"Spell design is really hard and only gods or extremely powerful ancient wizards can do it from scratch," one of the girls confirms. "- and yes, you can do a wider variety of things with magic items."

"What you can do with magic items is combine elements more freely," someone else says. "If there are two items that do different things, you can build one item that does both. You can't do that with spells at all. And you can make a magic item that casts a spell once an hour, or twice an hour, or on a trigger, that's really tricky to put in a spell."

"I'm approaching certification in item crafting, if you have more questions specifically about that."

Keltham has been trying to figure out what obvious-to-him things would not have already been tried.  "How are magic items at precision, focusing forces down to smaller levels?  Let's say I want to take all the power that would go into something like a mage's faithful hound, and apply all that power to compressing and heating something the size of a dust speck."

The girl looks crestfallen. "I ....don't know. I think it'd take more skill, to make something that can work on very small things."

"Sort of thing a topnotch research team could do in a week, a month, a year, a decade, or never?"

"I think if it could be done in a week someone would've done it. Though they might have, and not published it, depending what it's useful for."

"Possible component of a device that would make a lot of heat for smelting more iron and steel.  I'm wondering if we can skip coal mining and go straight to... an analogue of fire that requires much higher starting temperatures and produces much greater amounts of heat when something burns.  That might work if magic can take a fixed quantity of heat and focus it down into a small enough volume that the local temperatures are incredibly high, like thousands of times higher than molten iron; and I've already verified that somebody from this world didn't seem to have the corresponding basic knowledge to know what the underlying constituents of matter were or how to burn them, so it's the sort of thing that nobody here might have tried yet.  Oh, but don't try that on your own until we've all nailed down equity distributions and intellectual property so I can explain further details.  It's legitimately dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

Basic physical principles should plausibly be given away as gifts, because it's hard to make them excludable and they're too necessary for others making basic research contributions, but specific inventions should still be charged-for - is Keltham's current thought.  Keltham might feel differently about it, if he'd personally discovered all of the relevant physical principles.  But in fact Keltham is carrying a lot of dath-ilan-produced information that he got for free, and that dath ilan would have preferred him to spread around; and he is, as he has just contemplated, honorable even in the dark.

The idea that there's an analogue of fire, that burns things if you get the starting temperature high enough, and yields much more energy - for that matter, the idea of binding energies and mass defects for nuclei - should under this policy be given away for free.  Knowing that you can extract hydrogen from water and burn that in particular - or hydrogen and boron, if they can get the temperatures high enough, that would be safer and less radioactive to do inside a steel furnace - seems more in the realm of specific inventions that he could charge for.

Or actually... given some of the weirder exotic effects he's seen in the spells, maybe he should more privately at some point talk about squeezing down some 'impenetrable' wall of force around a bigger mass of liquid hydrogen until the whole thing fuses, for purposes of trying to destroy the Worldwound?  Actually he'd first need to ask whether enormous explosions would have any effect on the Worldwound at all.

Is that squirrel thinking about how to do SCIENCE to MAGIC in order to create HUGE EXPLOSIONS?

The existing treaties about enormous destructive magical explosions admittedly don't encompass this but new ones that do should be agreed upon promptly, because if there are a lot of explosions of that kind there won't be anything anyone values left on Golarion! ...also, that particular squirrel should NOT be encouraged to blow itself up, that particular squirrel is very valuable.

This is so exciting!  Prophecy is broken and now the squirrels are going to develop magical nuclear weapons centuries ahead of Nethys's schedule!

The squirrel appears to be in Cheliax!  Nethys goes off to bother Asmodeus about this.

The top decile of attractive girls at Ostenso's Imperial Academy of Magic are diligently taking notes and also exchanging glances at the announcement that there are equity distributions involved in this? It kind of sounds too good to be true but he is a bizarre alien. An oblivious bizarre alien.

Keltham shall continue asking extremely basic and/or extremely difficult questions!  And seizing one book after another from the library (this time with their guidance) and reading random pages from it!

Facts that are likely to become clear to his audience:

- Keltham does tend to look at you when you drop a pen on the floor and strategically pick it up.

- Keltham believes that they were assigned to him as a research team.

- Keltham is a proud man, but has an alien concept of pride which does not preclude him continually calling his own ideas stupid.

- Keltham thinks himself to be in charge of something he calls the Golarion Industrialization Project, but does not seem to act or talk in any way that reflects this self-assigned high status.  Trying to show him overt signs of deference causes him to produce odd looks and uncomfortable side glances.

