"If it expends significant social capital relative to what I currently have, I'll try things the regular way first for a day or two.  Gotta do that anyways, unless it can be here instantly."

Keltham turns his attention back to the question of arranging his remaining day's schedule.  Should he try to negotiate equity allocations today, or...  "Can you guess how likely it is that a god of individuals individually playing positive-sum games with each other would have magic for... symmetrically fair negotiations?  Like a spell that forces everybody in a room, including the caster, to be honest about how much they're gaining from a trade?"

" - it sounds like the kind of thing that some clerics have. I - uh, crash course in spellcraft, so you can recognize it if you've got it - spells have schools, school is one of the easiest things to identify about a spell from its structure. That'd be enchantment, which is the category for magic that affects the minds of other intelligent creatures. Enchantment looks like it's interfacing with something obscenely complicated, it'll have a weird sort of surface -" She does another illustrative illusion. It's her last for the day but maybe she can borrow a pearl of power off the security guys. "Enchantments break into charms and compulsions. Charms form a two-way connection, and look like this; compulsions oblige or prevent a course of action, and there's no connection between two minds - so you'd be looking for an enchantment (compulsion) and if you have one that's not in the book it could be something for fair negotiation."

He's got four first-circle spells with that look, one copy of one, three copies of another.

Keltham considers the possibility that this structure, in fact, denotes something completely different which Carissa very much wants to know whether Keltham has, for some reason.  But if Keltham goes ahead and casts them, and they do something very different from what Carissa suggested, that would give her game away, so she wouldn't do that... right?

Keltham wishes he had played more alternate-universe master-criminal-detective LARPs, which no doubt exist somewhere on his home planet.  This level of paranoia is exhausting when you have to do it for real, and you don't have much experience doing it for real.

"If I look through my spells and see one like that, are people likely to be okay with my casting it during negotiations when I don't know in advance exactly what it does?" Keltham asks temporizingly.  If the answer is no, then Carissa could be fishing for information in a case where her deception wouldn't be found out immediately...

"I mean, on the Queen no, on me yes."

"Fair..."  Keltham closes his eyes, pretends to concentrate.  "Okay, huh, yeah, I've got at least one first-circle spell like that.  But it sounds like I might need to figure out what they do first, today, and then put them into negotiations for real, later.  Which I think implies... that today is maybe not best spent on equity and pay negotiations... so I could spend it learning about Golarion, learning about wizardry, or communicating really basic stuff of the sort where you can't plausibly industrialize a planet while keeping that stuff secret.  Experimental method, formal epistemology for communicating results, the less complicated tiny bits that complicated substances are made of, that sort of thing.  Where I'm not selling that part, but by giving it to you, I'm expecting to garner informal social capital of the sort that lets me put in requests for headbands and Detect Magic equipment on loan from the government.  Your government can trade the information on for more informal social capital, but they need to credit me with some of that social gain, and can't copyright that information or declare it a trade secret.  Oh, and besides learning wizardry, I should take a look at whatever your local heritage-optimization setup is, in case you're somehow doing something drastically wrong that explains why the average intelligence here is so low."  He has no idea how to negotiate selling his genetic material right now, and certain aspects of him are in favor of doing that sooner rather than later.

"Sure, all of that sounds good. Uh, unless the experimental method or epistemology things run into things our government has already declared secret for reasons like that they make it really easy to blow up the world, or summon gods, or that Asmodeus says would cause those sorts of problems, I assume you'd understand in that case that they'd go right on considering it secret. - if you made a god then that seems neat but it only takes one god who wants to let Rovagug out."

"Yeah, understood.  Not destroying the world is everybody's problem."

"I would hope. So which of those things do you want to do first? Lots of people can make you smarter for five minutes at some point, probably learning wizardry's the best use of it, and security can Haste you at the end of the day if they haven't gotten into a fight by then. Other than that I don't think I have any particular reason to think one thing should come first."

"I would've otherwise wanted to prioritize learning wizardry first, while my brain is fresher, but if we only get the Haste spell at the end of the day and we want to stack all the boosts together - what does Haste do, and can you stack everything together, and also what does the make-smarter spell look like?"

"Make-smarter's transmutation." Here's its structure. "You almost certainly won't have it, though - the gods never give that one, for some reason. Boosts to different kinds of ability stack, boosts to the same kind usually don't unless they're specially engineered to. Haste improves reflexes and cognition speed but primarily from a physical angle, your brain working better; Fox's Cunning - that's the make-smarter - improves working memory and spatial memory and also cognition speed but from a different angle that does stack with Haste."

