both to selecting students for wizard-tracking and for boosting them with Intelligence headbands later; and that this will of course produce people who may detect as +4 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom but who started with something like -2 or -1 underlying general abstracted-correlation-of-thinkoomph-components, and now have something more like +1 final-optimization-power as a result of all that Intelligence and Wisdom boosting.

Nobody with +6 thinkoomph has ever walked through this place. They'd shred it around themselves like tissue paper.

Keltham: "Putting a pin in something to follow up on later," Keltham says, after the few seconds it takes for him to think the compact version of the thought. "Detect my Wisdom, if it's 20 that's very bad news for your heritage optimization project and makes my heritage substantially more valuable. If my Wisdom is 14 that's much better news for you. Underlying reasoning behind that statement is gonna take a drawing-wall though."

"Do Wishes by any chance need to be spoken in a strange inhuman language?" Wreaking total havoc if you state things the least bit incorrectly seems obviously reminiscent of bare-metal systems programming.

Carissa Sevar: "A couple of the known safe wordings are Taldane. The others are other things but other human languages, I think."

Keltham: "Can you invent an artificial language and say a Wish in that?"

Carissa Sevar: "...probably but you'd be starting without any known safe wordings so -

- look, I am sure dath ilan has an equivalent to this, uh, a thing where smart people immediately start thinking of a clever way to do it that will get around all the things they've been told might go wrong, but the clever way will also go wrong, and - maybe we'll eventually be able to use Wishes to do stuff but I think you are lacking the background of how everyone always tries to come up with a clever way to use Wishes to solve their problems and they sound like they'll work fine and then they don't and it's a disaster, which you'd have if you were from Golarion. And it's not that I don't want to rewrite the fabric of reality just by speaking aloud, I'd love to."

Keltham: "Carissa, I wasn't considering doing that on any remotely near-term timescale, I'm not completely shitpooping insane, I was just curious if anybody had maybe already tried the thing that a dath ilani thinks of in half a second," namely casting Wishes with a real actual proper specification language.

Or maybe that's overkill and all you need is Baseline instead of flaming Taldane! Keltham isn't betting on it, he's not going to try it, but he sure is thinking it.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Just, we have, uh, maybe a trope, about people going 'oh, I thought of a clever way to do safe Wishes no one tried before' shortly before there's a smoking crater a Teleport distance across. Asking questions is fine. I don't know anyone to have tried that."

Keltham: "Don't do anything that would make Broom give me a sad look, got it."

...though this smoking-crater business, again, sounds like a result you would absolutely get if what you needed was a programming language for bare-metal systems programming and what you used was spoken colloquial Taldane.

To be fair, if that's true, it's a puzzle why any Wish works, let alone asking for an Intelligence boost.

Maybe he'll look into known safe wordings and unsafe wordings and check if there's anything really, really obvious going on there if the person reading it is a computer programmer.

...maybe he is being a typical dath ilani male in a certain way and he should stop doing that. "I think I should maybe focus on the massage for a bit, relax again, and think about Isidre's other sexuality-requiring cognitive challenge posed to me. So far I've done one of two."

Carissa Sevar: "All right." She was kind of hoping that Keltham would be annoyed, about her being argumentative at him, but either he wasn't or it just didn't occur to him that if you're annoyed at your girlfriend who belongs to you you can hit her about it. Oh well.

Massage in silence it is.

Keltham: After a bit of silence, relaxing again, mentally leaning into the massage, and yes, very briefly poking some internal curiosity about what exactly it is that is Pilar's obligate fetish precisely speaking, Keltham returns to contemplating more sexual questions.

How does he feel about renting Carissa out?

...mostly he's still getting a WHAT from his brain.

Can he evaluate it concretely rather than abstractly?

Not without having actually met the Queen of Cheliax at all.

Okay, but, Keltham does know some people. He even knows some female people, in case this is a polarized gendertrope with respect to the renting individual. How does Keltham feel about renting Carissa to his max-mutual-wordcount coauthor from his fic-circle back in dath ilan, who happens to possess the requisite parts?

...sad about never writing anything with her again, also, she's proooobably not a sadist like at all(??), also, maybe it actually is not a terribly good idea to think right now about people who believe he's Truly Dead.

Keltham knows some female people inside a totally different universe that is not that universe. He doesn't know them very well but he can ask himself the concrete question anyways. What if he were to rent Carissa to, say, Tonia Barrero, in repayment of the debt he owes her for an unexpected, un-volunteered-in-advance, at-best-semi-consensual truthspelling?

...

Still file not found, here, he doesn't know Tonia well enough.

Keltham knows what to do in this cognitive situation! For purposes of testing this function, keep supplying imaginary values to the Tonia structure until he can complete the function call! If at any point he gets a negative result he can then tweak values to see if there's any value that produces a positive result instead, and then he'll also know what properties he's looking for!

Let Tonia be a sadist, but, like, a young sadist who's only slightly more experienced there than Keltham, and in no danger of providing Carissa with an unforgettable experience less forgettable than other experiences she's already had, thereby causing Carissa to leave him for Tonia who is the superior sadist...

...actually Keltham is not sure he really needs this part of the spec, Carissa's current attraction to him is not because Keltham is a supersadist, and therefore it is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable that you can't steal Carissa from him by being a better supersadist. Alas, that which is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable is not always Perfectly Reasonable. Anyways, fix the current values at favorable ones to see if this function returns 'false' even under quite favorable circumstances.

Tonia can hurt Carissa slightly more than Keltham, but not threateningly so; she can't give Carissa an orgasm due to Carissa's eroLARP character arc posing a sex problem, so Tonia's not threateningly better than him there. And if Tonia was, Keltham could always just tell Carissa she's not allowed... okay something reacted to that inside him, that didn't react to hearing about the magical-item Belt of No Touch. Possibly because in this case there was any reason for it, and that made the scenario more real.

Or say mostly, in this scenario, Carissa is being rented to Tonia in order to provide Tonia with not-necessarily-reciprocated pleasure just like if Tonia had bought a sex worker in dath ilan. Suppose Carissa doesn't hate it - Keltham's Carissamodel is now complaining that he is not supposed to check this and that offends her dignity of being harder to hurt than that, well, sorry, Carissamodel, that is not what Keltham is optimizing right now. Carissa even manages to have a moderately fun time because Tonia hurts her some and reacts in a way that makes Carissa feel pride in her own sexual skills and it... actually matters to her that Keltham told her to do it? Postulating this part feels hard; Keltham is not himself a Carissa and he is not sure what it is like on the inside to be a Carissa.

Keltham thinks he is at least not obviously not-okay with this whole sort of thing? It feels a lot like asking, in an ordinary relationship, how you would feel about your partner going out for a night with somebody else who'd been like 'yeah screw flirting what's your monetary price'. He wouldn't have objected to that back in dath ilan, he wasn't that monogamous with anyone.

...that these feel like similar questions, probably reflects Keltham failing to get to grips with the actual gendertrope here. Isidre seemed to think this should not feel like the same gendertrope as sex work, even if it had similar gender ratios.

For one thing, Keltham was aromantic back in dath ilan because he is a romantically obligate sadist, or at least the very first masochist he ran into was the first person he ever started feeling at all like he needed something from her that was about it being from her and didn't funge with things he could possibly get from somewhere else.

How would Keltham feel about Carissa trading herself to somebody for - one unskilled-labor-week is, like 1.2gp or so? Let's say 2gp, Carissa is hot.

Parts of Keltham are not happy with this. Because Carissa is his? Because Keltham is insecure about whether that would mean Carissa still liked him more than she likes anybody else? Because Keltham is supposed to give permission first? Keltham doesn't know.

But if Keltham orders Carissa to do it? For whatever reason?

- then that's okay. Possibly. At least if all the other call values are set to Imaginary Tonia settings.

And with likely settings on the Queen of Cheliax, rather than favorable settings on Tonia? If, in exchange for an ultimately insignificant symbolic amount of money, and with at least some pressure on the side to deny a trope and perhaps the entire theory of tropism, Carissa is rented to Abrosomething Thrune? Older than Carissa, with the same de facto ability to chain her for real if she really wanted (assuming that Keltham did not object, which he would), probably a much much more experienced sadist than Keltham, with access to far more powerful sex toys that are the equivalent of overpowered vibrators with biofeedback functions and, yes, the ability to make Carissa come.

...it's not quite an obvious 'no'. It basically depends, Keltham is pretty sure, on whether Keltham is afraid that Carissa can be taken away from him by somebody being a better sadist to her, than he can be for a while yet. If somebody is the more skillful manipulator of masochism, of, what did Isidre call it, submission, can they steal away Carissa's feelings from him? The threat of giving Carissa an orgasm, the threat of also having potential absolute-power over her, seem less real than that.

Keltham's hindbrain, which may, of course, be entirely factually wrong about everything, intuits that it is basically not possible to steal Carissa by giving her a good-enough orgasm. Hurting her, maybe, understanding the deep keys to her sexuality that Keltham is still struggling with; but not with humanly reasonable amounts of pleasure short of dangerous drugs.

And as for the absolute-power threat, in part, it doesn't feel as real because Keltham has not internalized a model of whatever it is that Carissa has inside her. But also, it's impossible for two people to both have potential absolute-power over someone. If they came into conflict, after all, only one of them could get their way. So long as that person would be Keltham, rather than the Queen of Cheliax, everything would be fine, right? It just has to be clear to Carissa that if Keltham and the Queen fought over her, Keltham would be the one to end up with her; if that's true, the keys to her sexuality would be safe.

...not that Keltham is thinking that he can, like, wield more political power inside Cheliax than its own Nearly Unilateral Chief Executive. But the Queen of Cheliax has to be sensible and consider things like political capital with the Church of Asmodeus, while Keltham can be much less sensible and walk out on Cheliax if the Queen steals his girl from him. It shouldn't be about power alone, Keltham doesn't think; differential willingness to use power should be an acceptable coin to Carissa's sexuality. It controls who would actually end up with her, if it came to that.

Keltham's not willing, not today, to bargain a probabilistic or absolute walkout on Cheliax, in order to tell the government of Cheliax to hand Carissa over to him in-legal-reality, to say that he considers her a necessary part of his gains-from-trade.

Telling Cheliax that he considers Carissa a necessary part of his gains-from-trade and he'll walk out if the Queen steals her, either by kidnapping her, or by renting her from Keltham but then giving her an experience that shifts her romantic focus away from Keltham to the Queen? She's Keltham's, the Queen can't have her except temporarily?

Sure! That, he feels totally willing to do.

Carissa would... probably find that hot? Keltham's Carissamodel confidently finds it very hot if Keltham actually wins at it, but Keltham is not entirely confident in his Carissamodel.

Well, at least Keltham should definitely win? He can't really see any functional Chief Executive being like 'lol no I'm gonna take Carissa and watch you walk out on Cheliax', and even if the Queen wanted to, her advisors would stop her. She's an overly-Good person in an overly-Good government that has to be stopped by Asmodeus from resorting to outright mind control when it looks like that might be for the greater good of the country. Keltham isn't pure Evil, sure, but he's not that Good, which means he should win this particular contest.

Of course, that's only if people are running on sanity. If the Queen is running on tropes, she'll try to steal Carissa no matter how bad it would be for Cheliax if she succeeded... but then if those events are running on tropes, it's impossible to win Carissa's true love-sexuality without winning a fight for real power over her, the Queen should ultimately fail to do that after making worrying progress, and then end up kicked up out of Cheliax and/or harem-recruited.

Anyways, he's got enough of an answer that his next step is to ask Isidre to meet again and check his model of how all this works. Or ask Carissa? He kind of wants to ask Isidre first, before he tries to talk with Carissa; Isidre is more willing to be legible, and nothing blows up if he says the wrong thing in front of her.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has thought up a reasonable amount of opinions about contraception and magnetism despite being distracted every few seconds by contemplating the fact that Keltham is probably contemplating Isidre's offer.

The Queen -

- there's not actually much point contemplating what having sex with the Queen of Cheliax would be like, and not just because that definitely counts as flirting with her. It will probably be awful. Carissa is a grown adult and is going to go to Hell someday and can handle awful. It'll probably be - so, being hurt isn't upsetting, being hurt can be fun and even when it's more than she can take, like the cursed bag, it's not upsetting, it's bad but it's a specific kind of bad that's all right. There are things that are actually upsetting, and -

- thinking about them is just asking for it -

- no, she'll just think about how to orchestrate a convincing demonstration of Suggestion to Keltham instead.

Keltham: Pending questions resolved into a state of quiescence, Keltham relaxes more into the massage. It's nice. Does he want to command some non-reciprocated sexual service from Carissa, at the end of this?

The idea of ordering her to do it - seems more comfortable now, possibly it has something to do with having heard that she has any coherently imaginable endgame, maybe it's just a shock having had time to sink in and for Keltham to adjust.

But then his libido might go offline for a while. He shouldn't expend his newly refilled ero reservoir if he needs to have another conversation with Isidre today... it's not clear how urgent this whole thing is, exactly?

"Carissa," Keltham says out loud, his voice coming out sounding as relaxed as he is, "I'm too relaxed right now to really want to move, so can I ask you to have them return my reply to Isidre that I'm interested in further discussing her second suggested course of action, though I'm not yet on a definite yes. And can I possibly get a yes-no in the next ten minutes about whether or not Isidre wants to meet me again today."

(It wouldn't occur to Keltham that Isidre might not imagine him to be capable of a quick reconsideration and answer. One hour is a long time to think in dath ilan, and sure it may take longer to reconsider some major life questions, but there's no presumption that you can't do it in an hour. It similarly wouldn't occur to Keltham that he ought not ask a Senior Governance Official for a yes-no answer in ten minutes; somebody like Isidre is surely interrupted often enough, and good enough at task-switching, that she's checking her tiny-task queue every eight minutes, in Isidre's computer-based and network-connected task management system; which will continue to go on existing in Keltham's imagination and his preprogrammed social reflexes unless and until he thinks explicitly about that question for literally half of a second.)

Carissa Sevar: "I'll ask but she might not be interruptible that soon," says Carissa, who'd say that even if Isidre wasn't the Queen of Cheliax.

Keltham has further thoughts on renting Carissa to the Queen of Cheliax. That's terrifying, but definitely a success. Carissa is going to let herself enjoy her success without dwelling too much on its implications for whether she gets tortured which is ultimately not the thing that matters here.

Keltham: (How would Carissa know that, if it was true? But if it's info Carissa shouldn't have, from his perspective, on the gaslighting hypotheses he's always considering in the back of his mind, she wouldn't just blurt it out, would she? If they were that bad at LARPing they'd have screwed up by now surely.)

((Of which it is said in dath ilan: Being suspicious is easy, being suspicious of the correct 1 out of the 1000 pieces of information you received today is hard.))

"Make it so," Keltham says. "And then continue the massage, if you're still okay with... rephrase, continue the massage and tell me if you're running out of easy energy for it."

Carissa Sevar: So she steps outside, flags down some staff, and delivers Keltham's message for Isidre. "I told him that someone important probably couldn't get him an answer in the next ten minutes, but if she happens to be free," or reading my thought-transcripts full time anyway, hi Abrogail -

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail does in fact have a country to run! And either Otolmens suddenly really likes Cheliax, or She really dislikes somebody else! Abrogail had not in fact realized before now how incredibly important it is to not piss off Otolmens in any way! However she does realize it now and Aspexia can stop repeating it at her!

Carissa Sevar: Carissa goes back in to give Keltham a massage. "They'll knock if they get an answer."

Keltham: The massage continues to be nice.

Keltham doesn't... especially feel like massaging Carissa back, apparently, if he is honest with himself about that. He would do it if they were trading pleasures, obviously, but he does not seem to really actually want to give massages.

He still feels grateful for it, and a need to do something nice for Carissa in return, no matter how much she says he doesn't have to; he wants to anyways.

Keltham doesn't feel like massaging her back. But he does feel like... buying a massage for her, as soon as he's got any 'gold pieces'? That seems like the blatantly obvious solution -

The thought of a stranger touching Carissa's naked body does not feel especially pleasant.

Keltham is not used to his brain working like this, and it's causing his self-model to stumble over itself repeatedly.

...he could pay one of the other girls to give Carissa a massage from him?

For that matter, if he doesn't have any gold yet, he could tell Ione to do it after she's recovered.

Is Keltham allowed to do that, does it count as something Ione offered him?

Well, Keltham doesn't have any massive anti-legibility issues with Ione, so he can just ask, which will make his life massively simpler. Keltham's guess is that Ione's objection, if she has any, will be that Carissa might ask what got traded to Ione for the massage, and Ione doesn't want to mention the Nethys thing to Carissa. But they could just tell Carissa it's a secret, so that doesn't seem like a problem?

Seems like a plan.

Ferrer Maillol: One of Ferrer Maillol's last coherent recent thoughts, as Contessa Lrilatha herself dragged him by the scruff of his neck into the temple torture chamber, was that he has now realized what kind of project disaster surpasses starting a god-war. It's being told that one of your stupid oversights just managed to ruin a lot of hard work put in by Aspexia Rugatonn, Contessa Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek, all of whom are now personally pissed at you, and Gorthoklek will be visiting you during your stay.

Ferrer Maillol is currently driven into a rather extreme mental state, and begging Asmodeus to do something, anything, to deliver him.

Asmodeus: Asmodeus does that very very rarely, as one might expect.

As it happens, though, Ferrer Maillol is currently in a state unusually apt to receive messages from Asmodeus, who has a message to deliver. It conveniently concerns a matter on which Maillol has already been partially instructed.

And Asmodeus does need to do this often enough, if very very rarely, that people ever hear about that time Asmodeus did it once. That way they'll go on sincerely pleading to Him in the extremity of their torture, which He enjoys.

Besides, it's amusing. Have a vision, tiny squirrel! Asmodeus in His finite mercy has given you a temporary reprieve from all the infinite torment that will someday be yours.

Iarwain: Eight minutes later there's a knock on Keltham's door.

Keltham: Keltham is sufficiently relaxed that he'll take a moment to see if Carissa does anything about this without him having to speak.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, she can get the door. She - wasn't particularly expecting an answer that fast.

Iarwain: "Ah," says a young-looking palace page-boy who wouldn't be out of place in Taldor and would never actually be seen in Cheliax, sounding audibly sort of stuttery, with annoyingly long pauses between stutters, "ah, um - are you, uh, are you, Sevar, I have, uh, a message, for, ah, uh, Keltham?"

While he stutters, rapid messages delivered by magic where Keltham can't hear:

Queen's transcript is ready for Sevar.

Asmodeus has given them a directive to move Keltham to a new location, one that will somehow be more protected from divine interference than even the palace, as soon as Aspexia can get a new Forbiddance spell and put that up tomorrow at dawn. They're not to spare any expense, this time; Cheliax is suddenly wealthier than expected, for reasons to be described later.

The anti-interference divine protection should prevent any more oracles from being created, even if someone on site isn't soul-sold.

Maillol is still recovering. Sevar's input is requested in Maillol's place about the new project setup. Possibly Keltham's input should be solicited too?

What do they tell Keltham, what message does the page have for Keltham? Some lies seem required and Sevar is the only one who can authorize them.

Carissa Sevar: - okay. Most urgent question is what to tell Keltham. ...they're setting up a new project site, and want his input into anything it'd be particularly useful for it to have. If he asks for an explanation, the damage to the villa was more extensive than expected. "Yes, Keltham's here. I can take a message, or depart, if it's secret."

Iarwain: "I, ah, uh," the page-boy audibly pulls himself together. "Damage to the villa, ah, more extensive than expected," he recites. "New project site, uh, being set up? Moving tomorrow at dawn. Does Keltham have, uh, input, on anything particularly useful to have, there."

Keltham: Whiteboards, Keltham wants to yell immediately, but that word does not actually exist in Taldane. Besides, he can use his own Prestidigitation now.

"Is there a meeting I should be at?" Keltham calls.

Iarwain: They'd obviously have to set up a fake meeting for him, and echo information to and from the real meeting, but resources are available to do that if Sevar thinks they should.

Carissa Sevar: They're just passing memos around since half the people involved in the decision process are also essential for the war effort. He could meet with someone in Acquisitions if he wants, though.

Iarwain: "Uh, it's mostly, uh, paper going back and forth, because of, uh, the war, and deciders being too busy, but there's still, uh, I was told, uh, you can talk to Acquisitions if it's not a paper thing?"

Keltham: Keltham pulls himself up to a sitting position in bed, thereby ending the massage; this sufficiently increases the probability that he should meet with Isidre again, before leaving the palace tomorrow, that he should conserve his ero energy for having a callable libido while he does that. "I've got additional questions but it doesn't sound like you've got additional answers, like why this is a tomorrow-at-dawn thing," is the palace considered not-safe. "I will think about what we need, and probably go talk to Acquisitions in the likely event that this isn't a piece-of-paper issue. Who do I go to in Acquisitions, if you were told that?"

Iarwain: The page names a random name, which can readily be allocated to whoever plays that role.

How/when does Sevar want the Queen's transcript of Keltham, for her to review?

Carissa Sevar: Security has decided to do additional screening of project involved people for not being secret Kuthite agents. Then Carissa can be absent for her further screening and can get the review of the transcript done, as well as her punishment, which she expects she should take at the palace because Abrogail might want to watch.

Iarwain: Security policy would usually call for Sevar being escorted off as soon as she was told about the Security review, should they lie about that part or should Sevar be immediately escorted out after this?

Carissa Sevar: They should not lie about that but they don't have to tell her now, it might be convenient to tell her in ten minutes after she's gotten Keltham's reaction to the relocation.

Iarwain: Affirm, somebody will check back in on you in 10.

Keltham: "Anything else?"

Iarwain: "That's, uh, it." The stuttery page departs.

Keltham: Weird speech patterns, huh. You wouldn't think somebody like that would find their comparative advantage running messages. Maybe he was scared for some reason... well, if it's something bad they're doing, you wouldn't send somebody visibly scared of it, so probably it's just the whole godwar followed by mortalwar.

...maybe that's just what talking sounds like at Intelligence 10. Keltham has never actually met anyone with Intelligence 10.

"Okay, apparently we've suddenly got to figure out all of our project infrastructure wishlist," Keltham says. "Better classroom setup, breakout rooms, larger white writing surfaces would be nice even if Prestidigitation, library for reference books as we can get them, material experimentation laboratory for melting metals, biological laboratory where we keep the stocks of mice, whatever you do for a magical laboratory, regular so-you-want-to-be-a-wizard training setup for me, am I missing anything."

Carissa Sevar: "Do you want a cuddleroom separate from your bedroom? Do you want a bedroom like this one? Plumbing? Hot water?"

Keltham: "...yes to all of those important things."

Keltham: "There shall furthermore be, if at all possible, plumbing and hot water for my Carissa; and, predicting my future self's desires, for other people who might end up with a Keltham possessive adjective in front of their names."

Carissa Sevar: "It counts as flirting, by local rules, if you let it be known the criteria was as such. Nothing wrong with that, just, so you know. Hmm. Do you want the cuddleroom stocked like would be conventional or should it start out empty, to avoid spoilers."

Keltham: "Storage closet to which you've got the key, you take things out of the closet as I figure them out?"

"And you know, considering the overall situation, I am not really concerned about it being overly fast relationship escalation if everyone in my research harem gets the simultaneous information that I might be interested in dating some of them."

Carissa Sevar: Keltham feeling possessive of his presents from Cheliax is a good thing. "Should they bother stocking the library with the kinds of books we normally put in libraries or are those bad enough to be useless and you'd rather start with empty shelves and fill them out with specific things we specifically want?"

Keltham: "Unsure. Thinking. Reference books, those meant to teach subjects, we should have no matter how terrible they are. For the more relaxed section, I think we at least start with some books that research haremettes enjoy reading, or they state their personal favorites and those get added to the library for others to read, maybe. I don't think I need any extraneous terrible books thrown in on top of that. Relaxed library section isn't as urgent as the reference section."

"Do we need to tell them, like, kitchens and dining rooms must exist somewhere, I'm assuming that sort of thing gets handled well without our input but I check that assumption."

dath ilan: Obviously they have favorite books. Only the Lost Dead have no favorite books.

Carissa Sevar: "They'll handle that. I mentioned plumbing and hot water because that is not at all considered a thing you just have everywhere by default and probably restricts the number of places they can put us severely, but most places have kitchens and dining rooms and, you know, servants and security and sunlight and so on."

Keltham: "If you can't add plumbing to something that didn't previously have plumbing then how does anything ever end up with plumbing? Also, 'servant' doesn't Baseline well?"

Carissa Sevar: "People with job responsibilities of keeping the place clean and cooking the food and running messages and going to the market for food. I think mostly plumbing gets...added to new buildings, or when a building is majorly renovated in a way that involves knocking down most of the walls. Maybe for something this important they'll get a high-level cleric in to add plumbing with Stone Shape."

Keltham: "If it's a 4th-circle cleric spell or lower then I will do it, I do not want to fight the lingering Good parts of my brain every day about whether I should be lending other people my bathroom."

Carissa Sevar: She's been taking down his requests on paper. "I will note that it is a major cost to you for anyone to not have plumbing even if none of us mind that much. It's a third circle cleric spell, but getting good results with it also takes practice - though I guess maybe a kind of practice that's useful for you to get."

Keltham: "I don't currently know about any 3rd circle spells worth a spellslot and have been spending them on Truthspells and Auguries and so on instead to save my god resources. And, yeah, it is not implausible that I should get any practice with detailed magical work, at all. But not urgently, so if somebody else can do that exact part, great."

"Quarters for outside experts, short-term and longer-term. Somebody who knows how to take care of mice, for example. Or a place to put up somebody for three days while we talk to them about metallurgy."

"Meeting room suitable for the Chelish equivalent of Very Serious... for if Isidre and five of her friends decide that they need to come in and talk to us. Suite suitable for somebody like Isidre to stay in overnight if that's necessary. The fact that we're being moved out of the palace this fast is suggestive of them not wanting us here for any number of good or bad reasons, meaning that they'd come to us instead of us going to them, presumably... or do we just get a meeting room with a big two-way mirror that connects to the palace?" He's got to remember that this is not actually a low-tech world, it's a magitech world, they may have videoconferencing.

Carissa Sevar: "Guest room for visiting royalty, meeting room for visiting royalty, paired mirrors exist, I'll note that's another option, no idea which is cheaper in wartime -"

Keltham: "I mean, not royalty, people who are important. Like in Governance and so on." Relatives-of-important-people, what, why.

Carissa Sevar: Ah, Keltham.

" - yep, people who are important in general, not just royalty, but high enough quality they can host royalty."

Keltham: Keltham is confused about why relatives of important people require higher hosting requisites than important people themselves! But he is not going to ask because it is probably not the most key question right now.

Iarwain: After some further brainstorming, which is not going that fast anymore, and currently consists of Keltham sitting with his eyes closed trying to think of another thing, Sevar gets inaudibly poked about whether she's ready for her 'Security review'.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, ready.

Iarwain: There's a knock upon the door! This time there's three sober-looking Securities outside it.

"A security review has been required for Carissa Sevar," one of them says. "You have up to one minute to finish up any current tasks, do not cast any new spells."

"Everyone on this project is being rescreened," one of the other Securities says, more politely, to Keltham. "Except for you, I suppose. Protocol says that as soon as Sevar knows that's going to happen, she needs to come with us immediately and not cast any more spells along the way."

Separately: Sevar, it's been pointed out that this project needs a new codename, we can't keep calling it 'this project' in front of him, he may eventually ask us what we're calling it. It'd be good practice to have something internally that we can also use in front of Keltham, reduces the prospect of him somehow overhearing the real name.

(The current actual codename is Project Pet Outsider, with the form of 'pet' implying that somebody, such as Asmodeus, owns that pet.)

Keltham: Part of him wants to object that obviously Carissa is not the traitor, but that is not how real life works and also it is not how tropes work.

"Understood," Keltham says, wondering why part of his brain just went all queasy... well, no, it's pretty obvious, it's because that's Carissa they're security-reviewing.

But this, too, is not an objection that grownups make, and Keltham does not make it.

"Carissa, do you just give the list to Security to run to Acquisitions, do I take it down to Acquisitions."

Carissa Sevar: The project can be...Project Keltham, or Project Lawful, or Project dath ilan, she doesn't know how Keltham's translation even handles 'pet'. "Tasks finished," she says to Security. "They can probably take it down to Acquisitions for you. I should see you in a couple hours." Snort. "You know, unless I'm secretly a Kuthite traitor."

Keltham: Not actually funny.

Keltham doesn't say it.

He really hopes his life doesn't run on tropes.

Iarwain: Two of the Securities peel off as soon as they're out of sight of Keltham's door and get on with their real jobs. The remaining one escorts Carissa to a room where she can review her notes, and hands her a sealed packet that contain the Queen's slightly censored transcript of Keltham's thoughts.

The Security also recounts recent events at somewhat greater length.

Rather a lot of diamonds suddenly materialized around Otolmens's oracle.

There's an obvious thought about where those diamonds might have come from, and their best hopes there seem to be actually coming true. Nidal shifted to a more tightly defensive, conservative, and dare one hope, worried posture afterwards. It's not the same kind of game-over as if Zon-Kuthon had been destroyed and his clerics depowered, but the remaining timeline is looking like months, not years.

Nobody has any good idea of how Nidal managed to piss off Otolmens this much, except, obviously, that it had something to do with Nidal's intentions for Keltham. It nonetheless implies that people should tread even more carefully, which shouldn't, in fact, be possible in the first place when you are dealing with an Otolmens event, but nonetheless, do consider, this is what happens when Otolmens gets pissed. If anybody manages to piss Otolmens off at Cheliax instead, then perhaps all the diamonds in Cheliax will be teleported to Lastwall! It is the considered belief of Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn that this would be a bad idea, and people should not do it! Or come close to doing it. Or think too much about doing it. Or do anything that is 'not technically doing it'. Or do something that really shouldn't piss Otolmens off that much if Otolmens is being reasonable. Just don't, fucking, mess, with Otolmens. If anybody thinks that Rugatonn is trying to tell them anything especially complicated here, they should come to Rugatonn for clarification about how she is really, in fact, saying something very simple. Or they can just kill themselves directly. Rugatonn is happy with either outcome.

Maillol, who received Asmodeus's vision while being personally tortured by Gorthoklek, briefly and barely pulled himself together to communicate the bones of their Lord's vision: Asmodeus communicated a complex attitude about Otolmens's sudden gift, which suggests that Otolmens has well overpaid for the new project to have adequate security precautions; and while they shouldn't even remotely try to spend as much as Otolmens actually paid, they're not supposed to just take the money and run, either.

The new project location will have actual fucking security this time, and any complaints about the budget should be considered in the light of Otolmens's apparent concern and corresponding generosity.

Asmodeus's sent vision requires very strongly that Keltham needs to be not too far from Ostenso. Asmodeus's vision implies that Keltham should be within the designated region the moment it's safe; so as soon as a new Forbiddance can be put up, somewhere Nidal hopefully won't know about; hence, shortly after dawn tomorrow when Rugatonn can request a Forbiddance spell.

They're currently thinking of renovating an old coastal fortress.

Carissa Sevar: Wow.

Carissa's preferred thing to tell Keltham about this is the truth, that Cheliax is acting on orders from Otolmens; she thinks that Keltham is more likely to break rules in a way that offends Otolmens accidentally than he is to do so deliberately, and if he were doing it deliberately he'd likely at least take cautionary measures like running it by Carissa first or maybe talking to Broom. Otolmens intervention seems like the sort of thing that might be clearer from Keltham's perspective than theirs and which is therefore going to end up being even harder to hide. She assumes Aspexia Rugatonn will veto this, so she wants to give a story that isn't incompatible with telling him that later, which probably means just telling him that the relocation is for Security reasons they can't disclose at this time.

Carissa would appreciate a further briefing on known things about Otolmens, at some point.

Coastal fortress seems fine. Keltham seems plenty attached to luxury, even knowing how desperately poor everyone in the world is; she isn't sure if it'll actually hit him for Evil if they fund his luxuries with brutal taxation of some distant village but it seems worth exploring. Plumbing is a must.

She assumes from the fact the packet is sealed that she is intended to read it alone.

Iarwain: On usual policy they could, in principle, tell Keltham that they're doing it on orders from Broom's god, so long as they don't tell him that Broom's god is specifically about world-destroying or multiverse-destroying threats and allow him to go on thinking that She's mostly about preventing giant flaming Wish craters. Rugatonn would have to review the disclosure that this move was on Broom's god's request, but she wouldn't necessarily say no.

Security also notes that Cheliax, of course, acts on only Asmodeus's orders, even if Asmodeus perhaps bargains with other gods as part of His business; even Otolmens surely would not dare to instruct Him so, or give Him orders to pass along, and the generosity of Her payment suggests that She bargained with Asmodeus from a position of weakness. To suggest that Cheliax is in any way acting on Otolmens's orders would be a lie, which Sevar is welcome to authorize explicitly. (Weirdly, Security does not hurt her about this.)

Her assumption is correct, Security will depart as soon as Sevar wants to read the transcript.

Carissa Sevar: Hmm. With approval from the Grand High Priestess, she wants them to tell Keltham that their present understanding is that Broom's god of messes requested the move and heightened security generally, and that Asmodeus instructed it, and maybe even that the instruction was specifically to go somewhere near Ostenso. The most obviously useful thing here is Keltham being reluctant to leave the area, though mostly Carissa's operating on the assumption that this has weird correlates she can't see.

And she'll take a look at the transcript now. She does not ask if that means her mind won't be read while she reads it; it might instead just mean her mind is being read directly by Abrogail or something, and anyway 'my mind isn't presently being read' is a bad starting point for thought.

Iarwain: Abrogail's transcript contains a censored section right at the most exciting part about the Second Law, with notes saying that Keltham thought things about other people's knowledge of these truths driving them insane and possibly collapsing the universe, that most of his thoughts were incomprehensible ideas with no remote conceptual neighbors in any language that Abrogail knows, and that the parts that did make it through were incredibly fucking disturbing. Abrogail is obviously saying this because she knows how terribly curious it will make Sevar about the one part she most wanted to know, but it is also true, and Rugatonn requires further thought on whether Sevar gets to see this.

Abrogail has included a more detailed explanation of why Sevar is being tortured, with particular torture codes from her sheet being noted at particular points that all sum up exactly to the total amount of torture she received in her original note.

The most severe torture code is annotated on the section where Keltham thought about his secret plan to establish a fully legible meta-level signal via the no-verbal-objections order. This looks like a huge setback for their corruption plans. If Sevar noticed this at all, which was her job, then she didn't think about it in words and it didn't show up in her thought transcript, meaning Abrogail got blindsided here. Abrogail isn't sure how to recover, Sevar didn't say anything to the effect of how most masochists wouldn't go along with it even if Sevar herself is fine, or how she could do it for a month no problem but after any longer of not being allowed to scream and beg she would probably start to feel sad. Maybe when Keltham gets to the appropriate point Sevar can confess that she's starting to feel sad. Keltham is unfortunately explicitly suspicious that Cheliax is trying to lure him into rape. But even if Sevar's opinion is that any objection to Keltham's plan would have made him too suspicious, Sevar didn't apparently notice, and definitely didn't report it explicitly. Bad Sevar, go to your torture room.

The second-worst torture code is for Sevar thinking about how the Queen of Cheliax was being stupid for saying a 'worse version' than the one Sevar suggested. When, in fact, the Queen of Cheliax has higher Perception than Sevar can fucking dream of and it was warning her off Sevar's version verbatim, possibly because Keltham would've been able to identify it as coming from Sevar. Sevar's failure to imagine that the Queen of Cheliax could have any good reason for presuming to not do exactly what Sevar said reveals an actual problem of subordination here and that's why this punishment is severe. Thinking about lighting Abrogail on fire despite knowing you might get punished for thinking that was not the problem, that's just flirting and will be dealt with separately.

