The plan is that, unless there are entities here which think and write books extremely quickly compared to Keltham, they probably cannot fake an entire library in order to control Keltham's flow of information.

"Lots of random sampling, accompanied by trying to infer back the world that the pages were written in.  I'm not trying to acquire thorough knowledge of anything, just orient myself to this whole universe."

"Well, if you find the personal diaries of the Archduke you've got to copy a page down so we can mysteriously reference it at parties, later, and make him wonder how much we know." That feels like the right amount of aesthetically Evil while completely unobjectionable even to Good which Keltham seems comfortable in.

Dinner arrives. It is generous heaps of a dozen different things, since they didn't know what he'd like; fish and rice and bread and shellfish and vegetables and stuffed pheasant and seared meat and fruits and pastries.

LADY WHAT - she must have been joking, even most criminals wouldn’t do that and no sensible Archduke would just leave his personal diaries in the library either.

Keltham samples everything, and will gravitate towards the more protein-heavy dishes accompanied by fruit, treating the pastries and bread as a dessert.  He chews the first bites deliberately, experiencing and considering, and then eats much more rapidly after he has already Observed the New Experience.

The food is much better than at the Worldwound and she's going to enjoy it while it lasts. She also suspects people are frantically making some arrangements in the library so it's better for Keltham not to be done too quickly, though she's also not going to observably stall him. 

When they're done she'll ask which rooms are free and pick one out and demonstrate the symbol on the door. "See you in the morning?"

"Suppose so.  I check explicitly: you don't expect me to accidentally get lost on the way to the library, or lost on the way back, in a way that I can't recover from by running into somebody to talk to."

"I expect not but if you want an escort I could make space in my schedule."

"Eh, think I'm fine checking empirically how lost I get without you, before I assume it's bad enough you need to be always following me around.  I'm just checking that it is, in fact, inside the disaster class where you can sensibly plan to see what actually goes wrong and then recover, instead of some plausible-seeming missteps being bad enough to require advance foresight."  This language and the number of words it takes to say things oh his ass.

"You will not wander off a cliff or through a portal to the Abyss if you get lost, and probably some of your security's following you, so it should be recoverable."

Under other circumstances Keltham might ask about intelligence-amplification headbands that might prevent him from forgetting his path; but mind-amplification is also mind-alteration, so Keltham is not about to just yank one of those things onto his head, even if supplied, before he manages to run across some mentions of them in the library.

Keltham shall now attempt to explore yet another place where no dath ilani has ever been.  How is he doing at Finding the Library?

If he asks the staff they will show him down a flight of stairs and through a courtyard to a ....very modest library, really. Two rooms with high ceilings and shelves full of books.

Also it's full of teenage girls sitting three to an overstuffed armchair and giggling.

Is there anything that looks like a section on gods, or a section on global-factional-politics?

(Keltham is (a) bent on his mission and (b) processing teenage girls as extremely normal inhabitants of libraries.  It may take him a bit of a delayed drop to ask what they're doing in a supposedly high-security area and why the gender ratio.)

There's a section on theology, which looks rather sparse, and a section on world affairs which seems to have the global-factional-politics he might hope for. 

The teenage girls observe him raptly but don't interrupt, he looks in-a-hurry and also (to Detect Magic) there's clearly several high-level invisible people shadowing him, which means it would be a bad idea to make sudden movements, even ones that are just accidentally dropping your pen on the floor so as to strategically pick it up. 

(Keltham rolls against his SED to notice the attention.  Fails.)

Theology seems like the highest priority.  Pull a random book and look at a random page.

A series of mental exercises for Asmodeans, to practice submission to the will of their god blah blah blah, meditations for executing on their intentions successfully. Meditations to consider before making a promise. Meditations for raising Asmodean children. Meditations for blah blah blah anticipating Hell in a productive and confident fashion.

Hm.  Seems broadly consistent with the picture Carissa drew, so far.  Different random page?

The physical structure of Hell. It's not technically a plane, but nine of them; the only one accessible from the rest of the universe is Avernus, the first, where souls go when they die. The second is only accessible from the first (and third), the third from the second, etc. 

Let's try a different book.  Do any of them look like they'd have information about the other gods?

Nope! This library contains no books about gods other than Asmodeus. Those are illegal in Cheliax and could have been acquired on very short notice but spot-modification would be, well, hellish.

Okay that's downright odd, given the extent to which negotiations between gods formed part of this world's Foundations of Order, in the mental picture Keltham was drawing; you shouldn't be able to understand current reality without knowing who had what utility function.  Book on history of divine negotations?

Also no!

(That's....not even a kind of book that can be found on short notice; it's probably in some private libraries but not Chelish private libraries.)

A book about Shelyn, goddess of art, love, and beauty, has turned up on a shelf in the corner; he must've missed it in his first scan.

Great, let's flip to a random page in that one.

Shelyn once had a brother, but then His utility function was inverted and He became a god of torture; it's very sad. 

SHIT WHAT okay let's temporarily forget breadth-first search and read the pages before and after that one.

For a time, she and Dou-Bral shared the portfolios of beauty, love and the arts, and were worshiped by the early Taldans, until at some point they argued, and Dou-Bral abandoned Golarion for the far dark places between the planes.

When Dou-Bral returned to Golarion, he had become the god of mutilation, misery and torture: Zon-Kuthon. Believing that Dou-Bral still existed within Zon-Kuthon, Shelyn reached out him, but he pierced her hand with his black nails. When Thron, their father, tried to welcome him, Zon-Kuthon captured and tortured the wolf-spirit beyond recognition.