"Oh, good.  Two second-circle spells look similar to that one."  Seems relatively innocuous to say, and if he's too reticent he'll learn a lot more slowly.  "The headbands do the same thing as Fox's Cunning but permanently in magic-item form?  That's also something I'm very interested in reading about, any books that mention it," so he can maybe learn enough to know if putting one on is actually a good idea, but it would be better to present a different reason for his wanting those books - "Your planet needs those to be much cheaper, as soon as possible, heritage optimization takes time."

"You'd have to invent a better way to mine spellsilver. It's in the ground but there's only a little of it in a whole acre of earth, and you need it for all magic items. It's why they're rare. Headbands can be Fox's Cunning in an item, yes, or they can be Owl's Wisdom, which does the same thing but enhances - intuition, noticing-things, letting your beliefs spool out and have all their implications - or Eagle's Splendour, which enhances interpersonal and verbal skill."

"If those are the only three and the gods don't give Fox's Cunning, I've presumably got the other two.  Sounds like Eagle's Splendour wouldn't be that useful for learning magic, trouble is, I don't know which is which, so I'll save both for the end of the day."

He can think of all sorts of angles on the spellsilver stuff - off the top of his head, there's figuring out why there isn't a Mine Spellsilver that teleports it all in from a cubic distanceunit of earth and if any obstacle to that can be fixed, seeing if there's ways to anchor spells with stuff other than spellsilver but it requires much more precise engineering or something like that, rebroadcasting the spell from a central anchor over an area.  Yada yada too many ideas and he doesn't know which ones are at all possible or something that the locals wouldn't have already tried.  Might be wiser to stick with the innovations that he knows will work, if physics is at all locally similar on the chemistry level, which does need to be verified beyond just snowflakes.

"Anyways, if wizardry is end of day - then probably the most thought-intensive thing I can do early is ad-libbing a lecture on basic Experimentation and Engineering for my research haaaargroup.  My research group.  Just to check my understanding, I'm assuming I'll get more experienced domain-specific engineers later, but the research group I was already assigned is full of young minds who are supposed to pick up my general methods and apply those?"

Carissa should really have thought through in advance whether she wanted to lie about this. "I think probably the girls are meant to be whatever ratio of entertainment to research help to low-level magic access is best for your productivity. Once you have accomplished some concrete stuff it should be easier to consult anyone you think it's worth consulting."

'Entertainment.'  Ha.  Nice try, you blatant sperm harvesters.  "Going on the absolute garbage quality of inference in the books in the library, I do not anticipate any difficulty in describing how to reason more clearly than that.  And the math is self-evidently correct once you see it, so I can provide verifiable value quickly from the informal-social-capital noncopyrightable basic knowledge stores.  Hm, would be nice to have some official representative sign a thing formalizing the information's provision under conditions of nonclassifiability, though.  With an exception for not destroying the world."

"I told them that you said you wanted a hundred forty four children and they probably took that into account when figuring out what a nice work environment for you would probably look like. If that is not how dath ilani have children and instead you do some very enlightened thing that happens entirely over carrier pigeon correspondence, my apologies. You can request a representative of the Queen, if you want to hammer something out formally for the - quality of inference lessons - but I bet they'll want something a bit broader than 'not destroying the world', like 'not destroying the world or any of the other worlds and none of the gods firmly tell us to STOP THAT'."

Apparently they're having this discussion right now!  And it is of course entirely plausible that Keltham, new to this world, misinterpreted some things.  "I wanted 144 children in dath ilan under dath ilani circumstances, like none of my beneficial - elementary units of heritage - being unique to that world.  Here, I've got a lot of intelligence heritage-carrying-units that I'd expect wouldn't exist in this world at all, which you all desperately need, and should, I think, provide a noticeable small boost to your entire heritage optimization program, though I haven't actually run any math on that?  I should probably have more than 144 kids, with many different otherwise unrelated smart women, spread out all over the world.  But I do want any compensation for that.  And some understanding of the conditions under which my kids will grow up, I suppose.  That said, it is a very nice prospective work environment and I'm not objecting to that part, seems like it could be good for research too if the interpersonal stuff works out."

"The girls mostly don't have very much money, they'll be still in school, but I am sure the government would be happy to compensate you for efforts in Cheliax, and probably competent governments elsewhere would be similarly happy to compensate you there, though - in most places it would be complicated for reasons of a sort of social equilibrium that I am betting dath ilan does not have."