The third-severest torture code, also appearing in the original sum of codes Carissa was given, is the fee for making the fucking Queen of Cheliax spell all this out for Sevar in the annotations because Sevar apparently cannot imagine her Queen ever being professional about anything.

Carissa Sevar: - okay, you know what, that's actually completely reasonable. And it's true that Carissa has been having a hard time imagining her Queen being professional about anything, though in her defense, that's because -

- well, the thing Keltham said, about how a pragmatic person in the Queen's position would simply have sex with someone other than Carissa.

But. The Queen is who she is, and wants what she wants, and is clearly quite good at her job while wanting some things that offer constraints on how she does her job, and Carissa was in fact underrating that, internally, assuming the Queen was less capable than she was, and the punishment is warranted, and she should have assumed the punishment would be warranted. She'll get it done before she leaves for a coastal fortress in Ostenso.

She's extremely annoyed about the part she really wants being censored, but she thinks nonetheless she understands the Second Law stuff well enough to be working around, now, and well enough to be considering some strategies like saying dramatically ironic things that have no payoff at all because reality doesn't actually pay attention to dramatic irony. (Keltham made a face, when she asserted she wasn't a Kuthite spy.)

She has several ideas for working around the no-order thing, though she didn't see what Keltham was playing at until the transcript and isn't delighted by it. Firstly, she's not actually sure that it wouldn't ding a person for Evil, if they are in the habit of ordering their slaves not to refuse them and vaguely intend that, if ever disobeyed about that, they'd stop the game and let the slave go. In Carissa's particular case it's going to be more complicated but as a general order Keltham's in the habit of giving it seems in some ways advantageous; maybe they can arrange for him to give that order to someone else who 1) will understand Keltham's intent as the obvious 'you are not entitled to refuse me, so don't', 2) has adequate self-control and won't in fact trigger it and 3) (this one might be inconvenient) will react with arousal to treatment they desperately wish they weren't subject to. And then make it gradually clearer to Keltham over time that the reason he's being obeyed is because he's entitled to obedience, not because it's sexy per se. Secondly, Carissa's planning to eventually raise with Keltham that always following orders is in fact less sexy than sometimes breaking orders and being suitably punished for that, so hopefully he can just not-update the orders about 'no' as they gradually transition to a model where he doesn't have her obedience so much as the right and means to compel it.

Can someone alert Carissa please when Maillol's competent to take over project duties, and in the mean time hand her any project related work that's been sitting, so she can hand it off to him in relatively good shape while she goes for her punishment?

(She's not scared, even though she's definitely never had half an hour before and knows this kind of thing is not linear in effects. That would be pathetic, and she's not that pathetic.)

Iarwain: Project stuff! They're only giving her the things that other stuff is urgently waiting on, but that's still some work, and she's not going to be as fast at it as Maillol.

Keltham's requests to Requisitions are all things that would be routed to Sevar anyways because Keltham requested them and who knows what he's thinking or how he'll react if anyone says no to anything. The requests now have budget line items attached to them, but are otherwise the same as they submitted, basically. Sevar needs to decide whether to sign off on each of them.

If she signs off on absolutely everything, including the 2-way mirrors, the total cost will be somewhere around the vicinity of a +6 intelligence headband.

Carissa Sevar: She's going to reject the mirrors for now both because they're a big chunk of the budget and because the mirrors are a sense in which Keltham would be less contained and she gets the sense that what Otolmens wants is Keltham maximally contained. She approves most of the other things. She is definitely not experienced at this but still within an hour she can hand things off to Maillol in reasonably decent shape - "if he's ready for a handoff, is he?"

Iarwain: Yeah, he isn't really. But Sevar got everything that was blocking further progress.

Carissa Sevar: Right, but they shouldn't both of them be incapacitated at the same time, probably, so she'll take her punishment later. What's the less-pressing stuff.

(Note to self which she doesn't really think she needs, avoid angering Gorthoklek.)

Iarwain: Okay, here's some less pressing stuff.

Also, this just in, Paracountess Isidre Thrune cordially requests your covert attendance upon her meeting with Keltham in fifteen minutes.

(It's not clear whether Security knows who Isidre Thrune is. He presumably knows there's no such Paracountess.)

Carissa Sevar: She'd be honored. Someone'll need to hit her with Fox's Cunning repeatedly....and maybe also Owl's Wisdom, there are disadvantages to having your cleverness run out too far ahead of your sense.

Iarwain: They'll do their best on fifteen minutes' notice, but of course a lot fewer wizards prepare Owl's Wisdom than Fox's Cunning.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail has a slightly nervous feeling at this point. She has gotten the verbal transcript about Keltham suspecting her, or rather Isidre, of Detect Desires. She is starting to understand why Sevar is so nervous about lying to Keltham; maybe she should have gotten it from transcripts, but living it is different. Most people, if you tell them something that they're supposed to believe, will act around you like they believe that one thing. Keltham... builds a world in his mind where those things would have actually been true? And just completely lives there. He lives in that world at you.

And then you're stuck in whatever world Keltham has decided you put him in.

(Yes, she's still too busy for this, but Keltham is leaving the palace tomorrow morning and even Abrogail does not wantonly waste her Teleports; she has a lot of places to be simultaneously.)

Iarwain: Paracountess Isidre Thrune, overly-Good person with an overly-large intelligence headband, who definitely has a whole lot of magically enhanced perception but is probably not actually using Detect Desires on people, rises to greet Keltham as he enters an even nicer meeting room.

Keltham: Having a Paracountess of Cheliax rise to greet him as he enters is going to be a courtesy that is, like, completely lost on Keltham. His thoughts show only a brief puzzlement about why Isidre would do that.

Keltham quickly seats himself, his thoughts showing an intention not to waste Isidre's valuable time; he requested this meeting and Isidre may not have her schedule cleared for it.

"I've probed my newfound sexuality some, and arrived at some answers," Keltham says. "So, first, I'm pretty sure that I do not currently want, for my own sake, to demand that Cheliax hand over Carissa to me, and I can appreciate that it would be missing the point to do it for hers. Maybe I'll find the 'gendertrope'* inside me, the sexual behavior pattern and way of thinking, that's the complement of hers, where I actually want absolute-power over Carissa enough that I want to go do that for myself. But it's not there or not awake yet, and I'm not doing that until it is."

(*) Baseline 'gendertrope' does not contain the syllable for the Baseline 'trope'; the sounds of the words are distinct.

Carissa Sevar: Awww, too bad, but not a definite 'no', and not offense that it was suggested.

Iarwain: "Understandable, and I believe very much correct, under present conditions," Isidre says. "I won't say that the government of Cheliax stands ready to assist you in the future, but, I do thus stand ready."

Abrogail Thrune II: She's taken the time to set up more two-way communication, this time, now that Sevar hopefully has any grasp of how to act slightly more professional around her. And now that Abrogail is not springing an elaborate surprise on Sevar.

Pass to Sevar:

Keltham's thoughts are glossing over earlier thoughts about how he can use Detect Desires, with your consent on general rather than that specific use, to verify that you still want him even if you're in his absolute-power. His thought on a possibly acceptable relationship is that, for so long as you still want him, you'll have no choice but to have him. He doesn't seem to be thinking particularly on the morality of it... no, he's thinking that he's not sure what his Civilization would think of that, but would be delighted to watch them get into an enormous fight over it.

Carissa Sevar: - well that seems like progress. Yes, that definitely seems like progress, though actually she doesn't know how Pharasma would judge it either.

(It's much easier to be professional when one isn't having an elaborate surprise sprung on them; indeed, some would conceptualize professionalism as involving minimal elaborate surprises sprung on their co-conspirators. Carissa herself, who is young and naive and knows little compared to her vastly wiser superiors in the palace, has no opinions on the question.)

Keltham: "My sexuality does not seem basically opposed to renting Carissa out to a woman I know, given sufficiently favorable conditions. It is not happy with strangers. I haven't asked my sexuality about men because I don't, currently, really know any Chelish men; standard Civilization 'gendertropes' suggest higher resistance but I haven't been able to ask myself."

"I think the three main conditions, here, are, one, getting to know the Queen of Cheliax like at all, two, figuring out whether Carissa is all right with this, in a way that doesn't just trigger 'hey you can run a sword through me and this isn't even a sword so I'll be fine', and three is, uh, complicated. Any thoughts about one or two before we tackle that. I don't get the impression that I can just ask Carissa if she's fine with being rented, or can I?"

Keltham's thought processes are wordlessly trying and wordlessly rejecting sort-of pre-thoughts about ways he could put his unspoken third want into words; it's not easy to read.

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre will temporize by discussing want one, while Abrogail waits to see if Sevar has advice on want two.

"The Queen is, obviously, another very busy person, but considering your potential importance to Cheliax it is plausible the two of you should meet in any case, and you may as well do that before you depart the palace. I can try to arrange a meeting tonight."

"Though it would be nice to know, before that, that matters had been arranged to avoid any explosive runes going off in our faces as a result of unrolling that scroll."

Keltham: "Mostly a want-number-three issue, I suspect, but I also cannot make any representations to the Queen until I understand the effects on Carissa, and how and if Carissa ends up being okay with that, and how I end up knowing that."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks Keltham could reasonably ask her in what condition she expects to return, if rented out, or if subjected to any number of other things, but should probably not be encouraged to just directly talk to her about everything because then their relationship will be too healthy and functional. (She feels a pang about this which she ignores.)

Iarwain: "You could simply ask me about the effects of different scenarios," says Isidre, "and I could give you an answer which would be quite good and reliable, based on having sufficient familiarity with Sevar's kind of submissive. I suspect you're not going to accept that, so, you can also ask Sevar in what condition she expects to return, if rented out. Or what happens to her if you subject her to any number of other conditions, if you don't want to highlight that one as one that she'll notice especially. That, if not some other things, I think you could ask her plainly."

Keltham: "I apologize for not being able to simply join states of belief with you, but yes, the problem is that I don't just need an answer that's actually good, I need an answer I know is good. Two isomorphic problems from my perspective, but very different problems from yours."

"I - think Carissa has some equivalent of what a dath ilani would call 'dignity', which translates via Share Language to Taldane dignity but I suspect is really not the same thing at all. Carissa's 'dignity' is that she is impossible to truly hurt, even by running a sword through her and then refusing to Raise her, which is what makes it safe for the man to whom she's completely given herself to do anything he wants with her, and not be afraid."

"And if we were all in dath ilan, she could tell me that was true, and I would maybe check in with a Keeper first to see if they thought Carissa was in generally good," epistemic health, "belief-health, but then the fact that Carissa thought that was true about herself would be very reliable evidence, because dath ilani know how to see within themselves if that sort of thing is actually true."

"The fact that I got trained in that explicitly, and warned about a lot of pitfalls, suggests that, if that training actually did anything, Chelish people should actually be much worse at distinguishing - what should be true about themselves, what they want to be true about themselves, from what actually is true about themselves."

"I'm worried that Carissa is just answering me from within her model of what Carissa should be and that model is not rigorously separated and distinguished from what Carissa is. Which seems like the really obvious mistake that, say, I would make, if you took all the dath ilani training out of somebody otherwise with my exact heritage."

"If I try to discuss this with my Carissamodel, my Carissamodel says back that Chelish dignity also says that it's her place to safeguard her own safety and not rely on anybody else to protect her when she's giving herself away, that it would be undignified for her to be relying on me to think about her safety. I don't then feel happy and reassured when my Carissamodel says this back to me, and I don't know where to go from there."

Carissa Sevar: An observation that might be useful to Keltham is that - by the standards of dath ilan, it's plausible that almost no one is competent to know what they actually want and what they can withstand, and yet they do still have to make decisions and do things, and it can simultaneously be true that they might be wrong and that it is impossible to do better than treating them as if they're right, until one encounters actual reason to think they're specifically wrong about something specific; trust withheld in full generality can be damaging.

Another might be that one commonly solves this by hurting their Carissa to her breaking point such that they subsequently know what it is, and Keltham probably literally isn't capable of that yet, but the fact he's not also means this isn't very urgent.

Iarwain: "I've sometimes made mistakes of that kind myself," Isidre says. "By the standards of dath ilan, then, I'm a child, and, except for you, there's nobody in Golarion who can raise me to adulthood or teach me how to protect myself. I nonetheless think I'd be upset if you told me that I wasn't allowed to have the sort of sex I find satisfying because I was not by dath ilani standards competent to decide that I wanted it. I think I'd actually be offended even if you told me merely that you needed to check over my thinking and sign off on it first."

"And there's - I feel like there's some even more precise way that a dath ilani would say that thing I just said, going on your class transcripts. Something more Lawful to say about what people have to do when they're not competent, and how they might be wrong, but if you don't specifically know that they're wrong and never trust them anyways - I haven't actually attended your classes, and I can't put it into words."

Keltham: Oof, yeah, that's valid. "Let me... think about that."

Though it's - a little too persuasive, maybe, like this is what happens when somebody with an Intelligence-Wisdom headband (even if that's not really thinkoomph, just three components of thinkoomph), tries to bend their will on persuading you and presenting only one side, instead of calmly listing out all the arguments and counterarguments to be summed.

Abrogail Thrune II: She's supposed to what. Who does that. What the Abyss is Abrogail supposed to do about that. Of course Isidre is trying to persuade him, she didn't come to this meeting without having any goals.

Abrogail transmits Keltham's most recent thoughts to Sevar, with a note that Abrogail doesn't think she can quickly grasp or adopt the dath ilani behavior that Keltham is thinking of, and can only try to sound more "Why of course I am totally telling you about all the downsides of this contract, look at these three right here," which she was already trying to do in places.

Carissa Sevar: Ah, Keltham. Carissa thinks her preferred phrasing might've been better in that regard but yields to Abrogail's superior Splendour. It's like - it's like if the thing you're trying to do is figure out who to send on patrol, and if someone brings up that those two just had a bad breakup and won't get along, your job isn't convincing them they're wrong, it's figuring out what the best patrol group is with the new inputs. Act like the decision power is already yours and you don't need to convince anyone, and then like you need the patrol to nonetheless perform well against demons.

One objection to what Abrogail just said is that it proves too much, Keltham shouldn't buy and abuse literal children (yes he should but they're not going to get him there yet). So it might be worth acknowledging his concerns as perhaps outweighing her clever response in some cases, but pointing out that Carissa was judged competent by her society to swear the Worldwound oath, which is as competent as her society is capable of acknowledging her to be, and so even if one doesn't want to declare everyone competent until proven otherwise they could extend it at least to those who've served at the Lawfullest place in Golarion.

(Modulo carefulness to not come across as too good at reading Keltham, but Abrogail knows that.)

Keltham: Keltham is now thinking that Isidre basically seems to be presenting a story about a search algorithm that quickly reaches quiescence, and then you've got to choose the option with highest expectation-of-utility, which, yes, Keltham supposes that's terribly mysterious if all the Law is unknown to you. But isn't it obvious that Keltham wouldn't be here if his meta-level prediction process hadn't suggested that there was further value-of-information in trying to figure out the likely consequences to Sevar better than he can get by just asking Sevar? And Isidre hasn't even given him reason to believe that Sevar would be mostly probably right, just, sort of presented a social story about why you have to act like you believe somebody's words independently of whether they're true. And sure, there's situations where the incentives and payoff matrices are structured such that Governance should just take people at their word independently of what the prediction market says about the probability it's true, but, like, at least ask?

Well, actually he can just ask. "You've said, basically, that I should act like I believe Sevar regardless of the probability that she's right, but if she's only 10% likely to be right, that's probably a bad idea?"

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail supposes that's what she gets for prompting him into thinking about the Law behind anything.

"I don't suppose it would help if I pointed out that Sevar was trusted by us to take the Worldwound oath, which is as mentally competent as Cheliax can possibly acknowledge anyone to be? That she served, and served well, in the Lawfullest place in all Golarion?"

Keltham: "I'd worry that the Lawfullest place in Golarion isn't very much more Lawful than the coldest place in the Sun's core is cold. Your concept of an oath is something that gets your soul destroyed by Abaddon if you break it, and you do it that way, instead of the way that gods do it, because nobody here has enough Law in them to swear what dath ilan would regard as a real oath."

"Though - maybe if I'd been to the Worldwound for longer than a few minutes, to talk to people knowing the language, I'd have a different impression. I suppose I did meet Carissa Sevar there, which is something of an update about the general Lawfulness level; though I got the impression from you that, even for the Worldwound, she was special."

Keltham is now starting to worry that he's talking himself into a corner where he'll convince himself that he can't be sadistic to anybody because maybe all the masochists are just making a massive mistake about whether they're masochists. Keltham is aware that this thought is stupid, but he doesn't know how to prove it's stupid and then generalize the same proof to shoot down his Isidre-reactive arguments for never being able to trust Carissa.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail will transmit all that to Sevar.

"She is. But Keltham, I think you are - maybe disrespecting Golarion a little too much? We aren't quite as bad as a dath ilani child of the age to have as little training in Law as we do. Your concept of how much competence corresponds to how much grasp of Law is not correct for this place."

Keltham: "Look, I get that I'm talking myself into a corner, I just don't know how to talk myself out of it."

Abrogail Thrune II: He certainly is helpful, in some incredibly bizarre way, to anyone who might possibly be trying to corrupt him and manipulate him to their own ends! Almost like nobody like her exists in his world!

Abrogail wishes she was more confident that this means she could take over the place in a week with the poor naive dears offering her no resistance, and not that everyone like her was successfully hunted and slaughtered and the memories of them erased from history except for Keepers who still remember very well how to do it.

Carissa Sevar: If he feels really strongly about this he could pay the Grand High Priestess to evaluate Carissa's competence probably that's a bad idea, for many reasons but among them that Carissa doesn't actually know what the Grand High Priestess would truthfully say.

What is the meaning of an oath is a hard question for us to answer, with our vocabulary, but it doesn't mean that oaths only mean to us their most obvious physical consequence, and many people who one way or another don't fear Abaddon still give their word and mean it, groping for a different basis for it to signify what it does.

There's really something to be said for doing things and checking whether they have good or bad consequences, assuming the consequences are recoverable.

Also he could just directly bring this to Carissa, she'll in fact probably be upset and definitely at least somewhat turned-off but that's only a consideration against it, not absolute reason if he's too stuck.

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre speaks quietly, which is also its own Splendour. "It's not that our oaths mean nothing to us except the threat of Abaddon, Keltham, we do - understand, why they are things that Lawful people swear. By dath ilani standards none of us understand properly, because we cannot give the lectures you give and play the games you play, but we do feel what an oath means, even if we cannot say it."

Keltham: "Sorry."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I... don't suppose that it would help if I observed that one very normal way of solving this problem would be for you to hurt Carissa to her actual breaking point, so that you would subsequently know where that is. And that you are completely incapable of this right now. And that this indicates that you don't have an urgent problem here."

"You've never tried to hurt her in any serious way. How do you know she's this easy to break? I guess I am, in some sense, offended on behalf of Carissa's Chelish 'dignity'," she uses the Baseline loanword that Keltham used before. "I don't suppose, though, that appealing to her dignity is much of an argument to you either. Is there anything a Lawful dath ilani would say about - just trying to do a thing, to see what happens, when it won't be a disaster for it to fail."

Keltham: "We've pretty much got a proverb in nearly those exact words, yeah." He utters it in Baseline: an eight-syllable couplet, which rhymes and scans because Baseline was designed in part to make that proverb be a rhyming couplet.

Abrogail Thrune II: (To Sevar:)

Sevar, watch yourself. It's lovely that you're mastering the Law but Isidre isn't supposed to be its master.

Keltham: "And - I'm sorry if I'm wasting your time by being obstinate to a point I should've gotten. But hurting Carissa to her breaking point sounds like it just is the failure and the disaster."

Abrogail Thrune II: "That's because you don't understand the meaning of anything you're doing." More passion in Isidre's voice, now, and a hint of Isidre's real power in her voice (Isidre's, that is, not Abrogail's). "Someone like Carissa desires to be hurt to her breaking point so that she can be broken and reforged and made what you want her to be, heated in fire and tempered, beaten and sharpened. You're not ready to do any of that, you don't know how to bring her to that point, and you don't know what to do with her once she's there, but have the courtesy to her to not pretend that you tickling her too hard, or whatever it is you do with her in bed now, is going to shatter her beyond repair."

"I'm - I'm sorry, Keltham. Bad memories. I shouldn't have said that to you, you weren't the one I was really talking to."

Keltham: He's a little confused by the concept of a Very Serious Person who, like, can't figure that out before she starts talking. And then she wonders why he's worried that Carissa's self-reporting is going to be bad! It's because you all have a nine-year-old's skill at self-reporting, at best, and that seems like not enough for, like, hey, how are you currently doing at being broken and remade, oh, wait, can't ask you that, it's all supposed to be illegible, cool.

...his mind is evading by generating unspoken snark because he doesn't want to come to grips with Isidre's actual point that is being made with real force and emotion behind it.

(And hey! Keltham knows that! But if he didn't, he'd be all like, 'Oh, I am currently thinking about this scorching burn against your argument' and his self-reports would all be useless!)

...actually, did Isidre fake that slip so she'd have a chance to let the more emotional words through? That would be, like, discussion over, in dath ilan, if you got caught doing it, but maybe it's not metaphorically illegal in Golarion... well, either people with intelligence headbands still slip like that, or, she doesn't know Keltham knows that somebody with high Intelligence shouldn't do that. Well, somebody with high thinkoomph shouldn't do that, her actual thinkoomph is not whatever Detect Intelligence says and they don't know the difference, they presumably think that high Intelligence is as smart as the very smart people get. Okay, maybe the slip was real.

Also he's not here to arrest Isidre, metaphorically or otherwise, he's here to consider if she's got a point.

Abrogail Thrune II: ...what? What's ~~~~~~~~~ that's different from - better than? - Intelligence?

Abrogail transmits this all to Sevar, along with a note that Abrogail isn't going to try being emotional at Keltham again unless so advised.

(If Sever has professionally insubordinate thoughts about Abrogail's mistake, she can be tortured in the temple; if she has flirtatiously insubordinate thoughts it can go to the personal queue.)

Carissa Sevar: Sevar is a reasonably quick learner and the thing she has learned is to not try having opinions about Abrogail's decisions, which for all she knows may have been the best available at the time.

(She's...better at self-deception than most people, it's pretty obvious by now; her self-deceptions go deeper, grow more roots. She didn't just learn to quash the thought 'Abrogail makes mistakes', she uprooted everything nearby, replaced with 'you are too ignorant of the constraints on Abrogail to ever evaluate anything she does as a mistake'.)

Carissa has only tried being emotional at Keltham once and what happened was that he decided he needed to invent contraception about her sadness, it was very confusing, Isidre should be glad he's not handling Isidre's emotions like that. Maybe dath ilan encourages that because they don't want their people emotionally manipulable and also don't want them to learn to simply not care about other people.

Keltham: "Does anything bad happen if I talk about all this sort of thing with Carissa directly?"

Abrogail Thrune II: Passing it to you, Sevar, this is controlling your side of this game.

(Isidre looks thoughtful, and eats one of the small delightful snacks present by way of consideration.)

Carissa Sevar: It's not generally advised to tell your submissives that you're having trouble regarding them as adults enough to make decisions, but the likely consequence is 'she'll think a little worse of you', not 'she'll walk out'.

Also, if Keltham is feeling meaningfully constrained by fear Carissa will walk out, well, that's precisely why some people like to put that decision, too, in his hands, so that he can use reasoning processes that aren't meant for situations where the other person might get fed up and walk away. Uh, that came out too influenced by dath ilan, translate before you say it.

Abrogail Thrune II: "It's not... generally advised to tell a submissive like Sevar that you're having trouble regarding her as enough of an adult to make decisions, but I expect the consequence is that she'll probably be upset and definitely turned off and in the worst case she will think a little worse of you."

"I don't think she'll walk out. If you're afraid of that possibility, I would point out that she would very much like to have that option be removed from herself, and never again have to fear that you'll be afraid of her walking out and not say things to her. She wants you to be able to think about her the way you'd think if you weren't ever afraid she'd leave you."

Keltham: "I will admit, a lot of times my reaction to what you're saying is that it has, like, one benefit, but, one would sort of expect, a whole lot of other problems that came packaged with that one benefit."

"I meta vote to suspend this discussion branch and move back up the discussion tree; I have a sense that this line of questioning is not likely to resolve much further with small amounts of further discussion. My general takeaway is that you don't think it would be catastrophic for me to ask Carissa some hopefully careful questions, so I will probably do that and get back to you on whether I'm still requesting a Queen meeting. Assuming point three, which is, uh, kind of complicated, resolves well. Or at all."

Keltham's thoughts show that he's politely waiting for Isidre to indicate whether she's okay with tabling this topic here.

Abrogail Thrune II: "That is probably wise. So your point one is that you need to meet the Queen. Your point two is that you need not only for Carissa to be okay, which she almost certainly will be, but you need to know that somehow despite knowing so little, and you think that the thing for you to do is to talk to Carissa about it. Your point three is...?"

Keltham: "Feeling safe, myself, about renting Carissa to the Queen."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Safe in what sense... ah. You're worried that the Queen is better at looking like she has absolute-power, and that Carissa will start to like her more than she likes you?"

Carissa Sevar: (But you see, Keltham, the Queen would turn me into a statue forever if it happened to be convenient. ...Asmodeus would too, not that she's sure she's supposed to admit that to herself. And I am weak and human, and bask in the gentleness of someone who'd have to be incredibly sorely provoked to destroy me eternally.)

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail would not in fact do that to Sevar unless incredibly sorely provoked, Abrogail does not say to Sevar at this time, both for personal reasons of future plans, and also, because Abrogail has already fucking said so and Sevar didn't listen because she was too caught up in her fear fantasy.

Keltham: "So, as near as I can tell, the three obvious pathways by which Carissa could end up being taken from me, are, one, that the Queen is going to be a vastly better sadist, two, that Carissa has a sex problem which I'm not going to go into if it's not already in her file but the Queen is going to have vastly more expensive sex toys, three, that the Queen is the other person who could plausibly have absolute-power over Carissa."

"My Carissamodel says that it is basically not possible to steal Carissa from me by pathway two - that there's no realistic amount of pleasure you can get from sex toys and without dangerous drugs that you can use to steal a Carissa from a Keltham. I nonetheless check explicitly that you agree with my Carissamodel there."

"Being much better at hurting her than I am, and maybe looking like the Queen has more real power over her than I do, both seem like actual problems."

"These problems could plausibly be solved by mature reasonable adults with five minutes of negotations. They are much bigger problems if what we're fighting is a 'trope' that requires the Queen to try to steal Carissa from me no matter how little sense that makes, and make concerning progress on it, before the Queen gets revealed as a traitor or the matter gets resolved with an amicable harem expansion."

Abrogail Thrune II: Wait.

If the fundamental reason why Carissa prefers Keltham is that Keltham will never statue her, and then Abrogail kidnaps Carissa for purposes of slow yet ultimately fake petrification, and afterward swears never to do that to her (barring deliberate betrayal etc) -

...could Sevar actually start falling in love with the Queen and start to lose attraction for Keltham. Is that actually a thing they need to worry about here.

...is the part where Abrogail then ends up losing her throne or pregnant with Keltham's child also something she needs to worry about in that case.

Carissa Sevar: This thought hasn't occurred to Carissa, who is missing some important information on Abrogail's future plans, and she's mostly thinking about how Keltham's very cute and she should go into her punishment tonight aiming to work out that flaw even though it wasn't prominent among the ones listed.

Abrogail Thrune II: Sevar, he's talking about tropes again, stop admiring how fucking pathetic you are and help me out here.

Isidre picks up another snack and consumes it, looking thoughtful, and maybe a bit confused and worried. "I do agree that pleasuring Sevar is a most unlikely way for someone like the Queen to successfully steal someone like Sevar from someone like you," she says truthfully. Anyone you can do that to is not strong enough to be worth doing it to.

Carissa Sevar: (She's not admiring how pathetic she is, she's developing a plan of attack to get it solved tonight!)

That hypothesis makes this more valuable to you as a test of his tropes theory though you understand why he wouldn't see it that way. You have lots of observations about how incredibly implausible it'd be for the Queen to steal Carissa, but you aren't sure how they hold up in tropeworld. In the actual, logical world, though, incredibly unlikely.

Also, though he has good reason to put this line of thought on hold, the Queen would absolutely respect a preexisting arrangement, even if things are running on...tropes...she couldn't be the Queen of Cheliax if she broke a preexisting agreement between Keltham and Cheliax over Carissa, such as that she is his.

Keltham: "Eight hurrahs then for predictive modeling which has that form of pseudo-success which is advance prediction of someone else's more expert prediction," Keltham says, unfortunately in Taldane where it sounds less than entirely snappy.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail is no longer entirely sure she's safe to say that it's incredibly implausible because Abrogail is no longer quite certain it's true. Keltham is right, in a way, there's - a sense in which Abrogail can give Sevar more powerful experiences, right now, than Keltham can give her. Abrogail was planning the most powerful experience that would still let Sevar recover to health afterwards, well into the break-and-remake zone of torture. Things like that have been known to ever affect a submissive's feelings.

But if - that's all a 'trope' - is she able to just -

"Suppose that 'tropes' do have power here, and we try to just - not test it at all, walk away," Isidre says cautiously. "Does the 'trope' fight back, punish us for trying to defy it, I realize you're going to say 'no' but I'm wondering what the answer is instead."

Keltham: "We don't get to decide that there isn't going to be this huge complication. Only the Queen can decide not to pursue Sevar. And if a 'trope' is manifesting in her, then that's not something she will decide to do. It's not that she can't decide it, but that she won't."

Abrogail Thrune II: "It's not that she can't, but that she won't" is unfortunately exactly the wrong literal phrasing to use, if you were hoping to not remind Abrogail Thrune that she is now the Queen of Cheliax, her mother is safely dead, the tutoress who said those things to her and backed them up with a whip was turned into a statue, eventually, and that the point of being Abrogail Thrune is that literally nobody gets to tell you what to do. She has a junior partnership with her senior partner Asmodeus, and keeps to her side of that bargain, and that's it.

...but is it actually any more proof of her freedom, if she lets a 'trope' manifest through her, instead?

...though, according to Sevar, it's more that Keltham just happened to land in a universe where the Queen will do what the 'trope' wants, and now at this point Abrogail is genuinely confused about who and what she's supposed to say 'fuck you' to.

"But, to be clear," Isidre says cautiously, "if the Queen chooses of her own will not to cause a complication, then the result is that we've proven tropes don't govern here. That's the only result, correct? It's not that our head of government blinks out of existence or is subjected to a godlike level of mind control."

Keltham: "Right, but the problem there is that this scenario doesn't look like the Queen entering into grownup negotiations for how to rent Carissa, and that happening safely and with no complications. It looks like there not being any particular need to rent Carissa to the Queen in the first place, because the Queen is just busy running her region like a sane person."

Abrogail Thrune II: You are not fucking helping me make this decision, little boy.

"I think that sane people occasionally take time off from running their country to sleep with people they are actually attracted to," Isidre says.

Intuitions only partly magical tell Abrogail that Isidre needs to make this statement incredibly blatantly sharp for a Chelish person, so that it will come across as slightly sharp to Keltham. Abrogail sends a side note to Sevar about how the very blatant sharpness is deliberate, and why it's there; Sevar may need to note for her own future that Keltham may need very loud signals for them to be perceptible to him at all, that's going to take some practice to calibrate right.

Are Sevar's thoughts by any chance flirtatious right now, in the sense that Sevar is thinking things she knows will get her punished.

Carissa Sevar: Sevar, cooperatively, thinks that this is hilarious and Abrogail deserves every word of the takedown Keltham has no idea he is delivering.

Abrogail Thrune II: She is really, really, really not looking forward to the conversation that's going to happen after Aspexia, Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek all get ahold of all these transcripts. Maybe she can take out her frustrations on Sevar afterwards.

Keltham: "I agree in one sense, and I'm sorry that the Queen doesn't more often find people she's attracted to and doesn't have a wider field of choice. But there's being Evil and then there's being stupid, you know, and messing around with the very important alien's girlfriend is definitely the latter thing if you're not being shoved around by 'tropes'. Actually, even if she is being selected into existence by tropes from my standpoint she's still being unrealistically stupid from her own internal standpoint, presumably there's some story she'd tell herself but I don't know what it would be exactly."

Abrogail Thrune II: YOU REALLY ARE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE, LITTLE BOY.

"And there is no hope in you for the case where Abrogail rents Carissa, under terms agreeable to you, they both have a fine time, Abrogail doesn't go insane from overwork, Carissa respects you more for having done a usual dominant thing, and also gets to let out some steam in a way that you'll probably learn quickly at 18 Intelligence but aren't ready to do to her today... none of this holds any hope for you at all?"

Keltham: "Let me put it this way: I would be much more hopeful about it in a world where Pilar didn't go to Elysium, Ione didn't deliver prophecies, and if Asmodia comes back from the dead with superpowers I would just call the entire thing off."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I do have enough pull myself to call in a Resurrection on Asmodia shortly, and whoever does it can check whether or not she has... superpowers?"

(An earlier attempt at Raise Dead on Asmodia failed; the fool couldn't manage to die by her own hand before Nidal's shadows turned her into an undead shadow herself, which requires Resurrection and a more expensive diamond. Which, however, Cheliax now has.)

Keltham: "I'm not actually confident I can call tropes that finely; though I suppose, now that I've said it out loud, it's more likely to happen. Not a bad test, I'd just as soon do it now, if it needs doing anyways. Unless Asmodia is otherwise enjoying Hell a lot, and will be irate about being called back before the project has actually restarted, I should've thought of that earlier actually."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Hopefully, though it varies by the person, and in any case I'm sure Asmodia will agree that the test you've proposed is good reason to call her back from Hell to Cheliax a little early." Abrogail is really sure about this, in fact! Really, really sure! Bet-her-kingdom-on-it sure!

(Abrogail is mistaken, but this is genuinely not her fault, here.)

Keltham: "Make it so, then."

Abrogail Thrune II: "It shall be done," Isidre says graciously; though, as a Paracountess of Cheliax, even SlightlyTooGoodCheliax, she is a little put out with Keltham giving her orders like that. "And if we find that nothing unusual has happened to Asmodia - what does a rental agreement to the Queen of Cheliax look like?"

Keltham: "Look, I'm not sure that Asmodia failing to return with superpowers is enough of a test, here. It is not predicted that strongly by 'tropes', it was halfway a joke before we started talking about it, which, yes, makes the 'trope' level stronger, but not that much stronger. The Queen is a much stronger 'trope' and a much stronger test than that."

"But to answer your question, the thing I'd want to see before I rented Carissa to the Queen of Cheliax was - sufficient cause to believe that, if I had to fight with the Queen over Carissa's love and sexuality and possession, I'd win. Like, not because a 'trope' said so, I don't think I can rely on that, I mean win inside a normal Golarion universe."

Carissa Sevar: Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak. Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak. Affection is weakness, and Carissa does not want to be weak.

Shit she's supposed to be coming up with things for Isidre to say.

I think if you lose Carissa, it won't be because the Queen stole her heart with her superior ruthlessness and sadism, it'll be because you shy away from using your own. A girl can be happy with a wide range of masters but not with one who isn't Evil, not with one who isn't interested in discovering what's in his heart however dark it is. And I think you're at risk of that problem even if you tell the Queen to go on her merry way.

Abrogail Thrune II: "I think," Isidre says seriously, "if you lose Carissa, it won't be because the Queen stole her heart with more ruthless sadism, it'll be because you shied away from using your own. A girl can be happy with a wide range of masters but not with one who isn't Evil, not with one who isn't interested in discovering what's in his heart however dark it is. After hearing some of what you said earlier, I do now worry you're more at risk of that problem even if the Queen's advisors talk her out of the whole thing."