One myth speaks of how Zon-Kuthon first came into conflict with Abadar, the god of culture, wealth, and stability. Seeing the crimes Zon-Kuthon committed in Golarion, Abadar knew that he must be punished, and made a bargain with the evil god. Zon-Kuthon agreed to go into exile on the Plane of Shadow for as long as the sun hung in the sky in exchange for an item of his choosing from the First Vault. This imprisonment was not meant to be over as soon as it was, though, and when the sun stopped shining upon Golarion during the Age of Darkness, Abadar reluctantly honored the deal, giving Zon-Kuthon the first undead shadow, which the Midnight Lord has used to craft evil creatures in his realm of Xovaikain ever since.

Okay, the utility-function-inverting thing does not sound like a thing that typically happens to humans walking around, but SHIT Golarion has issues.  How do you even manage to negotiate to a multi-agent-optimal boundary with the god of mutilation, misery, and torture?  Would it accept nonsentient things to torture if the nonsentient things were configured carefully enough to match its utility function, or is the utility function too precisely inverted to accept that?  Does it have any interests in common with the unflipped gods besides the continued existence of the world despite Rovagug...

Let's put this book back for now, and go look at global politics.

There's more here. Perhaps the Archduke found it more interesting. There are dozens of different countries with their own summary-books, and then books on The Ancient Tian Empires and Lessons From The Pharaohs and Great Heroes Of History and then books on trade routes and shipping and what plants grow in what places and what magical beasts roam which wildernesses.

Several of the books have maps, and the maps agree on nearby things and diverge on faraway things. 

Nidal, a nearby country: ruled by Zon-Kuthon, the flipped utility function god. At the annual festivals of mutilation, people stab one eye out, or cut off some of their toes. Servants of other gods are barred from entering on pain of a slow and horrible death; some Good cults are suspected of operating there anyway, though it rarely ends well for them. A random flip reveals some sketches of Nidal's law enforcement, grotesquely scarred people with a bloody whip in one hand; a first-person account from a refugee who escaped to Cheliax and converted to the service of Asmodeus, an excerpt from Zon-Kuthon's holy book's writing about how best to keep people alive while you torture them.

Andoran, another nearby country: was part of Cheliax until it broke away blah blah blah. Andoran has now banned Evil and is trying to require everybody to be Good, with limited success. One of their major social problems is that all of their productive, intelligent Evil people left; another is that they keep aggravating their allies in the Inner Sea by refusing to contain piracy; another is that they abandoned Law when they banned Evil and there's been a corresponding breakdown of the social order. A random flip: Evil people forced to flee Andoran tell horror stories of the disarray caused by the country's ban on Evil; a ship captain killed by pirates and subsequently resurrected at great cost to his family accuses the government of Andoran of permitting the pirates to stalk the seas for their own benefit; a historian on how much more prosperous Andoran was when it was part of Cheliax.

Osirion is ruled by a god-king selected by Abadar, god of blah blah blah. It's a poor country but a populous one, fed by the generous grain crops of the Sphinx river, and has a wealth of ruins of the ancient Osirian empire that adventurers are now painstakingly extracting from their trapped tombs. A random flip: Osirion is a prospective ally for Cheliax due to their shared commitment to Law; Osirion's tombs contain relics of an ancient, more advanced civilization, the pharaohs of seven thousand years ago, and Cheliax is collecting and learning from many of those artifacts. Another flip is about how Osirion banned grain exporting.

Rahadoum, another neighbor, bans all the gods, and all their servants. On a random flip, a theologian argues that this is ineffectual, the exact way gods get information about the Material Plane isn't known and they certainly benefit from worshippers but banning their worship, even if people obeyed the ban, which they won't, just means the gods would rely more heavily on non-worshipper methods, which do exist; the gods, for instance, know of faraway worlds where they aren't worshipped at all. On another random flip the case is made that Rahadoum was more prosperous when it was part of Cheliax. Another one is about shipping lanes.

Any fine subtleties of the Chelish authors are going to be completely wasted on Keltham due to his absolute incredulity at this whole library section.

On the first random page Keltham opened to, the author was saying what some 'Duke' (high-level Government official) was thinking while ordering the east gates to be sealed, which, like, what, how would the historian know what somebody was thinking, at best you get somebody else's autobiographical account of what they claim they were thinking, and then the writer is supposed to say that what was observed was the claim, and mark separately any inferences from the observation, because one distinguishes observations from inferences.

This.  This is supposed to be an expository educational history book.  This is supposedly in the nonfiction section.  What did the author think they were doing.  This isn't reasoning, this is ink somebody spilled on a page and it happened to come out looking like words and everybody was so amazed at the coincidence they decided to reprint it.

There are no probability distributions on this page.  There are no numbers on this page.  There are no distinct premises and conclusions anywhere on this page.  This page contains more fallacies than it contains distinct words.

Keltham puts back the book.  Maybe it was just written by a three-year-old.  Yeah, Keltham already knows that it wasn't written by a three-year-old, it was written by somebody from a lower-intelligence world; but maybe the next book will have been written by a member of the cognitive elite wearing an intelligence headband.

The next random page in the next random book is written like a school parody of how you would critique somebody else's faction, if it had never occurred to the writer that anybody in the audience might think that the other faction would have a different story.  Like.  The author doesn't even try to explain what the other faction thought they were thinking.  The other faction is just supposed to be running around being Wrong because they are the Wrong Faction.