"Say more?"

"- so, uh, in most countries women cannot legally own property in their own right, it belongs to their father until they're married and their husband's after they are. And in those countries, getting an advantageous or at least a healthy and extant husband for their daughters is a family's highest priority with respect to her. They don't teach girls to read and they only teach them skills that husbands will want and one thing husbands care about a lot is that their wives have never been with another man, so women who aren't married go to great lengths to avoid the perception they've had sex. And once married, a man can leave his wife, or kill her, if she betrays him for someone else. And children born to unmarried parents don't have their parents' social standing. And so in those countries - and I can only think of five or six countries this doesn't describe - you're going to have a difficult time finding smart women who'll go for it, because they would have to get paid a lot of money to compensate them for the hit to all of their life options.

Cheliax isn't like this, because Cheliax is Asmodeus's and Asmodeus isn't stupid. But it's how most places work."

"Why do the women go along with that?  I - don't understand how this describes a stable multiplayer equilibrium.  I had that reaction to a lot of your world, actually."

"What are they going to do about it? If you refuse to get married, then maybe your parents grudgingly support a useless woman who is embarrassing them all, or maybe they kick you out and you become a prostitute, or starve. No one's going to teach you magic for free, and you can't take out a loan against your potential future commercial value because everyone knows you won't be allowed to have any. You can, you know, play the game, murder your husband eventually and be a widow with more options, unless you're in a place that kills widows, which some do! Where would you expect it to break down?"

It doesn't feel real.  "The women move to Cheliax, or one of the other five or six countries where they can get loans and be people."

"Well, we'd take them. But - most people don't have a way to get to other countries, it's so far, you'd need money for the passage, you wouldn't speak the language - and also their religions probably teach that Hell is horrible and Cheliax is full of Evildoers - which, it is, but there's nothing wrong with that -"

"So if travel became a lot cheaper - women move en masse to a small subset of regions, some men follow, others stay behind, and the entire current global order violently implodes in ways I can't visualize?"

" - probably. They'd deserve it, though."

"I don't - actually know how many people'd leave? They're - it's all they know. And they're not very smart, not on average. And they're told that the next life matters more than this one, that they'd be ruining their families, that they - maybe we could talk to some and ask. I met people from those countries, at the Worldwound, but - the men. For the obvious reason."

"I think - that in dath ilan - the other dath ilani would hesitate to say they deserve violent implosion, because they are - dumb enough to count as mostly children, from our perspective.  I don't know whether I feel that way about it.  I may not be Good enough to feel that way about it.  Does it seem to you like if we just threw an enormous amount more planetary wealth at this problem, things would be better a hundred years later, or is it going to be - more complicated than that?"

"Well, I'm not Good at all and if they violently implode I'll be cheerful about it. I ....probably if everybody were rich enough then it'd break all the bits that rely on 'and if your family kicks you out you starve'. I don't know if anything would be left, at that point. A lot less, certainly."

"We were about," how much productivity would dath ilan need to lose before people started to starve if their family kicked them out, "somewhere around twenty times that rich.  With no magic.  Just understanding mundane materials science.  If you think clearly, you can do more things."

"Well. Then you should - teach the bits that are teachable. And father some kids with the bits that aren't teachable, I guess, here in Cheliax where we know who all the smartest girls are because we train them into wizards."

"Is there - are things going to start to implode as soon as the regions who have their acts together at all, start to become richer - do the crazier factions just teleport a bomb into this whole facility as soon as they find out it exists, if there's no Forbiddance here - I don't understand this world's equilibrium between regions like that, at all, let alone what happens if it starts to enter a disequilibrium state -"

"There are probably a lot of factions who wouldn't want Cheliax to get there first and might assassinate you if they could, though it'd be hard, because Cheliax could just resurrect you, and getting close enough to steal your soul is much harder. Asmodeus will be negotiating with the Lawful ones. The Chaotic ones - there are equilibriums, made of who would win in a fight and how much your own nobles will tolerate your demands for troops or grain and for that matter how much they'll tolerate apparent weakness - I need to explain how government works, don't I - I think no one can win a war with Cheliax right now, and it won't be destabilizing for that to get more true, but I'm not really an expert."

"I am going to want to talk to somebody from one of the other factions and hear their side of things, at some point.  Are you okay with the rule that even the horrible Chaotic factions get to learn about experimentation, engineering, valid reasoning, et cetera, if they come looking for the knowledge?  Think ahead a hundred years?"