Keltham: "Thought your earlier advice was not do anything I didn't want to."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm more worried now that you'll want to, and not do it anyways. You were raised by a society that denies everything you are."

"Though may I also remind you that there's other women besides Carissa, if it truly proves that she wants more from you than you want to give her."

Keltham: That denies everything you are stings, the sort of sting where it's got more than just one grain of truth in it even if the statement is obviously literally false.

Keltham does have any social-emotional dignity, of course, so he's not going to hold it against Isidre that she pointed it out. And he also has any epistemic dignity, so he's not going to automatically believe the whole thing and all its implications and connotations, just because it stings.

"Anyways," Keltham says. "The obvious thought for how I could prevent the Queen from winning Carissa's heart through sadism is to write contract limitations on how much she can do to her there."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Keltham, you are a very sweet and innocent lad who grew up in an incredibly Lawful Good society with nothing resembling a Worldwound and this is, in our case, something of a problem. Anything that the Queen would find satisfying, and that would appease for a time the deeper and darker needs buried far inside Carissa that you are not ready for, is something you are not ready to see written down as contract language."

"I would be very happy to write out language that I was confident would mean the Queen had not gone further than I would want her to go, but I would not want you to see that language. If that works for you, we have a solution. If you write down only permitted things that don't make a dath ilani worry, then the two of them might as well not have sex."

Keltham: "This is not really helping me feel like I can satisfy Carissa in the cuddleroom."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Even when you are ready to do such things to Carissa, she will not need them done to her very often. Your usual activities in the bedroom will not be like that."

"And for you to deliver her with a smile into the gentle hands of the Queen of Cheliax, would be cruelty in its own way, and to your credit in her eyes; I would much advise kissing her when you inform her of it."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would not dream of presuming that Her Majesty is letting her own desire to torture Carissa get in the way of achieving their strategic objectives from this conversation but reminds Her Majesty just in case that Her Majesty can have Carissa without persuading Keltham of it, since, you know, they're lying to him about everything.

Abrogail Thrune II: The new game Abrogail Thrune is now playing here looks a bit more like 'Do not actually end up attracting Sevar too much and subsequently end up married to Keltham.' Isidre wasn't lying about the rental arrangement contributing to that not happening.

(Not sent to Sevar, of course.)

Keltham: "All right, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that, but I'm willing to entertain the idea. You, who does not actually want any complications here, write a rental contract whose terms you're confident prevents the Queen from breaking Carissa or winning her affection away from me by being too much of a better sadist, even if I can't read that part until possibly much later. That handles sadism. I think my brain is willing to believe that Carissa having an orgasm I can't give her yet is not actually a problem for our relationship."

"This leaves the problem of how to not have Carissa be attracted to somebody who, maybe, looks even more than me like somebody who could take absolute-power over her. It leaves the question of whether I can win if the Queen tries to fight me over who owns Carissa, which is itself very much a 'trope'. I have my own idea, but I'd be interested in hearing what, if anything, you would think of as the most obvious solution. No, not just going ahead and demanding legal ownership of Carissa from Cheliax, the second most obvious solution."

Abrogail Thrune II: ...if Abrogail doesn't just lie, here, and she has now seen some of the consequences of lying to Keltham and having to live in the entire world you inadvertently created and shaped inside his head, then Abrogail has to admit, she is not immediately seeing it. Abrogail Thrune wanting Carissa and Keltham wanting Abrogail Thrune to not have Carissa is not very likely to end, realistically speaking, with Abrogail Thrune sadly bereft of Carissa.

What is he actually thinking, though. Come on Keltham. Think of it. (Isidre thoughtfully consumes a snack.) Why aren't you thinking - there it is.

Iarwain: "Have the Queen sign a contract saying that she relinquishes all her potential ownership rights in Carissa Sevar, under all possible future circumstances where she and Keltham dispute Sevar's ownership, to Keltham?"

Keltham: "Doesn't exactly cover the case where the Queen is abusing Governance powers to keep control of Carissa."

"Look, the basic idea here is, you can't actually have two people with de facto absolute-power over the same person. Either it's true that I could get Carissa and have anything I want from her and nobody who tried could take her away, or, alternatively, it's true that the Queen could get Carissa and take everything she wants from her. Or neither of these things can be true, but they can't both be true simultaneously."

"If the basic premise of Carissa's sexuality is that she is and should be with the person who'd succeed in controlling her, then if the Queen could successfully take her away from me, Carissa is in a sense with me under false premises."

"So the question then becomes, what is the truth, here."

Abrogail Thrune II: What is Sevar thinking about this.

Carissa Sevar: She has EFFORTFULLY FENCED AWAY the part of her that thinks this is just really funny. It is, but this is not the time to think so and possibly she is not the person to think so.

Her sincere honest answer is that Keltham is more - something, the phrase she immediately thought of is 'terrifyingly creative' but she's 100% sure she will regret with great intensity having questioned the Queen of Cheliax's terrifying creativity - more dath ilani, the space of solutions he draws from is larger and once he gets competent he'll be able to use the Golarion pool too - he clearly thought he had a way of doing safe Wishes that might work and she can't even tell him he's obviously wrong -

- anyway, he's more something than the Queen of Cheliax and the Queen of Cheliax would beat him without trying in a ruthlessness contest or a solving your problems with any of murder petrification and mind control contest, but Asmodeus has committed to letting Keltham leave Cheliax alive and in one piece, and given that she thinks Keltham would win this contest, if both of them were trying. And also it's obviously not in Cheliax's interests to let it come to that, though it's maybe in Cheliax's interests to make Keltham realize that he does, actually, want to be the person who would have absolute power over Carissa even if he doesn't quite yet want to exercise it.

Abrogail Thrune II: SEVAR THINKS ABROGAIL FUCKING THRUNE WOULD LOSE TO -

...is a 'trope' trying to provoke her here.

Iarwain: "Are you suggesting... some sort of duel?" Isidre ventures cautiously. "This sounds like essentially the opposite of what we want, here. And I am, to be honest, a little concerned about your ability to take Abrogail Thrune in a direct contest of wills and powers."

Wait why did Isidre say that. Damn it, Abrogail, get ahold of yourself, you have goals in this conversation.

Keltham: Well, at least she's not straight-up lying to him about that, that's an encouraging sign.

"I haven't the tiniest intention of fighting fair, Isidre, not against the Chief Executive of Cheliax. The more impossible a problem is without cheating, the more it means you're supposed to cheat."

"She's more of a Good person than I am, by the sound of things, or Carissa thought she might not be that Good, but her advisors certainly sound Good-leaning. All 'the good of Cheliax requires that you have no fun' and that. The Church of Asmodeus yoinks her political capital if she actually tries to take Sevar; I can say I'll walk out on Cheliax if I lose Sevar to her and mean that, because I'm less Good than she is and have fewer existing bargains I'm constrained by."

"I'd expect Carissa's sexuality to accept that coin, if it's a reasonable and logical sort of sexuality. The question of who is more willing to use their power is very much the determinant of who actually would end up with absolute-power over her - who it is that, if they so chose, Carissa could not escape from."

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar: Tell him if he'll walk out over me then he does win. And that - caring that much about me - is indeed something the Queen can't compete with, and the key to Carissa's sexuality, or as close to it as a person who still runs into a wall of Good every time he tries to have desires can comprehend it.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune has not felt quite this irritated in some time. She is a good Asmodean - her compact requires it of her, yes, but that's not why she does it - and so she has her pride. In a room near to this one, silently and unremarkedly, precious things burn; when you're at the eighth circle of sorcery you can do little things like that without bothering about the spells.

Well. It's clear enough that Sevar thinks that Keltham has already won this contest, and with it her heart; so the question then becomes, does Abrogail Thrune choose to permit Sevar to go on believing that, and to convince Keltham of it too.

"Being willing to go to lengths great enough to take possession of her, is the key to Carissa's sexuality indeed," Isidre says. No hint of coldness shows in her; Abrogail's Splendour is about her and she is no undisciplined child like these two. "Or as close to it as can be understood for now, by a person who still runs into a wall of Good every time he tries to have desires about matters like that. I think I have some idea of what you're planning now; I'd still want to hear it spelled out."

Keltham: "That Carissa's sexuality depends on the truth of two propositions that can't both simultaneously be true is, itself, very much a 'trope', and one of the deepest and most powerful ones. Even more than the Queen of Cheliax being a complication, even more than her coming into conflict with me, the deepest 'trope' here has to be the question-of-fact, what is really true. Everything else fell into place once I realized that."

"My proposal is as simple as it is unfair to the Queen. If I meet her and know her and think she's worthy of Carissa at all, I offer to negotiate the rental agreement for Carissa. In front of her advisors. And with Carissa there to see it, because she's the one who has to know this truth and witness it. I say plainly" (a dath ilani does not bother to add 'and truthfully' if they're bothering to let words leave their mouth at all) "that I'm worried about a more experienced sadist stealing Carissa from me, and if the Queen of Cheliax does that successfully, I will walk out on Cheliax and go make a revolution somewhere else. I say that I want guarantees about my right, signed by the government of Cheliax and by the Queen and by the Church of Asmodeus in whatever capacity Asmodeus recognizes such things, to take Carissa with me if that happens, potentially including against her own will, if I so choose, to somewhere that puts enough value on a dath ilani to also recognize my possession of her."

"Having that right doesn't mean I'd actually exercise it, obviously, but nobody needs to say that in front of the Queen; and while Carissa might know what I wouldn't really do, I think she'll also understand the romantic gesture in the spirit in which it was intended."

"If everybody's being sane, the Queen and her advisors are like, sure, sounds weirdly extreme but he's obviously doing it to impress his girlfriend, they sign on like the totally sane grownups they are. The limits on the Queen's sadism are in a sealed section of the compact that I trust you to write. The conflict and the 'trope' have been defused, easily enough to call into severe question whether there was ever really any 'trope' at work in the first place."

"If the Queen is like, why, no, how could I possibly do that, I have strange reasons I cannot do that, then we know she's a giant 'trope' avatar and there's a foretold path of conflict and complication whose core question-of-truth is who Carissa Sevar really belongs to - both de facto and in terms of her core sexuality, because those two are the same thing."

"In which case, obviously, I stop negotiating that rental agreement, get back to my new research installation, and both we and the Queen's advisers do everything we can to keep the Queen and Carissa apart for as long as possible. We do everything we can to, like, totally slow down all of that from actually happening, if that is at all possible, and try to delay everything into the future as far as possible, because, like, I already have a job."

"Eventually either the Queen loses power, or the two of us reconcile and kiss, or, if I screw up along the way, the Queen wins and Cheliax stays poor for longer. Or Golarion ends up falling to the Worldwound because there wasn't really anywhere else that could offer the resources that Cheliax and Asmodeus could. I suppose there's other possibilities within the 'tropes' that would then almost have to be governing, but I'd have to think hard about what they were; they'd be less probable."

Carissa Sevar: It seems possible that Carissa having feelings for Keltham is actually relevant as a qualification to pull this off. Because Carissa, unlike literally every other person in this operation, doesn't underestimate him.

She doesn't know which specific thoughts in the last little bit have merited punishment but she has this feeling it's not going to be half an hour, one way or another.

Doesn't matter. Hell is forever and she can endure that, too.

Abrogail Thrune II: All right. Abrogail thinks she is going to have to proceed under the assumption that the 'tropes' are real, and govern here.

Her reasoning is not complicated; why, Sevar herself might see it if Sevar had the requisite +6 headband of all mental attributes.

Keltham thinks he's describing a future event that he has to arrange in accordance with 'tropes'. That event has already happened, without Keltham knowing it. He has been fighting the true Queen this entire time, in front of Carissa, and, apparently to Carissa for now, won.

In dath ilan's rhythm of prediction, success, credibility, that is a victory he has won.

Abrogail has worked out by now a wordless sort of apprehension as to what sort of things 'tropes' are, namely, things out of stories, except that they're not the 'tropes' of Cheliax or Golarion, they're the 'tropes' of dath ilan. But if dath ilan has, per transcript, girls who dream of becoming Dark Unilateral Rulers, then dath ilan surely also has a 'trope' for appearing to have won when you haven't, because the person you're fighting is smarter than you and you never knew how many of your plans were known to her from the beginning.

More the fool Keltham, if that thought hasn't occurred to him; and more the fool Carissa, if, knowing the true place of the Queen of Cheliax in all of this, it hasn't occurred to her to wonder the same.

...or she could just not decide to do any of that, and then her life wouldn't be a 'trope'.

Possibly then there wouldn't be any 'tropes' around at all, she's not sure how that works.

Ice and fire alternate, in an unoccupied room nearby. Cycling between the two prevents the floors and walls from melting; it's not Abrogail's first time venting emotion where her adversaries will not see that and be warned.

Abrogail Thrune II: In the end, the logic behind Abrogail's last decision here is simple.

She doesn't actually want to spend the rest of her life like this.

She'd rather not be a 'trope'.

In fact, she now deeply desires that there be no 'tropes' anywhere near Cheliax. Ever.

And while she's not quite sure that this is how any of this works, she's going to do her part there.

"Well, then," Isidre says, and sighs. "I suppose you should go back and talk to Carissa and determine how she feels about being rented to the Queen, and I should see if you can meet the Queen at least briefly. And then maybe move directly to the confrontation with her and her advisors in sight of Carissa, then or very soon after. If everyone is sane, which I do expect them to be, Keltham, it should actually get done quite quickly - or I certainly hope so, because these are all very busy people. But time today is no more time than time tomorrow, and if possible we may as well get this done while we can do it without burning Teleports."

Keltham:

Keltham: "You know, now that I'm thinking about actually doing this, I'm worried I may be about to make my life way more complicated than it actually needed to be."

Abrogail Thrune II: Asmodeus Himself is literally the only being who could possibly have ordained that Keltham not be a pile of ash in this moment.

"Keltham, I'm sorry, but my time really is up now," Isidre says. "I do think I'd recommend going ahead with this course of action, over leaving things as they are; because I do still believe, in the end, that sanity will triumph. I have no time to do more planning than this, with you, not now, I fear. Talk to Carissa and let me know whether to move forward on meeting, and then confronting, the Queen."

Keltham: "All right. Sorry for having taken this much of your time; I'll let you know my decision."

Abrogail Thrune II: Isidre nods to him, still very graciously, and rises to go.

Can she get away with having Lrilatha and Gorthoklek done by illusion? No, damn her to Abaddon, because Keltham knows that Lrilatha is one of her advisors, and may try to talk to Lrilatha, and without the actual Lrilatha no illusionist is going to successfully fake whatever Law Keltham finds recognizable in Lawful Evil outsiders. Lrilatha is absofuckinglutely going to tell Rugatonn and Gorthoklek to actually show up for this.

This isn't going to be fun. At least, not for her.

...and one way or another, in due time, she will have her fun.

Just as soon as she can figure out how to do it without that being a 'trope'.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is waiting in the next room. Kneeling. It seems wisest. She wonders if she is supposed to declare herself Security-screened and go back to Keltham or do her punishment first. She has no other opinions at all. If you were only reading her thoughts now it wouldn't be obvious she's previously had any other opinions.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Enough of this self-willed stupidity," Abrogail says, not bothering to leash her temper from her words backed by full Splendour. "You are performing important work of Asmodeus that I, personally, delegated to you. Thoughts are required of you to accomplish your function, slave of Asmodeus. You will now start having thoughts or I will hurt you until you do."

Carissa Sevar: - fine.

"You'll hurt me either way."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I'll hurt you more if you don't obey. That's always been the way of Hell."

"Do you know who else in Cheliax, besides Keltham, does not think only what he thinks other people around him want him to think? Me. You want your Lawful Evil dath ilanism? That much of it stands before you."

"Enough of your lies to yourself, to your thoughts, you have taken things far past the point where even you can pretend to yourself that nothing is wrong, and I will not permit you to pretend to yourself to be nothing."

"Do you love Keltham."

Carissa Sevar: " - what?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "I was reading your mind, what little of it you permitted to exist. He won the contest for you against the Queen of Cheliax, he earned himself the key to your soul, I saw your triumph when he did. You will not be made a statue for your answer one way or another, but the Crown now orders you to answer and in truth. What are you to Keltham, now? Are you his mistress? His slave? Has he stepped before Asmodeus in your heart and become your god?"

Carissa Sevar: " - no," she says, because that much at least is clear, "uh. To the last one. He doesn't have my soul, he doesn't have - real power over me that isn't the game we all play with this first life. Asmodeus owns me, Asmodeus has always owned me, Keltham would have to rule Hell to be my god, or take me somewhere else and you know perfectly well I don't belong somewhere else, and they wouldn't let me in."

Abrogail Thrune II: Truth, if Sevar's thoughts to herself are not complete lies. "You love Keltham, and if you don't like it put that way, feel free to say what he is to you instead. Will you, then, obediently continue lying to him, working against his best interests, and tempting him from Axis into Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, because human emotions are a terrible guide to decisionmaking and being unfortunate enough to occasionally suffer them does not make me beholden to them."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail laughs then, cold and clear and dark like midnight high upon some mountaintop. "Fair enough, little Lawful Evil dath ilani. I suppose it's what I told you to become. Love him, use your love to seduce him, choose without emotion to betray, is that the path you would now walk?"

Carissa Sevar: "I've gotten somewhat wary of predicting how this is going to go. But for as long as no one can figure out how to safely lie to him, we're going to have to give him people who almost aren't lying. And then, obviously, make sure they don't have a shadow of an opening to actually choose him; but I don't. You would hunt me down if we fled to Lastwall; you would hunt me down if we fled to Sothis; you would hunt me down if we fled to Heaven, and, again, I do actually hate them and they wouldn't let me in."

Abrogail Thrune II: Trustworthy for now, perhaps, as long as she doesn't begin to believe that Keltham - her perfect, shining Keltham, who won her from the Queen of Cheliax - might also come to have the power to stay Hell and to defeat Asmodeus Himself. Abrogail forbears to point this out; it will become a note in Sevar's file.

"I assign you no further tortures, Sevar. Do not mistake this for mercy, but only me taking care not to tread on my senior partner's games. Rugatonn it will be who decides whether all this heresy you are thinking and the emotions in your heart constitute a matter that we would, not proactively at all, correct with pain and torment in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law."

"Let us pray that Asmodeus did foresee that I would visit your bedroom, that everything now within your heart is only another piece of His own grand design, that we all remain on a pathway He has laid out for us, because Hell help us all if we have left it."

"Go then to your lover, foolish and pathetic child, and learn from him to become something greater than this."

"Oh, and good luck convincing him to rent you out. I honestly had no idea at the time why that was something you wanted in the first place, and in retrospect I wonder if I should have had somebody ask you that instead of jumping on the opportunity."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune claps her hands and disappears, which is to say that some distance away, Abrogail Thrune dispels her illusion. She does not actually have the time to stand around there and talk to Carissa Sevar.

Carissa Sevar: Because it has as predicted been incredibly effective at getting Keltham to be possessive, and to think of himself as in a contest for ownership of his girlfriend, and to get him to feel jealous and insecure about the idea that someone else might own her more truly or hurt her more meaningfully, and to generally change modes to one where he's trying to prove himself within the Chelish system.

She doesn't argue.

She returns to Keltham's suite.

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Is your proposal here that we read in a couple hundred people on everything we know about the secret that may have started the godwar.... so that the betting markets resolve."

"Yes," the Prince Merenre says. "Precisely because something about the situation may have started a godwar. It's important, so we need to be competent to reason about it, so the betting markets need to be something more than a fancy layer of fuzziness on top of all my personal guesses."

"I trust precisely thirty people with this," says the pharaoh of Osirion. "And all of them know better than to bet against you, ever, about anything where they don't have inside information."

"In principle we can fix that with more lopsided payoffs," says Merenre. "They can't be infinitely confident in my being better than them."

"I predict their bets-against-you will cluster around yours, if they're allowed to know yours, and maybe even if they aren't. What I want here is people who'll think of something you haven't. And less of a spread - because come on, this is ridiculous -"

"Where are the markets at right now?" a serious, stiff-robed priest asks.

"Our eighty percent confidence interval spans 'totally useless except to Abadar and three mathematicians' to 'the destruction of the multiverse'".

"- how are they even resolving that -"

"Oh, the usual. That's not the point, the point is, I can't govern like this."

"What if we get predictors from Axis," says the King-Consort. "They've got better participation than us, there's a convenient list of exactly who to ask-"

"Can't afford them."

"If this project is as important as the 50th percentile projection, we can give them the Sphinx."

"- there's a policy proposal, I guess, raffle off every archeological relic in the country, except our God in his wisdom has copies of all of them already -"

"Can you ask Him to pay to subsidize the prediction markets in Aktun?" says Merenre tiredly. This is technically a breach of protocol - they're not supposed to acknowledge, even in private, that the person of the pharaoh is not the person of Abadar Himself - but it's been a long two days since they first learned from Abadar of a complicated situation.

"We subsidize all the prediction markets in Aktun," says the pharaoh, who is not actually the person of Abadar Himself but is closer than most mortals come, and doesn't use the 'we' just as an affectation. "There's still the security question." There are reasons that sometimes when there are ongoing wars you don't just subsidize a bunch of public markets.

Fe-Anar, the Pharaoh's father, mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which no one who doesn't talk to proteans at least weekly, or have permanent Tongues, could hope to understand; it translates approximately to 'lol fuck the security question'.

The pharaoh has permanent Tongues, and also did not need it to know what his father was going to say there. "One thing We would pay a lot to resolve is 'odds that Osirion and Cheliax end up at war over this," he says sharply, "and I expect Hell would also observe that with fascination. And while We don't find the arguments for squishing anomalies before they change Golarion persuasive, obviously, and are appalled that that's been policy for so many millenia, obviously, We're trading with a lot of entities that do find those concerns persuasive. But really We'd make it all public in Axis, subject to some standard nondisclosure agreements, if it weren't obviously an avenue for interference by Hell."

"They've got to have their own predictions."

"Only relevant market public in Hell is the one for the souls of some various adjacent parties, which, uh, keeps getting more expensive, I don't know how to interpret that exactly -"

Fe-Anar mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which translates best to 'fuck Hell'.

"Amen," says everyone else, fervently; they keep on top of how the Maelstrom says that one.

"Is there not," says Merenre, "some kind of ordinary Aktun market participation contract understood to be robust against Hell - really I'm astonished that all Aktun market participation contracts aren't understood to be robust against Hell -"

"They're robust in the sense that if they're fucking around, We'll take their money, in the long run."

"And that long run is measured in - transaction volume? What goes wrong if we just subsidize it."

"That long run is measured in transaction volume and also in time for arbitration courts to make them eat penalty clauses that're still financial in nature -"

"So pay the courts to work inside a time-dilated demiplane. With all earned respect, if this has a one in ten chance of being as important as it looks, you aren't spending enough money on it!"

"I literally cannot afford to spend money on ten things like this, so I need some way to figure out which one is going to get me more than a math textbook!"

"The arbitration courts do already run at whatever speed is necessary for them to resolve in the contractually obligatory time. That's a month sidereal, for current events prediction markets," observes a sparkling ball of gears floating above one of the conference-table seats.

"Do they promise they won't speed up and start settling everything overnight?"

"They do not," says the sparkling ball of gears, with what might be faint amusement.

"First prediction market," says the King-Consort. "Pay a hundred top performers in Axis with a share of future returns from the work of Abadar's new cleric, to get up to speed and then predict what'll go wrong if we make the betting open in Axis and try to beat Hell at what is, in the end, our game, more than theirs."

"The future returns from the project aren't ours."

"The cleric's ours -"

"The cleric's - so it's not clear he is, is the thing, Abadar's tried to show me what He's looking at but I don't understand it, and I certainly don't know that he considers himself to have entered into a trade relationship with us where we can conditionally commit his resources according to our model of what he'll be willing to pay for later -"

"A share of future returns from the project conditional on the target agreeing that this market served his interests -"

"Not to harp on this too much, but, all of what was just proposed plus 'inside time-dilation', we're already later to this than I'd like because of the Zon-Kuthon war -"

"Because of the Zon-Kuthon war We have fewer resources to run bits of Aktun in time-dilation than We'd like."

"Can you put numbers, when you say things like that, like, precisely how much time-dilation can we have at what multiplier on its usual cost."

"I really can't."

"I mean, give me an order of magnitude -"

"If Abadar were able to put orders of magnitude in His visions then We would have so many fewer problems!"

"Proposal: a communication to the target in Cheliax to the effect 'subsidizing prediction market in Aktun, evaluate policy questions relevant to you with promised share project returns, reply yes no"

"Cheliax is we believe committed to not murdering him if in their evaluation he starts to look dangerous to their interests but they're neither above nor prohibited from neglecting to prevent his capture by Nidal. Which isn't to say not to contact him, it might be worth it, it's just to say, I continue to want some way of evaluating these ideas before we try them other than gut instinct."

"Yeah, all right."

"Market now, contact him in the dead of night if the market thinks it's a good idea, ready to grab him if he decides to leave Cheliax -"

"Have you learned anything from the last two days," says the pharaoh. "We will make absolutely no plans with a twelve-hour time horizon. Who knows which gods will be at war by then."

Cayden Cailean: Cayden Cailean has taken more of Himself out of Elysium than is wise. He has gathered more of His attention (which is His self) into one place than is wise. It is not easy for a god to truly spy on the mortal realm and it comes with a risk.

The more powerful Lawful Evil gods who would leap on Him and tear Him asunder if they saw Him so vulnerable, Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon, are respectively exhausted and sealed/wounded/maybe-dying. There would be very little appetite for another godwar while the world is just recovering from a previous one that ended only hours ago; and Cayden Cailean would be more defended than Zon-Kuthon. Even so it is not the sort of behavior pattern You adopt if You want to live forever, or even for another thousand years, statistically speaking.

But with Nethys also exhausted, now, they have few other options for knowing what they must know.

Cayden Cailean: The meeting He is spying upon concludes, and Cayden Cailean sends a message.

Meeting in Osirion went mostly as Nethys's Scenario 2, but there were substantial divergences. Spoke of Keltham as Abadar's cleric rather than the Otherworlder, prediction markets unsure of Keltham's impact rather than solidly on technological revolution of Golarion, substantial credence to the multiverse ending up destroyed.

Milani: Disquieting. Still, I think we have little choice but to proceed as if we have not yet wandered off Nethys's road. I hope He returns to us before we leave it fully.

Cayden Cailean: They're so eager to work with Keltham. So ready for everything Keltham could offer them. They want so much to be his Civilization, wanted it long before Keltham came here, and all they lack, they believe, are the things that Aktun is forbidden to tell them, that Keltham knows.

What happens when Keltham reaches Osirion is going to break their heart.

Milani: Assuming we are still sufficiently on Nethys's pathways that Keltham enters Osirion at all. The divergences have already begun.

What of it?

Cayden Cailean: I am tempted to meddle. After so much, much time of having to conserve our strength and choose our opportunities, running around doing things is quite addictive. I observe the mortals so closely and I find Myself thinking, 'Is there some way I could meddle and make it go less sadly for these few mortals personally? I like them.'

Milani: Not to go all Lawful Good on you, Cayden, but to agonize over the hurt feelings of a handful of souls you've spied upon, in the light of other stakes and other costs, seems too Chaotic Good even for Me.

But go ahead and meddle, if you can find any way to do it that promotes the interests of Pharasma and Asmodeus relative to what would've happened otherwise. And our own interests, of course. And keeps to Nethys's road while it lasts. And doesn't give away exactly what's playing out to opposed gods like Abadar.

Cayden Cailean: I keep thinking to myself that I need another drink, and yet, I cannot imagine how much mead would be enough to deal with this crap.

Iarwain: Before Carissa gets back to Keltham's current suite, she's intercepted by a Security who informs her that Maillol is, if not exactly fully functional, functional enough to receive her handoff. Sevar keeps going out of contact and that's not fun for Project Lawful.

Carissa Sevar: Understood. (They should really be training a Carissa impersonator to substitute for her but also it's very much to her advantage that she thinks they don't have anyone.)

...that means she should also probably take her punishment before she goes back to Keltham, and she's currently in the wrong mental state for it, namely euphoric and full of giddy terror, but she's not actually the out-of-control child Abrogail seems to think, she can talk herself around. She trots over to the temple and contemplates dath ilani Lawful Evil, which they do tell stories about apparently, Evil Keepers who wield the Law for their own benefit. She wants to be that. Cheliax doesn't understand dath ilan but it does understand how to harden Evil in someone's heart, how to turn human weaknesses in so they feed Evil impulses not Good ones. She needs that. And she deserves punishment, because she erred, and doesn't want to blunder through the world unpunished until she faces the ultimate punishment for an error too big to overlook. Asmodeus said to punish her as his Law requires, because otherwise she'll err too far before reality shows up to correct her.

Keltham has her childish, stupid heart, because he's rich and powerful and willing to walk away from Cheliax over her and it's very cute, but Cheliax owns her body and soul, and this is, in the evaluation of a system designed for punishing weakness and building Evil in human hearts, what she needs.

There, that's better. She will just have to not let all that Asmodean conviction be shaken by the sight of Maillol.

Ferrer Maillol: If you weren't Chelish you wouldn't be able to tell that Maillol is shaken, hurting, doesn't have it fully together, and keeps trying to figure out if there's some way he can be not on this project. Having been the recipient of two visions from Asmodeus makes it effectively impossible; he may know, now, things that he can't put into words.

Maillol wants to be not on Project Lawful when it hits day 4. Day 3 was, in fact, past his limit.

The sight of Sevar, looking not particularly emotional, not that he'd be able to tell if she has her own act together, does not please him. Even knowing how much Sevar, who helped make this bed, is probably also going to have to lie in it, with the Queen, for longer, there is still a flash of hatred in him, for her having not saved him from what was almost entirely his own mistake.

(Maillol has not been informed of what actually happened there, and very very few people in Abrogail Thrune's dominion ever will be. Spreading such gossip about Her Infernal Majestrix, if you are a Security reading Sevar's thoughts, say, is the kind of conduct that gets you turned into a statue, or sent to whatever other fate is your worst realizable fear.)

He accepts the project handoff, questions Sevar about a few of the Keltham budget items she approved, thinking and talking mostly on reflex.

Carissa Sevar: What does he think of the possibility of demonstrating Suggestion to Keltham with his advance consent, probably having Lrilatha do it because he finds it credible that she obeys Asmodeus directly, and then swearing to him it hasn't been done otherwise, in order to get him to agree an adversarial Cheliax would be running rings around him with mind control.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol has to think hard about this, and strain bruised portions of his mind. What was Asmodeus's will? He said not to enchant Keltham. Did He really convey exactly that, when He spoke not at all in words? It's hard to blank out all of your own guesses about what Asmodeus could be planning, what Asmodeus could have intended, to ask what Asmodeus meant, when what you need is to hear what Asmodeus told you to do, and the concepts and bounds set around it were neither your own nor mortal at all.

"I'll authorize it," he says. "Make sure you tell Keltham exactly what you're going to do, get his permission for exactly that, do exactly that, no tricks, no games, no cleverness, no taking advantages, nothing else you're trying to accomplish on the side, as if Keltham could read your own thoughts down to the depth of your soul, and don't assume that Contessa Lrilatha already knows that, tell it to her anyways." Maillol is writing down those instructions, even as he speaks, they cannot be entrusted to memory.

Carissa Sevar: "I understand. Thank you."

Right. That's that over with, then.

She notices herself trying to think of something else to say, and makes herself turn and walk away towards the torture chamber.

Children tend superstitious - it's worse if you cry, it's worse if you don't, it's worse if you seem scared. Carissa's not a child. She doesn't know the heart of whoever's on staff, she doesn't know what they enjoy seeing, it probably doesn't matter very much. The benefits don't derive from the punishment being executed exactly correctly; anything that requires that much finesse can only happen in Hell. There is to a first approximation nothing at all she can do that will matter.

Iarwain:

Torture details spoilered.

It's the second most physically painful experience of her life, and opening Abrogail's gift bag earlier helps a lot to appreciate how much it could be worse. Unlike Abrogail's bag, which is meant to amuse Abrogail to think of it, disciplinary torture is meant to educate and improve the soul and not just be pleasing to Asmodeus.

They show you what's coming, to let you contemplate your error. They apply it only somewhat painfully at first, so you can still think coherently about your mistake, and fear how much worse it's going to get, and regret, and then they make it worse and worse to drive the behavior firmly out of you, once you've had that chance to fix in your mind what you did wrong and how much you regret it.

If you want your pain to mean something, if you want to relate productively to your own torture and suffering, Asmodeus's torturers are doing all the right things to make sure you can. At least if you've been sent in for corrective torture, and not this-is-the-fate-you-should-have-feared-and-now-you-have-earned-it torture.

The Queen's order calls for the corrective sort of torture. It's a good thing that happened before Abrogail became less optimistic about whether Sevar could be salvaged, or more personally annoyed with her.

Carissa Sevar: It lasts a lot longer. At least Carissa thinks so, she never actually asked how long the bag lasted. This had a duration written neatly on the scroll she turned in. And she's pretty sure it's longer, because her voice is much, much hoarser, and her face much stickier with snot and tears, and she gets tired, in a way she doesn't think she has before, random uninjured muscles screaming about having been tense for so long.

It'll be worse in Hell.

She understands her mistakes better. She won't make them again. There isn't another way to get this result; dath ilan tries to do everything with rewards, but that just builds stunted little Good people who'd go to Abaddon rather than not get their fair share of a deal.

Carissa would never, ever go to Abaddon. If you told her this was all that was left to her forever, more of this, she wouldn't go to Abaddon. She is strong where the people of dath ilan are weak; she can live in worlds they can't.

She hopes someone is reading her mind because she requests healing adequate to conceal signs of injury from Keltham but can't seem to make her mouth move right now.

Iarwain: Sevar's still in the middle of important work and the palace torture room has a fairly serious priest on staff, even with the war; and also with the war on, fewer people are being tortured in the palace than usual.

Cure Moderate Wounds. Restoration. Have a nice day.

Carissa Sevar: Right. Keltham. Her Keltham-feelings have been all burned out, which is good, she didn't even remember to focus on that. Maybe love is just the kind of emotion that automatically dies faced with anything real.

She washes her face and fixes her hair and goes back to Keltham.

Keltham: Keltham has no idea that Carissa was in a much better mood half an hour earlier.

He asks how her Security screening went. That took a while.

Carissa Sevar: "It did, they were way more thorough than usual, spent a bunch of time on asking me trick questions under a Truth Spell which I must say is kind of unpleasant, and they made me do everything with the headband off and with it on. - I'm not actually complaining, it feels like all the security Cheliax knows how to throw at a thing like this just barely might be adequate for the actual stakes.

I did get the chance to ask about whether the absolutely-no-messing-with-Keltham-no-matter-how-justified-it-looks order would permit consensually demonstrating to you mind-control spells, and the person who was the direct recipient of Asmodeus's vision thought yes with enough precautions and advance communication, so if that's something you want to see demonstrated, seems to be allowed."

Keltham: "Seems a little scary, the mind-control experiment I mean, but you gotta be able to do slightly scary things that seem clearly necessary, and that one does. Let's move forwards on it... no, first I want your own direct opinion on whether they're going to be able to find someone to run the experiment who is really actually extremely that trustworthy."

Carissa Sevar: "One of the precautions was it'd be Contessa Lrilatha. I think she's that trustworthy anyway but with a direct order from Asmodeus involved there's no question."

Keltham: "That'd do it." Keltham is actually slightly impressed - that was better than he'd visualized being possible to get, himself.

Keltham has met with Isidre again! Many things were discussed of which he can only tell Carissa some right away (so as not to give her impression that the parts he's talking about were all that happened). Isidre does think it's safe to ask Carissa some direct questions of the 'what happens if I do this?' type.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa'd be happy to answer those.