Okay, so, Keltham is just going to adopt the rule of not believing anything that a Golarion author seems to explicitly be saying or even calling attention to, and is going to flip through random pages only trying to infer the world that gave birth to these parodies of argument and exposition.  Just looking for things that the author seemed to assume away as politically nonvalent obvious uncontroversial truths, the equivalent of mentioning that the sky is blue when that's not a focus of political attention.

To the extent Keltham supposes that this class of inference is reliable, it does seem to be confirmed that a place called Cheliax exists.

Some other points that Keltham is able to pick up on:

- People had higher tech seven thousand years ago.  What?  What happened?  Some kind of infohazard thing that required all the tech to be buried?  But if that was true, why are they digging it up again?  When dath ilan ran into the Past Infohazard they went to a lot of trouble to mothball all the old cities, nobody sane would just wander in and start looking at them without knowing why they'd been hidden.

- You get to be a really powerful wizard by killing monsters rather than by deliberate practice.  Why.

- Governance as Keltham knows it does not exist.  Prediction markets do not exist.  Delegates, Electors, Legislators, and Tribunes do not exist.  Nobody seems to be talking about anything that looks like an obvious preference-aggregation mechanism.  Choices get attributed to people and it is at no point obvious why anyone would listen to those people.

- People fight giant destructive battles, and it does not occur to any author to remark or explain on how multi-agent-optimal this is not.  It doesn't seem to be a remarkable fact when it gets mentioned in passing.

- It looks sort of like... factions have sharp territorial boundaries, and there's a thing where you kill the person at the top of the faction and the people inside the faction all switch sides to the other faction that killed them; which, what why would anybody do that.  Why, of all the things to successfully coordinate on, would people coordinate on that?  Keltham is really missing something here about individual incentives.

- This entire planet is so on mind-altering drugs Keltham doesn't even just what what what

By the time Keltham reaches anything about Zon-Kuthon, he catches a glimpse of an infohazardous page, winces, and just shuts the book.  He may eventually have to work out what is true and what is Drugs; but whatever that was, it is probably not the most important thing for him to deal with right now.  In fact, maybe he should move on from the political history shelf entirely.

So is there a section of this library about "Magic: How Does It Even No Seriously What The Fuck Golarion"?

There's a book on wizarding education and a book on dragon spellcasting and a book on famous sorcerer bloodlines and their achievements.

And what occurs, do tell, if Keltham flips to the start of the wizarding education book, in hopes of finding a careful and reasoned exposition of background theory.

There's a long essay by the author about the foolishness of other wizards who took the wrong approach to the craft and didn't approach it with the discipline Asmodeus requires. Then there's a long recounting of his achievements as a wizard and as a teacher of wizardry. After that there's a discussion of the simplest spells and meditations you should do in order to find them easier to hold in your head and cast properly, and tips for common errors, and some argumentation about which simple spell is the best to start with. 

There's no mention of needing to fight monsters in the wizarding education book. There is a mention that you should inflict punishments at the end of the day because students are unlikely immediately after a punishment to be able to concentrate on their spellbooks, and if you're worried they'll run home and get it healed you can keep them late.

Maybe there's some local custom about how written knowledge is supposed to be a record of all the things you shouldn't do, and from this, you can infer what you actually should do instead.  Keltham genuinely has no idea if he's even supposed to believe all the bragging the author puts in front of the book about his achievements, as presented in a format that Keltham himself finds almost absolutely unconvincing.  Maybe it's this huge string of blatantly false advertisements, and it's actually signaling cleverness at crafting false advertisements, or... Keltham doesn't get Golarion at all.  Is he supposed to believe the thing about storing up punishments to be inflicted at the end of the day, in defiance of all behavioral shaping theory if you were even doing that in the first place; and the implicit claim that students are so admiring of this teacher and desirous to learn his knowledge, that they stick around even after being hurt?  Keltham is guessing this is just a deliberately-unbelievable status brag claim in a very alien format?  Whatever; it should mostly fall under the rule, for the moment, of not believing any fact which a Drugs Author seems to be actually trying to make him believe.

Mostly, Keltham is interested in the discussion of the simplest spells, the meditations, the tips for common errors.  How does a very basic spellcast actually work, if Keltham tries taking what the author says at face value, when it hopefully maybe looks like the author isn't being political and would be discussing something that ought to be politically nonvalent ordinary common knowledge.

Magic behaves sort of like a liquid, but it clings to itself. When you have a very little bit of it, the clings-to-itself effects dominate the behaves-like-a-liquid effects, and you can shape it, which is done through the will of the caster, on a complex scaffold that is itself magic (doing it without a scaffold is possible, magic got started in the first place after all, but much much harder). The simplest spells are those that need to be shaped as closed 2-manifolds, and you have to understand how magic behaves reasonably well to get it to the correct shape, and then you have to stabilize it and tie it off, after which it sits until you want to cast it. Casting it is much simpler - you untie it and flick it loose. 

Does it say how to get a very little bit of magic and use your will on it in the first place?  Sort of thing Keltham could try literally right now?

You need a spellbook, and inks which anchor the scaffold (the kinds of ink appropriate for spellbooks are so appropriate because the ink binds to the magic well). Here's the spell diagram he personally uses for new students, though of course they'll develop their own diagrams over time as they optimize their scaffold for their personal needs.