"I'm confused what it profits you to offer it to enemies but I don't expect it'd be much of a sticking point, if you do want it."

"I want to say that nobody in real life is in enough of a zero-sum relationship to you that you're better off if they don't learn the logical principles they need to negotiate with you, but - it is a different world, one I do not know.  One with an unreasonably basic factor the locals call 'Chaos' that, I'm starting to worry, isn't really individualism at all.  The five or six regions where women can get loans - are they the kind to go in on a collective industrialization project with Cheliax, send their own researchers here?  Are there any regions which would do that but the banks don't serve women?"

"Korvosa'd go in with us. Osirion's Abadaran and doesn't let women get loans but they'd definitely go in on something like this. I have only met a handful of people from Tian Xia, it's all the way on the other side of the world, but Minkai's Lawful Neutral, and doesn't let most people get loans including any women, and would probably send people...Lastwall's Lawful Good- Iomedae's country - and will probably refuse to work with us because they object to Evil but maybe not, for something this big.... Andoran's Neutral Good and will definitely refuse to work with us, there's bad blood there from when they drove all the Evil people out of their country - Irissen is ruled by the witch-queen descendants of Baba Yaga, I don't know more about them but if anything I think they discriminate against men, who can't inherit Baba Yaga's witch powers. Women can get loans in Absalom but I don't know who in Absalom would be deciding whether to partner with us, it's a big trade city, not very centrally ruled. Women can sometimes get loans in Galt but they permanently kill their entire government every few years and change all the rules and I dunno what the current ones are."

"A few too many weird names and weird properties, too fast, when it's not written down, and everything is so absolutely alien and I don't see how it forms an equilibrium at all - I might need to think through all this with the benefit of Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom at some point.  What does the entry for Cheliax look like, if I'd landed anywhere but here, and they were listing off all the ways that other factions were horrible?"

"They'd say that nearly everyone goes to Hell, which is true, and that that's terrible because some other afterlife is nicer, which we disagree on but it's not outrageous, the ways Hell is better are mostly once you've been there a couple centuries and been perfected and I absolutely believe some other afterlives are more fun to start out in. - but the long term matters to me more. - And they'd say we kill a lot of babies, which is true though we're trying to make it really frictionless for people to keep them, and they'd say we don't value marriage and family which is - pretty much true because other countries run all their norm enforcement off those things and in Cheliax they're kind of things people do if they happen to feel like it. Andoran would additionally accuse us of doing awful things during the war, and maybe be right about some of them, when you have lots of angry scared adventurers running around some of them do awful things and as the saying goes Geb's got the only army that doesn't rape and pillage. I think we do less awful things during war than other countries because I've seen lots of armies at the Worldwound and ours had better discipline."

Having your army not rape and pillage should not be such a high bar that only one country passes it.  "Based on what you know of me, is there anywhere on this planet that I would not think was... a mess?"

"I am pretty sure you'd be upset about everywhere. And probably about a bunch of things I haven't even thought to explain yet."

"If I hopefully asked about Geb, the place that doesn't rape and pillage..."

"Their army's zombies. Corpses, controlled by necromancy."

"I'll be frank with you, I was expecting to hear something surprisingly depressing, but that was a little more depressing than I was expecting even so.  So there is, basically, on my plan, going to be a project to make this planet richer as a whole and maybe less of a giant mess, which, if it doesn't happen, I would not be the least bit surprised if you all died to the Worldwound while all y'all were futzing around with being a giant mess.  Are we going to see basic buy-in to this basic philosophy, do you think, from the sort of factions that are not bugass entropic?"

"You have Asmodeus. You have - whoever your god is. I suspect you'll have more buy-in than that, but if you don't, that'll be enough."

"I am trying to ask whether there's a group of factions that can collectively set aside their 'everyone hates someone' tangled web and collectively get rich and collectively not all die to the Worldwound.  I am not entirely on board with taking the first faction I ran across and appointing them The Winners, even taking into account that my appearance on Golarion may not have been in a completely random location.  If there's a whole interfactional collective of everybody who's not bugass entropic, it's straightforward to work with them - every faction who manages to fight at the Worldwound is an obvious candidate for that.  If it's not like that, then I should actually talk to a lot of factions and figure out what's going on before deciding who is probably going to make the least mess of the planet a hundred years later.  If I'm being cosmically stupid for thinking like this because I am a stranger to this planet, just let me know."