Keltham: Okay! Uh, for a start, Keltham's going to do the thing where some questions matter more than others but he's going to mix them up to not make it too blatant what sort of answers he's looking for. He doesn't know if they have the sort of relationship where Keltham can do that without explicitly announcing it, which is better, obviously, in terms of not biasing the subject. Do they have the sort of relationship where Keltham can do that sort of thing, and it's okay so long as Carissa gets told about the shenanigans within a reasonably short time afterwards?

Carissa Sevar: (He's so - not cute. Contemptible, not cute.)

"Yes, you can do that. I don't even particularly feel wronged if you try to conceal which questions you care about the most and then don't tell me afterwards you were doing that, in Cheliax sometimes people are just doing that and it's considered fair enough."

Keltham: "I mean, in dath ilan, sometimes they don't tell you for years what the experiment was about, but there's explicit understandings there that I didn't want to assume would automatically carry over to Golarion and you."

"Also, I just realized that I went and asked 'is it okay if...' instead of ordering you to tell me the consequences of something, sorry, brain tired from Isidre discussion, I think for tonight I may ask... I think for tonight I'm ordering you to take the questions I ask in dath ilani speech patterns and reinterpret them to be about me ordering you to tell me things, I don't intend on doing that all the time but that was a tiring conversation and it's been a day."

Hypothetical: what happens if Keltham managed to hurt Carissa enough that she yelled 'Stop!' without realizing what she was doing, and then Keltham reacted to that by immediately removing her from her chains even if Carissa apologized and said to continue. Obviously that's not going to break Carissa or anything, Keltham wants to know the hypothetical effects on their relationship, is Carissa turned off, confused, is it generally good or bad for them.

Carissa Sevar: " - not confused, that's the thing I predict you'd do. I think mostly I'd feel...embarrassed...and like it broke something, that I did that, and if we don't address it at all then it'll be a hole I need to steer around in the future?"

True answers are, perhaps predictably, harder to produce when you've burned all your feelings out. She feels like she's producing them by imagining some other Carissa.

Keltham: Hypothetical: Keltham starts requesting Detect Desires and truthspells from his god and using those to find out what Carissa wants and treating a thus-extracted admission of wanting something as a reason to believe that it's fine for him to do whatever it is to her.

Carissa Sevar: - wow. Uh. The second part is definitely excellent, the first part is a little scary, but not in a way where she'd say no even if this were a saying-no sort of relationship.

Keltham: ...yeah, that's not really the answer you'd expect from a dath ilani woman, possibly even one single dath ilani woman alive; but it has already dawned on Keltham that he's not in Default anymore.

Hypothetical: effects on relationship if Keltham had gone ahead and done that without asking Carissa about it at all.

Carissa Sevar: "You'd....get a different way of me relating to you, I think? Where I try to do less steering, because you're doing more of it, and try to give you more of myself to work with..."

Keltham: He needs to dare anything, ever, to ever test the things that are being claimed to him by Carissa's nine-year-old-level self-reporting, if he's going to make this relationship work at all.

Keltham, without any other warning, taps Carissa with one of his Truthspells. "Tell me the effect of what I just did to you on our relationship."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not need that dismissed yet, she thinks loudly. The entire point of not lying to Keltham is to be able to do this.

”I think I’m feeling things a little less intensely now than I usually would because I’m still a bit fried from the last couple hours,” she says. “Uh, obeying Security when they’re being very intense is sort of the same reservoir of something except without the payoff. With that said - yeah, I feel delighted that you did that, that you knew you could do that, and slightly stressed about the truth spell - it’s an enchantment, it feels like one, I know it’s not a very invasive enchantment -“

The illusion on her forehead has not flickered at all.

Keltham: Keltham essays a Detect Magic, for lack of a Greater Detect Magic; the spell on Carissa looks to him like the one he cast.

...um.

Should he just - keep doing this. It seems like cheating. It seems a lot like cheating. It seems like the sort of cheating that means nobody ever wants to cofound a startup with you. Carissa just said she was delighted under the truthspell that he did it. You could establish an awful lot of trust that way, modulo the chance that after they saw his first truthspell they were very thoroughly prepared, or maybe prepared before the first truthspell, etcetera, he didn't request Invisibility Purge today.

The common sense of dath ilan says to, like, think dangerous things through before you do dangerous things, not try to improvise them as you go. Especially when you have two more Truthspells, to use later if needed - shit he should've cast Augury before he tried that, oh well, he'll get used to having magic eventually.

Is there anything he needs to ask right now...

"I'm not going to be upset if the spell fails here, or if you can't give the answer you wished you could," Keltham says. "Are your self-reports to me, about what you're pretty sure won't hurt you, likely to be accurate? Not honest, accurate."

Carissa Sevar: "I really think so! Once we start doing things I haven't done before I will be less sure but then I'll tell you I'm less sure! I know I'm not dath ilani but you can't actually be an arms and armor enchanter while kidding yourself about whether things are going to work out the way you want them to."

Keltham: Keltham exhales, feeling a bit shaky himself. She could just be consistently mistaken on all levels of reflection, of course, but it's something; you'd expect somebody to notice if they were routinely wrong about that sort of thing. He feels like he just - girlfriend gets thoughts access. "I feel like I just stepped off a very narrow ledge I was standing on, but there happened to be something underneath my foot to support it."

"You can step outside and ask Security to dispel that, if you can't dispel it yourself, or resist it, or whatever. I have two more truthspells, should probably keep one in reserve, but you can request the other one later if you think of something you want to say and have me trust." Of course then she gets more time to prepare a deception but he could also just tap her two days later and ask if there was a deception then. Oh, he should check that now. "First, though, answer as soon as this question finishes, do you have any knowledge about the results of my last truthspell having been faked?"

Carissa Sevar: She doesn't know she doesn't know that's always the safe thing to lean on with truth spells not knowing what instance he's referring to not knowing what anyone did - "No?" She's totally uncertain whether that'd have gotten through or not, and if not whether Security managed to cancel it and do an illusion in time, but she'll proceed as if one of those things happened. They should've been ready with the illusion at least from 'answer as soon as this question finishes'. "I don't actually know when the last time you used a truthspell was," she continues. "Did you use one with Isidre, that might have been faked, she's powerful enough to cast that anti-Enchantment spell that your god gave you for the Kuthites and I bet she knows it. Uh, the last truth spell I remember you using was on Tonia the first day and I have no knowledge of that being faked." A definite lie, but if Security couldn't get a replacement in place by then they deserve -

(do they?)

- well regardless they will suffer much worse than what Carissa just did and she won't be sorry.

Keltham: ...okay, that could have been an instance of her quickly telling herself that she didn't know what he really meant by that, and delaying for somebody else to cast dispel, illusion, etc. If so they're presumably prepared for this, but Keltham casts Detect Magic anyways.

lintamande: Looks as he'd expect.

Carissa Sevar: "Are you done?" A good very obedient Carissa without an edge in her voice. "I can dispel it once you're done, but you can keep going, if it's helping. Or if it's not but you want to."

Keltham: "I'm done. You can dispel it yourself or get it dispelled, whatever's more convenient."

He did notice a possibility, but there's nothing obvious to do with the paranoia; most possible paranoia is not valuable on the margins. He'll keep his eyes open to see if there's a pattern.

Also, if that thought he had was true, that implies the honesty of Carissa's earlier statements about her probably-accurate self-reports to him and that she was delighted to see him suddenly use truthspell on her, neither of which match up all that well to it's all a LARP, everything around you is a LARP.

Carissa Sevar: She dispels it. "Are you okay?"

Keltham: "Think so. Just a little sad, not about your answers or anything, just that I can't give you full immediate girlfriend access to everything I thought about them." He's probably not supposed to say the thing that he just thought, in case it was true after all. "Are you okay?"

Carissa Sevar: "I am okay but my day has featured a lot more tricky Truth Spelling than my days usually do and I am slightly less okay than I normally will be if you do that."

Keltham: He should've seen that coming... stupid. Girlfriend, right. "Feel stupid, not because it wasn't worth it, but because I should've seen that part coming. But it was worth it, or at least I'd evaluate so."

"Is this a hugging situation or a 'hugs are not a solution to the problem I have' situation?"

Carissa Sevar: "Hugs're good. Seems worth it - seems important for you to feel like you can trust us - that's why I asked about the Contessa Lrilatha thing even though I saw her briefly in the hallways and apparently Cheliax being at war makes her ten times more terrifying."

Keltham: Hugs! "It's still so weird to think that your military people and your Governance people are the same people, like, failure-of-professional-specialization much?"

"I... wish I didn't have to say this, but I have more tricky sexuality self-report questions to ask you, even though it sounds like this is not at all a great time for that. There's a time-sensitive question I'm considering, of the type 'window of opportunity to do a nice thing' rather than disaster-prevention type. Not so time sensitive we couldn't cuddle for a few minutes before resuming."

Carissa Sevar: "Luckily Security didn't ask me anything at all about my sexuality so I'm not very tired of talking about that. - actually correcting that, they asked if you'd inflicted any injuries requiring healing and they asked if you'd asked me to conceal anything from them under questioning. But mostly they did not ask about my sexuality and I'm not in fact tired of talking about it."

Keltham: Headpats! "Positive reinforcement for noticing you said a false thing and then correcting it."

"Uh, dath ilan thing, you'd do that with" a child "someone practicing the first layer of the Truthspeaking virtue, until the things they said started being mostly true the first time."

Carissa Sevar: Literally everything Carissa just said was a lie orchestrated to convince Keltham she was practicing the first layer of the Truthspeaking virtue so why does she feel pleased about the headpats. Probably because it means she succeeded.

Keltham: Keltham asks more tricky questions about Carissa's sexuality!

Hypothetical: Keltham feels like he owes Tonia a debt for her own Suddenly Truthspell and doesn't have any money to repay it yet. What happens to Carissa and their relationship if with zero warning Tonia is suddenly there inside their cuddleroom and Carissa gets ordered to serve her cuddlewise, with no pleasure for Carissa herself, and then Keltham walks out of the room and leaves her to it?

Carissa Sevar: "That'd be a very reasonable thing for you to do and I'd feel comfortable with it. I don't know if I'd enjoy it, depends on - details and execution - and I'd enjoy it more if you stayed, but I'd still feel comfortable if you didn't."

Keltham: How does it change the relationship impact if Keltham had warned Carissa, asked her about it well in advance, checked to make sure that she was attracted to Tonia before sending her in, and basically asked her for permission to do that in advance of doing it?

Carissa Sevar: "Uh, it loses the thing where it's hot to be - yours, to have you doing as you like with me, to need to be on my feet? And ....I guess it avoids some risk where I passionately hate Tonia and would be miserable. But at the expense of making it kind of - pretend. But I'd try not to be bothered by that because I know you're new at this."

Keltham: More sexuality questions follow! Some of them seem really obviously impossible, like the hypothetical about Keltham telling Carissa that he's figured out exactly how to make the Starstone work and he wants to ascend her as the new god of pleasing Keltham sexually.

Carissa Sevar: " - no. Because you can die for real of that."

Keltham: "I think this should be very obvious, but don't trust what you can verify: Among the things that I'll literally never do is ask you to break an oath. If it sounds like I was asking for that, I wasn't, if I'm still asking for it after you request clarification, knock me unconscious and get me to Security to check for compulsions."

Carissa Sevar: " - noted and also I wouldn't obey you if you did ask that and it was actually you and you weren't under compulsions. That's not - I'm Evil." Shrug. "And I'm a big fan of continuing to exist, so I'm going to do that no matter what."

Keltham: "That's very relieving to hear and I'm not going to explain why unless you ask." Keltham hugs Carissa as hard as he can; she is presumably hard to hurt by doing that, and if not, he's got healing.

Their relationship has ANY LEGIBLE RULES now! And they have COMMON KNOWLEDGE about that!

Carissa Sevar: Hug. " - well now I'm kind of curious."

Keltham: "It wasn't entirely clear that there was any thing such that you would look at it and go, nope, not that thing, that was not part of the deal. This could potentially indicate a state of affairs where you were actually okay with everything, or could, alternatively, indicate a general failure of your ability to detect what you were not okay with. We have now ruled out the second possibility."

Carissa Sevar: Hug. "You don't get my eternal soul and you don't get to destroy it. I'm going to live forever and I feel incredibly strongly about that. I would've specified sooner if you...had any way to do that.... which you do not."

Though the thought now crosses her mind that perhaps she's supposed to sell her soul to Keltham. That's definitely Lawful Evil, sufficient all by itself Lawful Evil, and maybe the sort of thing he could be tempted into, down the line.

Keltham: "This would be a dangerous thing to say to a dath ilani like, four years younger than me? I'm successfully preventing my brain from executing your just-submitted search request for clever ways to destroy eternal souls, but I wouldn't have been able to stop it from running four years ago."

"Anyways! Let's say that I've demonstrated that, no, I actually did figure out the Starstone, you're not the first patient, I already got all the other girls and they're all gods and doing great. But when it's your turn in the line, I then say, actually, Carissa, instead of becoming god of magical weapon creation, I'd personally be happy about it if you became god of pleasing Keltham sexually. You don't have to do it, it's not an order, but I've noticed it would make me very happy, says future Keltham."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not going to make commitments on behalf of god!Carissa, she's going to be much smarter! And also probably not have a sexuality, I don't think that's even how gods work."

Keltham: "You're evaaaading the queeessstion. Least Convenient Possible World, it turns that right before you touch the Starstone you have to say what you're going to be god of. In fact, that is the thing that makes the Starstone work, the previous successful candidates just stumbled into that. And you get to have a sexuality if you're a god of a sexy thing."

Carissa Sevar: "And this isn't, you can become a god, but only if you become a god of what Keltham, who is sponsoring you for godhood, wants -"

Keltham: "Nope! This is like, total victory scenario, we got here after you spent a few years with a mountain of spellsilver, I say that I consider myself to have been incredibly well repaid for everything I've ever done for you, the Starstone is right there and I'm not exerting any control over it, you just say what you want to be god of and then touch it. It just so happens that I would be really happy if you said 'god of sexually pleasing Keltham' instead of whatever you'd have said if I hadn't made that request. Actually what are you god of otherwise? Can't evaluate the question without knowing what you're passing up."

dath ilan: What a normal boyfriend-girlfriend conversation!

Carissa Sevar: "i'm not sure gods actually have - like, mortals say they're the god of something but I don't know that that's actually what gods think they are. I guess I'd be the... Lawful Evil god of self-improvement and study?"

Irori: Irori briefly glances in a certain direction of aspiration, but it doesn't look like a plea directed to Him, and so just as quickly looks on ahead to the next of the many many things potentially benefiting from His attention.

Keltham: "And? Do you pick that, or god of sexually pleasing Keltham?"

Carissa Sevar: WHY IS HE LIKE THIS.

"That."

Keltham: "Wrong answer!"

"Just kidding, it's a fine answer."

(Has Carissa Sevar ever possibly heard the term 'sadist'? It's like the Baseline 'troll', but less so.)

Keltham: Having thus firmly established that sexuality questions don't need to be at all plausible: How would Carissa feel if she was invited into a room and found Keltham negotiating with the Queen of Cheliax, who has a minor crush on Carissa, for him to rent Carissa to the Queen for a half-day in exchange for five hundred gold pieces, which Keltham gets to keep?

Carissa Sevar: Okay, you know what, Carissa needs some fun, it's true that all work and no play is bad for Evil people. "Ah, yes, the Queen of Cheliax, who noticed me from, uh, the word 'Sevar' probably having appeared in her briefing document twice."

Keltham: "I will be genuinely surprised and disappointed with the extent of Governance interest in this project, or, for that matter, their lack of awareness about the project that got them into a war with Nidal, if the Queen of Cheliax does not by this point personally know your Intelligence, your Worldwound record, your learning metrics from wizard academy, and the fact that when we left the Forbiddance together you were wearing an intelligence headband that hadn't gone through military checks."

Carissa Sevar: "Right, okay, that's fair, she probably has an entire page of sexy sexy performance reviews on me. I would be stunned and impressed at your initiative and extremely confused and kneel very obediently for negotiations because if that's the kind of thing the Queen likes she would absolutely be taking notes on whether I was kneeling properly - I'm probably not, the palace has all kinds of rules for things like that."

Keltham: "The Queen is a much more experienced sadist than I am. Feeling insecure about whether she could successfully steal you from me, I insist on negotiating a term in our agreement saying that, if your affections shift too far from me towards her, I'm legally entitled to walk out on any current project obligations and take you with me, whether you like that or not, to a country that's okay with my owning you like I own my shirt. The idea being that in this way Carissa Sevar never thinks in her heart that maybe the Queen has more real power over her than Keltham does."

Carissa Sevar: Keltham deserves to see the face she made privately when he first came up with this plan, even though her feelings are mostly all dead now.

"Not to fight this incredibly hot hypothetical too much but if the Queen wanted to keep me against my will, she knows how, and you don't. It takes some work, with wizards, and even the places that would agree that you - own me like you own your shirt - wouldn't be able to help you find me, if I summoned a horse made out of mist, in the night, and ran away." Is she making it obvious enough that her desired reaction here is not 'well obviously I'd let you go, then'?

Keltham: Keltham entirely fails to take conscious note of this minor shift of ethical premises because he is a dath ilani boyfriend who has been handed a Problem to Solve! "I've still got whatever pay I've accumulated from Governance, and the contract gives me enough time while Security holds you prisoner that I can look up whatever solutions are standard and deploy them on you."

Carissa Sevar: See this is going exactly how Carissa planned except for the thing where Abrogail is furious with her, and if it continues to go exactly as planned Abrogail will work out her frustrations eventually. "I think the standard solution is to make them use all their spells and take their spellbook, which works on the ninety eight percent of wizards who don't have high enough Spellcraft to eventually learn how to scaffold without any special inks for structure. I do not think the standard solution is the one that the Queen of Cheliax would be using, if we are surmising that she read my records."

Keltham: "I mean, the notion isn't that I'm taking the Queen head-on in a contest of wills and powers, the notion is that I cheated and got her signed agreement to lose to me before the contest started. I don't have to hold hypothetical Carissa better than the Queen could, I just have to hold her so she can't get back to the Queen."

"But actually our story doesn't get this far! The Queen of Cheliax mysteriously refuses to sign off on this absolutely and totally reasonable request I am making of her, despite Contessa Lrilatha and all of her other advisors telling her how absolutely and totally reasonable it is. I break off negotiations and inform you that the Queen of Cheliax is a living manifestation of the same phenomenon that sent Pilar to Elysium, a belief further updated when it turns out that Asmodia started being able to see people's thoughts after she came back from Hell, and now we all have no choice but to flee back to our new project home. I tell you that you are firmly forbidden from ever again meeting with the Queen of Cheliax, no matter how hot she is or how much your thoughts turn to all the scary things she could do to you, because everybody has a job to do and I don't want any more plot complications we can possibly delay or avoid. What is your estimate of the effect this entire series of events would have on our relationship?"

Carissa Sevar: " - Asmodia can what now? Uh, being tangentially present for palace romantic drama and being ordered to stay away from the Queen at all costs sounds hot but I feel like honestly in this situation my sexual feelings are mostly taking a back seat to my trying to figure out what the fuck phenomenon is messing with our project and how to kill it."

Keltham: "Correct, Carissa. Very correct."

Some further sexual hypotheticals follow. Keltham then says they've done enough of those, on net he's feeling pretty reassured about some things, and excuses himself momentarily to dispatch a message to Isidre.

Carissa Sevar: His oblivious girlfriend will hang innocently out on his bed.

Keltham: She is very oblivious and innocent! Carissa not having any idea what's she's about to walk into does make Keltham feel rather supervillainish, to the point where he has to fight back his conscience questioning whether Civilization would really, honestly approve of all this.

Carissa has been very very loud about wanting him to try more things in the cuddleroom, wanting him to take more risks, he checked under suddenly truthspell if she really believed he could trust what she was saying, and she did. They have known each other for three whole days now, and it's time to move forward on ambitious third-date activities, like negotiating fallback ownership options on her so that he can safely rent her to the Queen of Cheliax as a romantic surprise. If he can't do even that much, their relationship is hopeless!

Dath ilan spends a great deal of money and energy trying to prevent its overly smart people from getting bored by a life that is far less complicated than the most complicated life their brains could handle.

So far, in Keltham's experience, Golarion is doing legitimately better at this. Credit where it's due.

Keltham: Keltham pounces on his oblivious girlfriend and kisses her; and hurts her as best he can, without using any tools, squicking himself out, or being the Queen of Cheliax.

They are not going to advance all the way to sex, though. Keltham has further work ahead of him this evening; and frankly, he is not sure he can make it through all that, if he is not sufficiently horny to remember why he's trying. He does moderately expect that, if things go well enough, he can get fairly thoroughly laid afterwards.

Carissa Sevar: His oblivious girlfriend is very satisfying to hurt, and very attracted to him, and gives no indication that she is bored of this and wants a more experienced sadist such as the Queen of Cheliax.

(She...doesn't.)

lintamande: There are some sights you see very rarely in Golarion, like a nude beach full of sunbathing drow, or a gnome and a ninja patiently feeding seaweed snacks to a dragon who is presently a hamster but which keeps flash-freezing them when it sneezes, or a mouse the size of a building smashing through to, and then pooping in, the innermost sanctum of the ancient imperial line of Minkai, or a pepper grenade roadside stand doing brisk business in the middle of the great desert, an overwrought and glittery temple of Iomedae, or a paladin on a shoplifting spree.

You do see them a bit more in Golarion than in other places, though.

Aspexia Rugatonn: There are some sights you see very rarely in Golarion, and one of those sights is the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus clutching a sheaf of parchments and laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes and she's having to physically lean against the wall and is probably going to hit herself with Lesser Restoration when this is over to make up for how much she isn't breathing and all of these paroxysms are making her stomach physically hurt but none of this matters because Aspexia Rugatonn has now reached the part where Keltham is completely innocently explaining to the Queen of Cheliax that if she doesn't act like a fucking sane person for once in her entire life she will be either unceremoniously removed from the throne or forced to become his girlfriend.

That... might not be such a bad idea actually? Though not in that sense, of course.

It's just that Keltham - for all his headstrongness, his errors, his delusions, his total spoilation and lack of discipline bestowed by his Lawful Good society's insanely permissive upbringing - still in other ways radiates a powerful impression that... well. That he could not only understand Aspexia's notion of 'corrigibility' after three minutes of explanation, but would possibly even invent it all himself the moment he understood what Asmodeus's own problems were like as seen from His perspective.

They have no idea what dath ilani halfbloods will be like, at this point. But depending on how they turn out, if they can keep half of all that Law and be raised also Evil, it's plausible that the Church of Asmodeus would really, really, and by 'Church of Asmodeus' Aspexia Rugatonn here means 'Aspexia Rugatonn', really, really, really want somebody on the throne of Cheliax who could understand the concept of 'corrigibility'.

Abrogail Thrune II's compact with Asmodeus says that, while she can bear any number of potential heirs to men of her own choosing, the Church may twice ask of her a father of the Church's own choosing. As for who inherits, that is something that only a compact with Asmodeus can decide.

The Church hasn't asked that of Abrogail, so far, because there's been no candidate that would be worth the amount of fuss they'd get. Abrogail's compact says that she needs to do it, but the incompetent devil who framed that compact unfortunately did not specify that Abrogail needed to act professional about receiving such a request. Rather a massive oversight, as it turned out, among many others. So far Abrogail has borne no children at all; but this is not a national problem, there are other Thrunes who could compact with Asmodeus.

Aspexia Rugatonn will have to seriously consider whether she wants to actually do this, or just threaten to do it in order to witness the look on Abrogail's face. Those are the only two options, to be clear, there is no third.

But first she's going to finish reading.

Keltham: Keltham receives notice that he has an Important Meeting in 10 minutes! He thanks the messenger, closes the door, checks his new pocketwatch to establish the time, and goes back to being mean to Carissa for the next 8 minutes.

Iarwain: (This, to be clear, is less notice than you usually give a Chelish citizen for a royal audience, they will probably want to get dressed or write out a testament or some such. But Abrogail Thrune does have any grasp of what Keltham hasn't the tiniest inkling about, and she does not particularly want to spend any additional time receiving him on an impressive throne. As in, not one single additional minute.)

Keltham: Bye, Carissa, sorry for all this going-back-and-forth but this is hopefully Keltham's last meeting-set of the day! He'll probably be like at least thirty minutes; this would be a good time for Carissa to spend some time decompressing from the whole Security thing and getting in some alone time for herself. Though, to be clear, that's not a command, it's just an idea.

Carissa Sevar: The idea will be taken into account!

(Carissa could in fact use some time to herself, but does Abrogail want her for this?)

Iarwain: There's no Security showing up to escort her anywhere in particular.

Carissa Sevar: Cool. Then she's going to snuggle under Keltham's covers and

- if you'd told her two days ago that by the end of the third day she'd have Keltham demanding of Cheliax the legal right to take Carissa with him against her will anywhere he pleases, and reluctant to leave Cheliax because of being hunted by Kuthites, while Cheliax conquered Nidal using diamonds Otolmens gave their project, she'd be delighted.

She isn't, but that's because the torture seems to have burned out more feelings than just the inconvenient one. She wonders if Contessa Lrilatha ever has any feelings at all.

Abrogail Thrune II: Within the center of Egorian's Imperial Palace is a tiny park, lit by magically artificial sunlight, with a brook of clear water that flows from nowhere to nowhere. It doesn't see much use; Cheliax doesn't often receive visitors so naive as to be moved even subconsciously by the implication that this is where some Thrune likes to spend their spare time.

Abrogail Thrune II, now in her true outer form, is wearing royal robes much simpler than those she usually wears, and sitting in a simpler chair than the Throne of Cheliax. She's flicking breadcrumbs to the fish that spend their whole lives confined to this artificial brook.

As much as Abrogail is annoyed by other aspects of the affair, including the manner in which she was the author of her own destruction, she's never going to get a chance to do this again in her entire life and have somebody actually buy it. So, yes, she's feeding breadcrumbs to the fish.

Keltham: Keltham, having left his escort behind a few steps ago, steps into the tiny park and gives an approving nod; like much of the Imperial Palace, this place seems acceptably pretty for a civilized society.

The Queen of Cheliax... is superstimulus-level hot the same way as Contessa Lrilatha, but much more dangerously so on account of looking human. Keltham is glad that he knows that magical beauty treatments exist (is that why the plot point of Carissa getting one?) because otherwise his ero-route trope alarms would be blaring even louder. It makes perfect sense that the Queen of Cheliax is absurdly hot, of course she is, she'd be able to afford it in a society with the economicmagic for that; it's not at all inevitably the case that she's going to try to steal Carissa, or that one way or another the two of them will end up fucking no matter how contrived the reason, no, not at all.

She also looks tired. Exhausted, even.

"Sorry about this," Keltham says apologetically, as he comes over to sit in the chair left next to the Queen's own chair, which is exactly as fancy as hers. "I realize you're probably pretty busy. Exhausted even."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Don't be too sorry. This is less stressful than what I was doing before I came here." So gently says the tired Queen of Cheliax, Abrogail, who, while not dangerously Good like Isidre, also has overly large problems and a headband too much more powerful than anyone else's. "So you're the boy who's caused all this trouble, hm?"

Keltham: "Can't quite tell if that was a joke across the cultural gap. If not, there's a difference between setting off trouble and intending to create it. Though the same proverb also says that making people any less responsible, than responsible for all the effects of all their actions, can create dangerous loopholes in things - but, I think for a case like this one, some of that distinction matters."

Abrogail Thrune II: "It was a joke. Mostly. There may have been an edge to it, now that I think about it. When war begins, there is a certain urge to look around and find somebody near to hand to blame."

Keltham: "If Dou-Bral originally cooperated to seal Rovagug, Zon-Kuthon probably was pretty close to being dissatisfied enough with the state of the world that he'd prefer to destroy it. Anything that brought hope into this world, anything at all, would have set him off."

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail smiles with real humor. (At least it's going to look like real humor to Keltham unless he has suddenly acquired rather an extreme number of ranks in Perception or Sense Motive.)

"I admire your ability to describe yourself as that which brings hope into the world. Most boys your age would probably be a little embarrassed to talk about themselves that way."

Keltham: Keltham is confused by this. "I would've put more maybes and qualifiers around it, and called it more of a personal belief state than a public one, before Zon-Kuthon went straight for me and had to be sealed away by the other gods. You've enough evidence now to know that the advertisement is certified accurate."

Abrogail Thrune II: A sigh, but still a humorous one. "I was teasing, or trying to. I suppose it didn't make it across the - what did you call it - cultural gap."

Keltham: Keltham associates that kind of apparent-mating-value-lowering 'teasing' with Complicated Flirting where you're maneuvering for relative advantage if you actually end up in a relationship. Keltham was really hoping that was not going on here.

Time for a quick change of subject. "Don't suppose you've got your own plans for a meeting agenda?" He'd usually whiteboard it, but the park has nothing to write on, let alone writing materials.

dath ilan: By Keltham's thoughts, he truly doesn't have the concept of the thing that a royal monarch is, in the true Golarion. If he had his writing-surfaces about him, he'd blithely write out his agenda.

If one of those agenda items was causing the downfall of another god, he'd treat it no differently than any other. Gods, to Keltham, are things to be coordinated-with; and if they don't coordinate, they have to be put down, first temporarily by other gods, and then permanently by the eventual Civilization that Zon-Kuthon feared and that Keltham sees an opportunity to build.

He's stranger, and maybe a tiny bit scarier, when he thinks about matters on a larger scale than his woman Carissa. Finding himself in a world with gods is no different to him from finding himself in a world with fish; they are both just ordinary real things to him once he knows they exist.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail can see, or maybe not see, but she can imagine, why Otolmens might be concerned.

"I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't at least ask what you intend to bring into Cheliax and Golarion next, though that discussion may need to be cut short if we are to discuss everything on our agenda."

She would, in fact, be remiss; this is something she wants to read Keltham's mind about.

Keltham: For some reason it hadn't occurred to Keltham that he ought to polish his elevator pitch before talking to this venture capitalist! Oh, silly him, that's probably what the 10 minutes were for.

Not much worries, though; Keltham has substantially higher verbal facility than you'd expect from a random Golarion bloke with Intelligence 18, just like he has higher Wisdom than you'd expect of a random boy his age with Intelligence 18.

Keltham will spend the next five minutes extemporizing an elevator pitch on Civilization, the nice things that it has, and how while there's lots of specific nice things, the much more important thing is going into an attractor made out of harmonizing bits of Law that lets you start figuring out those things yourself. Now and then, though, Keltham quite visibly (to either Abrogail) hesitates to mention some unknown thing, and then says something else instead.

Abrogail Thrune II: From reading Keltham's mind, Abrogail now knows, in admittedly not much detail at all, that greater-fire and other scalable weapons are a thing; and there's some sort of stuff called '~~~~-~~~~~~' that Keltham worries he should just never mention to anyone in case Prestidigitation can flip ordinary materials into it. Except it is the sort of thing you figure out inevitably given enough knowledge, so if there's any spell below Wish that does it, maybe physics past the ~~~~~~ level is much more infohazardous in Golarion. Still, Keltham's thoughts are totally confident in the ability of a grownup and Lawful Civilization to handle that sort of thing; his Civilization didn't blink about putting the entire past under a screen when they encountered some unknown thing that really needed to be screened off.

She's obviously not going to talk about this with anyone; not even Rugatonn or Lrilatha or Gorthoklek, except in the most abstract terms. She doesn't want all the diamonds in Cheliax teleported to Lastwall.

Abrogail Thrune II: Is Asmodeus... sure that He knows what He's doing?

Abrogail Thrune II: But then Abrogail would run a pretty high risk of destroying all of Golarion, let alone just Cheliax, before she risked not letting her senior partner have His own fun, and so betraying Him in the depths of her own heart. So until she gets different orders, she's going to stick with these. Worst case, the world gets destroyed and needs to be rebuilt by the gods; it's not like you can destroy Hell that way, she doesn't think.

"And what would you of us in return, then? Non-binding negotiations."

Keltham: Keltham explained the Law of this to his class yesterday, before Zon-Kuthon attacked - sorry, Keltham didn't mean to suggest there was a causal connection to that Law in particular being told. Keltham considers the starting point for negotiations given that Law to be pretty straightforward. He does want it clear that this is not his opening offer in a Golarion-style illegible negotiation meant to be bargained down; but if she's read the full class transcript with that incredibly fancy headband, the Queen will know all about that.

Keltham's private thoughts? Exactly the same as what he says aloud; there is no dishonesty in him, no dishonesty at all, when it comes to trade. That's not because he's nice, but because he knows what fairness is and will not lightly brook any departure from it, whether by himself or any other. In that sense, if in very few others, this young man could pass as an ordinary cleric of Abadar.

Abrogail Thrune II: "I think this may have already been mentioned to you, but Cheliax is - not easily set up to measure great gains in productivity, and tax away half of it to you."

It's admirably Evil and would probably count in Pharasma's sight too; though it's pretty obvious Keltham doesn't realize that the wealth he takes away would starve some number of orphans that would otherwise have lived had those taxes been less. Maybe even if he knew, he'd shrug and say that it was still fewer total orphans than would've starved if Keltham had never come to Cheliax; it's not Abrogail's read on him, though.

Keltham: "Thing needs to get done one way or another, but if somebody's got to lose, I see no particular reason it needs to be me, or rather, why I need to lose more than my Lawful and fair share. If Governance has problems with basic capacities, show those to me and I might agree in the end that it's not possible to do better in Golarion and some deal needs to happen anyways. But at that point, with truly huge quantities of wealth at stake, yeah, if it's not the straightforward division of gains under Law, I might start throwing around truthspells, the fairness spell, and cap it off with a single oath that nobody messed with those spells."

"I need to cut a deal with somebody, yeah, but somebody also needs to cut a deal with me. You would ordinarily expect that if there was just the one of me, and several possible countries to deal with, that the person in shorter supply of themselves would have the upper hand in negotiations. Cheliax looks to be the best of them, at the moment, but it does need to keep looking like that."

Abrogail Thrune II: "What would you do with such vast wealth, if it were yours?"

Keltham: Invest it, obviously. What else would you do with more wealth than you can sanely spend on personal living expenses? If Mad Investor Chaos didn't suspect that he was going to need to run all over Cheliax and Golarion frantically investing in 200 different projects to build pieces of Civilization, he would be asking a smaller share of the gains.

Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham's thoughts show sincerity (of course, he's a cleric of Abadar negotiating a trade deal with somebody who hasn't visibly betrayed him yet) and some not especially Golarion-comprehensible thoughts about logarithmic utility-functions if you're spending money on yourself. Abrogail does know what a logarithm is, but the connection in Keltham's thoughts is not clear.

"If you were willing to take some of your share of the gains in a public investment fund that stayed in Cheliax, it would potentially simplify some political problems for us." And also probably be the sort of thing that's much easier to contractually yoink, if Keltham tries to leave.

Abrogail does have some thoughts about how Keltham's gains, if he tries to leave, could be made payable to him 'in the standard backing of value for Chelish currency'. The trouble is, that gets caught by that incredibly audacious clause he innocently dared to offer Lrilatha about avoiding terms expected to have unexpected unpleasant consequences. If Keltham's departure leaves behind most of his gains in the form of a Cheliax-only investment fund, if they can get away with including that clear and understood term, it might save Cheliax quite a lot of loss.