Once you have a spellbook and inks anchoring the scaffold, you should be able to learn to feel the magic. The meditations help with that. Book author recommends preparing spells on the student's scaffold while they concentrate; it might be easier for them to feel the magic while it's in motion. Some students pick it up quickly, within an hour, mostly predicted by lots of childhood magic exposure; he doesn't know any promising student to have taken more than a week.

...okay, promising enough for trying later.

But really, it feels like there should be - much more knowledge available on what magic does, even if the natives have no clue why, some overview of what it can do?  Fine, they didn't write their books for aliens.  But Golarion seems to run on magic to an amazing extent.  There really ought to be a book that gives him a better overview of magic than this, somewhere in this library.

Why is there no such thing as a subject-encyclopedia, on any of these shelves?  Do subject-encyclopedias just not scale down to a much smaller Golarion book market?  Shouldn't they be able to produce small subject-encyclopedias?

...maybe he's just not in the reference section, because the reference section is behind a secret door that looks like a bookcase, as any habitual user of Golarion libraries would surely know and take for granted.

(When you buy your houses separately from the land it's on, you can afford nice high-tech specialist-manufactured houses.  For many, many dath ilani, the definition of 'nice' would very much include a library with hidden doors that look like bookcases.  Why, what else would you spend money on?)

Keltham turns around, with the intention of identifying some prior library inhabitant who might be able to explain if he's just doing library exploration Completely Wrong.

Keltham very quickly turns around and looks back at the bookshelves again.  It's not what you would call an optimal strategy but it is, at least, a strategy which can be implemented fast.

EMERGENCY INTERNAL KELTHAM MEETING RIGHT NOW

That sure is a lot of girls his age.

Pretty ones.

In a high-security zone.

He does not, in fact, have any right to be surprised by this.

Dath ilani civilization would likely try exactly the same thing, if somebody showed up from an alternate timeline, with +4SD intelligence, derived from a different selection history, yielding an entirely different set of intelligence-promoting alleles.

What does his brain mean "    ", there's got to be more to think than that.

Could this have, like, happened in some way that would fit exactly into his prior life narrative, so he would already know exactly what to think of it.  Is that too much to ask?

Okay.  Okay.  Let's - just slowly back up - and start with most important question here.

Does he want to have sex with all the girls in this room?

...there's not enough girls in this room, if they want to make sure to grab a copy of each of his 46 chromosomes with say 99% probability.

While an interesting point, this is not really the central point under consideration.  Does he want to have sex with all of these girls plus a large further number of such, thus having enough kids to bring the dath ilani geneset to this world and - what, bump up the average central intelligence factor by half a standard deviation?  How many generations would that take, and would it actually be all that useful compared to whatever heredity-optimization processes the locals are running already?

Keltham doesn't actually know offhand how to do those calculations.  If Keltham had known this was how his life was going to go, he would have spent a lot more time studying population genetics, sexual technique, and flirting.

It has been a while since Keltham's mind has ended up in this much internal disarray.  It's going into loops and repeating the same facts, and occasionally the same blank stares, just rephrasing the same thoughts over and over.  Like "that sure is a lot of pretty girls" and "they're probably also some of the smartest girls around locally even if that's not directly visible, at least if they want the next generation of wizards directly off this event, which I would in their shoes" and "I should have realized earlier that, rather than just showing up with my head stuffed full of valuable extraworldly information in my brain, I actually had a whole lot more highly valuable information inside my testicles".

It is, in fact, this last thought that snaps him out of it.  Sometimes, just rephrasing your existing thoughts in slightly different ways does knock something loose, as long as you're not repeating exactly the same thoughts.

The sum of his private property on arrival: valuable knowledge, slightly valuable clothing, and valuable genes.

Those sneaky sneaks.  They thought that maybe if they threw enough girls at him fast enough, he'd be seduced into just going along with that, without first asking for any form of compensation for his valuable genetic information.

Or possibly they were planning to offer him whatever's standard.  Keltham has not observed them try to get away with his precious bodily fluids without paying; one must distinguish inference from observation, after all.

But, yeah, no actual sex with these girls until Keltham is oriented enough to know how local money works and set up an explicit contract.

...snuggles?

Oral?

Okay, so, given the sheer amount of internal disarray he has going on here, he is going to give himself time to think about this, absorb, and not come to a conclusion right away.

They do say not to rush into sex if you are feeling rushed, and that... probably extends unchanged even to very large quantities of sex?  Why is his brain slightly reluctant to accept that obvious-seeming meta-conclusion.

Invisibly, and also inaudibly, two high level wizards spent a truly heroic length of time trying to have straight faces at each other and it's not totally clear who failed first because it was basically simultaneous.

"I -" says one of them, the one who doesn't need to breathe because he has a necklace of adaptation - "- reject the explanation that this is what people are like without free will or with better training in not using it."

The other one doesn't have a necklace of adaptation and does need oxygen and so takes several minutes to catch his breath. "My theory is that, probably, if I can trust my premises here, Cheliax exists."

"We should add to the list of things that go wrong with a honeypot setup, 'he decides that the presence of girls implies that his ejaculate is very valuable and he should not give it away for free'."

"Should we, though. When it will absolutely never ever happen again."

"Well, if we commission thousands of him, maybe in a few generations it's a common problem."

"Gods forbid."

"From what I know, the gods seem supportive."

"You know if Nethys gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and destroy themselves. Maybe if Abadar gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and end up like this."