"There isn't really that. Everyone who fights at the Worldwound would...probably be the closest thing, but I think some of them won't be on board with your project necessarily, it's not as simple as 'the world should go on not being eaten by demons'. The advantage of talking to a lot of factions would be that you'd know more about who you wanted to help the most and the disadvantage is that there are a dozen more opportunities for what you're doing to leak to people who want to stop you, or kidnap you, and Cheliax can protect you against most such efforts but not everything anyone in the world could come up with if they all had it called to their attention that they ought to try. I think personally in your situation I'd work from the first place I found that could supply and assist me enough to not be slowing me down, unless my god told me otherwise, and until I was powerful enough to be very hard to kill."

"Yeah.  I want to talk to my god about it, but they are, it sounds like, being blocked somehow."  And Asmodeus is an obvious candidate for who could possibly be doing that, if god control goes by region.  "How about if I suggested that fundamental noncopyrighted info be covered by a contract saying it gets, at minimum, shared to all the factions that send troops to the Worldwound, but any info-sharing provisions don't come into effect for a month and the contract can be renegotiated by mutual consent before then?"

"I don't know much about contract law but that sounds good to me. Maybe shared in a way that makes it harder to figure out who produced it."

Suspicious.  But also a plausible security precaution for a much less Lawful world.  "I'm on board with that for month one, at least, yeah.  Okay, so my current schedule looks like... get a preliminary reasonable-looking contract drawn up on noncopyrightable basic info, with any dangerous-looking provisions not going into effect for a month during which the contract can be renegotiated by mutual consent.  Then give a lecture on some basic stuff, get informal social credit, scale up resources.  At end of day, apply all the enhancement spells and try to learn basic spellcasting.  Oh, and also, if there's some safe way to cast some of my other spells to find out what they are, like the enchantment-compulsion spells that are hopefully for symmetrically-fair-negotiation, maybe try that too."

"Enchantments are safe to test on people, they only last a minute and don't have long-term effects. Abjurations -" She's apparently lost concentration on her illusion while trying to explain to Keltham that women aren't people most places. That's embarrassing. "The illusion ran out but abjurations are protective magic and also safe to test, we can look through a book for examples. Illusions are safe to test. Conjuration and evocation and necromancy are all a bit risky but you could try 'em on a goat or something."

"There's one first-circle spell I've got more than one copy of, looked to me like enchantment-compulsion.  Let's go ahead and test that one, in case using another of the copies is relevant to negotiating the preliminary contract on the default plan for propagating basic info... anything special we should do to test it?"

"Uh, if you're not trusting us then probably you want to ask your whole gaggle of girls to look and write down what they think is going on with it and that'd make it harder for anyone to lie? Otherwise not especially - you'd want to tell the person you're casting it on, so that they can avoid instinctively trying to break it when it's cast."

"Not quite sure I understand your proposed procedure... I think maybe possibly the spell targets one person that I touch?  I don't have enough copies to cast on all the researchers."

"You're quick at spellcraft," she says approvingly. "Just in front of them while they have Detect Magic up so they can see it cast and make their inferences. Probably they got you girls with decent spellcraft." Is calling them 'girls' too unsuble? Does it even connote childishness across the magic-bridged language barrier? Is his a society that considers it a disadvantage for women to be in their twenties? - not the most important thing right now. Well, actually, plausibly the most important thing for Carissa's interests here but not the most urgent. "Doesn't matter who you cast it on, you can cast it on me if you like, but everyone who sees it ought to be able to guess what it does."

"Part of me feels like I oughta have something more - planned, for investigating stuff like this.  But yeah, let's just go do it instead of preparing.  We'll see if anybody's in the library, I guess?"  They're really going to need a research chamber with proper whiteboards at some point.

"Sure. That's the best place to find wizards, if there isn't a big round stone tower around."

Keltham tries to walk to where he roughly believes a library ought to be, theoretically speaking.

He has the floorplan of the place approximately right! It is not nearly as cleverly full of nooks and secret passages as one might expect from a sprawling palace for an Archduke, or if it is the secret passages are very well hidden.

They're followed by the security staff, who have probably figured out a plan to subvert whatever spell Keltham has. The least complicated thing would be dismissing it but some enchantments leave an indication of whether they're active. Dismissing it with an illusion to cover for it? Supressing it, more complicated than dismissing it but less likely to have any magically perceptible effects.... not her job.

The library contains a bunch of students. They're very pretty. They're delighted to see Keltham.