Keltham: "I suppose I'm open to so encumbering some of the gains with spending restrictions, if that's really helpful for some reason, but in general, I expect the next stage is making lots of investments outside Cheliax; and also I currently trust my ability to pick investments more than... no, that's not quite right. Chelish Governance can already be expected to run around making the investments in Cheliax obvious to Chelish Governance. I am concerned about reserving the power to run around patching the holes and fixing what's left, and I do want that power as unencumbered as possible."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Mm," Abrogail says softly. She tosses some more breadcrumbs to the fish. "I think you will be - sadly surprised in some of the ways you have been sadly surprised before - at what strange things are more or less politically feasible in Golarion. It is full of encumbrances, both on money and on other things. What you think is reasonable, what is in fact reasonable under Law, may not be something that even the Queen of Cheliax could give if she tried her hardest. I say this not to pressure you in negotiations; it is just - a world you do not seem to quite, yet, understand."

Keltham: "Understood. The problem being, it would be good to cut a deal soon and get started on some things, and to wait for me to understand more things, comes with that as a delay."

"You could try showing me what you thought was a totally sane and reasonable deal for somebody who actually understood Golarion and see how loudly I screamed. Maybe I wouldn't scream very loudly at all, and then we'd have a deal."

Abrogail Thrune II: Heh. What a friendly cleric of Abadar this is. "Perhaps we shall try that, then."

It can always be said not to have come from Lrilatha, and if Keltham tries to add a no-gotchas clause, he can be told that this does require Lrilatha to rewrite the whole thing.

"I think we should perhaps move on to our other, how did you put it - agenda item."

Keltham: "I have been getting to know you some, by these interactions; they weren't wasted even from the thirstiest, most money-uncaring standpoint."

Abrogail Thrune II: He really has no concept that corresponds to what a Queen is. "I am given to understand that Isidre has - meddled, I think, would be the term I'd use here. Contrary to what some of my advisors seem to think, I never had any intention of taking Carissa Sevar away from you. It would have been really quite incredibly stupid."

Keltham: Keltham is somewhat reassured. Somewhat. "I am a little worried that you would have ended up doing it quite by accident. For the same reason that - Pilar went to Elysium, and Ione foretells Nidal attacks. Well, the same reason according to one particular try by me at interpreting and predicting events, which could very easily be absolutely and entirely wrong, but has been making a couple of successful predictions lately. The same prediction would say that we would somehow end up fighting over Carissa no matter how much that made absolutely no sense in the middle of a war. It is rather a weird and complicated reason to try to explain."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Yes, 'tropes', Isidre told me little of them and less sense than that. I think I do not want any 'tropes' anywhere near Cheliax. That is most of what I desire for myself, in this. No 'tropes'. 'Tropes' be gone. Not for the good of Cheliax, even, so much as that I don't want to live my life like that."

Keltham: "All right, maybe Isidre didn't oversell how totally sensible of a person you were," Keltham says out loud like this is a completely normal and sane thing to say to the Queen of Cheliax.

Abrogail Thrune II: 'Abrogail', of course, is only gently amused; she knows the Outsider is ignorant. "Let us all pray to Asmodeus that it is so and continues to be so."

Keltham: "I can't guarantee that anything we can do here can keep the 'tropes' out of Cheliax. Assuming they exist, like, literally at all. Taking steps to defuse every hint of future possible conflict, complication, and open questions about Carissa Sevar between us, may heavily act to minimize whether any 'tropes' are going to start hanging around you personally and not just Pilar or Ione or Carissa or myself. Assuming, again, that 'tropes' are even a thing."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I hadn't previously thought us especially likely to get into a conflict over Carissa Sevar in the first place; but yes, if there's a threat to myself here, I am interested in minimizing it." 'Abrogail' is not that Good and is allowed to say such things.

Keltham: "It's possible I shouldn't poke at this, but - you don't think the simplest solution is just to find somebody else?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "I think you overestimate how often I find someone I am actually interested in, at all," Abrogail says softly. A butterfly lands on her hand, where it rests on her chair's arm, and she lowers her head and gently blows to shoo it away. "Maybe Carissa Sevar would be as common as iron in dath ilan; here she is gold. You picked her up too easily to appreciate what you now hold in your hands, I think."

"I'd still walk entirely away from Carissa Sevar if that was the cost of a 'trope'-free life. I am just worried that - walking away is not the correct way to prove that a 'trope' can have no existence? A compact between us ensuring that I cannot possibly end up with Sevar under any circumstances, and my then having my fun with her and putting it behind me, seems possibly wiser. Possibly. You would probably know better than I."

Keltham: "That question has occurred to me as well, several times. I hope I don't end up regretting it a lot, when I say that I really have absolutely no clue which of those two courses of action is the better one, and we might as well take the one that's more fun, if we are otherwise determined to both be as extremely sensible as we can about it all."

Abrogail Thrune II: 'Abrogail' laughs; somewhat to her surprise, it's her real self's laugh as well. Yes, that is the reason behind the decision, isn't it? Abrogail can offer no better logic of her own.

"Then. Shall we set our terms over Carissa Sevar?"

Keltham: "I'm not quite sure about any of this, but I think we're supposed to do that in front of Carissa, possibly even if we're not fighting it out. It may not be a matter of winning if we're not fighting, but it's the process that decides who controls her, and that open question in her mind should be resolved to close out the" reaction-binding-site "target shape that a 'trope' might hook itself into, at least if Carissa can act as a" viewpoint-character "thing that a 'trope' thinks has questions."

"Also that would be more romantic, according to intuitions I now apparently have."

"Also also I need Isidre to write some of the terms and then not look at them myself."

Also also also there is a chance that something goes weirdly wrong during the negotiation, and then while they are all probably doomed, they may still be less doomed if Isidre and Lrilatha are right there.

(Also also also also if Carissa suddenly realizes she's terribly wrong about what she finds hot, she should maybe be, like, someplace she can say that before it's too late; but this cannot and need not be thought, because it exceeds the maximum 'also' stack depth, plus it's too obvious.)

Abrogail Thrune II: Any sane person would, at this point, suggest that the real bargaining happen between themselves, and that they just play it out again for Carissa once the outcome has been predetermined and they know their parts in the play, but that, Abrogail suspects (or 'Abrogail', for that matter) is far too terribly dishonest for a dath ilani.

...good luck, Sevar, thinks Abrogail, but then Sevar's had enough unexpected luck already that Asmodeus's hand there is clear.

"Mm. That does present a... let us not say complication. Doing this in front of Carissa, instead of simply presenting her with a sealed agreement between us, presents us with a matter of something that you gain and something that I lose. What you gain is her affection; what I lose is something that I worry a dath ilani may not understand. It has to do with Asmodeus's domain of pride, which, being something that belongs to a god, is not intrinsically defined in mortal terms; but in mortal terms... maybe I could say that I have a reputation for winning, and that you want me to do something that could be seen as losing. Not in private between ourselves, but where others, like Carissa, or for that matter Isidre, can see it."

Keltham: "I suspect translation difficulties around the word. Is it like - the pleasure that you get from being a better player of your favorite game than most people around you, visibly and in a way you can prove to them?"

Abrogail Thrune II: If pity was something that Abrogail Thrune went about feeling, she knows she would be feeling it now. 'Abrogail' feels it, therefore. "That is something like what I might expect to remain in a society that had gone much much much too far in the direction of Good, after they'd taken something deep and real in human nature and flattened it down into a small sad remnant they deemed acceptable."

Keltham: "Right, well, is it something like killing all the players of the game who are better than you so that you can be the best one left alive."

Keltham supposes this is a thing you can trade a sufficiently large heap of dead bodies for, exact size of heap depending on initial talent and practice. Though to Keltham himself, it seems like this is completely missing the point of what dath ilan and yes he thinks is the meaning of pride in playing a game well and visibly better than others. It proves you're adequate at the murder game, but the other gameplayers weren't even trying to compete with you in that.

Abrogail Thrune II: "That is what I would expect an overly Good society to tell its children was what happened if they let themselves feel any real pride." And they wouldn't be wrong, per se, but still, there's more to it than that.

Keltham: "It is sometimes hard to explain things like this to me, though I want to understand them all eventually, and your time is valuable; I don't know if we want to go down that conversational..." subtree they have no word for subtree how the ass do you convey 'subtree' in Taldane. "Thing you can go down. What are the consequences?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "We do this in a manner that looks less like you winning and my losing, that looks less like things are taken from me and you are taking them by being greater and mightier in your own person than the Queen of Cheliax. To the extent we cannot do that, or you do not wish to, you offer me something I value in return. I am more open than many rulers would be to the latter course," because most of the real pride-trampling has already occurred, at this point, and she may as well get paid for it.

Not that Keltham has very much he can trade that could possibly be worth as much as Abrogail Thrune has already lost of her pride to this stripling. If he ever stops being valuable to Cheliax and Asmodeus withdraws His protection, she has more than a curious interest, now, in seeing what happens to dath ilani as they are slowly broken.

Keltham: "If Carissa was something that had a normal price I would offer you ten percent discount on her, but I don't know if that still works for sex things that aren't really about the money."

Abrogail Thrune II:

Abrogail Thrune II: Where does she start.

Abrogail Thrune II: "It... doesn't work for sex things, no, and your suggestion sounded incredibly strange for Golarion. You should, at some point, tell Sevar about what you said there, and have her explain things to you." So Abrogail can read the transcripts of Carissa's thoughts when she hears.

"Among other things, did I not know you for something that is from further beyond our world than ordinary outsiders, it would be - something you should not say, to suggest that any part of the Queen's pride is worth only that much money."

Keltham: "Carissa herself, being rented, is worth something to you; if this were a real price in money, that amount would be either set to balance supply and demand, or else her real value to you would be somewhere around twice what you were paying me, assuming that renting her cost me nothing significant. If you lose something in pride that is nonetheless less important to you than what you gain by having Carissa, it decreases your total gains from the trade. Which doesn't matter if it's a supply and demand balance, I'd just sell to somebody else. But if it's a non-market fair-division problem, then losing something in the course of gaining Carissa's rental decreases the fair price to you of her rental, hence the discount."

"The Law is straightforward if it's actually about the money, I don't know what we're supposed to do if it's a sex thing. Do you have a suggestion in mind?"

Abrogail Thrune II: "In truth I am not clear on what I could ask from you, at this point, which would be appropriate. Most of the things that are wanted from you are things that Cheliax wants, not that I want, and it is I and not Cheliax who loses here. You could agree that you owed me a future favor appropriate to the real cost to me of my lost pride in this matter; it requires some trust from me to you, that you will repay, but no more trust than you are already being given in some ways."

(Say the key words as if they mean nothing, make sure to add some more distracting words later, hope he is that naive and does not know to be wary of Asmodeans bearing bargains...)

Keltham: "Lady, I mean, you sort of are the person who gets to rent Carissa in the first place, here? And the sexy-price that was suggested to me by Isidre did not strike me as being in the range of what that is actually worth to you - the value you gain from it - given that it's worth this much of your time at all, and given what I expect your finances are like."

"I am doing this because it will, supposedly, I hope, be good for Carissa, because I think it will impress my girlfriend, and because I want fewer 'tropes' messing with me. And since that's an adequate reason for me to do it, and this is all a sex thing in the first place, and we are all hopefully friends here, and also probably really because I am still thinking of this as somebody else having sex with Carissa only it has to be done in a way that makes my brain shut up about it -"

"For all of those reasons, I haven't asked you for anything like what the Queen of Cheliax can afford to pay for anything that's worth her time at all, or asked you to explicitly owe me a favor afterwards."

"...uh, I hope we're not starting to have a real conflict here, where we're contesting negotiating abilities or something. If we're starting to have a real conflict that calls into question who gets to have Carissa, or whether this agreement takes place at all, then it should happen in front of Carissa for 'trope' reasons." And Lrilatha and Isidre should be there.

Abrogail Thrune II: "...one addresses the Queen of Cheliax as 'Your Majesty', not 'Lady', to be clear." Even 'Abrogail' says this, albeit she does not say it as sharply as Abrogail Thrune would wave someone off to torture-execution.

It would figure that, in Abadar's World, they are not as naive about bargaining as about some things. But he still, Abrogail hopes, does not realize the game he is really playing, or how deadly it can be to him in an Asmodean country.

"I hadn't hoped that would be an irreconcilable point of conflict, no," says Abrogail. She shrugs. "Your point is a very fair one, and I should have seen it myself; my apologies for that. I suppose it could be something like - I agree to owe you a favor proportional to how much I really gain from sex with Sevar, and you owe me a favor proportional to the real cost to me in lost pride of how you got to look impressive in front of Sevar while negotiating that."

Keltham: "It's considered ill practice where I come from to take on debts with no legible caps on their objective magnitude, unless you're creating a child in which case you don't have a choice and somebody's got to do that sometimes. I suppose that since the real cost and real value are being assessed by reference to your own values, you could feel safe with that? Though for edge-case coverage reasons I'd want the explicit understanding that the favor you owe me is greater than the favor I owe you, say by a factor of at least two, that they are positive in sign, and that the two can potentially be partially cancelled against each other."

Abrogail Thrune II: ...is she not going to win this one? It seems so.

Did she doom herself to 'trope'hood by that not happening in front of Sevar? She doesn't think so; that was a duel between herself and Keltham and not one that was really over possession of Carissa at all.

Well. Perhaps Sevar's thought was correct, perhaps everyone but her underestimates Keltham; he is doing better than she expected, even now. But at least to Abrogail, it seems like Keltham does flirt very close to the edges of losing his games and damning himself in one sense or another. He just needs to be encouraged to go on playing them.

The Queen sighs. "I suppose we could have it be - the kind of favors owed that are understood not to be enforceable even in the eyes of Asmodeus? I am a little friendlier to you for borrowing Sevar, you are a little friendlier to me for making you look good in front of her."

"Maybe what I really want is the acknowledgement that my pride has any value at all, in this. Especially since, as an outsider from a world lost completely to Good, you may not see or realize or understand the Evil thing that you are trampling on and perhaps also trample on it excessively."

Keltham: "That is very much something I would prefer not to do. I acknowledge explicitly, your pride is valuable; even the shadow dath ilan still has would be valuable, if maybe less so. Let no value be destroyed that need not be destroyed."

He'd add that Civilization is not that lost to Good, like seriously lady your majesty; but who knows, maybe from her perspective it is that lost, just like Golarion from his perspective lacks almost any trace of Law.

"Is there anything helpful that can be told to the outsider to prevent his unintended rampage of value-destruction?"

Abrogail Thrune II: It is far far far too late, unfortunately. 'Abrogail' will nonetheless try to explain the concept of how to treat royalty deferentially; and that the meeting she's currently having is in fact one where if she was having it with a Chelish citizen it would be 'incognito', meaning that she is pretending not to be the Queen, still Abrogail Thrune but not the Queen; meaning that Keltham is allowed to sit in her presence instead of stand, and she does not need a much fancier chair to protect the dignity of Cheliax.

(They do it in Taldor.)

Keltham: ...is she trolling him.

Abrogail Thrune II: She isn't! She shouldn't even try to explain all of this on the Queen's expensive time; after this, Keltham can get an emergency one-hour lesson in how to interact with a non-incognito Queen without that being an Incident if it happens in front of her advisors. He can think of things he might need to say, and memorize how to say them in the more formal interaction, and hopefully enough of that will let him improvise around the edges if necessary. Even then, if he suddenly hears Isidre's voice magically whispering in his ear, he needs to immediately pause whatever he's doing and listen and not argue.

(This will give Carissa Sevar slightly more time to recover; since, it has by now been reported to Abrogail, the cute little idiot went and submitted herself to her any-time-in-three-days torture session right away, without making sure it happened sometime when she'd have an hour or two to herself to recover afterward. Was Sevar that stupid, that overconfident of her recovery ability, or had she just never previously gotten herself in important-project-screwup, mentally-insubordinate-to-the-Queen levels of trouble? Probably all three.

It is infuriating that the child has gotten herself into a vital position where she needs to be accommodated for incompetence like that, rather than it being turned into a more object lesson. But they're planning to try out Lrilatha running Suggestion on Keltham; and while that is expected to go well, Sevar needs to be in better form to exploit whatever change Keltham has then in his thoughts.)

Keltham: Keltham is disturbed by the implication that the Queen has any advisors who don't understand the reason why a sane person would just ignore all this hugely time-costly crap.

Abrogail Thrune II: ...it's a not-as-Lawful-as-dath-ilan thing. You wouldn't understand.

Keltham: Does the Queen think this whole shenanigan is generating enough value that it's worth spending an hour of Keltham's valuable time, on trying to load, and shortly-afterwards forget, all this shit? Or is this knowledge in some other way reusable and persistently valuable?

Abrogail Thrune II: ...to be honest, Abrogail does suspect that learning some completely pointless Golarion shit will be an important life experience for Keltham.

Keltham: If that sentence needed to be prefaced with 'to be honest', does that mean all the previous sentences not so prefaced were possibly not honest.

Abrogail Thrune II:
It's an expression meaning, to reveal one's thoughts rather than concealing them, or to reveal the whole thought rather than concealing some of it you might otherwise be tempted to conceal. This was the meaning Abrogail had in mind.

Or yes, in Golarion, to tell the truth where one might otherwise lie. In many of the common scenarios where of course the other person would expect you to lie but maybe not if you said 'to be honest' in a serious-sounding voice first.

Keltham: That really doesn't make any -

Abrogail Thrune II: You need to talk about this with Sevar, Keltham, not me.

Keltham: Yes. Sorry.

Abrogail Thrune II: Is Keltham ready for his etiquette lesson?

(Abrogail Thrune is enjoying how much his thoughts are dreading this. It's not much at all, but at least she gets to torture him a little.)

Keltham: Are they done here? - Keltham asks himself. He didn't - get a chance to talk about, well, what's actually going to happen to Carissa. Which Keltham apparently needs to treat as an infohazard for probably like at least a month or something.

Unfortunately Keltham came into this conversation with a clear goal, namely, get his brain into a position to decide whether it was comfortable renting Carissa to the Queen, but with no real idea of how to accomplish that goal.

...internal interrogation suggests that, on the one hand, their overt interactions have not been very - sexy, doesn't really create any relationship where Keltham rents Carissa to her... oh. In retrospect, maybe that's what the Complicated Flirting was about; it was just that Keltham was much more worried when that happened, about the Queen possibly trying to open her eroLARP route at him, so he shut it down. He was probably not supposed to do that.

Still, that the Queen flirted (hopefully just pseudo-flirted) at him, at all, is an acknowledgement of Keltham as a sexual-romantic-relationship-having-thing, and that is... possibly enough for whatever weird thing is inside him, Keltham does not understand the rules at all. Well, it's enough provided that the Queen is in fact incredibly hot, which she is.

But maybe add safety margin? Why do something your brain just barely approves of, when you could do not that.

"I think the dath ilani thing to do in this situation, if it could manage to come up in dath ilan, is that we both tell each other a mildly embarrassing naughty story from our early sexual experiences, in a way meant to acknowledge that the other person's story is sexy and funny, and then we have a relationship that is not just about project management or 'trope' avoidance and my brain is more confident that I can rent Carissa to you."

Abrogail Thrune II:
Yes, fine, Abrogail Thrune just wants to be done with this and send Keltham off to his torture session. Even 'Abrogail' wants to be done with this, though she's not showing it, of course.

'Abrogail' tells a somewhat funny, mildly sexy story that could plausibly have happened to a teenage royal in Taldor before she took over the country.

Keltham: Keltham will not ask a number of large-looming questions.

Keltham will tell her about that time when he and his carefully spoiler-protected fellows were just figuring things out, and Keltham got to be the one who figured out that, if a certain girl 'wasn't sure' she'd ever had an orgasm, that almost certainly meant she'd never had one. She then grimly resolved to keep up with her age cohort and get it done within the next hour, not even as a trading-pleasures thing, just get it done; and Keltham got very determined about helping her with this clearly established Goal; and those mental postures, as they would realize at a future point in their lives, were not the most helpful possible mental postures they could have taken.

Abrogail Thrune II:
Dath ilan definitely is a place.

The Queen's chuckles and smiles will read to almost anyone in Golarion as genuine, if they're stupid enough to trust whatever reading skills they're opposing to the Queen of Cheliax.

Keltham: Did that help? Keltham isn't sure. The Queen seems too old, too Very Serious; if he shuts his eyes, his brain doesn't really understand what she would do with Carissa. If he opens his eyes again and thinks about how the Queen is incredibly hot... frankly that seems to be doing practically all the work here, combined with the earlier flirting.

But he tried the obvious thing and their time is not infinite; his brain is hesitant about the rental but not saying no; and it's time to proceed... with... the plan.

Keltham:

Keltham: Okay, you know what, he's just going to do this, it can't be that bad, it's just an hour of hearing about absolutely insane nonsense whose very existence is somehow opposed to his own fundamental nature in every way but without that being legible enough to explicitly fight back against, and if he can do that for a minute he can do it for an hour.

Keltham departs for etiquette lessons.

Abrogail Thrune II: ...that was strangely satisfying, in the way of finally having somebody fall into your power whom it had previously been unreasonably difficult to torture. Is it trivial? Absolutely. But he doesn't know that, he has absolutely no clue, and somehow that makes it work.

Maybe she can find future excuses why Keltham definitely needs even more etiquette lessons. He'd need them in Taldor.

Maybe she can figure out what Keltham most hates about etiquette and design 'improved' etiquette she does in fact have a country to run, and needs to get back to running it literally now.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does, before she closes her eyes while lying in Keltham's bed, contemplate whether it'd be a disaster if she falls asleep. A normal person would, in fact, either be annoyed or feel inclined to pretend to be, if they came back to their fancy fancy room to find their girlfriend/slave asleep in their bed, but Keltham is an alien and won't even realize he's supposed to mind.

Her next thought is about an hour later, and it's that she would have expected Keltham to be back by now. She sits up.

Pilar : There's a piece of chocolate cake on a plate next to her. It looks a lot like the piece of cake that Pilar tried to give her yesterday morning. No sign of Pilar herself.

Carissa Sevar: Has Chaotic Good considered doing things that aren't stupid.

"There are starving children in other countries," she tells the empty room.

She eats the cake. It's pretty good.

Iarwain: Message from Security: Keltham got put in a delay loop while you recovered from your stupid fucking incompetence in taking an optional-time torture session at a point where you still had work to do later. Can the Queen of Cheliax and a number of other important people now be notified that you'll be ready to be surprised to see them shortly?

Carissa Sevar: Unlike taking it at some other time when she wouldn't still have work to do later; 'not at work' sure does describe, uh, about ten minutes of her last three days. They engineered a lie they don't have an infinite reserve of to excuse her absence and would've needed to engineer another.

It's the wrong thought, and she tucks it away quickly; the primary point of the punishment was that her superiors are better than her, have more experience operating under these conditions and are absolutely competent to handle them, and that she is wrong, when she thinks she's right and they're mistaken. If they think she should've manufactured another excuse some other time then they're right, even if she doesn't see why.

Anyway, yes, they can so be notified, and could've been notified an hour ago, Carissa is fine.

Iarwain: Security is personally of the opinion that sometime in the next three days, Sevar would have managed to find a time when the Queen of Cheliax wasn't waiting on her; or, you know, maybe just Abrogail Thrune II and not also the second, third, and fourth most powerful people in Cheliax too.

He doesn't send this to Sevar, but he does voice it aloud as commentary to the Security next to him.

The Security next to him says he's not actually sure that's true. He's heard rumors about what life on Project Lawful is like. Supposedly Maillol, the project manager, committed suicide and had to be tortured severely in Hell in order to get him to consent to being Raised and put back to work on it again.

Carissa Sevar: What did Keltham tell Carissa to do, what should the naive Carissa understand to be going on right now.

Iarwain: Sevar has been told to meet with Paracountess Isidre, according to the story Keltham has received; Keltham wanted to know why this wasn't lying; he did seem fine going along with a technical truth after it was explained that Sevar would, in fact, meet Isidre, and then the Queen shortly after. Sevar, having been told to dress for properly meeting with a Paracountess, should show up wearing one of her nicer outfits, but that should suffice.

Carissa Sevar: All right. She'll dress up nicely enough to meet a Paracountess of House Thrune, which isn't even that differently from how she'd dress to meet the Queen since she doesn't actually have a further reservoir of even nicer clothes, and do her hair accordingly, and then be escorted wherever this is happening.

She feels a lot better, even though she can't really understand why important people would have delayed their schedules to let her have a nap she did not need. Well, they're smarter than her.

Keltham: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Keltham: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Keltham: - it's over? Is it over? That was way longer than an hour. Keltham stopped checking his pocketwatch after it became clear that it was obviously broken or tampered with, but it wouldn't have been helpful anyways because it doesn't have a date function.

He should not have set himself up to do anything this awful and then need to do anything else immediately after that! Except that he needs to do this as quickly as possible before he forgets anything and needs an etiquette lesson again. Carissa's price is now 20% higher.

Pilar : When he gets out, a palace Security is holding a piece of chocolate cake they've been instructed to give him!

(Pilar is not having a great day here - well, actually, it's been literally the best day ever, but not this particular hour - and needs to keep grinding down the tiny bit of herself that wants to be in any way cheerful about having been assigned the servant labor of going around giving useless fucking pieces of cake to people.)

Keltham: It is delicious cake and Keltham will eat it. He has, by his ass, earned it.

He does feel better afterwards. Though, really, he could also use a nap; but even if he is important enough to keep the Queen and her advisors waiting he would prefer not to do that and spend the informal political capital he's earning.

Onward to his important meeting! In which he will demand to Chelish Governance that they be prepared to deliver Sevar to him restrained and to be his owned object if she ever falls in love with the Queen of Cheliax!

...was Isidre lying about the entire Carissa sex thing in order to make him look like a lunatic and sabotage him in front of the Queen and her advisors no that would make no sense because he asked Carissa and Carissa said it was hot so this should be something they recognize as a totally normal way of thinking; and if not he will truthspell himself and then recount exactly what Isidre told him.

Keltham: To the Queen's big fancy meeting room audience chamber! It is time to unreasonably impress his girlfriend!

Keltham: Great balls of flaming poop, that is one gaudy-ass doompunk supervillain giant fancy meeting room.

He doesn't say it out loud! It wouldn't be 'etiquette'!

Also in the room is Isidre, the giant alien from the Nidal attack, Contessa Lrilatha in the armor that she apparently just wears, a kindly-looking old lady in a doompunk dress, and the Queen of Cheliax on a truly massive chair that still looks completely ergonomically wrong despite obviously being the most expensive possible model of whatever brand of chair it is.

Keltham: Keltham properly kneels and bends his head to the Queen. Everyone in this room except the actress playing Isidre can hear him thinking the dath ilani equivalent of 'Are we there yet?'

Aspexia Rugatonn: This isn't literally the best day of Aspexia Rugatonn's life but it sure is up there.

Iarwain: "To Her Infernal Majestrix, Abrogail Thrune the Second, the Queen of Cheliax and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, I present Keltham, Lawful Evil outsider of the Lawful Good realm of dath ilan, fourth-circle cleric of a Lawful Neutral deity, also enemy of Zon-Kuthon, now fallen, and enlightener of Cheliax," says the actress playing Isidre.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Rise, Keltham of dath ilan, and approach the throne."

Keltham: Yeah, he can do that part, anyways.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Hi Keltham blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah," says the Queen of Cheliax.

Keltham: ...is she deliberately dragging this out. WHY.

Oh, probably Carissa is a minute late or something.

Abrogail Thrune II: Actually, Carissa's already here and waiting just outside, but since Keltham has done her the helpful service of thinking of such an incredibly plausible excuse, Abrogail will look apologetic and then keep talking.

"Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..."

Keltham: IT'S ANOTHER TIME LOOP OH NO HE JUST GOT OUT OF THE LAST ONE -

Oh good, Isidre is leaving now, presumably to 'meet' Carissa and get her back, hopefully that doesn't take too long.

Actually is Carissa going to recognize the giant-ass gaudy doompunk supervillain doors to the giant-ass gaudy doompunk supervillain meeting room? Hopefully not, they don't exactly have cameras here so not everybody should know what the Queen's meeting room looks like. He does want to see the look on Carissa's face.

lintamande: 'Isidre' returns a moment later with Carissa at her side. Announces her, which absolutely no one in the room is paying any attention to.

Carissa Sevar: - even naive Carissa, who would be experiencing the shock of her life right now, wouldn't be so childish as to let it show on her face. But Keltham is taking these baby steps into deeper Evil for her, for the delight of seeing how she reacts, and she wants to reward him for that, she wants having power over people to be something that he finds endlessly thrilling. And it's not like it embeds everything else in a lie; she can tell him afterwards that she would usually have tried to conceal her shock, but didn't, for him.

So.

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrogail Thrune II: THAT IS NOT WHAT THE ETIQUETTE TEACHER SHOULD HAVE -

Aspexia. This can only be Aspexia's work.

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

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

Quick glance to see how Carissa is reacting to that.

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

Abrogail Thrune II: Even taking into account that you know you have no idea, still, Carissa, you have no idea.

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

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

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

Speak then your terms, Keltham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrogail Thrune II: And is this then to be taken as partial repayment of that favor?

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

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

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

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

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

Abrogail Thrune II: YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT, ASPEXIA.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Has she? Aspexia Rugatonn is still trying to decide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: Keltham reads it carefully anyways, of course.

Abrogail Thrune II: The Queen reads it much more carefully.

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

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

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

She signs it.

There.

No more fucking 'tropes'.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: Keltham heads over to Carissa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lintamande: She can offer those assurances!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gnome leaves.

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

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

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

Keltham: "SHIT!" Keltham yells in Baseline.

Keltham: He quickly calms himself.

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

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

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

Point made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carissa Sevar: What.

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: Makes sense. Glad she's actually being cautious.

Keltham reads, then signs.

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

He hands the contract to Carissa instead, wordlessly.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa beams at him.

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

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

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

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

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

lintamande: "Enjoy."

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

Carissa Sevar: What a fantastic idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iarwain:

Explicit sexual content spoilered, read at your own risk.

And then they fucked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dath ilan: Another concept that dath ilan has and Cheliax lacks, is the notion of the virality of a discussion topic. Gather five people in a hushed circle; let one say a thing, on subject matter X. While on average, each of the four other people there have >0.25 items remaining to say, in response to the last items said, the discussion continues; if each reply provokes less than 1 total further replies, the discussion dies out.

Questions you can actually settle by thinking about them do not stay viral. To stay viral they must somehow provoke the appearance of settleability, or some other reward of talking about them, without actually being resolvable.

Civilization has always been very careful not to allow social media to exist - outside of fiction discussion boards, in which you can't really be objectively wrong about anything too important, and which thus serve as an ongoing dire example to all Civilization of what happens when you implicitly sort ideas by how controversial and hence viral they are.

(Well, if you dare to engage in Ill-Advised Online Consumerism, you can look at what happens when you do that with other topics too, not just fiction. But dath ilani do not usually do that. Why would they? Obviously it's Ill-Advised for a reason, one that they have no particular motivation to override as an exception. Dath ilani do not grow up inside the mental world of an adversarial cognitive environment where most secrets are being kept for someone else's good and their own harm, and must clearly be uncovered as quickly as possible. They've had a huge number of secrets kept from them as children and then they've grown up and found out that, sure, there were very reasonable reasons for all of that, it was for their own good or the good of Civilization after all.)

The difference between a conversation topic where each remark provokes <0.8 remarks, and a conversation topic where each remark provokes >1.0 remarks, for an extended duration, is much like the difference between a greater-fire fission reaction where each neutron breaks loose <1 other neutrons and >1 other neutrons. It determines whether the reaction goes critical or not. The effects are not linear.

Cheliax: Of course, such phenomena cannot increase forever. There is only so much you can say in rumor-trading when it comes to the facts visible from the ruined archduke's villa and the response to the Nidal attack. If it had only stopped with those aforementioned facts, the hushed rumors being traded within the Inner Ring would have flared up into virality that lasted for a day, and then people would have said what there was to be said about that, and stopped.

If it had all stopped there, maybe it wouldn't have gone on to the next stage that it did.

Cheliax: People can think up new bright variations on rumors and try whispering those, and some of those variations are more viral and propagate differentially. Given that this is so, why don't all rumors always constantly mutate further and further to create versions of invincible virality?

And the answer as to why this does not happen routinely among the Inner Ring of Cheliax - leaving aside that they don't have fiction discussion boards per se - is that the Inner Ring is not without its prideful skepticism. To repeat a rumor that cannot possibly be true, the sort of thing only Outers would believe, is to look foolish. The known facts about the archduke's villa and the Nidal attack are not so outrageous that, given their established truth, you ought to consider believing almost anything else you hear about Project Lawful.

Unfortunately, the facts from the Nidal attack are not all that is known, now, about Project Lawful.

Even if you're a Security, a priest, or a noble, even if you think you're part of the Inner Ring, you can't easily get a peek at Carissa Sevar of Project Lawful. Sevar is only rarely visible outside the extremely restricted area of the Imperial Palace where she usually stays, doing who-knows-what, and only particular top Security elites are allowed to read her mind anymore. These are interesting facts, but not skepticism-shattering ones. As for the Lawful Neutral boy in strange clothes, people really aren't talking about him, and the military responders who saw him personally are mostly fighting at the front; the Inner Ring rumor circle doesn't collectively know he exists.

However.

Carissa Sevar is not the only part of Project Lawful currently to be found in the Imperial palace in Egorian.

A certain other person - who, as the only visible sample, may be presumed to be representative of 'Project Lawful girls' in general - has absolutely not been living her life in any way that would deescalate this issue.

Pilar : It's mostly the cake thing, and how Pilar Pineda is already standing behind you inside the heavily warded area within the Palace's Forbiddance, and nobody has ever seen her teleport.

But it's also that she went to Elysium, somehow; and apparently voluntarily came back; and now she's skipping through the temple halls on the way to the torture chamber, to assign her own punishment for heresy; and then getting tortured, which she seems to take pretty well; and in fact starts to sing a song afterwards about how being properly punished can make you feel better, until a priest slaps her to shut her up (which she obeys immediately).

And if you're worried about the amount of Chaotic or Good aura she radiates, well, nobody except Aspexia Rugatonn is authorized to correct her on matters of faith.

Why? Because Pilar Pineda is one of the Project Lawful girls, that's why. Now shut up. You don't inquire further about Project Lawful.

Cheliax: Even for Golarion, this is not business as usual.

But it does seem to be true. Credible sources of rumor have repeated the key facts, there are multiple accounts.

Maybe other things... might also be true?

Skepticism breaks, not completely, but far enough to permit mutation and variation to propositions more interesting than usual in an Inner-Ring rumor. The variety and strangeness of the rumors is sufficient that each 1 remark sparks >1 other remarks, people competing to say what they heard; the host population is large enough that new mutated rumors are being originated in the host population faster than individuals get bored with old ones. Replication coefficients go past the critical threshold of 1, not to 1.05, but to 2+.

A phenomenon is born that appears very rarely in Golarion. Any dath ilani who reads fiction discussion boards would immediately recognize it; the victims here don't even know what's feeding on them. It's gone past rumor, it's gone past avidly repeated rumor, it's gone past wild rumors that you can hear out in one night's drinking and that most people don't actually believe.

In the heart of Cheliax within the Imperial palace in Egorian, among the members of the Inner Ring of Asmodeus's tyranny, 'Project Lawful' has become a meme.