"I have heard as many as several things about the pharaoh of Osirion and that seems probably wrong."

"But was it presented with the observations and inferences separated, with numbers for every sentence? No? I submit that you know nothing about Osirion except that a book-writer wanted you to believe that it exists."

"Observation: Osirian women can't own money. Inference: therefore, the pharaoh probably does not oblige them to pay him to fuck them."

"I didn't hear any numbers."

"Thirty seven. Point one five. Eight hundred ninety six."

"Ah. A credible claim, then."

Keltham needs a Plan.

He needs to handle this attempted mass mating rush in a way that neither immediately escalates to cuddling, nor signals that he is opposed to the mass mating per se.

Can he just... be nice and smile at the girls, but pretend not to notice their flirting attempts, for now, possibly?  Or be deliberately ambiguous, leaning negative, but with occasional positive signs thrown in?  Would that work to correctly signal that he was delaying but leaving his options open, if the underlying strategy was successfully decoded by the other side?  It's more of a classically feminine stratagem than a classically masculine one; but 'feminine' is here standing in for the sexuality in relatively greater demand, and the inversion for his own case should be as obvious to them as it is to him.  And even if the stratagem isn't correctly decoded by the amorous horde, obscured by unknown subgaps of the cultural gap between he and they, it seems relatively failsafe?  Given the common-knowledge-avoidance underlying theory of flirting, sending ambiguous signals should avoid either escalating or terminating -

Wait.  That style of flirting exists in dath ilan, deployed by people who know what 'common knowledge' is.  'Common knowledge' is not a very advanced formalism, but it is very plausibly not something that is known here; or plausibly something that exists, but is beyond the lower quartile of a population with -3.2 average intelligence.

A lot of romantic complications seem like they would plausibly be beyond the lower quartile of a -3.2g world, if that world designed or just equilibrated to romantic norms that worked for almost-everyone.

...do amorous girls in Cheliax... even do subtlety... at all...?

No, he might be panicking prematurely here.  Carissa opened by saying that she'd be curious about what happened to him, but afterwards mentioned that Keltham might be tired and need to find a bedroom to sleep in, rather than suggesting that they immediately go to a cuddleroom.  Romantic norms here probably call for some subtlety.  Probably.

...how about if he smiles in a friendly way, looks appreciative of appearances, and pretends not to notice any overtures that aren't fully overt?  He's from a very alien place, and it should be much more plausible than usual that he actually isn't picking up on flirting attempts.

At the point where Keltham noticed that he'd been surrounded by pretty girls his own age, he'd been about to... ask around for library-help, in case he was looking in the wrong place to find subject-encyclopedias.

Keltham observes of himself that he is, in fact, scared, even armed with his new Plan.

The stereotypically wise question to ask when you're scared is, "Suppose you go on avoiding this forever, how well will that work out for you?"

And Keltham knows well that he does not, in fact, wish to avoid talking to amorous female hordes forever.  Every man must, at some point, talk to the amorous female hordes bent on mating with him, and pretend not to notice.  This is wisdom.

In full knowledge that he is both silly and doomed (for he is not without understanding of how his own life might appear, seen from the outside) Keltham turns around to address the library.

"Do any of you happen to know if I'm looking in the right place for..."  Taldane doesn't have the word subject-encyclopedia.  Great.  "The kind of book on magic that would say - how much weight magic can lift, how much water it can turn to steam, how fast a little bit of magic accelerates when it clings to another little bit of magic?"

He has the rapt attention of the horde. 

"Principles of Spell Design has that," someone says instantly.

"I don't know if they'll have that here."

"Archduke Henderthane's not a wizard, I don't think -"

" - he might not say -"

"- but most of the noble houses've got sorcerous bloodlines, rather than studying to be wizards -"

"- it was only recently under the glorious guidance of House Thrune and Asmodeus that wizardry's better than a sorcerer bloodline -"

"And it still, you know, depends on the sorcerer bloodline. And on how smart you are."

"And if you're a noble you're enhancing splendour not cunning which works better with being a sorcerer -"

"- anyway if he's either not a wizard or pretending not to be he won't have Principles of Spell Design in his public library."

"Ostenso's Imperial Academy Of Magic has it. - that's where we go to school."

"Probably someone could fetch it for you."

...Did the local government assign him a research harem?  Because these pretty girls sound a lot like an engineering team that somebody just tossed a problem.

Okay, that's honestly kind of awesome.  Keltham is not going to complain about this at all.

"Expect I'm gonna want a lot of books that aren't here, if there's better libraries than this," Keltham says out loud.  "Unless it's very low-overhead to grab them one at a time, let's build up a list before making a run.  Principles of Spell Design definitely sounds like the kind of title that should be on it.  Does anybody see a standout good book that's already here, for quickly getting some picture of magical basics?  Right now I have very little idea of what magic can do or what's already been tried."

The girls have ostensibly been examining the selection of books in this library for the last three hours but they spring into action to actually examine the selection. 

"You want Bloodlines, it's got a breakdown of all the known wizard spells by which sorcerer bloodlines manifest them and so it's got a breakdown of all the known wizard spells."

"I know I saw Serrano's Abjuration -"

"I have Lorca's A Definitive Guide To Summons in my backpack -"

"That's no good, I have Marias and it's better -"

"All known wizard spells sounds hella useful."  Though the fact that there's a bookable finite list implies incredibly strong design constraints, why isn't that like saying that one of your books contains all known blueprints for technology that uses electricity?  Maybe she just meant all the known popular ones?