- Keltham thinks his researchers all need to learn basic calculus in order to be able to work on his project.  Obviously they are going to be dealing with all sorts of things that equilibrate, and you need to learn derivatives to understand equilibria.  Keltham hopes the smarter ones among them can have learned the basics there before they reconvene tomorrow.

- Keltham is following an unknown ruleset for sexual mindgames which permits him to appreciate prettiness and physical stretches through (completely direct and unhidden) looking, but not to respond verbally to verbal hints of interest.

- Keltham's mind runs completely skew to all other mindgames played in Cheliax.

- Keltham has absolutely no idea how Golarion, Cheliax, or this entire universe, operates.

- Keltham believes and takes for granted that they are all being paid lots of money to work for him.

They were not technically told to tell Keltham they're being paid lots of money to work for him but, if he is under this impression, maybe it'll incline him to pay them lots of money, once he's negotiating those equity contracts. Seeming vulnerable to coercion is rarely in one's interests. They have some cheerful conversations about what to buy with all the money they are (hypothetically) being paid. 

Given the actual assignment here, the students of Ostenso's Institute etc etc are mostly interested in figuring out Keltham's world's ruleset for flirting, but if calculus is part of it, then they will certainly learn calculus. 

Once Keltham has gone to bed there'll be a debrief with the mindreaders and hopefully it'll clear up all the confusing bits. 

Keltham notices himself starting to become tired, which means he should stop now.  He could go on further, but he's planning to try to poke or summon his Intrinsic World Keltham-god, followed by trying to talk to Asmodeus, so any energy he'll predictably recover after a hot bath should be reserved for that.

Now that he's pausing to think about it, on reflection, how suspicious is it that he's managed to run around this whole library - learning about spells and wondrous items, and some small amount of basic magical theory, and what little is known here about material science - without learning much about the gods whose utility functions and strategies apparently play a critical role in determining the equilibria of this whole universe?

...yeah, pretty suspicious.  Not quite as suspicious as it would be if all the books weren't written with appallingly low reasoning standards, implying a world whose general epistemics are cratered on some quality levels.  Not as suspicious as it would be if that library hadn't also lacked good explanatory books and knowledge about spellcraft, compared to what some research haremettes were able to pull out of their bagpacks because they were wizard students specifically.  It could just be a really really really awful reference library.

But the theory that they were trying to prevent him from knowing too much about other gods also made a tentative advance prediction about how much luck he'd have in the library, and that prediction has now been fulfilled.

On the plus side, there's now a lot more entities than just Cheliax of whose mere existence Keltham is moderately confident, in the branch of possible reality where the whole library wasn't just faked.  And while that faking is very possible given his current epistemic state, there are levels of paranoia which are hard to operate productively.  Like, "maybe they can just manufacture whole books from scratch as I want to look at them" or "maybe a god is individually puppeting all the other humans present" or "maybe one of the girls is an illusion-disguised advanced wizard who is mind-controlling me to think some thoughts but not others".  There's so many possible paranoid theories like that, and they typically don't imply obvious low-cost winning counterstrategies.

Off to his bedroom Keltham goes, after exhorting his research harem to sleep well, for there is much to be done the next day!

"He's completely insane," Elias Abarco, fifth-circle divination specialist with Chelish intelligence, declares, shooing the teenagers out of an armchair so that he can flop in it and expound on this. "I don't know if everyone in his world is like that, he conceives of himself as an outlier, but he conceives of himself as an outlier in our direction - less Lawful, more Evil - so maybe the rest of them are even worse. There's not going to be a good gentle way to break it to him that Hell is painful and there's not going to be a good gentle way to break it to him that Cheliax bans heresy and I'm not even sure there's going to be a good way to break it to him that we execute murderers? Or....the bit of good news is that I don't think it'll especially occur to him that Cheliax is worse than other places along the dimensions he cares about, he'll be as unimpressed with anywhere else."

"Did he notice people flirting," Yaisa Castilla, who was doing a frankly exhausting amount of flirting, asks as soon as there's enough of a pause that it's plausibly not an interruption.

".....yes," Abarco says. "He, uh - do you want to explain -"

Atanasio Torres, sixth-circle conjuration specialist with Chelish intelligence, glares murderously at Elias. "....he thinks you all were offered as an effort to trick him into sharing his genes with Cheliax without getting paid," he says eventually. "So he doesn't want to get anyone pregnant until that's been negotiated."

"What?"

"Negotiated with who?"

"His - there are other men at eighteen intelligence!"

"I thought he specifically wanted to have hundreds of children!"

"He didn't just not get anyone pregnant he wouldn't even flirt with us!"