Definitely gotta hurry up on certain negotiations.  "So, today's agenda.  I'm planning to dump a bunch of basic knowledge on you all - and on anyone else who wants to listen in, I guess.  But first, gotta work out a contract covering how stuff like that propagates and gets passed on, because it's not the kind of thing that makes sense as a trade secret.  And before I do that, I ought to check the result of casting an unknown first-circle enchantment-compulsion cleric spell that wasn't in the textbook of first-circle cleric spells, in case my god gave it to me for negotiation purposes.  Oh yeah, I'm a cleric now, don't know which god yet, that happened."

"So, uh, any volunteers to be the test subject and report on the felt result?  And let's have, say, three people with Detect Magic independently write down what it looks to them like the spell is doing, if that makes sense - maybe it'll be obvious what it does, but if not, it's better to have three independent components on the opinion, without the opinions cross-contaminating each other.  That's an example of a kind of general procedure I'll be covering as basic knowledge."

There are a bunch of volunteers to be the subject of Keltham's enchantment, from the categories 'girls who think that's hot' and 'girls who want to be helpful' and 'girls who have never in their lives refused to volunteer for work at school and are pretty sure you go straight to Hell if you ever do'. There are also some non-volunteers, mostly from people vying to be one of the ones who writes down what they think the spell is doing.  

Why are there so many of them. Is that really necessary. The school uniforms are not cut like that in Corentyn. ...they're probably not cut like that in Ostenso, either, bored teenage girls can get up to a lot of uniform adjustment.

It's kind of awesome how everybody in Cheliax competes to be the one in front as soon as any problem comes up!  It may be less efficient than the dath ilani reaction of everybody carefully figuring out who's the optimal candidate (or alternatively just picking at random, if the consumable variation in expected utility from additional search doesn't look worth the meta-overhead on a quick meta-meta glance).  But it's so much more energetic!  The Research Horde's enthusiasm and eagerness feels contagious.

Keltham randomly picks one volunteer and three people to write down the spell effects, since this is pretty obviously a case where the overhead cost exceeds the consumable knowable variance from his perspective.  It's not like he's really figured out how to tell these people apart yet.  At some point soon Keltham is going to have to explain the concept of "nametags".

Then the volunteer to get the spell cast will come over and do the practiced mental motion of not resisting a self-affecting spell and the other three will get out notebooks to scribble down the spell structure and cast Detect Magic so they can see it.

Keltham focuses, and tries to cast that thing he has three copies of.

There's a feeling-of-magic, now that that's a thing he is accustomed to feeling for, and a glowing symbol appears on the girl's forehead. She blinks.

Neato, Keltham supposes?  Keltham waits a moment, to see if the volunteer wants to volunteer any info on what the spell seems to be doing to her.

"It's not immediately obvious what it's acting on - probably stops me doing something, rather than making me do something -"

It's a truth spell. She does not volunteer this. Keltham's god gave Keltham a truth spell. As - a way of protesting that they're lying to him, presumably, but - does it mean he'd take the truth well? Or just that his god doesn't care for him to work with Cheliax?

Are we allowed to tell him, one of the three girls taking notes thinks loudly in the general direction of whoever's presumably coordinating here.

There isn't an immediate answer, possibly because they are debating that themselves.

Keltham tries to think fast, since he's not sure how long this spell will last.  This spell is either going to be useful for bargaining, or useful for finding out something else that his god wants him to know.  Let's try the more innocuous one first.  "Have you got anything on you that you own, and can offer to sell me for a ludicrously huge price?  Try doing that."

"- uh, sure. This is my shoe and I'll sell it to you for eighteen thousand gold pieces." The illusion doesn't waver. "I don't think it triggered."

"Okay, doesn't prevent unfair bargains known to both parties to be unfair.  Try telling me that your other shoe is worth twenty thousand gold pieces."  What is the thing with gold around here, Keltham ran across that in the books but it didn't make any sense there either.

"The other shoe is -"

She stops.

"The other shoe is worth -"

"The other shoe is worth.  Twenty thousand.          -"

Hmmm!  "Worth twenty thousand what?"

She looks very frustrated! "I'm just trying to say what you told me! The other shoe is worth....you told me to say the other shoe is worth twenty thousand gold pieces." That works fine. 

"Like Zone of Truth, but first-circle, with the visual indicator it's in place." How would you do that, spells can't usually do disparate things like communicating whether they're in place and also having their primary effect, not at first circle. Some god invested a lot of effort in that.