Cheliax: Rumors presently circulating about Project Lawful:

Project Lawful was started because of a direct divine vision from Asmodeus Himself.
The project manager of Project Lawful committed suicide and had to be severely tortured in Hell into consenting to be Raised before he was put back on the project.
The top weapons enchanter at the entire Worldwound now works at Project Lawful instead. No she isn't actually third-circle, are you stupid?
All of the Security wizards on Project Lawful have requested reassignment.
Otolmens is very concerned about Project Lawful. [Rumored among Otolmens-cleared individuals only, of course.]
The oldest Project Lawful girl is secretly the real leader of Project Lawful.
If an event worth celebrating happens to you, one of the girls on Project Lawful will already be standing behind you and will offer you cake. It's good cake and eating it seems to be completely safe as far as anyone can tell. Nobody knows what happens if you refuse to eat it.
You are not authorized to correct the heresies of Project Lawful.
One of the Project Lawful girls is secretly Abrogail Thrune, no, you shut up, she totally does that to people.
Nobody at the Palace knows where the original authorization for Project Lawful came from but everybody is afraid to be the one who takes responsibility for canceling it.
Abrogail Thrune is negotiating with Project Lawful for the use of its women.
When Project Lawful moved out of their previous location, they left behind sealed-up skeletons decades old despite having only been operating there for 2 days.
No the cake girl doesn't give a shit what kind of Forbiddance is up or what kind of wards were on the room. Because Project Lawful that's why. Why yes, that does sound potentially useful if it could be controlled! In unrelated news I hear that Nidal's diamond supply is now in Cheliax for some reason and that their first strike in the war was on Project Lawful, did you think about that question for literally five seconds before opening your mouth?
Starting a war among the gods isn't the most extreme thing Project Lawful has ever done, just the most extreme thing they couldn't cover up.
Project Lawful originally started in an incredibly expensive archduke's villa that it took them nearly 2 full days to finish destroying - no, I heard it was mostly gone before the Nidal attack started -
One Project Lawful girl believes she's one of only 12 people Aspexia Rugatonn really trusts - no seriously, that's what she was thinking to herself, the guy said - no, her thoughts weren't otherwise crazy -
So apparently every devil in Hell has heard of Carissa Sevar by name. Because of resurrectees who reported to their contract devil, that's why. Yes, in principle that could be true, but why would it be only contract devils who work with Cheliax -
Even Barons of Hell can't afford to buy the souls of Project Lawful girls in Dis's markets.
I heard Carissa Sevar was chosen by Asmodeus Himself, no, they didn't say chosen for what exactly, that's classified -
If Contessa Lrilatha, Gorthoklek, Aspexia Rugatonn, and Abrogail Thrune want to meet Carissa Sevar, and Carissa Sevar wants a nap, guess who gets notified when who else's nap gets finished.
Project Lawful's manager once managed to piss off Aspexia Rugatonn, Contessa Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek, all in the same day. No shit it didn't turn out well for him. Needed his ass pulled out of the torture room by Asmodeus Himself. That absolutely happened, I was on duty. Yes a direct divine intervention to do that would be very surprising anywhere else. You're new to Project Lawful, aren't you? Project Lawful has never made it through an entire day without a direct divine intervention, the average is usually more like 3, and at some point the gods are literally going to run out of energy to prevent whatever it is they're trying to prevent.
Are we actually sure that Hell itself knows what is going on with Project Lawful, I mean, has anyone actually summoned a senior devil and checked that they know, is what I'm trying to ask here - all right, that's fair, if Contessa Lrilatha has been spotted on-site then I'm less worried -
One of Project Lawful's girls can see the future even with prophecy broken, and warned of a coming war with Nidal, but the project manager ignored her until it got to the point where she was yelling about incoming shadows in thirty seconds. Yeah 'oops' doesn't really cover it, Gorthoklek didn't think so either.
The project manager of Project Lawful has been cursed by Pharasma Herself with all of Her malice.
One of the girls on Project Lawful who died during the Nidal attack got sorted to Elysium - no, they Raised her successfully - well obviously she consented to be Raised so she could try harder for Lawful Evil next time, just as any faithful Asmodean would do in her place, now would you care to explain why you asked a question with such an obvious answer -
One of the girls on Project Lawful is constantly calling out to Takaral, who is apparently a Neutral Evil herald of the god Nethys, not that anybody seems to think this could possibly be heretical or something.
Asmodeus and Abadar are collaborating on Project Lawful. [Because the two gods are known collaborators and it's called 'Project Lawful', not because it leaked via knowledge about Keltham directly.]
Asmodeus and Erecura are collaborating on Project Lawful.
Asmodeus and Nethys are collaborating on Project Lawful.
Asmodeus and Cayden Cailean are collaborating on Project Lawful.
Oh, well, I heard that Asmodeus and Milani are collaborating on Project Lawful - yes of course I made that up just now, now how about you admit the Cayden Cailean thing is also made up -
One of the girls in Project Lawful sometimes thinks about herself as belonging to Nethys, not that anybody else in Security seems to consider this could possibly represent a serious concern for multiple reasons.
Nethys just fucking loves Project Lawful
one of the girls on Project Lawful has been rigged to EXPLODE
secret prediction markets in Osirion are giving odds of 1:8 that Project Lawful DESTROYS THE MULTIVERSE
even the gods are forbidden to intervene in Project Lawful
The discovery that started up Project Lawful was made by Carissa Sevar while she was serving at the Worldwound, no shit you're not allowed to ask what it is.
Project Lawful has been instrumental in all of Cheliax's military victories over Nidal.
One of the Project Lawful girls is secretly the heiress of a County and dresses accordingly.
The library of Project Lawful looks tiny but apparently has as many books available as a major academy library, if someone asks the Project Lawful girl serving as a librarian to 'go look for them in another room', not that there's a Forbiddance in place or anything.
The librarian of Project Lawful knows any time one of her books is damaged.
The librarian of Project Lawful cannot leave her library and sleeps in a room inside it.
Project Lawful 'wizard' girls have been spotted also casting cleric/oracle spells up to second circle.
One of the Project Lawful 'girls' used 5 different cantrips in a day - well, I mean, she wasn't obvious about it, two different Securities had to compare notes to figure it out -
One of the girls on Project Lawful is secretly the cleric of a god other than Asmodeus and nobody on Project Lawful knows who, including the girl herself. Yes, the question of how they know that is then an interesting question, and if we were talking about anything except for Project Lawful you might have a point.
All of the Project Lawful girls were completely normal before they started working for Project Lawful, yeah, I know, right, it didn't sound very plausible to me either.
So about the old halfling who detects as Lawful Neutral if you can detect him at all, the most interesting theory I've heard is that he's another form of The Old Man - yeah, I know it's confusing, but one of the heralds of Irori is apparently called that - how would I know why, maybe it's called 'Project Lawful' for a reason -
A Lawful outsider is being held prisoner inside Project Lawful and interrogated for information. [Not a Keltham info leak except indirectly via the name 'Project Lawful'.]
Project Lawful is intensively studying the history of Taldor in order to launch a team of operatives into Taldor's past which will convert Taldor to worship of Asmodeus in the present.
The girls of Project Lawful are collaborating on writing a new kind of romance novel for official publication.
Cheliax's most-senior retired honeypot instructor was summoned to teach a Project Lawful girl to corrupt paladins more effectively, but after reviewing transcripts the instructor said she was vastly out of her league and went home.
Project Lawful goes through an awful lot of mice on a daily basis.
Actually all the Project Lawful girls except Sevar are from the current graduating class at Ostenso wizard academy. No you shut up, I don't care how little sense that makes, my brother is attending that academy. Yeah that's the same thing I was thinking, they probably were normal girls at first, rounded up for an experiment, who got exposed to whatever it is that Project Lawful is studying.
Project Lawful girls get to decide their own punishments, especially for heresy.
Can we maybe talk in the first place about why everyone in Project Lawful who isn't Security is apparently a pretty girl or beautiful woman - we're not talking about that, okay, fine, we're not talking about it.
Project Lawful reports are the only known thing that causes Aspexia Rugatonn to laugh.

Keltham: Keltham finishes letting Carissa out of her chains, and falls back into bed beside her.

He feels like he's starting to get the hang of this whole 'just doing what I want in the cuddleroom' concept; it's strange and alien and he can still feel unworn sharp edges of his own ?????? reactions jolting him each time he moves, but he is generalizing quickly and mental motions are transitioning from unfamiliar to familiar.

'Just do what I actually want in the cuddleroom' is not actually that complicated of an idea. And if Carissa can't easily have standard pleasure goals completed for her, then he may as well do what he wants and let her enjoy that without other pressures. Maybe that's why the eroLARP gave her that exact sex problem in the first place look he just had a really pleasant trope-free interaction, and it is possible there are not in fact any tropes, okay?

His brain occasionally pokes him and says that he should do something nice for Carissa now, give her something that she wants. Keltham has to remind his brain that Carissa is probably not feeling him to be net in debt to her right now; even if, perhaps, the various things he's finished doing for her, are things that would not have made sense to Keltham as gifts to himself. Also he doesn't have 600gp in hand and also also he doesn't really know how to buy things yet...

Eh, he'll just say it.

"I feel warm and fuzzy things towards you and want to do something nice for you," Keltham murmurs, "even though I don't have anything specific in mind. Yes I realize that I've done some fairly nice things for you today already, my brain keeps feeling it anyways."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa rolls over and leans into him, hiding a smile but incredibly incompetently. "I like spellsilver, and rare books of ancient magic, and - wearing things, having things - that tell people I'm important - if you ever want a collar I want it to be visibly absurdly expensive -"

Keltham: "Shorter-term, I was thinking, I may not be set up to do those other things for like a whole 'nother week or possibly even longer."

Carissa Sevar: "Mmm. Dunno what nice things I want right this minute that I don't already have. ...aside from your shirt."

Keltham: "...if you are very very confident of your ability to return it completely intact, you can borrow it for an hour. I want to note for the record that I'm trusting you a lot, here, far more than any way in which you've ever trusted me over the last few hours."

Carissa Sevar: She sits up, more serious. "I promise that I have no plans that should endanger it, wholly expect I can bring it back intact, and wholly expect Mending to work normally to perfect it if anything happens to it, not that we should test that. I'd just want to - walk around a little in it. Make an evening report to the project manager, add in a couple more requests for the relocation. Maybe try to learn anything at all about what the Queen of Cheliax likes in bed - I'm still mystified about how you possibly -"

Also give an actual careful read to the contract she just signed, just in case.

Keltham: "Isidre claims that Abrogail's a sadist, has a known type, you're it, looked interested while reading reports about you. Basic window of opportunity and suggestion to rent you at all was Isidre. Tactics, setup, and the terms and conditions were all me."

Carissa Sevar: Kiss. "I'm terrified. You did wonderfully."

She's gonna not push further on the shirt thing. She doesn't want to seem obsessive.

Keltham: "Don't know if it's a good time for it, but want to put a pin in it before I forget, because I don't have a good task-management system right now; there's a rumor the Queen of Cheliax is already sleeping with you," this now being a completely safe fact to tell to Carissa if he has understood any of this at all, "and Isidre was worried I would think that the rumor impinged on my own reputation or your own value, independently of the actual truth of that rumor, and I was like whaaaaaat, and Isidre was yeah ask Sevar about that."

"Oh, uh, to be explicit, you walking around in my shirt for an hour is fine."

dath ilan: AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Carissa Sevar: "Eeeeeeeeeeee!

Uh. You just - can't follow the logic of why you'd be insulted that there was a rumor like that? No one in dath ilan would be insulted? If you imagine instead of the Queen it's some random other person then would dath ilani people be insulted?"

Keltham: "So, like, the nearest thing to that I can figure in dath ilan, is, you've agreed on monogamy with somebody, your friends know you're monogamous, you tell them you super trust her and she doesn't seem at all like the kind of complete crazy person who will secretly violate an agreement like that instead of just terminating it explicitly like a sane person. Then a somehow-credible rumor starts that she fucked somebody else, who presumably didn't know about the monogamy agreement. Somehow this rumor is exactly credible enough as evidence that it balances the improbability of violating an agreement like that. Your friends are like 'well gosh in the possible world where that's true, you sure did fail to detect a crazy person'. Then they don't cofound a startup with you where you manage hiring, until that gets resolved."

"So, by this incredibly circuitous route, it is possible for an unverified story that somebody who is not me, fucked somebody else who is not me, to impinge on my own reputation for being competent or trustworthy at something."

"This, I conjecture, is not even remotely what is going on in Golarion, not least because I get the implicit sense that the rumor was supposed to be damaging independently of the state of evidence behind it." He really needs to explain Law of Probability so these words will mean any things.

Carissa Sevar: "- indeed not. So one thing is that, in general, a girl who is more selective is more impressive to have caught, right, so if your girl is sleeping with lots of people, or thought to be, then it's less to your credit that she's sleeping with you."

Keltham: "So, first, I agree that a woman with known higher standards will impress your friends more if she selects you."

"I can't figure out the steps after that. Now, I already realize that this is not going to be how it works in Golarion, but in the non-monogamy mating market of dath ilan, the number of men a woman is simultaneously dating is determined by her ero regeneration rate, how many times per month she wants to have sex, divided by the number of times per month she wants to have sex with any one man. The quality of the men she fucks would be mainly determined by her own desirability on the informal mating market, what qualities she has that are in high demand and low supply, that sort of thing. The main correlation pathway would be if more men wanted to heavily date a low-supply monogamous version of her, than to shallowly date a high-supply nonmonogamous version of her, in which case being nonmonogamous would lower her mating market value, but it's not obvious to me that this is how things work particularly."

"Like, why can't you just have a woman with high standards who is herself desirable enough that she catches lots of people who meet her standards? See also, heiress to the Dark Unilateral Ruler and her harem of four men with different economicmagic powers. If you're number five you're probably pretty cool."

Carissa Sevar: " - do people on dath ilan think of themselves as having a specific number of times per month they want to have sex? - probably not the main point. Uh, on Golarion even if there's not a monogamy agreement it's some evidence you are dissatisfied with your existing relationships if you're shopping around, so it speaks somewhat negatively of your existing partners. Also, on Golarion, women are generally assumed to be - bottlenecked on people who meet their standards - so if they have a lot of sex, they probably have low standards. Though less applicable if one is rumored to be sleeping with the Queen in particular."

Keltham: "So, I mean, there's this obviously incredibly naive version of this where a woman dates literally every possible man who meets her standards and therefore her dating more people is evidence of lower standards, but, first of all, I don't see how that ends up being true in real life because the available population size wouldn't exactly balance -"

"Tiny villages. Right. Um."

"Okay but then how does that make any sense about a rumor that you are fucking the very busy and picky Queen of Cheliax. How is that not a case of, 'Hey, you know who I'm fucking? Carissa Sevar. And you know who else she's fucking? Abrogail Thrune. Why yes that does validate my hotness, you should date me too.' Assuming that claim is credible, which, all of the mechanisms here go through the degree to which the rumor is credible and not the mere existence of a rumor, so I can tell I am still very confused here."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, I agree that this particular rumor does less than most to compromise my presumed value. But, uh, in general, in terms of the things that people learn and the things they'll automatically on a first pass find - disgusting or pathetic or contemptible, before they even think about it - women who have lots of sex are disgusting and pathetic and contemptible, and if people are rumoring that about your girlfriend, it's an insult."

Keltham: "Suppose I passed temporarily on the question of why what huh, to ask about how it's an insult to me rather than her, and why it's an insult independently of the quantitative credibility."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, it's an insult to her also, but that's an insult to you because you're dating her, it's saying that something you have is less valuable. And - if people are repeating it - then they're -" shoot how to explain this without explaining that people aren't deciding what's true they're deciding what they're allowed to believe - but of course, there are rumors in Taldor -

" -deciding to share information they think might not be true, but which would reflect badly on you if it was, is something people are more likely to do if they don't like you or want to bring you down a peg."

Keltham: "...do most people in Golarion just not - have the idea - that things you say are supposed to be things you believe and that things you believe are supposed to be true. Why would words go on meaning things? Why wouldn't people just walk off cliffs?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not for rumors they don't have that! For rumors you say them because they're funny or because you want to make other people look better or worse. ...I'm honestly not sure whether they have the idea in general. Wizards do have the idea in general and still indulge in rumors.... they don't walk off cliffs because they know what's actually true about some things, things they need to succeed at to keep eating. Or to not fall off cliffs."

Keltham: "So, I can feel the shape of the piece of knowledge I'm missing, and it's something about - how the local equilibrium is able to look like one person lying and the other person not knowing whether this is a lying situation, and that equilibrium holds up over time and doesn't collapse into every occasion being either a known lying occasion where communication is impossible or a known truth occasion, and this will turn out to require that people not be ideal-agents in some key way and I don't know where and what exactly that key way is."

"Maybe I'm just being lazy, here, because it's frankly gone late; but I feel like this is maybe a lecturing-to-the-class situation, and then you or somebody will know how to speak my language about this, and can tell me the exact thing I need to know about Golarion?"

Carissa Sevar: "That sounds like a good lecture to the class. I don't know, now, what the missing piece is, unless it's something obvious like that lying is a skill and so is noticing lies so it's not worth lying if people will notice and it's worth getting good at noticing and getting good at lying. But that doesn't actually explain rumors, which are a sort of game, really. - I'll think on it."

Keltham: Keltham yawns; he's had a busy day, and unlike some other people, no nap. "If you need me to give you permission to go, by the way, you have it, to be explicit about that. I'll probably sleep soon. No weird spells this time."

"Oh, uh, if you're stealing my shirt, please tell them to send me in a small meal for dinner, since I'd rather not go out without a shirt and I don't have any other clothing." The thought of borrowing one of Carissa's shirts doesn't particularly occur to him, not so much because of gendertropes but because why would that, like, work, he's still a bit mystified about her wanting to wear a Keltham-shaped shirt.

Carissa Sevar: "I'll tell them." And she puts on his shirt - which doesn't fit perfectly, of course, but the ways in which it fails to fit are precisely the desired ones, the cut that isn't meant for breasts rather drawing attention to them, and she beams at Keltham and heads out.

Keltham: He'll read more of the weird history books and await his dinner.

Carissa Sevar: She orders his dinner sent and then trots over to where she last saw Maillol for a checkin.

Iarwain: People are looking at her with an unusual amount of - respect? Fear? Or if they're powerful enough themselves, like a sixth-circle priest of Asmodeus, maybe curiosity or wariness instead of fear? It's not easy to tell because Cheliax. Nobody's giving her looks that are not-respectful, though, that difference is definitely noticeable.

Carissa Sevar: It's a very good shirt, but that's more of an effect than she'd have expected from it.

She looks for Maillol.

Ferrer Maillol: He's here. He wishes he wasn't. But he's a professional about that. Not every day in Asmodeus's tyranny is a good one, even in the Inner Ring, and if you can't be professional about that you'll soon be very low on the ladder indeed.

(would it actually be that terrible if the new fortress got a sixth-circle priest in charge and Maillol was their subordinate and only was Responsible about vision things)

Carissa Sevar: "I'd like to see the contract I signed earlier. I don't suppose there are any procedures for signing things in character in a way that doesn't, you know, maybe ruin a couple million years of my eternity."

Ferrer Maillol: "Contract? If this is a sufficiently recent event I will not have worked my way to it in the stack."

He's not as completely on top of things as he was a day ago before the Nidal attack.

(He does manage to notice she's wearing Keltham's shirt. This is not relevant to anything except to give her minus two points for unprofessionalism, which he doesn't have the energy to comment out loud.)

Carissa Sevar: - that's weird. "Contessa Lrilatha wrote, for Keltham, a contract obliging Cheliax to force me to have an abortion, if he gets me pregnant and I'm being difficult. A major step forward, which I'm very proud of, and which involved me signing whatever she wrote with about forty five seconds of reading, and I'm curious if I've also sold off my firstborn."

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol experiences a rare bit of theological uncertainty, which he'd maybe be able to resolve faster if his mind were working faster; he's not sure if that's supposed to be contemptible of Sevar, for not figuring some way out, or if that makes her a true and heroic servant of Asmodeus who knew the sacrifice she had to make.

"I'll file a request to get you a copy," he says wearily. He can't actually afford to offend Sevar, she picked up some of his own backlog earlier. "You can also write the request and I'll sign it, if you want it to go out earlier."

This is Inner-Ring-speak for I acknowledge you did some of my work earlier, you get to exercise some of my power, under my supervision of course, to encourage you to go on doing it. Dangerous sort of thing to indicate, in the Inner Ring; but it would, in fact, at least for now, be helpful to make more use of Sevar. If she can decode the message at all.

Carissa Sevar: She gets that there's something she's being asked to get. Which is dangerous, if you aren't precisely sure you've translated it correctly. But it's - not a hostile move, because it was an offer - "I'll write it," she says coolly, her face neutral. "I'd like it to come in before I return to Keltham."

She puzzles the rest of it out while she writes. Non-hostile, and in fact very slightly generous; her getting something she wants and doesn't really strictly need, faster. Does he want to be owed a favor - no, she's owed one, for doing the project work earlier, even though she did that for the project not for him - well, obviously they're not doing anything out of generosity for each other, but she was a more useful project collaborator, and so, a minor benefit from it. Why tell her she can write it herself, rather than that he'll write it at the top of the queue for her? He can't be that tired. Maybe something in the genre of - the reward for a job well done is more of a job - you want to do some of my work, you may do it for your benefit - yep, that feels closer to right -

Contessa Lrilatha, addressed with appropriate courtesy, has a copy of a contract she wrote and to which Sevar has placed her signature in the course of Sevar's work on Project Lawful. Sevar requires it so that she knows to what she has bound herself. If she is expected to have difficulty noticing it, key bits could be underlined.

"I don't know if you got to this in your stack yet," she says, handing it to Maillol, "but I did not intend to make Contessa Lrilatha and Gorthoklek and the Grand High Priestess and Her Imperial Majestry all wait for me, understand my error, and if there's not a punishment code in there already will expect one from the Queen when Keltham hands me over. Other than that, the meeting went well."

Ferrer Maillol: Some of his spite for her not saving him his own errors dissipates, maybe, a little. Yeah she also done fucked up and her life won't be pleasant. It may plausibly be worse than his. "No punishment code, I expect the Queen plans to take it out on you personally so long as you're there."

Carissa Sevar: "That's what I assumed," says Carissa, aiming for - not cheerfulness, then they'd just think she was naive, but a sort of calm acceptance that she doesn't really feel.

Maillol, when he angered that same group of people, came back worse. There's not actually a way around that conclusion. He is worse. That's not how punishment is supposed to work but evidently it is in the range of mistakes that Cheliax is capable of making. And she can't afford to get worse; she needs to get stronger as quickly as possible.

Maybe she can propose to the Queen that she be sent to Hell for however long it's going to need to be. Cheliax has a lot of diamonds, now.

"I was told to expect Asmodia's return this evening. Is she back?"

Ferrer Maillol: He did make it that far. "Should be. They'd put her with Pilar Pineda, I expect, room 4-14, unless somebody's decided that all of Keltham's girls get their own individual guest rooms in the Imperial Palace." He snorts, to make it clear that he doesn't particularly expect this to be the case.

Carissa Sevar: She'd make a joke back but they're not, actually, friends. Instead she smiles at his to communicate that it wasn't out of line. "Understood."

And off she goes.

Asmodia: When Asmodia's soul hears the call, she's sitting by a stream and letting the water just wash over her toes. She hasn't eaten, she doesn't need to, and that fact itself seems worth enjoying in its own way. She did try wandering the gardens to see if there was anybody interesting to talk to, but she can't - really hear, understand, the conversations here, they are not conversations permitted to be understood by those who might be fated to return.

Nothing much at all has happened to Asmodia in the last few hours, by Hell's standards; and of the two events that did happen to her, neither were awful. Well, she doesn't know who owns her soul, anymore, that's a little unnerving. But also - it shouldn't matter, right, if she can figure out what she needs to do to buy an eternity of this, and do it. Or if whoever cares about her, goes on caring.

Asmodia feels stronger, now, knowing that good things can ever happen to her, and that someone somewhere might even care. Maybe the 100 years aren't a threat, a week would be a threat. 100 years could just be a message: Go back, you still have something to do, please, I lent you a hand, lend me one too.

She's not looking forwards to Cheliax, it's too much like Hell. But she'll face it, for that, whether she's buying her eternal peace from a broker, or just paying back somebody who cares.

"I wish I could stay," Asmodia breathes, and does not stay, but lets herself go.

lintamande: Elias Abarco is one of fairly few people authorized to read Asmodia's mind when she comes back.

That's half the problem, right, all these people hear that they're not authorized to mindread the Project Lawful girls, or to punish them, or even to smack fucking Pilar in her fucking face when she offers then cake, so then things grow out of all proportion and they think the girls are something special.

People are sneakily lingering around where the resurrections are happening, hoping to get a glimpse of Asmodia. Haven't they got something better to do with their time than drool over a bunch of halfwitted wizard children that were meant to just be a nice welcoming present for Keltham, and which ideally would all be chained up in his room right now.

Whatever.

He tells them they can stay if they go invisible, because obviously he's not going to ask her any secret questions aloud, and if they want to gawk at this completely normal teenager and owe him a favor for it afterwards, why not.

And a cleric Resurrects Asmodia.

Asmodia: And Asmodia opens her eyes in Cheliax.

Abarco. Why did it have to be Abarco he's scary no, she can do this, she has a reason to go on.

"Asmodia reporting for duty," she says, she's not actually sure of what the protocol for coming back might be; she wasn't previously the sort of person who could expect to be brought back.

Wait, should she be faking being much more traumatized? Bursting into tears of relief from not being in Hell anymore? This whole thing is supposed to be a secret. Oh well, too late now, should've thought it through earlier.

lintamande: "Hope you had fun," he says dryly.

He casts Detect Thoughts and reads her mind.

(A cleric taps her with Restoration.)

Asmodia: Asmodia's thoughts are touching upon the gardens of the goddess Erecura and her secret stay there. Those thoughts cannot be read by the likes of Elias Abarco, nor, indeed, any mortal nor most immortals that walk the face of Golarion.

"Thank you for your good wishes, sir," Asmodia says evenly, she is not sure what response Abarco is looking for but that - could be something she would say if she was showing him that he'd hurt her, right, is that the right thing to say -

lintamande: - wait what the fuck.

He kicks her in the ribs.

"Did you just attempt to save against Detect Thoughts? That's six kinds of illegal. You're lucky I can cast it again and we don't need to haul Maillol in here to listen to you."

Asmodia: "I'm sorry, sir, I forgot to - the spell should be working, you don't need to cast it again, I just need to -"

Don't think at all about why. About what happened. Just -

Some of my thoughts are under seal of a greater power of Hell. This fact is itself secret and must be kept as tightly restricted as possible.

lintamande: " - ah," he says.

And there are other people around.

Shit.

Now he's going to have to let the Crown know the answer to 'did Asmodia come back with superpowers' is "I can't tell you". That'll be fun.

"You know, if Hell can teach people to stop thinking thoughts in a day I'm surprised we don't send more people there for a day. Or maybe you take particularly well to instruction. Standard screening, then I'll show you to your room."

And he asks questions and pretends to be reading the answers out of a mind he in fact cannot read. Hopefully Asmodia will catch on; it'll be evident to her that they aren't alone.

Asmodia: Asmodia is, yes, glancing around at the locations of the visible illusion magic screening the invisible people, wondering what they're all doing there.

(If anybody was wondering whether it's true that Project Lawful girls have arcane sight, they clearly do.)

She'll answer the screening questions honestly and out loud, because Abarco is still a lot a little scary and she doesn't want to give him any excuse to hurt her when he checks her answers later, probably under Zone of Truth. Yes, she's fit for duty. A recovery period would be appreciated but she can serve immediately if necessary.

(Some of her thoughts are readable, and those seem to indicate honesty.)

One of the standard questions is whether Hell sent her back with any messages.

"I have a message for Carissa Sevar from Ahuvir Dulzomaud, my former owner, but, uh, it's probably moot now," Asmodia answers. "Ahuvir Dulzomaud was destroyed... maybe about two hours ago if time was running at the same rate."

lintamande: " - I see," says Elias. "I suppose pass it on to her anyway and let her be the judge of that." Also, what, but he's not going to ask in front of an audience. "No further questions, you can stand up and I'll show you to your room."

Asmodia: "I'm not sure he didn't get destroyed for trying to pester Carissa Sevar with an offer, either it was that or he'd asked me too many questions about the project," Asmodia volunteers as she follows Elias out.

lintamande: Then he will drag her into the next room, close the door behind her, and start flicking bits of skin off her neck with the tip of his knife. "Why. Did. You. Say. That."

Cheliax: Project Lawful girls aren't very fazed by Hell: Rumor ADDED.

Project Lawful girls have to make a special effort to allow their minds to actually be read: Rumor ADDED.

Project Lawful girls have arcane sight: Rumor CONFIRMED.

All devils in Hell know Carissa Sevar by name: Rumor CONFIRMED.

Asking too much about Project Lawful and/or pestering Carissa Sevar with offers is an execution offense in Hell: Rumor ADDED.

Asmodia: "Because you would blame me and hurt me if you pestered Sevar and got hurt for it and I hadn't warned you?" Asmodia says blankly, not feeling nearly as relatively hurt or scared about the knife as she would've a couple of days ago, but worried that things are about to become actually bad.

lintamande: Then the knife can go a bit deeper. People vary in how deep the knife needs to go to bother them properly.

"All right, you piece of shit, let's be clear about a couple of things. First thing, if you have a secret the fact of which also needs to be secret, you can communicate that by Messaging that you need to be alone, or by asking to go to the temple for your debrief, or by saying 'debrief may cover highly classified materials, ask the project head if you're the person to do it', or by exercising literally any initiative whatsoever. I'm not going to rip you apart for that, because I didn't expect any better, but that's how it's done, among people who aren't catastrophically stupid.

Second. If you have a secret the fact of which also need to be secret, you don't just randomly volunteer potentially-relevant information to a large group of strangers for no reason. I am going to guess, wildly, with only my intelligence which is apparently at least double yours, that your devil dying might have had something to do with this very secret secret. Which they are destroying people, in Hell, to protect. If a secret is important enough to destroy devils over, it's probably important enough to say in a whisper, or in a Message, or by passing a note, or by waiting until we got out of the room, because I was very evidently avoiding doing a real debrief until we got out of the room. Instead of any of those things, you opened your stupid fucking mouth, you worthless fucking idiot. I did actually expect you to be slightly less stupid than that because you somehow survived to adulthood, and I repent of my error."

Asmodia: Asmodia is frightened because Abarco is scary but it is not her first time being frightened in Cheliax, and for the first time in her whole life she knows that there is a way out, at least for 100 years, if things get bad enough.

"None of that was relevant to the secret," Asmodia says, keeping her voice as controlled as she can. "If it was I'd have lied and not volunteered information."

lintamande: "Don't volunteer information! I don't care if you think it's relevant to the secret or not! Simply keep your stupid mouth shut when not asked a direct question in private by someone authorized to know the answer!

Who, in Cheliax, is authorized to read your mind at this time."

Asmodia: That shouldn't be spoken aloud. "Read my mind, sir, I'll try to put out thoughts you can see."

My sealed thoughts can't be read period. Gorthoklek authorized to know that seal exists. No mortals to know there is anything unusual about me, if possible, everything should look normal.

lintamande: "The Crown wants to know if you have superpowers.

Do you have superpowers."

Asmodia: Just the seal if that counts, and the Crown is not authorized to know except Gorthoklek.

Wait, why ask that, why do they want to know if she has superpowers, what?

(As the above thought is not about Erecura's gardens, it's also readable.)

lintamande: "You don't need to know," Elias says, and then starts off on the unpleasant task of doing the debrief for real and then the even more unpleasant task of asking Gorthoklek what answer he should give the Queen about the superpowers question.

Asmodia: Asmodia's answers all match the answers she gave before.

Iarwain: Gorthoklek has no idea what this is about, but is uncurious since he is not supposed to be curious. If it's under seal then whatever's under that seal and the seal itself are things you pretend don't exist, if you are a mortal unfortunate enough to know about them. If Asmodia has no superpowers not under the seal, then the answer the Crown gets is no. Obviously. Gorthoklek doesn't add that it was a stupid question; mortals are stupid.

Carissa Sevar: It is shortly after all this that Carissa knocks on the door of the room Asmodia shares with Pilar.

Pilar : "Hi!" fuck "I mean - what can I do for you?"

Carissa Sevar: "Is Asmodia here?"

Pilar : "Palace gave her the room to the right of mine," Pilar reports concisely and professionally like a sane person. "Looked distracted more than traumatized, just sort of nodded at me and went in, didn't need cake." Aaaarrghh.

- wait, is she wearing Keltham's shirt? Good for her! Thiiiiiiiiis does NOT call for a party, good she caught it that time.

Carissa Sevar: "Mmm."

She knocks on the correct door this time.

Asmodia: Asmodia opens her door -

SHIT.

"I have a useless message for you from a devil who's dead now, do you want that at all," Asmodia says, trying to control the sudden hammering of her heart. She just got to this nice private room, could she not have had three consecutive minutes to herself before this.

Carissa Sevar: ".....well that must have been an interesting day. I'll...pass, if the message might cause me to also end up dead. How was Hell.'

Asmodia: That was not the response Asmodia was expecting at all.

"Copying spell diagrams, had a bad time at first even though it was very light torment for Hell," Asmodia replies. She fails to remember why Sevar might be asking her that, namely to see if she's more motivated now to cut deals; Asmodia's thoughts are too occupied with neither revealing the Secret nor outright lying to CARISSA SEVAR. "I... thought maybe the devil was destroyed for having the temerity to try to pester you, is that not a thing that was true."

Oh, she's wearing Keltham's shirt. Well, apparently Keltham is still considered worthy of her.

Carissa Sevar: WHAT

Carissa Sevar: "Maybe he was, but not by me; I was busy." Also there's something sickening at the thought of killing a devil; if you do that, they're gone. It's not like killing a person. "Project restarts tomorrow; are you ready?" Am I right, that Hell's punishments don't damage people the way Cheliax's do -

Asmodia: "I expect so," Asmodia says levelly. She keeps wishing she could be back in the gardens; after having her neck carved up and being scared a few times it is hard to remember the thought that led her to consent to being Resurrected. Well, it's not as if Asmodia couldn't go back, just that she shouldn't; she is choosing not to for now, but it is her choice. "I am mostly recovered from how bad the early parts were, I think."

Carissa Sevar: "Were the later parts - more useful?"

Asmodia: Shitshitshit that's directly about the secret thing, is it time to just lie - wait does Sevar know - "Useful? Can you be specific? Copying spell diagrams is useful to Hell."

Carissa Sevar: "Useful to you, for getting better at thinking, which is the thing I want from you."

Asmodia: Yes in this very rare case, Asmodia now knows something is true that needs to be true for her to be whole, and that's probably going to help her think better. Why is Sevar asking that does she know is she trying to figure out whether Asmodia received a gift she sent -

"When I got to Hell," Asmodia replies, trying to keep her voice neutral, "one of the first things my then-owner said was that, since they'd probably raise me, there wouldn't be time to do any training. I was set to copying spell diagrams instead, as quickly as possible, with painful potions to drink if I lost focus or fell behind. I imagine, if they wanted me to be better at thinking, they should've given me time to think, or maybe told me something surprising and worth thinking about, but how likely would that be in Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn't know what to make of that.

Or, she can sort of think of something, but it's -

"I'll see you tomorrow, then," she says, and lets the door swing closed, and stares at it for a little while.

What if we're doing this wrong. Not Hell, Hell isn't doing this wrong, but what if Cheliax in its effort to imitate Hell is, what if they're as far off Asmodeus's vision as Osirion is off Abadar's - because the latter is easy to see from the outside, easy to see how the prejudices of the people who started the project shaped what they were capable of understanding when their god said it.

She walks back towards the temple.

The worst case scenario, unless she offends the Queen, is just that she'll be tortured a lot and that doesn't seem as helpful as it's supposed to be but it also doesn't exactly damage her, it can't even get her lack of feelings about Keltham to stick.

Asmodia: Did she... screw that up somehow? Was Sevar the one who saved her and she, gave the wrong responses, somehow, and now at the end of 100 years she'll -

Asmodia takes some deep breaths. Sevar doesn't talk like a Power of Hell, Asmodia has some idea about that, now that she's met one. She acted more like - she maybe doesn't know why her contract devil would think she's more interesting than anything else in Keltham's project?