Bloodlines is found in the library. It's in eight volumes but it's distinctly finite. The girls are quietly arguing with each other about which is the definitive text on Transmutation and about how far afield the book-fetchers will be persuadable to go. There is at least one whispered "Asmodeus's direct orders -"

Keltham is sufficiently intent on rapidly flipping through All The Wizard Spells that he's unlikely to overhear any whispers like that.

WHAT.  WHAT IS THIS.   HOW IS THIS THE LIST OF WIZARD SPELLS.  WHAT.

Mage's Faithful Hound

5th Circle, Conjuration

You conjure up a phantom watchdog that is invisible to everyone but yourself. It then guards the area where it was conjured (it does not move). The hound immediately starts barking loudly if any Small or larger creature approaches within 30 feet of it. (Those within 30 feet of the hound when it is conjured may move about in the area, but if they leave and return, they activate the barking.) The hound sees invisible and ethereal creatures. It does not react to figments, but it does react to shadow illusions.

If an intruder approaches to within 5 feet of the hound, the dog stops barking and delivers a vicious bite once per round. The dog also gets the bonuses appropriate to an invisible creature (see invisibility). Its bite is the equivalent of a magic weapon for the purpose of damage reduction. The hound cannot be attacked, but it can be dispelled.

The spell lasts for 1 hour per caster level, but once the hound begins barking, it lasts only 1 round per caster level. If you are ever more than 100 feet distant from the hound, the spell ends.

So you could either send something into the Elemental Plane of Fire, or alternatively with the same conserved-resource expenditure, materialize a temporary domesticated wolf.  Not, like, a barky bitey sphere or something, a domesticated wolf specifically.

The spell list is incredibly varied, gratuitously exotic, around three-quarters focused on combat (albeit this does make some sense if wizards only get more powerful by defeating monsters), and exponentially too tiny for a list of possible structures that can be made that complicated and which are key to a whole society.

But, wait, the pipes were enchanted to deliver hot water, weren't they?  Maybe all the utility stuff is - magic items, right.  The wizard spells are just the structures you can build using an item-scaffold, tie off, and then carry around until you fire them at something.  It would make sense for those to be combat-focused, because that's the context in which you'd fire something immediately and without carefully constructing a reusable magical item to do it instead.

It still doesn't make sense how there's a short finite list of structures this exotic.  Unless...

"Two wild-ass-guess hypotheses," Keltham says out loud.  "Confirm or refute.  Hypothesis one, only gods, or some extremely rare class of people with access to restricted stuff, can create," or rather compile but Taldane doesn't have the word, "spell designs.  Hypothesis two, there's a much wider variety of magicalized devices than standard wizard spells, too many for there to exist a comprehensive book set listing all such device templates.  Also, sorry all my words come out so long and stuffy-sounding, they'd be shorter in my native language."

"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...

...wait a minute.

There is definitely a sort of - affordance - inside Keltham's mind - that wasn't there before.  Like a door inside himself, with a flat plate that is clearly meant to be pushed rather than pulled.

...did the god-of-Keltham, or whatever he managed to touch, just cleric him?

Keltham did manage to pick up, from random library pages, that some clerics are supposed to be able to heal without much preparation.  That inner metaphorical door - feels like it should, if he opens it like this -

Warm divine energy washes in Keltham and through him, clearing away the lingering strained muscles from his earlier frantic dash through the Worldwound's cold.

First spell, heck yeah!

...wait.  This also means that whatever god it was just clericed Keltham and didn't tell him anything.

Darn it.  Keltham would really have thought the god-of-Keltham would have been interested enough in the Golarion industrialization plan to say something.

...assuming Keltham even got approximately the god he tried to visualize.

Okay, Keltham is feeling a little out of his depth, and slightly apprehensive about the potential side effects of his clever plans that he's just been charging ahead into.  This is a bit of a Maybe-Not-Easily-Revocable Event with Side Effects that he's gotten as a result.  He's going to sleep, and then he'll talk to Carissa or other domain experts tomorrow morning about his sudden clericing, before he proceeds further.

No one interrupts his sleep though there are a lot of unhappy stressed conversations happening where he can't hear them.

Keltham sleeps for a while, his dath ilani port-of-origin's sleep cycle not matching up exactly with Cheliax time.  He is woken, still a bit woozy, by the harsh light of Cheliax's Sun coming in directly through the windows.  Somehow Keltham had failed to foresee, in advance, the connection between the generally primitech bedroom, and the fact that the Sun was just going to shine in through the windows completely unimpeded come the morning.

Keltham draws on his unfortunately scented valuable clothes, after a brief abortive failed attempt to request a cleric spell that will launder them, and goes to see if Carissa is disturbable yet.

Carissa wakes up in an unfamiliar place and spends a minute trying to figure out if she ill-advisedly went off with someone last night - oh. No. Well, sort of, but more complicatedly than that. 

She both needs to really think about Keltham and is nervous about doing it, because - how did he put it - she'll be reviewed for alien thought patterns. And she suspects that there are some, lying there sort of dormant, waiting for her to devote them enough attention that they can spool out into fully-grown heresies. 

No.

Asmodeus ordered Keltham taken to Cheliax and protected. (She doesn't know the exact content of Asmodeus's orders, only the bits that pertain to her: she should not use mind-altering magic on him, or hurt him, or threaten him; she should keep him safe, if a situation somehow arose in which that fell to her. Which it really shouldn't.) Asmodeus thinks Keltham is valuable. Representative, perhaps, of what humans should be, of what they'll be once they are purified in the fires of Hell. Not all the way there - he's still human, he's still imperfect - but much closer.