"Truth spell?  Try two plus two equals four, then two plus two equals five."

"Two plus two equals four. Two plus two equals. ...two plus two might sometimes equal five somewhere."

"Okay, out of context, answer this one honestly:  Do you, in fact, believe that two plus two might sometimes equal five somewhere?"

"Yeah, somewhere, there are lots of worlds and you can do a lot of weird stuff with magic and I haven't encountered any proofs that there are kinds of magic that definitely don't exist or things that no kind of magic could possibly do. ...I don't think you could do it with our kind, though."

"One of us is very deeply confused, and I wish to eternity that I was sure it was you, but let's set aside that topic for later.  Try saying out loud that there's a ninety-nine percent probability your shoe is worth twenty thousand gold, then saying there's a one percent probability your shoe is worth twenty thousand gold."

Keltham has been trying to think quickly about lie detection.  If one tries taking all appearances at face value, some of the things he believes are in conflict with each other, meaning he needs to keep track of separate lines of possibility.

Branch 1:  Keltham actually did summon a completely unknown god to Golarion and its first-circle spells can do things that were not previously possible... no, it's not that, Carissa said there was such a thing as a Zone of Truth spell.

So, branch 2:  Truthtelling spells are known.  They should be incredibly useful.  If they're first-circle cleric spells, they should be in first-circle cleric books.  This whole planet does not look like a whole planet should, if it is very easy for people on that whole planet to trust each other - even if it requires paying a cleric, it should still have a huge effect.

Branch 2.1, maybe the clerics themselves are just not trustworthy?

Branch 2.2, the spell is very easy to fool.  Like by using Carissa's illusion spell to fake that symbol, even if it doesn't go up or disappears.  Depending on what kind of illusion-piercing utilities exist, and how much those cost, and whether you can counter illusion-piercing by paying even larger costs.

Branch 2.3, they're lying to him about what the spell really does, because it would be very useful to criminal!mastermind!Cheliax if Keltham believes he has an unstoppable truth-compelling spell, while actually it just inclines people to slightly more honesty or even does some entirely separate thing they don't want him to know.

Branch 2.4, the spell works perfectly and unstoppably and Keltham is wrong about what effects a truth spell should have on a society.

"There's a ninety-nine percent probability that my shoe is worth -" 

"There's a one percent probability that my shoe is worth -"

Imperfect evidence is still evidence, and there are possible worlds where the obvious test will yield useful results.  They may not be ready to defeat truthtelling spells right now.

"Okay, let's work under the assumption it's an honesty spell.  Does not prevent attempts at deception, does not enforce objective truth, you just can't say things you know to be false.  Um -"

Keltham isn't comfortable with this.

...people's lives and money are at stake, somewhere in the background, he really should do it anyways.

"I'm very sorry about even asking this, but I'm in very weird circumstances where I know very little about this world, so - are you alright with me asking one or two questions about this whole situation, as it is known to you, while you're still under a truth spell and there's been very little time for anybody to prepare for that?  I'll try to keep my questions narrow.  I wish I could promise that I won't update on anything if you refuse but, realistically, I can't actually promise that."

"Yes, of course," she says immediately. 

The people presumably monitoring this situation had better not need that much time to prepare a Dispel Magic and an illusion, she thinks and if they have fucked that up then clearly being on the Material Plane just isn't for them.

That was a weirdly fast response for somebody asked if she and her government are okay with her being interrogated under truth-detection, and strongly suggests that Unnamed Female Chelian #7 had thought through her answer to that question before Keltham asked it.  Did they know what spells he had already, with the apparent experiment a sham?  Wouldn't she be trying to conceal her speed of thought in that case, with a fake delay?

Keltham thinks of another obvious fillip to this test, but he's not sure he can ask questions and do that part at the same time - Carissa said it required concentration to use the spell he's thinking of.  He'll save it for last.

"Question one," Keltham says, "has your collective presentation of this entire situation and world, as far as you know what I've gotten, been roughly honest?"

"- I don't think I've told you anything except about magic. Everything I told you was true and not misleading or anything." That should be enough time for an illusion and a Dispel. "I don't know of anyone else having told you anything untrue or misleading either. I ...am not entirely sure I understand the question as phrased but I think yes, we have been honest?"