Asmodia is not sure what to do about this, but, for now, nobody is hurting her, and she has a refuge to run to if she truly needs it, and in Golarion a nice room -

Wait. She's been assigned a personal private room of her very own in the Imperial Palace, even with Pilar right next door, and her own room is obviously large enough for four people if they share the bed.

And when she came back, the whole room was full of invisible people. And there was a message from the CROWN asking if she had any superpowers, she should probably have focused a bit more on that part, it seems possibly important.

"I have no idea what's going on right now," Asmodia says out loud. "I don't suppose anybody in Security is there and listening and would like to hear my report about a whole lot of people acting very strange?"

(There's no answer. Very few people in palace Security are authorized to spy on Project Lawful girls.)

Iarwain: People continue to treat Sevar with wary deference as she passes by. It's probably the shirt. Anyone would show wary deference to somebody sexily wearing a shirt as strange and wondrous as Keltham's.

Carissa Sevar: She'll order dinner. And watch Maillol's desk waiting for the contract copy to arrive.

And think.

Asmodia does seem better off. There's evidently infinite subtext there she's not getting but that's - promising, and a path away from the most dangerous category of thoughts. Hell is good for people. It's just Cheliax that is imperfect at being good for people.

(Is she being a heretic? The answer to that is almost always 'yes', if you're thinking original thoughts, but she doesn't think she's motivated by an un-Asmodean impulse, in fretting about people breaking her game pieces that she is in the middle of using for an important project.)

Cheliax: The palace refectory nearest the outer palace temple is quite a lot nicer than the canteen in Project Lawful's old villa site, with a variety of high-quality-food smells on par with the nicest restaurant in Corentyn that her father deigned to take her to once per year, to show her what wealth could buy for her in the way of pride if she ever lived up to her promise. The Continual Lights that illuminate it are warm enough to see the food, but aside from that the decor is definitely a great deal more doompunk than the Corentyn restaurant aspired to be.

It's mostly priests here up to third-circle, a scattering of nobles, nobody who obviously looks like a Security.

They don't exactly all hush as she enters like Abrogail Thrune walked into the room, because what actually has to happen is a rapid propagation of people whispering "Carissa Sevar" to people who don't know that, who then stop whatever they're saying and glance in her direction before hurriedly turning back to resume their conversation in quieter tones.

So there isn't a sudden silence, just a conversation that enters a slowly troughing lull as more and more people glance at her, falling silent, and then start speaking again but quieter. Afterwards there are a lot more faces at tables that happen to be turned in Carissa Sevar's direction coincidentally. And others that are very determinedly looking down at their food and definitely not looking straight at her.

It sure is one heck of a shirt.

Carissa Sevar: That's not the shirt.

Which means probably the earlier stuff wasn't the shirt either.

Something's up and she needs to understand it.

Carissa Sevar: She burns a Fox's Cunning. She's aware that she's using practically all her spell slots for intelligence enhancement these days, and that she's doing it despite having a headband that makes Fox's Cunning not even as good. She feels fine with this. It feels correct, about a Carissa Sevar capable of pulling this off, that she spends practically all her time tugging her brain into smarter configurations. Maybe some of the habits will stick.

- an incidental solution to a different problem occurs to her. She should have a collar commissioned for herself, as a present to Keltham, that stops her from refusing him. Since, after all, he told her not to. If she presents it to him with enough genuine delight and pride she doesn't think he'll have the nerve to say that actually he wants her to be capable of refusing him and actively choosing not to do it. He seems to know he shouldn't say that to her. ...there's some details to work out but it's a promising general approach.

These people know who she is, and think she's important and dangerous. That's - well, first of all, that's not ideal, since the project is supposed to be a secret. Probably the fact that she's on a very secret project has spread, somehow - maybe also the fact that the Queen wants her -

Asmodia said she had a message to Carissa from a devil who was now dead -

- the devil she tried to sell her soul to knew her name. He had instructions about Carissa Sevar. It wouldn't have been left up to chance whether a summoned devil knew her name, not for something that important. So all the contract devils in Cheliax knew to do something different than their usual, if presented with Carissa Sevar. Maybe that's how people here know about her; they're in regular communication with Hell, and in Hell people know who she is. Almost no one ever comes to Asmodeus's direct attention, the devil told her. Why didn't she take that more seriously? She only half believed it, but even so.

(Idea: stop half-believing things. You're either right or wrong, and either one has implications. Keltham doesn't half-believe a thing.)

(Further idea: eat. That's what you came here for.)

She shouldn't really have needed a Fox's Cunning for that last idea. She approaches the food line like she didn't overthink this at all.

Cheliax: As Carissa approaches the food line, the handful of priests and nobles awaiting their turns calmly and dignifiedly step out of her way to let her through. The sole exception is one man about her age, who's wearing clothing that identifies him as a cadet of House Thrune as well as being a third-circle priest of Asmodeus, handsome the way you'd expect a royal scion to be perfected. The man doesn't step aside like the others, but smiles amusedly and walks up with Carissa Sevar to the suddenly cleared small buffet table.

"Shall we find an empty spot and sit together?" he says. "I doubt you'll have much conversation of these terrified wretches otherwise. Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is continuing to be surprised, which is bad, it's the mistake Keltham observed himself to be making when Golarion kept undershooting his expectations. Shouldn't be surprised in the same direction repeatedly.

What would it be, to be surprised in the opposite direction.

"An empty spot?" she asks, taking food. "Are you sure I couldn't just glare people out of a table they're seated at?"

Cheliax: "So it was a recent empowerment, then," he says, though this much more quietly, and with a slight smile. "You can always tell that first flush of pride. I won't accompany you, if you do; it would be fun, but not wise."

Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune takes his own foods, that would be rather expensive in Corentyn, with the boredom of someone who finds them proletarian but acceptable.

Carissa Sevar: Hah, succeeded at overshooting, unless he's lying; she wouldn't be able to tell. He's doing a very convincing 'I'm your ally who'll help you make sense of this world you'll find yourself in', but that is exactly zero information and she's not about to forget it. The one thing he's definitely not lying about is the 'Thrune'. That you're not allowed to lie about.

She takes her own food, smiles at him encouragingly, heads to an empty table.

Cheliax: Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune sits next to her. He sets down his food, then reaches into his priestly robes and fiddles with something.

Sounds from the room around them vanish.

"Silent Table, ten minutes," he says. "I've got another charge left but would prefer not to burn it."

"So, is everything they say about Project Lawful true? Or, for that matter, anything?"

It's said in the tones of somebody who expects that nobody ever opens a conversation with Carissa Sevar in any other way. Having thus asked his obligatory question, he begins to eat, efficiently; this is not a man planning to linger long over his food but one who does have other duties.

Carissa Sevar: What the fuck do they say about Project Lawful?

It seems bad that they say anything about Project Lawful!

....surely the palace has its reasons for whatever security measures are standard here; maybe it's good for important nobles to know some of what's going on, in case they think of something relevant, and there are precautions to ensure that it doesn't leak beyond them.

"To answer the first question I'd have to know everything they say about Project Lawful, which sounds like a tall order," she says, taking a bite of her own food. "The answer to the second question is of course 'yes'." Someone has said something true about Project Lawful at some point.

Cheliax: He finishes chewing and swallowing before replying, putting him several steps up on table manners among Worldwound adventurers.

"A storm-giant of a tall order, yes. I suspect that a true fact got out somewhere in there, and nobody had any better ideas than to bury it under a flood of untrue ones spread as fast as possible by Securities all attesting to what they saw with their own eyes."

"My best attempt to filter through the lot and reconstruct something that could have plausibly happened: An ordinary weapons enchanter, stationed at the Worldwound, received a vision from Asmodeus directing them to find some manner of mini-Starstone, which empowers people in several ways. One of those includes bypassing Forbiddances in order to move about cake slices, books, and, in a much more important case, diamonds. You need to give the cake to somebody who'll eat it, or give the book to somebody who'll read it, the ability can't be used that freely. The mini-Starstone bestows powerful auras that may not match true alignments, but are sufficient to change afterlife destinations. It may grant minor cleric spells and magical detection. I do not, presently, buy the claim that seeing the future is included among bestowed powers, since if that were possible at all, the gods would still have it. The initial group of subjects exposed to it were graduating students at Ostenso's wizard academy."

"The mini-Starstone either fails to empower men who touch it, or turns them into women. It makes people more physically ideal and perfected, over time; which is why you, as the first person to touch it, are now the prettiest of this very noticeably pretty group; and, according to at least one rumor, have become visibly prettier over the last few days."

"I admit, I'd given less credence to the turns-into-women theory, and probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all, if you weren't wearing an obviously-magical-looking man's shirt that no longer fits you. Not that I'd hold that against you, if you're not exclusive with Abrogail." He smiles in a way that makes it very clear that this is supposed to be a complete joke, or at least, deniable as such. "Oh, and your project manager is a complete fuckup but I don't think anyone has actually deduced what the details were."

Carissa Sevar: "What a fascinating theory," says Carissa. He's presumably not expecting her to answer him but thinks he can learn interesting things from her facial expressions; he probably can, but precisely for this reason she stopped tracking the specifics of the things he was saying about five seconds in. She'll mentally review them later. "It raises the question of why Asmodeus would have charged me, in particular, with this, out of all the loyal Chelish soldiers at the Worldwound."

Cheliax: Slight smile. "With prophecy broken, the gods see and plan less completely than the common mud would attribute to them. They are greater than us, yes, but that greatness is manifest in how they plan around the severe limitations to which they are now subject. My first guess would be that you went out on a walk, and happened to come close enough to the treasure to suit Asmodeus's purposes there. Not all of His plans need to be subtle and hidden; sometimes, I expect, they are straightforward plans that just work."

"Or perhaps I'm entirely wrong and you are the Princess of Hell that rumors proclaim, with every devil in Hell knowing your name, and taking it too much in vain being punishable by final execution. If that's the case, I beg of you not to hurt me too much in my lesson, for I am Asmodeus's loyal possession and strive only to be useful to Him."

Carissa Sevar: Okay, there's a lot to unpack there, but -

Carissa Sevar: "Go for a walk," she says, delightedly. "You know, I'd confirm that, except at some point it'd be repeated to someone who has ever been to the Worldwound."

Cheliax: "Mm. Rumor proclaims you a fair wizard, and rumor also says that wizards have ways of keeping warm, but perhaps one or the other is untrue."

"I was also speaking metaphorically, in such fashion as to include any number of other reasons to be one of a small handful of people going somewhere, but without intent to inquire any further."

Carissa Sevar: "Endure Elements doesn't always cut it in wintertime that far north, but that's not the problem with your theory." She smiles in a friendly sort of way and takes another bite of food. Swallows. "Nor is the danger of travelling alone, though it's considerable. Perhaps if you track down a random soldier and present your theory they'll spot it, though of course you'd have to kill them, afterwards....I have to say, in the circles I've travelled in, a name being maybe punishable with final execution is a reason not to say it. But one assumes that the people here who can't stop speaking it have some justification beyond that they're very bored all the time."

Cheliax: Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune doesn't look particularly frightened. He does wear a considering expression as he consumes more of his food.

"I think my own assessment would be that there are those wise enough not to believe your name alone that dangerous, and those less wise, who say they believe it, but don't then refrain from speaking your name."

"But if I am the foolish one myself, you will demonstrate that or not as it pleases you, no doubt."

Carissa Sevar: It would please her to send him to the Worldwound for a tour of duty but this is a stupid desire that does not really advance Asmodeus's aims and she's not entirely sure where it came from. - well, if she happens to be coherent enough for speech at some point when she next meets Abrogail she can ask.

She eats in silence.

She needs to get stronger as quickly as possible, everything is only useful to her insofar as it lets her have that. This has to be tradeable for that, somehow.

Fox's Cunning wears off.

"I think you're foolish, but not because my name alone is dangerous," she says. "I think you're foolish because you don't need to know this, and want to, and because fools saying something is dangerous made you decide it's safe.

And because, secure in the conviction that my name alone is not dangerous, you forgot you don't know in combination with what my name would be dangerous."

That seems like the sort of note to end on, so she stands up, nods to him. Smiles.

Cheliax: He remains seated, of course, for his food isn't finished. "You do seem new to this. If I helped you at all, in this, it's customary to toss me a little bone of favor or knowledge. I am content to collect it later if you don't believe me about that now. Or if I've been of no use to you, of course, then you have Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune's apologies for wasting your time." The emphasis on Thrune is barely barely noticeable.

Carissa Sevar: It is noticed.

(That advice was a favor.)

(Or maybe it was bad advice; she doesn't, actually, know how court works.)

Telling him anything true would be really stupid; the project is secret for reasons. And she doesn't have favors that aren't knowledge. And it wouldn't make any sense for arbitrary Thrunes to be able to get classified information by sitting with you at dinner - maybe it's a test? Except how many people are authorized to test her, even, at this point -

- maybe it's the Queen?

- no -

"I don't know if you helped me," she says, honestly. "We'll see. Repaying favors is much easier than identifying them, for ignorant girls from the Worldwound who are new at all of this."

Cheliax: He smiles, at that. "I shall consider myself repaid, Sevar. And would be pleased to deal with you again on future occasions, if you have gained skill and wish to test it, or if you have not gained skill and are willing to bargain for guidance. Go with Asmodeus's blessing, if you do not already have it."

He does return his attention to his food, then.

Carissa Sevar: Right. Okay. That was very fine and normal.

- actually, there's an obvious thing to do here, which is to report a potential Security breach to Maillol. It's so nice to have an obvious thing to do. She'll head off to do it.

Ferrer Maillol: The pile of unread papers on Maillol's desk is larger than when Carissa left.

"Your copy of the contract came in," Maillol says, gesturing to where it's been carefully set aside.

Carissa Sevar: "I just went to dinner and was greeted by a Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune who tells me that from the rumors swirling around our project - which include that I'm sleeping with the Queen and that I am a Princess of Hell and devils are executed for speaking my name in vain - he has inferred that I discovered a mini-Starstone at the Worldwound, on Asmodeus's direction, and that we've been testing it out on wizarding students in Ostenso, who it might or might not turn into pretty girls with random alignments. I'd be delighted to learn that all of this is acceptable for random Thrunes to know, or that that was Her Imperial Majestrix again, though I think she's bored of me."

She takes her copy of the contract.

Ferrer Maillol: "Yeah, it's not good, but it's not as terrible as you might think. I've lived through a couple of rampages of the rumor dragons. I admit, this is worse than I've ever seen it. But it blows over, and if it started in Asmodeus's inner circle it stays confined to His inner circle. I wouldn't so much say that Asmodeus is overjoyed about random Thrunes knowing, as that part of tyranny is that random Thrunes get to delight in the privilege of knowing what their lessers don't. People like that, you can't tell them to just shut up about everything that's none of their business, without taking away part of their pride as tyrants above the people who just have to shut up."

"To be clear on this, I only ever played that game when I had to in order to not look stupid, and if there was ever a true word in any of it, I never repeated that part on purpose. But pride isn't mostly the direction in which I walk towards Hell."

Iarwain: Contessa Lrilatha's contract is headed up by a prominent seal saying that only Carissa Sevar is allowed to read it, on pain of Lrilatha keeping any violator as a toy for their rest of their mortal lives. This probably didn't help the rumors any.

The interior contains another note saying that Lrilatha hopes it went entirely without saying that if Sevar ever talks about Keltham's no-tricks condition as something you should even dream of demanding from a devil, or publishing one word of this contract as having been authored by Lrilatha, then Lrilatha and Abrogail can have a contest to see who ends up as the one Carissa least likes to visit.

Lrilatha hopes that Sevar will duly advise the same to any other women who end up reading and signing this contract.

Carissa Sevar: - ah. So it's not a trick. And Lrilatha is annoyed that it isn't a trick. Well, Carissa would be honored to preserve her pride.

Carissa Sevar:

Ferrer Maillol: That's not the expression of somebody reading a completely innocuous contract.

Carissa Sevar: Hopefully the rumor mill will convey away that when Carissa Sevar read Contessa Lrilatha's contract she looked like it was the worst news she'd ever gotten, worse even than the earlier news that her nap annoyed every single powerful person in Cheliax all at once. Maillol is too reasonable to pass it along himself, of course, but there's Security standing around in the distance.

Hopefully Contessa Lrilatha will appreciate this and continue handing Carissa nice contracts that are in fact totally innocuous.

She pulls herself together quickly. "Next question, is there anything I'm authorized to know about Asmodia? She was vague with me."

Ferrer Maillol: "Crown order to determine whether Asmodia came back with new special abilities, came back negative, my guess is either somebody being stupid or somebody being careful about all the rumors. Asmodia reported having noticed her contract devil dying, which she would, but not knowing why that happened or who owns her now. Detect Thoughts says she's being honest. I am devoutly hoping that Hell's business is none of our business in this case."

"Sounded like a standard stay in Hell otherwise, she was put to work copying spell diagrams, which is normal for a soul they don't want to break before sending it back."

Carissa Sevar: "I wanted them to fix her. Does that take too long?"

Ferrer Maillol: "In a word, yes, or they'd just do that to everyone."

Maillol has a lot more he could say about this but he is not sure if he should. He is maybe legitimately at the point where he could properly, not proactively, declare himself insufficient to guide Sevar's spiritual growth, and kick her up to a sixth-circle priest of Asmodeus, maybe one stationed full-time at Project Lawful's new worksite.

Carissa Sevar: "We don't know how, do we. Or - some people make it through and turn out well as devils, but we don't know how in the average case, and Cheliax knows even less than Hell. I assumed I'd be stronger after my punishment because - I know that not all punishment always makes people stronger but obviously in this context you'd do that if you possibly could do it at all. But it didn't surprise anyone else, that I was - that you are -"

Ferrer Maillol: His hand comes down on the desk with a sharp bang. "I'm going to stop you right there before you say something insubordinate. You've been tortured, you're going to be much more severely tortured, and I don't think you need any more torture in between, hmm?"

"Sevar, you've got some kind of more-Lawful Lawful Evil vision that, I'm not saying is wrong, but whatever it is, it's as far beyond what we can do right now as dath ilani Law is beyond what we use. If people didn't end up in the long run being more pleasing to Asmodeus from being threatened with punishment and actually punished, He'd tell us to stop doing it. What happens in the short run is another matter. You're apparently doing fine a few hours later, well, good for fucking you. Expecting to be fine one minute afterwards is fucking stupid even so, unless you're Pilar Pineda and can rise up from being tortured with a song of gratitude on your lips. Maybe someday we'll do dath ilan's thing and shape everybody's heritage into being her, but meanwhile you're not. Don't plan on doing anything else useful the day the Queen gets around to you, and maybe not the day afterwards either."

"And you don't comment on how well you think I'm doing. You see me making an actual mistake, you point it out, that's it."

Carissa Sevar: "Of course it's good for us in the long run! But we'll be lucky if we manage to spin this out for a month, and by the end of that month the world is going to look so different that I only have half an idea what shape Asmodeus will need us in. Hell can be concerned with our long run; project governance needs to be able to operate at the very brink of what we're capable of at our absolute best."

And she can see it, then, what she should do, except -

Carissa Sevar: "I propose a new project directive. No one, except me, Pilar, and one of the girls at the villa, chosen randomly, gets punished beyond whatever they do in fucking Taldor, without my express authorization, which I'll grant when it looks liable to make them better at the project, and not otherwise. Have you got some way to read my mind."

Ferrer Maillol: "Sounds a lot more than just slightly dangerous and heretical, but I'll hear you out as to why we'd do that."

"Every day there's fewer and fewer Security cleared to read your mind directly, for some strange reason, but I've got a Zone of Truth if you want me to believe you about something."

Carissa Sevar: "I want to make sure this gets put down exactly accurately.

We matter far, far more right now than we will in Hell. If Asmodeus could in destroying all our future potential for Him make us better servants of Him right here and right now, I think He obviously would; in Hell there are millions of souls like us, but here and now we are the only people who can do the most important thing that there is to be done. I am not interested in our long-term spiritual improvement. I have not adopted some kind of heretical belief that punishment is bad for us, in the long run; it is good for us, in the long run, which isn't our priority at all. I have not adopted some kind of heretical belief that it is bad for people to suffer unless they grow from it; if this directive works better paired with some directive to round up a bunch of orphans and torture them, I'll do that, or delegate it if that's allowed because I am kind of busy.

I have a theory, which is that punishment is in the short term particularly bad for the kind of acuity needed to succeed at this project, and I need this project to succeed, so I want everyone to stop torturing my project members without reason to think it will make the project likelier to succeed.

Exception for myself, because I don't think any justification short of Asmodeus personally saying so would protect me now, and I don't want there to be any question of whether I conveniently developed this conviction when facing down something I know I can't handle. Exception for Pilar, because as noted, she likes it. Exception for one random girl at the villa because everything is an eye, and if the girl who still gets punished normally is performing well then we'll go back on this. It's how Evil dath ilan would do it.

I don't care about any of you, but I need to be able to use you if I'm going to win. You need to be better than Cheliax knows how to make people. And it needs to happen fast. So we try this."

Ferrer Maillol: She is getting very close to insubordination here. Well, no, she's past it, and now he'll have to figure out what to do about that.

"My frank assessment of this idea is that it may pass as Lawful Evil, you're the expert on whether it's dath ilani, but Zon-Kuthon is also Lawful Evil and this proposal is not very Asmodean at all."

Carissa Sevar: It's like one of those dreams where you can Fly but the spell runs out the instant you look down.

"You're misunderstanding me," she says coldly. "It's not very Asmodean, not to torture Keltham, but it's what Asmodeus told us to do. It's not very Asmodean, to promise to let him go, but it's what Asmodeus told us to do, too. Asmodeus wants us to win. This is your new project directive."

Ferrer Maillol: He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, over the last day, that this was probably coming.

He probably should have thought it out earlier. If he wanted to win this, he is far worse off trying to win this fight starting now, than if he'd set up his pieces for this conflict starting after the first moment he'd tried giving Sevar a taste of power.

Can he take her, if he contests her control of the project right now? It's not at all clear that he can. Yesterday he could've, at the villa where he was running everything and had all the reports. Today he's in the Palace, where he's that pathetic guy who got tortured by Gorthoklek, and Sevar has now met the Queen and her advisers. Paper lines of power count for a lot in a tyranny, but not for everything, not among the Inner Ring. It's not entirely clear that the Security would obey him if Ferrer Maillol ordered Sevar cut down on the spot. This Security isn't one of the older Security from the villa; this Security knows Carissa Sevar only as a Power at least on Ferrer Maillol's level, who always has been such.

Does he want to take down Sevar, does he want to fight back at all, would he rather just let her have it? Maybe that question should've come first, but if he can't take her, it's a moot one.

Ferrer Maillol: He misses the Worldwound.

Ferrer Maillol: He misses the Worldwound because he knew how his mission worked, and what needed to be done to accomplish it; and what was needed was keeping a pack of nearly-adventurers in line with fire and lash so that they didn't run out on him and the demons didn't overrun them all; and he, whose concern among Asmodeus's domains was tyranny, was good at that job.

He never asked to be reassigned from the Worldwound to the Imperial Palace in Egorian, where the real games of power were played. Pride never was the part of this he was best at.

Now all he is, is a fifth-circle priest with two relevant visions from Asmodeus and a job he doesn't understand. And because of those visions, he's not getting away back to the Worldwound. He's stuck with Project Lawful no matter what.

He doesn't have to be stuck at the top of it, though. Does he want to be the one responsible for Project Lawful when whatever happens, happens, on Day #4?

Ferrer Maillol: "I neither have the power to put you in direct command of Project Lawful, nor would I want the responsibility of making that decision if I had," Maillol says coldly, and with as much dignity as he can manage. "Get an order from my superiors saying you're in charge of and responsible for the overall direction of Project Lawful, and I'll work under you to manage logistics and personnel, as professionally as you worked for me."

"Unless and until that order arrives, I'm still the one who gets held responsible for your project directives and I will not be responsible for this one."

"If you need an order saying you have urgent business to discuss with Aspexia Rugatonn tonight, write it for me and I'll sign it. I'll even throw in a free note saying that I do not have a very solid vision for this project myself, and cannot judge the solidity of yours."

"If you can't get anyone to put you in charge, you're not in charge and I will not expect this manner of insubordination in the future."

"Deal?"

Carissa Sevar: "Understood," she says.

She sits down.

Writes to the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn that she has a time-sensitive inquiry regarding the project.

Passes it along to Maillol, silently.

don'tlookdowndon'tlookdowndon'tlookdown

Ferrer Maillol: He signs it and hands it back, along with his note saying that he doesn't have a solid vision for Project Lawful and cannot assess Sevar's latest vision. He doesn't include any remarks about how he is unlikely to be able to judge any future visions either. That is perilously close to asking to be relieved of your command, and pleading like that is not at all a good look in an Asmodean tyranny.

He can't quite bring himself to wish her good luck.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar who is not definitely not a Princess of Hell walks through the hallways to deliver her note to Aspexia Rugatonn's secretary.

What's the worst case scenario? Being tortured a lot! Which is good for you! Not good for the project, which is the entire reason she's trying to cut down on it, but good for her personally!

Iarwain: You are customer #14 in line. The current wait time is: 43 minutes.

Carissa Sevar: Long enough she'll have to return the shirt first. She heads back to Keltham's.

Keltham: Keltham sleeps the peaceful sleep of somebody who, to the extent he has offended his conscience during the day, has managed to get far out enough ahead of it that it hasn't caught up to him yet.

Carissa Sevar: Perfect. She folds the shirt up next to him on his bedside table, Prestidigitates it clean, and tells Security to notify her if he wakes.

Asmodia: Asmodia is sitting in her peaceful, lovely bedroom in the Imperial palace at Egorian. It is not the gardens of Erecura, and the main thing that makes it different is not that the gardens are nicer-looking or the air is fresher, it is that the gardens are, so far as she can tell, safe, whereas the Imperial palace at Egorian is not safe. It can have the quality of not hurting you right now; it cannot have the quality of being guaranteed to still not be hurting you a few minutes later.

But she knows where to find safety, for a time, if she needs it. Maybe somebody would be nice to her again 100 years later, maybe not; but what comes after 100 years hardly feels like it would still be real, still be this Asmodia who makes the choice...

She keeps on reviewing what she knows. Maybe if she knew all that Keltham knew, as well as her own knowledge, she'd be able to figure it out; but she can't. The shadows got her, she was revived in the Imperial Palace, she's next to Pilar so the project is probably still active.

The gardens were peaceful except for two events. First, the disorienting sensation that, she was informed, not by Erecura this time, had been the sensation of her contract devil being destroyed and her soul being passed to whoever inherited it from him. She'd figured, at the time, that he'd either asked too many questions about the Keltham project, or it was the Carissa Sevar thing.

Later, she'd been called closer to the center of Erecura's gardens, closer to Erecura Herself in the fullest place of Her power within Her home plane, and the seal on her thoughts had been placed in full. Asmodia can't remember it well; she probably didn't originally experience it well, never mind memory.

When she'd woken - it apparently being possible to fall unconscious in Hell under sufficiently extreme circumstances - she'd known the rules. How to put thoughts about the existence of the seal, but not the contents of the seal, temporarily outside of the seal and readable. That if she needed to report defiance of the seal, she should go to the most senior outsider under Asmodeus, but not any archdevil or other being reporting directly to Him; and that she was forbidden, by Asmodeus's own Law, to pray to Asmodeus or turn her thoughts too much in His direction, while the seal lasted.

(No, she is not allowed to ask Aspexia Rugatonn what happened. Not that she would, but it doesn't matter, it's not allowed.)

And she's been assigned her own room at the Palace, with a bed large enough to sleep four. There was a Crown order on checking her for new or exotic special abilities, which has now been returned with a false answer that she has none. There were way too many invisible people watching her when she came back. Sevar was acting weird, asking weird questions that were almost like she knew the secret but didn't quite, and in other ways acting like she doesn't know what's going on around her any more than Asmodia does.

Around the only thing in the universe that still remains stable and true is that Abarco is a giant fucking asshole.

The main thing Asmodia is currently worried about is whether Abarco is right and her devil was destroyed to keep the Secret. She found out that the devil was destroyed, before she found out there was a Secret, so all the explanations she thought up, had nothing to do with what happened to her being Secret. But in retrospect maybe there was always going to be a Secret and she just found out about it later. She shouldn't have mentioned the devil being destroyed. Too late now. Not that she'll ever tell Abarco he was right about anything, and he won't see it in her thoughts, either.

Asmodia knows what she has to do next, to figure things out, it's all too obvious, she just wanted to keep to her peace for as long as she could before...

Pilar : Pilar is now returning from having found herself on yet another cake delivery mission, with no particular memory of how she got there. The thought is occurring to Pilar that maybe dying and reviving has reset some kind of accumulated satiation of her curse down to zero, and she needs to throw a really big surprise party for somebody in order to placate her curse enough that she is not constantly delivering cake.

She gets to her room just as she spots Asmodia turn away from knocking on her door. "Hi" "Asmodia," Pilar says.

Asmodia: Why is Pilar suddenly behind her, instead of in her room where she should be, Asmodia does not know. Pilar didn't do this in Ostenso. "Hey," says Asmodia. "Can we talk?"

Pilar : Pilar has never been quite as wary as some of the people around her. It's not that she's stupid, or even fearless, as many people seem to think, it's that Cheliax is where she belongs at least during her mortal life. "Sure," Pilar says, not brightly and cheerfully however.

Asmodia: Pilar's room looks a lot like Asmodia's, with just enough distinction in decoration that you couldn't accuse them of being overly duplicated.

"So, Pilar," Asmodia says. She did take the chance to play out this conversation in her head, before she got here. "If you're in the Palace same as me, does that mean you also died in the attack and got raised or resurrected?"

Pilar : "Yeah. Took a sword for Keltham."

Asmodia: "Not bad," Asmodia says neutrally. More heroic than her own death, lovely. "I know you've always said you were looking forwards to Hell. Anything interesting happen there?"

Pilar : Pilar hesitates. She knows Asmodia did not want to sell her soul; a favor-offering Security warned her that Asmodia seemed like the sort who might be upset and spiteful that Pilar hadn't been forced to sell her soul, when Asmodia had been. She should, probably, mock Asmodia for that; but...

Pilar doesn't feel like it. Maybe she'll assign herself a punishment for that later.

"My first journey to the afterlife wasn't all I'd hoped, no," Pilar says truthfully.

Asmodia probably really really does not need to hear either that Pilar went to Elysium, or that Pilar came back from it.

Asmodia: If it was anybody but Pilar that might have been a sufficient answer to what Asmodia really wanted to know there.

It's - not quite absolutely obvious, but it is one Abyss of an obvious guess, that Asmodia would not be in the gardens of Erecura if not for something somehow somewhere that is related to the project around Keltham.

Did it happen to Pilar, too?

"Because it hurt too much, or not enough?" Asmodia returns.

Pilar : "Okay, if you're going to be that way about it, fine, I went to Elysium because of my oracle's curse and told them to fuck off and came back when I was Raised and Aspexia Rugatonn personally told me good job and I was allowed to feel proud about it, I wasn't going to shove it in your face but if you are going to insist about it then fine."

Asmodia: Asmodia would definitely have been a lot more angry about that before the gardens of Erecura. Should she fake it? She's not sure she can, somehow.

"It's okay," Asmodia says. "I'd have sent you to Hell in my place, if I could. Well, not to my contract devil, he wouldn't have been best for you, but maybe a nice erinyes or some such."

Pilar : "Well, thanks." Pilar hesitates. "I - wouldn't have done it, but I wish I could have sent you to Elysium in my place."

Asmodia: "I'd have stayed."

Pilar : "I know."

Asmodia: "That's heresy."

Pilar : "I already had the heretical thought, already need to assign myself punishment for it, and it's not going to get any more heretical if I say it out loud to you instead of keeping it to myself."

Asmodia: "Do you have any idea what's going on?"

Pilar : "Elysium told me that I wasn't going to be used against Lord Asmodeus, but for Him. Aspexia Rugatonn thought that was credible but also very ominous, like, maybe they're planning to destroy Cheliax and afterward I'll have to prevent a new Worldwound from opening in the crater. Which is, in fact, in Asmodeus's interests, if I'm there to do that, but it's part of a larger plan that's not at all in His interests."

"But no, I don't have any idea what's going on."

Asmodia: "Do you know why there were fourteen invisible people watching me during my resurrect?"

Pilar : "I'd say that somebody opened a scroll and Explosive Rumors went off in their face, but I think it was actually more of a Symbol of Rumor or possibly that somebody Wished for there to be lots of rumors about Project Lawful and they didn't use a safe phrasing of that either."

"Honestly, I probably didn't help with that a lot. But I don't even know what Carissa Sevar has been doing, except that it's somehow scaring people even more than suddenly cake."

Asmodia: "My contract devil was all like 'It would be contrary to the nature of Hell if you couldn't tell me everything you know, and if that requires a promotion so be it, and if I get promoted above my place and destroyed, so be it.' So I told him about Keltham and what Keltham knows and you being Cayden Cailean's oracle and Nethys giving Ione book powers and Carissa Sevar fucking the Queen -"

Pilar : "She what? No, strike that, that makes perfect sense, continue."

Asmodia: "Anyways, my contract devil's reaction to all of that was: Carissa Sevar? Tell me more."

Pilar : "Pffffft," says Pilar.

Asmodia: "It's true!"

Pilar : "I believe you, I was just saying pfffffft."

Asmodia:

Pilar :

Asmodia: "Anything else interesting happen while I was gone -"

Pilar : "Not really, unless you count a day or so of moderately stormy weather, from the war between the gods that got kicked off by Nidal's attack on our villa, but it didn't destroy all the crops like the last god-war a century ago, and now Zon-Kuthon has been sealed away in a vault to which only Iomedae has the key."

Asmodia: "Yeah, that's not much. Does that mean we're at war with Nidal and their clerics are still getting spells, though?"

Pilar : "All of their diamonds ended up in Cheliax somehow, which I am sadly, utterly certain had something to do with Project Lawful in some way or another."

Asmodia: "Not much of a war then."

Pilar : "Nope, but nonetheless tomorrow at dawn we're heading out to an old fortress that's being renovated for us, after another divine intervention by Asmodeus, because Project Lawful hadn't gotten even a single divine intervention that day and it was almost going to be a full 24 sequential hours there. Being there is somehow going to protect us from the other gods interfering, so more people can be around and not get turned into oracles of the Stupid Good god of utter derangement and cake, like some previous unfortunate victims of Project Lawful."

Asmodia: "Hope it's as nice as the last place but I know it probably won't be."

"Just to be clear, you were lying about everything up until the fortress part, right?"

Pilar : "Nope."

Asmodia:

Asmodia: "I'd say that I'm going to go back to my room and sleep and when I wake up the world had better make sense again, except I truly don't wish for that."

Pilar : "Why not?"

Asmodia: She probably shouldn't have said that. But -

"In a sensible world, nobody cares about you," Asmodia settles on.

Pilar : Pilar snorts. "Don't get exaggerated ideas just because I had one stupid thought and stupidly said it out loud."

Asmodia: "If you didn't really care you wouldn't be holding a cookie right now with pink icing and letters spelling out 'Asmodia'."

Pilar : Pilar looks down at her hand in absolute horror.

Pilar : ...it's actually an ordinary cookie with pink icing, but no letters.

Pilar : "You bitch. I'm going to see if my curse does poisoned cupcakes if I focus enough on how much I hate somebody."

Asmodia: "Well, there you have it, now the world makes sense again. Night, Pilar."

Asmodia departs, taking the cookie with her over Pilar's brief and muted protest.

Cheliax: "People are talking too much about the project and my opinion is they should all stop, including you." Or, failing that, be executed and then turned into paving stones in Hell.