"- he might've been thinking it's harder to exercise self-control farther along -"

"I also suspect he doesn't have much sexual experience," says Abarco. "And, remember, he is insane. You'll be really confused if you try to model him as a sane person."

"Who'd he like best?"

"I'm not sure he was successfully differentiating you."

"What'd he like best."

"- I think at least in the abstract he admires, uh, subtlety."

"He's not subtle."

"Well, he's insane."

Keltham takes a very long hot bath, much longer than he usually takes hot showers.  It's honestly been kind of a day for him.  Even after the plane crash.  He was simultaneously trying to infer the reality of an entire world and neither confirm nor deny his sexual attraction to a room full of women whose individual identities he would have more luck keeping track of if they had been introduced to his experiential universe one at a time.  And if they had not all been wearing identical school-issued clothing.  And not been of all the same unfamiliar... appearance-cluster? that isn't whatever appearance-cluster a dimensional outsider would assign to dath ilan, that Keltham's facial-recognition centers have been trained to discriminate inside.  And if they didn't all have two separate names.  That were all built from the same unusual distribution over consonants.  Or if they didn't all tend to talk at the same time.

(On reflection, he did like that one who always insisted she could do something better than some other girl who'd spoken previously.  But it's been a long night since she last identified herself and he has not remembered her name.)

Eventually, Keltham lies down in bed, closes his eyes, and - for only a short time - tries to think more like a Keeper.

The Keepers conserve much that is hazardous, maybe not even the greatest Keeper knows how much (would you really want all the cognitohazards concentrated in one person); and of that, it will often be true that the larger part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists.  But among the cognitohazards that Keepers are known to conserve, there is most famously the fact that if you go all-out on thinking in ways that locally obey coherence theorems in order to ape the higher unbounded structures, it can sometimes be wearing on the more... human parts of the human.

It is a necessary implication of the Utility structure that you can, for any three outcomes orderable by strict preference x < y < z, mix the outer two outcomes x, z at some probability p * x + (1 - p) * z in order to yield a mixed outcome of which you are indifferent between that and a certainty of y.

Or, in plainer language, there exists some probability p which is small enough that, if you are a coherent thinker, you would rather have a (1 - p) probability of getting the smallest local unit of money (say, a ten-thousandth of a labor-hour) and a p probability of dying the true death, compared to having nothing.  Or a p probability of your mother's true death, or less pleasant things.

Most normal people - that is, people inside a small range around average intelligence that includes Keltham - would not get much further in life on account of insisting to themselves that they confront such points.  That just sets up the component parts of you to get angry or sad about the higher logical structures that your more abstract parts are thinking about.  There is no urgent need, no benefit; what'd be the point of the soulstrife?

But that, Keltham is guessing, is the way a small mind should try to arrange itself, if it wants to receive overly direct messages from a large mind, without that hurting too much.  He's seen the books these people write, they do not have their facts and their values clearly labeled and separately binned, they do not know what is observation and what is inferred, they don't break down multistep inferences into steps... or at least, they write like that.  But Keltham can imagine how that mind, internally so disorganized, might slosh around and maybe hurt if somebody dropped a FACT and a STRATEGY with an EXPECTED UTILITY into it, when that was something outside of its native ontology.

Where the problem is, of course, that Keltham is not really a Keeper; and his own mind is also going to be very disorganized, very human, very not a locally coherent shard of higher unbounded Validity, Probability, Utility, Decision.  He's not sure - as he contemplates this - that there is very much he can do by thinking and meditating, to improve on whatever dath ilan has already given him in the way of thoughts clearly separated and binned.  He already draws as many distinctions as he's going to draw, his mind already has as much landing area as it'll have, for the assertion that some fact is 30% likely, or that one strategy is preferred to another by an amount that has a ratio to how much he prefers a hot shower over a hot bath.

But for whatever it's worth, Keltham tries to make it that much easier for whatever god to see him, and maybe talk to him.  He thinks about his direct sensory observations, mostly the now-internalized and partial memories of Carissa; his brain retrieves these memories, from these he infers the corresponding past experiences (not a certain inference, there could be memory-altering spells), Carissa may have been veridically describing a world, in need of industrialization.  He has seen letters upon pages in another language, he has had that selfsame language inserted into his mind by spell, and those written pages seemed to confirm in passing the existence of that world.  People exist in that world, incoherent but just barely coherent enough that you can look at them and idealize out notions of preference, shards of Utility; there is then the opportunity for Coordination, multiplayer strategies that gain more utility for all those players; of this is symbolized wealth, money; and this Keltham desires himself, not so much because he plans to buy particular things, here, but because he will be able to buy things in the future.  And because he is proud, and wants to prove something, maybe he can never prove what he could have done in dath ilan - and maybe, it is easier to acknowledge now, he could not have done anything in dath ilan - but if Keltham cannot make something of himself even here, where he is this special, then what is he worth at all?