Therefore, trying to understand Keltham isn't going to be heretical. There might be awkward intermediate steps where she believes something that's wronger than either her current beliefs or the correct set of beliefs, because understanding Keltham isn't something that's been done before where all of the heresies have been already identified so you can be warned against them and if necessary punished out of them. But the end goal here is to approach Asmodeus's perfection, which Keltham is closer to than her, even though he's not even smarter.  

She stares at the ceiling idly tracing this set of thoughts in circles until it no longer distracts her and she'll be able to pray in a less self-centered way. There's no altar in this guest room so she kneels on the floor, facing the wall.

Asmodeus, my lord, my god, owner of my immortal soul, steward of the fate of Golarion and all the distant stars, if it pleases You, make me Your worthy servant. May it serve Your aims to anticipate my stupidity and my errors and my flaws, and teach me better, to show me how I can be useful to You, and preserve me that I may grow in your service, to perfect me. See me in my weakness, my unworthiness, my foolishness, and see the bits of me that You can use, and help them grow in me, that I may be useful to you, and worthy of Your eternal life. Help Cheliax grow in strength and power, that it may spread Your power through the world, and bring Your teachings to everyone everywhere. Help Keltham of dath ilan to serve you, even if I think he does not have the concept that one should serve gods, and even if we haven't told him what You are and what You demand of us. Help us understand You better, that we may know the explanation of You that Keltham could embrace. Guide my mind in the path of understanding so that I do not fall into heresy or weakness or lies, so that I can reconcile all that I know of You, so that I can witness for You. 

Her heart is beating a little faster by the end, probably out of the vague awareness that Asmodeus did recently directly concern Himself with this precise thing, and of course He talked to His priest not to Carissa, but still, it suggests a degree of attention that most mortals do not ever experience, and mortals are endlessly disappointing to Asmodeus's direct attention. She tries, for a second, to see herself as a god must see her - tiny, stupid, disorganized, contemptible, frustratingly the sort of agent they must use to act in the Material Plane - but maybe that, too, is heretical, trying to imagine being a god. 

There's a knock on the door. 

"Come in," she says, but remains kneeling. 

        "Sevar? I'm to brief you. Have you prepared spells yet?"

"Not yet." She stands up. Her legs have lost their circulation and are numb and prickly.

       "Well, first briefing highlight, don't bother preparing Detect Thoughts, he became a third or fourth circle cleric overnight and now we can't read him."

"He what? Of who?"

       "That's a very good question. Lawful Neutral. Probably Abadar? Could also be Irori, or, uh, Erecura, or Otolmens, someone we haven't heard of."

"I haven't heard of Otolmens," Carissa says, wiggling her toes experimentally.

       "I hadn't either until an hour ago. Lawful Neutral god of stopping mortals from exploiting physical or mathematical features of the world that permit destroying it."

"There's a god of that?"

       "It's not advertised since that, you know, implicitly communicates that there are physical and mathematical features of the world you can use to destroy it. But yes. And, uh, Keltham was contemplating ways of exploiting physical or mathematical features of the world to create really big explosions, so, now we have learned that Otolmens exists, and They're on the list of candidate Lawful Neutral gods who gave Keltham cleric levels last night though one of the unlikeliest."

Carissa takes several moments to think of something to say to that. The first thing that has come to mind is 'what was his idea to create really big explosions' but if she needs to know that she'll be told. She doesn't want to destroy the world at all, she's entirely certain she can pass a loyalty screen about that.... "Three or four circles all at once? Does he have any idea how to use them?"

        "He does not. Nor how unusual that is, though we don't think we should bother pretending it's not unusual. We're hoping he'll ask you, once he's awake, which he isn't yet."

"Will he know what god he's a cleric of?"

        "We don't think so."

"Don't people who become clerics usually know what they're a god of?"

          "Usually they're praying to a specific god. He wasn't. He was praying to - the abstract concept of Lawfulness, sort of? Which cannot encleric people, though Someone evidently could and did."

"...I see. How did his library run go, he hasn't decided he's opposed to Asmodeus or anything?"

         "He, uh, was really disappointed by the standards of argumentation in all of the books, and thinks maybe they're deliberately instructively bad?"

"...what's bad about them?"

        "It's not how propaganda is written in dath ilan, I think. There's a lot more attention to making it the sort of thing that looks like on close reading it'd persuade a neutral very intelligent observer."

Carissa isn't sure what's safe to say about that but - but it seems impossible, the kind of vision that you'd only have if you'd never encountered a world with free-willed humans in it - there'd be no reason for a neutral very intelligent observer to pick Cheliax or for that matter any other country aside from whoever offered them the best deal, in Keltham-ish terms, but obviously unless you're Keltham no one's offering you a deal of any kind - the point of a book is to teach you what you're supposed to believe, not to convince someone who doesn't have any constraints on what they believe - she suspects Keltham wouldn't like that, but she can't articulate precisely why not - "Well, everyone's very smart, and they have all that training in not spilling free will all over the place," she says.

      "Yes. I expect probably the best line on the books is that most people are very stupid."

This feels unfair to the book authors. They are balancing such fascinating constraints, trying to say new things while also reinforcing all the things that must be communicated by anything published in Cheliax. She learns a lot from reading the newest edition of history books. "Yes, of course," she says.