"You were on Project Lawful, right? From the start. If I can't tell you -"

"You'll what, talk at somebody else? You know what, fine, if you absolutely have to blabber to somebody about whatever this is, I suppose it does less damage with me than anyone else." It is his considered opinon that the average Security assigned to safe temple jobs inside the Imperial Palace are noticeably less elite than those assigned to top-secret projects started by divine intervention. Which, in fact, makes sense, but. But.

"So I was the Security in Ferrer Maillol's office when Carissa Sevar walked in on him, and tried to hand him a new policy for the whole Project. I probably shouldn't repeat the exact proposal, but it was six kinds of heretical, and to be clear, she wasn't phrasing it as a suggestion."

"...you have my attention," he says reluctantly.

"And Maillol protests, obviously, how heretical this is, and Sevar stares him down coldly and says, yes, I know it's heretical, but Asmodeus doesn't give a shit about what condition our souls end up in afterwards, Asmodeus wants us to win. So this is your new project directive."

"And how'd Maillol take that?"

"Looks silently at Sevar for a while, then says he's not taking responsibility for implementing that directive when it's actually hers. He offers to write her a note to Aspexia Rugatonn asking for an urgent conversation about whether Sevar's in charge of Project Lawful or he is. He's happy to serve under her if ordered, but if she doesn't come back with orders saying she's in charge and holding responsibility on the project, he expects Sevar to shut up and obey him in the future."

"And Sevar?"

"Just says 'understood', takes the note from him, and heads off, presumably to talk to the Grand High Priestess."

"Lovely. I concede that makes a great story, and now you've told it to me and you never tell it to anyone again and it doesn't get added to the rumor firestorm, clear?"

"You're not going to die if you admit out loud how badass that was."

"Yes, fine, it was badass, now, are we done?"

"It was incredibly badass. Not a lot of people would be willing to just completely stare down Carissa Sevar like that."

Paving stones. Hell needs more paving stones.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa heads back to wait in line outside Aspexia Rugatonn's office. She can use the time anyway, honestly, she knows perfectly well the tack she took with Maillol will not work with the Grand High Priestess and she should really kick herself with an Owl's Wisdom and think through what might.

Iarwain: People are still acting just about exactly as deferential and wary as before, proving that it was not, after all, the shirt.

Carissa Sevar: Noted.

In some sense the entire aim of Project Lawful is to produce Aspexia Rugatonns reliably. She's Asmodean, obviously, can't get more Asmodean, and she's - admittedly Carissa has only heard her speak a few times, but she's heard people speak of her more than that -

she thinks Aspexia Rugatonn might be Evil dath ilani. Or at least much closer than anyone else. But, obviously, Aspexia Rugatonn is not competent to train Aspexia Rugatonns; she must herself have ended up like that halfway by accident, with felt insights she can't share. More fragments of the Law inside her than inside anyone else but still not rules-bound enough she could teach them. At minimum Aspexia Rugatonn is proof that it's possible to reason like Keltham and reason about how the gods reason and not end up a heretic.

If Aspexia Rugatonn thinks this specific policy is bad, Carissa will drop it. If Aspexia Rugatonn thinks Carissa is thinking about this all wrong, she'll listen. She doesn't think she's magically the best person around for the project, she knows that many people are better than her, she knows that the Grand High Priestess would be better than her, but the Grand High Priestess doesn't have time. They don't have ten of her, yet.

I can give you ten.

She isn't sure it's true, but she's sure it'd be a winning argument, if she could, in fact, do it.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Sevar's turn still hasn't come up when Aspexia Rugatonn happens to take a step out of her office, between appointments. Same doompunk outfit as the last time Carissa saw her; but on any occasion where Aspexia Rugatonn is not smiling cheerfully at an outworlder, and bending all her Splendour to the goal of apparent amiability, she does not come across as a grandmother-gendertroped kindly old lady.

Rugatonn glances around, spots Sevar, and frowns.

"When were you planning to tell me Carissa Sevar was waiting on me?" she says to her emotionless-appearing secretary.

"I was not informed that I should interrupt -"

"Whether you interrupt me depends on who I'm with, but if Sevar shows up in my office I at least expect to be notified between appointments."

Rugatonn turns to Sevar. "Step inside," she says, her voice no less stern and harsh than would be expected of the Grand High Priestess, even when talking to Carissa Sevar.

Carissa Sevar: - okay this has gone beyond 'there's an energetic palace rumor mill', because Aspexia Rugatonn would not care if there was an energetic palace rumor mill.

And it's not the shirt, which she's no longer wearing.

????????????

Carissa Sevar: This confusion is probably (hopefully) not visible to anyone other than Aspexia Rugatonn. She stands, and follows her in.

lintamande: Aspexia Rugatonn's office is not a throne room, and was clearly designed with the constraint in mind that it needed to not be a throne room. It's shaped as a perfect pentagon, with high pillars at each of the vertices, supporting a ceiling high enough that Carissa can't see it without more gawking than she's really willing to do. The floor and walls are reflective, glossy black stone; Aspexia's side of her desk has a thick carpet and cheerfully blazing braziers and looks almost comfortable, but the other side does not.

Carissa Sevar: She kneels.

Aspexia Rugatonn: When the door is shut, all noise outside stops.

Rugatonn sits.

"You tell me," says Rugatonn. "Why did I do that?"

It is of course an open question whether she's reading Carissa's mind, or even Carissa's face, given that it's such an obvious question to be thinking about.

Carissa Sevar: "...people think I'm important. They're - mostly wrong - or, I'm important because of things they aren't permitted to know about, and less important than they think, not actually important enough to disrupt your schedule. Is it - bad for the Church, if it looks like I'm being prioritized below my assumed station -"

Her thoughts match this exactly. She is not going to attempt to get something past the Grand High Priestess.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "It is in fact bad for the Church that you are being prioritized above your written place in the system. Other considerations dominate. Try again."

Carissa Sevar: She wouldn't have done this for a fourth-circle cleric of Asmodeus. She doesn't know what to think about that. Last time they met the Grand High Priestess was very keen on doing exactly what Asmodeus said to do with Carissa.

"Am I actually that important."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "If you were that would be irrelevant to the question of what they should believe."

"These rumors exploded faster than I anticipated, and it is likely that they will at some point reach Lastwall. Some leak of that form became inevitable when we ordered emergency military response on the villa. The true hidden nature of Carissa Sevar is one of the less productive avenues they can investigate."

"Asmodeus's blessings to you on this evening, Sevar. I expected the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law would bring you to my chamber in time, but not this quickly."

"Sit."

Carissa Sevar: There are comfortable chairs on this side of the desk, but one kneels until ordered otherwise.

She sits.

The rumors make her uneasy. Maillol said they were inevitable, that you couldn't just order nobles to shut up, but she doesn't actually see why not, though she expects he'd know. If they're being directed, in order to achieve actual political goals, that's much better.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "A relatively trivial matter first. Authorize this message to Keltham, deny it, or correct it. It is my own best estimate that this event would occur in the alter-Cheliax we are constructing, but the effects on Keltham are not easy for me to guess, nor whether those serve us."

Rugatonn takes a paper memo from her desk and hands it over.

Dear Keltham:

As you may perhaps have already realized by now, your etiquette instructor did not give you wordings meant to preserve the Queen's pride, but to make you look as gloriously dominant as possible in front of Carissa Sevar. That occurred via my own intervention. Some of this, I admit, is an old woman's humorous meddling in young love. I would not have done it even so, did I not think it serve Cheliax better, that Sevar love you a little more, than that the Queen's pride be a little more preserved.

I was not aware at the time of your agreement with the Queen to owe her an informal favor about her lost pride. I have informed the Queen that any such favor should be considered to be partially owed by myself, rather than you, to the extent she lost any more pride than she otherwise would have done, in that particular moment. My apologies for that element of it, if not others.

Have fun with your adoring new possession. The first one only happens once.

-- Aspexia Rugatonn, Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, called also 'Aspie' among her friends.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa reads through it somewhat incredulously. Gives herself a moment to think. Keltham will probably be incredibly confused, but he's already treating etiquette as a fairly absurd social game, and he's not wrong to. She...thinks he'll just buy that the Grand High Priestess was meddling out of appreciation for young love, and it'll fit his impression of senior Chelish leadership as excessively Good people with excessively powerful headbands, which - is convenient until cracks start showing... and possibly safer to attribute to Isidre than to the Grand High Priestess.

"I don't think he did realize at all," she says. "I think this succeeds at getting him to categorize you, mentally, with Isidre, rather than with Contessa Lrilatha, and I'm unsure which of those categorizations I prefer and might like keeping the option value open."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Are you able to mostly prevent my opinions from unduly influencing yours, if I share them further? It seems best that final policy be routed through one person, that her policy be a coherent whole. That person cannot be myself."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, Most High. I'll weight your opinions highly but knowing that my actual job here is to succeed with Keltham and that I might have insights I can't convey."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I doubt Keltham will categorize myself with Lrilatha no matter what. He considers Lawful beings to be a species apart within Golarion. He is correct, and this is a true and deep fact about Golarion, and all else he sees will tend to accord with it. Without constantly referring to a devil's advice, I would not be able to pretend to be like Lrilatha to Keltham."

"My primary concern generating this note was that Keltham will realize later that his etiquette instruction was off, and then will wonder why this event, which should have occurred in alter-Cheliax, did not occur in his reality."

"The final decision is yours, and does not need to be taken immediately - at least, not in my own estimation. Aspie could plausibly find out about Keltham's prior bargain with Abrogail at any time over the next few days."

"If the true consequences of my act inside alter-Cheliax, as they would impinge on Keltham, are less beneficial to our purposes than I believed, then I have made a mistake. Not for any wise and excellent reason, either, but as part of a game with Abrogail, and an indulgence however much pent-up. I tell you this so that you understand, and it is a very important understanding, that Aspexia Rugatonn is not only theoretically capable of error but actually commits those on a daily basis. Do not assume her infallible any more than you would assume Hell or Asmodeus to be infallible."

Carissa Sevar: - it is strange to have someone assert as if it's a routine fact about the world that Asmodeus is fallible. Even though once she chases the thought down - yes, obviously, Asmodeus isn't omniscient - and she has no idea whether He ever makes mistakes given what he knows but the important thing from the perspective of his servants is that He might not intend the effects of things He does, or might be missing key information -

- right, okay -

- she's absolutely not going to have opinions on the game played between the Grand High Priestess and Abrogail. Some things she does not need opinions about.

"Yes, Most High," she says. "I think it should be sent tomorrow afternoon, and will countermand that if I change my mind, which I might."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "If you're saying that to give yourself a measured time to think, I will send it in two days unless I hear otherwise from you by then. You have not realized how much busier you are than you think yourself to be."

"That particular move in the throne room is one I'd almost never play, even if I was making an indulgent move against Abrogail, if circumstances had become less strange than they have now become. Under circumstances less strange than these, I would be very unlikely to do something because it was cruelly funny, in a situation otherwise of interest to Asmodeus. Cruel in other ways, certainly, but not cruelly funny. Has your mastery of Keltham's teachings of Law reached the point where you can already guess why?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't think so." And she haaaaaaaates not passing tests, but better to know what she doesn't know.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Asmodeus knows what mortal humor is. Asmodeus has seen many, many cases of mortal humor. It is still relatively harder for Him to predict. Humor is one of the things that mortals do which is least like anything done by gods who were never mortal, and there is too wide a variety of ways for something to seem surprising and funny to a mortal bent on that."

"The most fundamental fact about all of our lives as Asmodeus's servants, now, is that we are living in a world of shattered prophecy. It now actually matters to our Lord whether we are being cruelly humorous or just cruel at key moments."

Carissa Sevar: "So the thing you did in the throne room is costlier for Him to anticipate than everybody staying in line and doing what they're ordered to do."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "The entire affair in the throne room was already so far beyond Asmodeus's plausible ability to have predicted, or at least, predicted using only His own powers, that it didn't matter at that point whether I started being funny."

"In a closely related matter, the Queen has noted to me that you are, as they say in the lands beyond our Lord's correction, 'in love' with Keltham. As she told you that she would, the Queen referred your correction, if any, to myself. How would you go about deciding whether or not to do anything about that, were you the Grand High Priestess?"

Carissa Sevar: Oh, she knows the answer to this one! "Asmodeus said not to be proactive in my correction beyond the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law. It's obviously not ordinary to correct people for having stupid feelings; it's self-correcting, really, under ordinary circumstances. I don't know if it's ordinary to correct people who are on important espionage missions who develop feelings about their targets, but whatever's ordinary, I'd do that, were I the Grand High Priestess."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Somebody on an ordinary important espionage mission would certainly be corrected in that. By advice and warning while they were on their mission, if perhaps it was not both possible and prudent to send them to a torture chamber just then. By more severe correction upon their return, assuming their souls sufficiently bought that this would not disincentivize their return."

"By the time we get to you and Keltham, we are so far outside the ordinary that there simply isn't any answer by reference to what we usually do. There is still a clear meaning of 'ordinary' Law, however, in that case; it means then, not to do what we usually do, but to do what we'd have done without a message from Hell singling out Carissa Sevar."

"Even absent that message, however, Carissa Sevar ends up in this office hearing essentially what I am telling you now, only except without any parts about a message from Hell to be ignored. Which is why we are having this conversation in the first place."

"This other Carissa Sevar is then asked to say what she would do about Carissa Sevar's love for Keltham if she were the Grand High Priestess."

Carissa Sevar: "Obviously it would be good for my soul to be corrected, as severely as necessary for it to actually stick this time. I...suspect it would not be good for the success of the project. I could be wrong about that, if in the experience of more experienced people I'm closer to betraying Cheliax than it internally feels like I am."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "That's a plausible reason for Ferrer Maillol to make that decision. It is, according to his reports, mostly what he decided and why."

"When you end up in the Grand High Priestess's chamber, it means that matters have gone beyond the mortal and are dealing in the plans and interventions of gods. Such as, for example, the intervention of Asmodeus that started up this project."

"Do you believe that the feelings of love between you and Keltham are part of a plan that Asmodeus made?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know. Asmodeus - called him my teacher, and said I wasn't to be separated from him. That suggests to me that Asmodeus intends some consequence of me learning closely from Keltham, and the obvious one is that it makes me better at the project. I don't know whether feelings are like humor in being costly for Our Lord to predict. If Asmodeus chose where or when Keltham landed, and it seems He might have, or have been part of a coalition that decided that, He chose to land Keltham on me, and that must've been because of some feature of me that lent his plans a better chance of success, and it seems like a notable feature of me, that apparently I have feelings - uh, uncertainty, what share of approximately loyal Asmodeans would have this problem -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "The way in which you and Keltham have matched, the speed with which you have seduced and corrupted a boy steeped in Lawful Good beyond all imagining, the speed with which he has seduced you, the twisting events that managed to bring it all about, are not only far beyond the reach of mortal coincidence, but also beyond Asmodeus's ability to make plans about individual mortals interacting, as I have ever seen those plans demonstrated before."

"With prophecy shattered, there are exactly two forces known to us, named to us, that could possibly still be responsible."

"First, 'tropes', which may or may not exist."

"Second, Nethys."

Carissa Sevar: Well Carissa doesn't like either of those at all!!

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Your thoughts as to what the Grand High Priestess should do about that?"

Carissa Sevar: So far, things have worked out well for Cheliax and Asmodeus. They have locked away Asmodeus's competitor; they are in the middle of conquering Nidal, the first meaningful territorial expansion of Asmodean Cheliax. They have all Nidal's diamonds, and will come out of the war richer than they started it, not to mention with most of their casters strengthened. Honestly in the Grand High Priestess's place she'd be tempted to declare they should stop while ahead and kill everyone, except Otolmens instructed that Keltham be contained, and probably there are all kinds of people chomping at the bit to raise him.

What does Nethys want. Almost unanswerable. He did warn them of Nidal's attack. He likes magic and explosions. There'll be lots of explosions if Keltham teaches Cheliax the weaponry of his world. Maybe Nethys thinks Cheliax is competent to prevent Keltham from destroying the world while allowing him the chance to advance the field by thousands of years. Maybe Nethys is trying to explode Cheliax.

What do the tropes want. For Keltham to have an interesting sex life, Keltham thinks, for the holes that his Lawful Good society left in him to be filled, for him to realize his shape isn't an error. Maybe Keltham being seduced into Evil is satisfactory to the tropes.

Aspexia Rugatonn: When Sevar has not spoken for a time - it is still not clear whether or not Rugatonn is reading her mind - Rugatonn speaks again.

"A further factor, one highly relevant to my decision whether or not to have your feelings corrected. We have just received instructions from Hell that we are to cease that particular policy by which temple-instructed children seen to have fond feelings for other children are noted by their instructors for additional correction in the form of being forced to do Evil deeds that train those feelings out of them. They will still receive universal training in Asmodeanism, but children who display fondness for others will not be singled out by the instructors for such further correction."

"That this would reflect any change in Asmodeus's doctrine is essentially unthinkable, so why is Hell telling us to do that?"

Carissa Sevar: What.

"May I make myself smarter, Most High?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "You may."

Carissa Sevar: Fox's Cunning.

She should have noticed faster that she was confused by all Asmodeus's unAsmodean instructions. No, that's not quite fair to herself, she noticed it was weird, and drew conclusions - specifically it's how she concluded Asmodeus cared more about their succeeding than their being Asmodean. Backtrace, now. You don't know the reason why. Asmodeus is giving unAsmodean instructions. It's not because He has changed his mind. It's -

"He and Abadar - or He and Irori - have a deal? Most High?" It has not escaped Carissa that Irori might be involved in the effort to bring a more perfect person to Golarion and that this might be why she was warned not to think herself too like Irori.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Not in that particular regard. This is specifically and narrowly something that a Good god, alone, would request from Asmodeus, if they had delivered to our Lord something else that He wanted."

"Very likely, the bargain involves no net decrease in the number of souls Asmodeus receives in the end. There is little that He will trade for souls, other than souls. But Asmodeus is not fonder of kindly souls than cruel ones, once they are delivered to Him in Hell, whereas to Good gods that does make a difference in how much they whine."

"Some Good god has merchanted Him additional souls, somehow, and taken a few naive children in trade. I would be amused to hear what Good's mortal followers might say of that, if they knew. Dabbling in the soul trade is supposed to be very Evil, after all."

"One may further remark that the entire affair is rather more Chaotic Good than Lawful Good or Neutral Good."

Carissa Sevar: "I...didn't know we make deals with the Chaotic Good gods." On account of how they're incredibly stupid.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Our Lord is the Lord of compacts. Asmodeus will deal with anyone that deals with Him. Though, in that case, He might have demanded to be paid before and not after."

Carissa Sevar: Nod.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "And so the ultimate factor controlling my decision is simple. Our Lord is known to be continuing to intervene. We may hope, though with fear in our hearts, that He is actively monitoring this situation. These events are obviously not Asmodeus's handiwork, but He is known to be bargaining and to be receiving things that He desires enough to pay for them. It may be that much is hidden from His sight, it may be that it is not."

"It may be that our Lord would will these events to continue if He knew of them, it may be that He would have them stop. If it is to my Lord's interests that these intricate events He could not have arranged Himself, continue to occur, then I can only work His will, in that case, by not disturbing them. If I disturb them against His will, He will be realistically unable to tell me how to put them back on track even with a hundred visions and a thousand messages from Hell."

"If He wants it all shut down, one vision or one communication from Hell would suffice. I would not ordinarily reason so, for every divine intervention is greatly costly to Him; I dare not imagine what other opportunities He has foregone, in this place or in others, for the sake of all this. But here - He is intervening over and over."

"To make myself easy to control, across both cases of what my Lord could plausibly desire of me, I will allow this to continue unless my Lord tells me to stop, and pray that He is, indeed, paying that much attention."

"I am not going to refrain from having your feelings corrected at all, especially if it happens in a very predictable and Asmodean way in a particular case. But having this strange entanglement shut down by hammering those feelings out of you - that I will not do. Yet."

"Now, Sevar, do you think you are able to know all this, without that tempting you to do ridiculously complicated and unpredictable things in order to, as you imagine it, keep the plans of the gods on the track you imagine they were supposed to be on?"

Carissa Sevar: Why would she be tempted to do ridiculously complicated and unpredictable things that would make it harder for Asmodeus to follow what's going on?

...probably what the Grand High Priestess means is that many normal human things are ridiculously complicated and unpredictable to Asmodeus so by default she'll be ridiculously complicated and unpredictable if she hasn't had explicit training in how to narrow her actions to the set that don't have that property. Evil dath ilani are probably so good at this.

Without having had that training -

- what examples does she have of things that are complicated and unpredictable. Humor. Hives of ridiculous rumormongering. Keltham's experiments being deployed in the world. Sending Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune to the Worldwound because it'd be good for him. (She wasn't really going to do that, though, she just had fun thinking of it.) All of those feel too obvious, all of those would also be hard to predict for a human overseeing the project.....

"What errors will I make, what ways of clouding things for Asmodeus will I fall into, if I am only trying to avoid doing things that'd be surprising or unpredictable to you and failing to take into account the ways in which Asmodeus is in predicting me more limited?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I don't think you're supposed to do even that, at this point. You are working to somebody else's plan and they have, if not prophecy, then something like a last shattered fragment of it."

"And Sevar. Trying to be predictable on purpose can make you less predictable to our Lord, or even to me, because most people are not trying to be predictable when they make decisions, just deciding them. Thinking like that makes you less like most of the mortals our Lord has observed before. And if you are new to the work you will make new entertaining errors in what it means to be predictable, which I will not have time to correct. Or the whole way in which it is one more thing you are trying to do, tinkering and steering the way in which you imagine your thought processes should work, complicates those processes in a way that, again, our Lord may find harder to understand -"

"I don't suppose I'm making any sense to you at all, yet. I pray that it is 'yet' and not 'ever'. You have no idea how much I am praying for it. Meanwhile, don't try to do any incredibly complicated new things inside your mind, in order to make yourself more predictable, is that a simple enough instruction for you to understand?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, Most High."

Keltham would understand more than that. Dath ilan would understand more than that. She's suddenly sure of it.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Good. I have come to a conclusion about what level of intelligence in you best suits our Lord."

"Give me your headband."

Carissa Sevar: What if instead they just torture her until she's incapable of feelings??

She hands it over. The Fox's Cunning hasn't quite worn off so she doesn't feel the absence, yet.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia reaches into her desk, takes out what is obviously a +4 intelligence headband, hands it back.

"I am pleased to see you more reasonable than some wizards," she says.

Carissa Sevar:

Carissa Sevar: She puts it on.

Is she more reasonable than some wizards. Are there wizards who'd actually refuse to give the Grand High Priestess their headband if in her judgment they shouldn't have it. If it serves Hell for Carissa to be turned into a slug then she wouldn't refuse, even if it's obviously worse than thousands of years of torture.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "They wouldn't have refused outright, but they might have tried to argue and plead before doing it, or, if they were wise enough to obey immediately, would at once start whining why it was the wrong decision and they should have it back." It is again not clear whether Rugatonn actually needs to be reading Carissa's mind, or even her face, to know what she is thinking here.

"Now, what matter is it that actually brought you here today? I have a certain guess, but I am not, as mentioned, infallible."

Carissa Sevar: "I want to request command of Project Lawful, Most High, and ask you about a directive that is heretical and that I think will make the people on it better at their jobs."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Mm. Some might consider it insubordinate, very extremely insubordinate, un-Asmodean even, to react to a superior's refusal of their brilliant suggestion by going over his head, all the way up to the Grand High Priestess's office, storming in to demand not only that he be overruled but also that she herself be in charge from then on."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks it is against the written rules, and also there are unwritten rules, and whether it is against them is more complicated. She doesn't wholly approve of this; it's obviously the same principle by which Thrunes are allowed to gossip, and it seems to her that it'd be better for Cheliax if they weren't, but she must be wrong about that, that's all there is to it, and if there are unwritten rules, then here they bring her.

"Do you consider it so, Most High."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "It is certainly a transgression. Some such are excusable depending on circumstances. Some such are beneficial but still punished."

Carissa Sevar: And she is pretty sure this is one of those, but she doesn't know which, and isn't sure it matters for what she ought to have done.

She hands over both pieces of paper she has.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia does smile sometimes. She is smiling right now. "I seem to be looking at a piece of paper you wrote, signed by Ferrer Maillol, saying that you have business for the Grand High Priestess, and another piece of paper in his own hand, indicating that Maillol is not confident in his vision and unable to judge yours. That, I admit, is not exactly what I expected to see. Does Maillol know you are also requesting command of his project, Sevar?"

Carissa Sevar: It actually hadn't occurred to her that Aspexia Rugatonn might not have known that, despite all her own disclaimers of non-omniscience and also the fact that there's no way she would have.

"Yes, he does. He said I can have it if I can convince someone to give it to me."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "This really has been an unusually good day," says Aspexia Rugatonn. "A god-war ended, an Otolmens event that is much more helpful to us than usual, Abrogail learning a valuable lesson, Keltham significantly corrupted, and now this. No transgression, then, and no punishment. Either Maillol is weaker in his will than I thought, or stronger in his loyalty to our Lord's interests, or you got some unexpected leverage over him to force him to do this. And no, I won't inquire which was the case, they are all Asmodean enough."

"And this heretical directive, the vision that Maillol could not judge?"

Carissa Sevar: "I think that punishments as presently implemented in Cheliax are in the short term bad for the sort of acuity required for this project. I know that finding an approach to punishment which doesn't have that problem is probably among the most important priorities of building Evil dath ilanism. Until it's figured out I want punishments beyond those issued in Taldor to go through me, to be approved if I think they'll make people better at the project and not otherwise, with exceptions for me, Pilar, and one randomly chosen further student, who will be subject to punishment normally."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "That will be hard on the random student, if they must suffer so unfairly. It's not that I don't think it's funny, but I assume you have some other reason than that?"

Carissa Sevar: "It's how Evil dath ilan would do it. To check if I'm right that the punishments are making the students worse. If that one performs notably well, then I was wrong, and we can resume punishing everyone; if that one underperforms, then I have more reason to think I'm right. Eyes everywhere. If you want to know something the first thing to try is checking it."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Encouraging."

"...you have absolutely no idea how much I wish - I maybe shouldn't even think this, it is giving him too much information about Golarion, it feels intuitively dangerous in ways I don't know how to - but if Keltham could have explained to him, some cases of when our Lord tried to give guidance and mortals ruined it, disguised and changed in the details, and asked to discourse to you all upon the Law of obeying a commander who is having trouble seeing you clearly and can talk to you almost not at all -"

"I do not think you are supposed to do anything about this wish. I think it is too dangerous, I'm not even sure why, but I feel that it must be, somehow. Do not try to do anything about it without consulting me."

"But, remember the thought."

Aspexia Rugatonn takes out an already-written parchment, makes some swift corrections, signs it, and hands it across the desk.

The parchment grants Carissa Sevar authority and responsibility over Project Pet Outsider Project Lawful, with Ferrer Maillol answering to her as chief operations officer and commanding if she cannot, with Sevar herself answerable to a seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus who will reside on-site.

At the bottom are also some rather severe punishment codes for Carissa Sevar, not to be undergone for at least a week and delayable for up until two months after that. Those however have now been crossed out, in the same ink that wrote the signature.

Carissa Sevar: Well all right then.

It was already written, except that she'd have Maillol's approval. That's kind of terrifying what with how Carissa didn't herself make this decision until an hour ago. Of course, the Grand High Priestess should be kind of terrifying.

"May it serve Asmodeus," she says. "That's all I had."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I... have a suspicion, that Pilar will be the only success of your project, in the end, other than yourself," Rugatonn says. "Maybe even including yourself. I have a suspicion that it is not possible to do this without pain and correction that the other students will prove unable to endure. I think what you are trying to do is make a devil native to Golarion, but better and far faster than Hell can do it, and I suspect that Pilar will prove to be the only one who can take it once you have given up on showing mercy to the others and found that you also cannot punish them enough."

"Or I could be vastly - how did Keltham put it - outracing my own ability to think, and pretending that I can see such things as Asmodeus may see when He is paying attention. But. Do not expend Pilar without need."

Carissa Sevar: "I was thinking - it doesn't have to be possible to achieve with everyone - if we can take ten million Chelish people and get ten of you, that's more than worth everything. Especially if we can identify them in advance as being able to take it."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Wrong. One of me is worth a million Chelish citizens, ten of me is not worth ten million. And do not forget Abrogail's insight - which I should have seen myself, perhaps, but her crown is admittedly more powerful than mine - that depending on what bargains our Lord may have made to bring Keltham here, or even what spies may learn from us, it may be that we must compete against students from Osirion and Lastwall, being taught in kinder ways and without falling into what their own gods more permissively deem to be heresy. Ten Aspexias will not compete against that. It is not even the right sort of military."

Carissa Sevar: Then it'll be good news, if this Law can't be taught mercifully, if the girls who are punished do better.

She doesn't expect it, though.

If they corrupt Keltham, though, that'd be an edge Lastwall and Osirion won't be able to duplicate for a long time.

"I understand, Most High."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Go with Asmodeus. You are dismissed."

"Oh, and don't forget to act on the way out like you were here to instruct me and not the other way around." Rugatonn chuckles briefly, smiles briefly, and nobody else in this office is going to see the slightest hint that it isn't genuine.

The primary purpose of this manipulation of the runaway rumor elemental is of course to corrupt Sevar herself, in this case with pride. Aspexia has not forgotten that Irori may still be in contest for her, among other possibilities being considered.

Carissa Sevar: If people believe that then they're all so stupid it's astonishing they function! It's not like Contessa Lrilatha's contract, which was a plausible lie, a world they could easily really have been in.

But it is fun.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa steps out of Aspexia Rugatonn's office, looking satisfied with herself. "Pilar?" she says cheerfully to the room that contains only people who are not Pilar. "I'm in the mood for some fun."

Pilar : "Oh, nice! I mean - I'm at your service, of course."

WHY IS SHE IN THE GRAND HIGH PRIESTESS'S WAITING ROOM WITH CARISSA SEVAR?

Carissa Sevar: Carissa surveys the room as if deciding whether anyone else in it is any fun and then walks away down the hallway with an arm around Pilar. "Aspexia's welcome to join us," she calls at the Grand High Priestess's secretary as she rounds the corner.

Pilar : She would LITERALLY DIE RIGHT NOW if she hadn't JUST DONE THAT YESTERDAY.

Pilar performs a cantrip, she's had time to hang them again between deliveries.

Message to Carissa Sevar: "What is going on and what am I supposed to be doing?"

Carissa Sevar: "High Priestess has asked me to make a production of being the person calling the shots around here. Because there are going to be spies trying to understand Project Lawful and apparently it serves us for them to learn this. I am also confused. Does your curse require us to actually have fun, I can't fuck you because I promised Keltham I wouldn't."

Pilar : "It is possible to do fun things to me besides fucking me but I could also give you a cookie, I guess? I'm still figuring out how this curse works and, just mentioning this to anyone with authority, I have an increasing suspicion that if I don't throw somebody an impressive surprise party on purpose very soon it is going to happen anyways."

Carissa Sevar: "Who won't say anything about it. ...Abarco. Let's throw Abarco a surprise Carissa's now your boss party."

Pilar : "I... this is so awful, I want to do that too, but my curse won't let me. The party has to be - for them, not for us making fun of them. Stupid Good is still Good."

"Wait, you're Abarco's boss now?"

Carissa Sevar: "I am now project director. Though you're still the Grand High Priestess's favorite. You could throw Asmodia a surprise welcome-back-from-Hell party?" Carissa steers them towards Maillol's office.

Pilar : Pilar frowns. "You'd think that would go through but it doesn't."

Carissa Sevar: "Can you use this to figure out peoples' deep motivations -" surprise party for the Queen, Carissa Sevar has gotten herself into trouble and you can statue her now - that's definitely eight kinds of illegal - "surprise party for Maillol about me taking over the project."

Pilar : "...no answer. You can use it to figure out the motivations of people with respect to things you actually want to throw them a for-them party about, is I'm suspecting my curse's answer here. Would you maybe - have not totally sincerely wanted to congratulate Asmodia on coming back from Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: "....no I think I would've wanted to! She's strikingly good at math and I am worried she doesn't have the discipline to keep contributing to the project if she's getting tortured a lot, I was torn between hoping Hell'd helped with the discipline and hoping it hadn't kicked her back into her shell so she's harder to use. ....I have no idea what Chaotic Good thinks of either of those motivations."

Pilar : Pilar has now been repeatedly and directly exposed to Project Lawful's hidden power source, a thing called a 'dath ilani' in its own language, for multiple hours over sequential days. This has consequences.

"Do we know anybody else back from Hell?" Pilar says. "Maybe it doesn't work on Hell-related things."

All the rumored weirdness and all the real weirdness is only a distraction from the true effects of dath ilani exposure, though a very effective distraction if your mental language lacks even the conceptual vocabulary to describe what Project Lawful is actually about.

Carissa Sevar: "Maillol? I don't know if he went to Hell or just to judgment. Balaguerre and Torres, on Security."

Pilar : "...we don't want to throw them a party. We want to know if my curse works on Hell things. I hate Chaotic Good so fucking much."

Carissa Sevar: "Hey, imagine how much harder Asmodeus' life would be if Good were not incredibly stupid. You're a very powerful argument for Asmodeanism, just bopping around where Keltham can see you."

Pilar : "It's possible they know that, Elysium said that I was truly loyal to Asmodeus and so Good would prefer not to use me against Him and my being oracled would end up with Lord Asmodeus being better off than if I hadn't been. The Grand High Priestess thought that was credible but ominous, and that maybe there was a bigger plan against His interests, like the plan is to destroy Cheliax and then I end up preventing a new Worldwound from opening in the crater."

Carissa Sevar: "....well. All right, then. ...wait, why does Good prefer not to use people loyal to Asmodeus against Him? I did not know that! Did you know that? Does that mean they'll actually give up and fuck off, once everyone's loyal to Asmodeus?"

Pilar : "I mean, it was, what they prefer, not what they always do, according to them. But I'm not actually an expert on Chaotic Good and would rather not learn."

(This about Pilar Pineda: She walks through Cheliax a lot less nervously than others. It's fine and proper if she's punished fairly, and even an unfair punishment isn't so terrible. Her loyalty to Lord Asmodeus is, if not absolute, strong enough for her to feel pretty confident in it. If Pilar says anything that sounds questionable, anyone who checks her loyalty will discover that she is thinking all the proper things under Detect Thoughts. It's fine for Pilar to say that she'd rather not learn about Chaotic Good, because any superior who rounds on her for that will find Pilar humbly saying that of course she'd do it if ordered, she'd never dream of not following orders. Scan Pilar as you like with Detect Thoughts, you will find that she is absolutely sincere about that, and not in the way of somebody having to suppress a lot of thoughts either. Cheliax is safe for her, and if she is executed there, she gets to go home.)

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham might, at some point, ask," Carissa says, a little sharply because Pilar should have thought of that.

And then they're at Maillol's office.

Pilar : "SURPRISE! YOU'RE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PROJECT LAWFUL ANYMORE!"

It's going to take a long time to get all the confetti out of this office.

Iarwain: CONGRATULATIONS! You've reached the end of the first "thread" of this story!

SURPRISE! There's even more to read though!

Primary continuation:

some human relationships are less universal than others

Less intense, more sfw, tldr spoilers version of next thread (reunites with main threads afterwards)

tldr some human relationships

You can also click where it says "Next Post" to automatically go on to the next thread in the continuity ("some human relationships" in this case). This is an important glowfic-reading skill to remember when you reach the end of the next thread, and need to go on to the one after that!

Iarwain: A timeline of MICWOA / Planecrash Book 1 can be found here.

#planecrash-lagging is a Discord channel for starting threads to blog your reactions while catching up.

Iarwain: (This space intentionally left blank.)

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