But all that is Keltham's Pride, and Keltham sets it aside for contacting Asmodeus later.  It is there only to be acknowledged as the thing that lends Utility to the outcome that Keltham prefers, as he reaches out to a hypothetical god theorized relative to a background reality that was inferred but never directly observed.  A god that desires higher Coordination for its own sake and for the sake of all the people who gain their own utility as they go about their own ways and through their own efforts.  Because Keltham is hoping for these probable classes of outcomes that are the industrialization of Golarion and Keltham taking his own profit from it, if he and the God of Coordination can shift their strategies mutually, in some unknown way.  He is, in his decision to think this, hoping for the outcome where the God of Coordination talks to him about that part, leading to a corresponding abstract unknown shift in Keltham's actual strategies along with the Coordination-God's strategies; and perhaps also whatever relationship is bound up in being a cleric...

...the squirrel has contorted itself up into a really odd, actually unprecedented shape, some strange half-mockery of Lawful thought.  And prophecy in this world is broken.  This fragment of Abadar's attention is not smart enough to immediately forecast with certainty, using just naked intelligence, what happens if you talk to a squirrel while it is curled up in that weird shape.  Probably nothing terrible, but squirrels are fragile even under the best of circumstances, this squirrel is strange, prophecy is broken, and it would be awfully tragic if this one exploded.

This isn't even Asmodeus's fault.  Abadar specifically paid for that part not to happen.  It's all the squirrel's own idea, whatever this is.

As a side note, this does tend to confirm the set of theories where this squirrel actually has no idea what it's doing.  Which would tend to go along with the class of hypotheses where the squirrel came from outside Golarion and maybe the whole local multiverse.  This world sure got itself messed up, didn't it.

Hopefully the squirrel tries praying in a more normal posture, at some point, and Abadar can have a more normal divine conversation.

At least the squirrel is now explicitly asking to be a cleric.

Cleric levels get exponentially more expensive very fast as you add more of them, when that happens by direct divine intervention.  But it's clear that this squirrel could use more help than just the one cleric level, if it's going to have any chance of surviving to divulge the more important things it knows.

With the equivalent of a frustrated sigh, Abadar moves to drop three cleric levels on this very strange squirrel -

Make it seven!  It'll be more exciting with seven!  Nethys will totally pay to make up the difference!  Abadar's into that sort of thing, right?

- drops seven levels on the squirrel.

What it feels like to be a cleric varies, because if you perturb a part of a human's brain the rest of the brain will generate all kinds of explanations of what just happened. It's not outside the space of experiences that people report without, in fact, actually being a cleric, because they're fasting or on drugs or just meditating very intensely, but this doesn't usually produce a lot of confusion because afterwards you either have spells, or you don't.

Commonly reported: a feeling of being seen by a penetrating beam of light. That feeling that you sometimes get in a dream where you see someone and hug them and know as a sort of background fact that they are the love of your life and you are reuniting after a long separation, even if your awake mind is pretty sure that person doesn't exist. A feeling of noticing there's something in your chest, or in your arms, that's been there your whole life but which you just realized you can move. A sense of being showered in transcendent divine love. A really intense variant of coming out of subspace. A moment of all your sensory input sending 'THE DIVINE' instead of their usual format of sensory input. A feeling of opening your eyes, except they were already open.

...whoa.  That is the most interesting if extremely transient drug effect that Keltham has ever experienced.

Keltham desires to communicate in more detail, because that will probably lead to classes of outcomes where he can execute more effectively on Golarion industrialization and also on bringing more honorable Coordination to this weird place.

Abadar is scared to talk to you when you're like this!  Abadar doesn't know what will happen if He does!

Nobody seems to be talking back to Keltham's carefully coherently configured desires for communication with the divine.  But something definitely just spoke to him or touched him or patted his head or screamed in inaudible frustration or... or something.

Maybe he should call off further experiments until checking in with Carissa or other domain experts, since he tried what felt like the most obvious avenue, and got a result that was very briefly like being on drugs.  Some drugs are dangerous, especially if you take a lot of them.  Or maybe that's just what happens if you try to talk to some weird god that wasn't already in Golarion; and Asmodeus, a known quantity, would still be safe to try to contact...