       "We got about a dozen girls from the Imperial Academy of Magic in Ostenso in here, and he spent a while mulling it over and decided not to sleep with any of them until he's negotiated payment for his trouble."

"For his - he's a teenage boy! He said he wanted a hundred forty four children!"

       "Yes, but he figures he has a lot of negotiating power, given how rare his genes are in our population - his society has done more sophisticated study of genetics and you should ask him questions about it at some point -"

"Have you tried having one of the girls be hurt at him, that he doesn't want her unless he's getting paid for it - no, I guess it's probably not worth the trouble even if it'd work -" 

       "You can try it if you want. We want him to form some attachments here but we aren't invested in any particular vision for it -"

"I'm not going to try it," says Carissa irritably. "- unless that's an order. I don't care to compete with a bunch of students for who can be the most clingy and emotionally immature."

         "As I said, we aren't invested in any particular vision for it. He was pleased about the girls and we'll probably end up paying him to sleep with them. He assumes they're getting paid as well, I think just on a general principle that any society would ....obviously ....generously compensate people doing valuable things???" He's so confused by this. "You did mention dath ilan is Good."

"They are Good but - hmm, did you personally read his mind or did you just get reports - they're Good but they don't even care that much about Good versus Evil because they've got so much Law that Evil just - you know how banditry's Evil, and Cheliax mostly doesn't have it, because we have the rule of Law - that, but also for, you know, assassinations, and shady business practices, and I strongly suspect for mistreating your slaves, though he did independently suggest buying babies so they must have slavery at all - he's not Good, he's probably got some Good-shaped assumptions but I bet if you asked him why Cheliax would obviously be paying them he'd have a Law sort of answer. ...I admittedly don't have any idea what it'd be."

         "Well. The pay is that you're doing your duty to your nation, and will be supplied with materials as appropriate."

That's, of course, as appropriate to maintain the pretense that they're all being paid well, so they might in fact end up being paid well. Carissa decides not to press the point right now. "I am honored to be of service," she says blandly. "If we're lying about pay, I take it we're not trying to explain Asmodeus to him yet?"

         "No one has any idea how. The theological gaps are...large.... the cleric levels suggest he'd have somewhere to go, if he decides to walk out - you did a pretty good job on the fly, incidentally, presenting the nature of Evil to him."

Carissa did not expect that acknowledgment at all and smiles back while frantically trying to think through what could possibly be meant by it. 

       The man delivering the briefing meets her eyes levelly. Continues. "I think most people would have explained that we are the property of Asmodeus, that He owes us no consideration, that in Hell we are cleansed and perfected, and that would have gone very poorly."

She's being accused of something. She's just not sure exactly what. "He would have walked away," she agrees. "There are other churches at the Worldwound."

             "Yes. And you've been, at the Worldwound, in fairly close contact with the worshippers of other gods, with adventurers from all around the world, in the course of your duties as a researcher."

Oh. Carissa's mind is suddenly oddly clear. "Yes. I knew how he'd react because I've spoken with opponents of Asmodeus, and with adventurers from far away confronted with His ideals for the first time. I have no formal training in interaction with heretics or enemies of the state but it has occurred to me, in the last day, that at this point I might seek some." She has passed every single review but he knows that; there'd be no point in mentioning it.

           "It takes a special sort of devotion to be exposed to such ideas, to model them closely enough to know how to respond to someone like Keltham, without entertaining heresy yourself."

"With all due respect, sir, that doesn't seem right to me. All the arguments of Asmodeus's opponents have been very stupid and obviously wrong."

          "Hmm. Even Keltham's?"

"He hasn't voiced them, sir, because he doesn't know what to object to."

          "What argument do you think he would make?"

That doesn't have a safe answer. She suppresses a flash of frustration. "I don't know, sir."

           "Do you see my dilemma, here, Sevar?"

It's an important question to get right and she doesn't see it, she doesn't know what he's pushing at, he doesn't want to arrest her right now - maybe he does, maybe he's working with one of the students to eliminate the competition - well, he shouldn't want to arrest her right now, it'll make Keltham suspicious, so he'll need a good justification. 

There's the thing Keltham said himself, last night, about how she'd need to do - the equivalent of checking in with a Keeper for alien thought patterns - the alien thought pattern of him, the things she'd realized when she read his mind -

"You're worried he's infectious, sir," she says. "This operation relies on the loyalty of the people close to him, but they also need to understand him, and you're worried that we'll become - that in modelling him closely enough to know how to respond, we will entertain heresy."

         "Are you worried about that?"

"...well, the students are young and impressionable."

         "Are you worried for yourself?"

"Asmodeus is the truth," she says. "I contemplated, this morning-" they were probably reading her mind - "whether, in the path from my current understanding of Him to the true understanding of Him, in my growth to possess Keltham's - command of his own free will - if there would be pitfalls, wrong things I'd entertain on the way to the right thing. It should not be attempted without guidance, I'm sure. But - Keltham's not smarter than me, I can learn the things his mind does - and Asmodeus wants that, Asmodeus told us not to reshape Keltham - and learning the things Keltham's mind does will let me know more of the truth, not less of it."

          The man sits back. "Very good, Carissa."

They've never used her given name in the army. She smiles at him. She's not at all sure it was very good.

An hour later when Keltham comes to check on her, her door is ajar and she's dressed, bathed, is reading a book.