Elias Abarco has a problem. The problem is that Keltham is presumably thinking he'll use Detect Magic to check whether his enchantment's still in place and that will totally work, it'll show an illusion not an enchantment and if Keltham can read it, game's up - and even if he can't, he can learn how in the future, they can't teach him illusion and enchantment swapped, forever - he can put the girl under another enchantment easily enough but the illusion'll still be there - what he needs is Greater Magic Aura, which can put the girl under the exact right apparent magical signature, but he didn't prep that and doesn't have time now -

There's got to be a scroll of it somewhere. 

Elias Abarco vanishes. This is noticeable to about half the assembled persons but they all have good poker faces.

Well, the symbol's still there.  Though it could be an illusion now.  Though some of that response seemed - suspiciously specific? - and she wouldn't need to do that if they were spoofing the spell by any number of magical means - but then she could be giving suspiciously narrow answers just to make him believe that - alternatively, in worlds where she's being honest, maybe it'd help if Keltham showed her that he is going to be reasonable in what kind of answers he expects?

"To the best of your knowledge, and your best guesses where you do not know, is the Chelian government concealing any major facts from me not relating to its internal security measures and standardly classified secrets, or secrets meant to ensure my own safety or the safety of other people of Golarion from me, or knowledge that is intrinsically harmful or intrinsically vastly dangerous?"

"I don't think so? I am pretty sure the Chelish government is not concealing any things from you that I am allowed to know. I think the things I am not allowed to know are all in the categories you mentioned - security measures, secrets meant to ensure peoples' safety, knowledge that's harmful or dangerous. ...probably there are some government secrets that are just embarrassing rather than properly critical to national security? I don't know of any, just, that's what I would expect, and I'd expect it to also be true of all other countries."

Why do the Chelish allow their version of Governance to keep secrets just because they're embarrassing - no, he shouldn't ask that right now.

Darn it, he should've asked her if the government was keeping any secrets, first, without the qualifiers.  To see if she would've danced around that one, or maybe implausibly answered 'No', and then Keltham would've had a high probability on the test results being faked in that branch of reality -

Keltham really wishes he'd LARPed this at least once before trying to do it in real life.

"To your best knowledge and best guess, if somebody purportedly representing Cheliax signs an agreement with me about credit for information given, future equity shares in industrialization projects, or similar matters, what's the probability Cheliax goes back on their word as represented by the person purported to me to represent the Chelish government?  Excluding scenarios where I would obviously agree in retrospect that the agreement should be broken as a matter of drastic urgency because otherwise Rovagug gets loose or whatever."

"Uh, very low? ....I think I can't give you a number without having a specific person in mind. If a person cheats you on a contract you can take that to the courts and they'd side with you, under the circumstances described. I cannot really imagine a situation where someone tries to do that and the contract is on your side but the courts decide to let them, that's basically just....abandoning being a Lawful country - Asmodeus is the god of contracts, He wouldn't approve of that -"

Keltham tries to think quickly about what he should be asking about here.  They don't actually know how to be Lawful; this much is obvious at a glance.  So in their distorted conception - "Am I liable to need to negotiate incredibly carefully, because somebody's gonna eat my abdominal fat* if I forget to insert a clause saying they can't do that?"

(*) A Baseline idiom roughly equivalent to "skin me in a deal".

"I think it's recommended to read contracts really carefully and if you can afford it with intelligence enhancement up? I, uh, even if you fail to word something carefully obviously there's also the thing where if you feel like we're being bad trade partners you can deal with someone else in future? But I would definitely not avoid spelling something out on the assumption that we think the same things are being reasonable."

"Sorry for demanding that you spell it out, but on your best knowledge and best guess, how much does the Chelian version of Governance reliably care about not looking like they're bad trade partners when dealing with somebody like me?  Are they liable to, I dunno, yoink all the gains from trade with a clever contract term and then classify the whole thing a secret so that nobody knows about it?"  That kind of thing being allowed to governments is still weirding Keltham out, he's only been here a day and that's not nearly enough time to get used to the idea of governments behaving like the governments around here.

It's the Chelish government but she wouldn't dream of correcting him about this. "I don't think they're likely to do that? If they did you'd probably leave, right, and do this work somewhere else, and they really want you to do it here. If there was some way they could, uh, invalidating your will when you died of old age because it had a loophole, and requisition your money then, maybe they'd do that? Because all that'd change if people knew about it is that they'd try to write their wills without loopholes? I'm not a contract lawyer, though, and you probably want one."

Keltham is trying to think quickly because he doesn't know how long the spell lasts and - what else should he ask, he doesn't know -

Well, there's always going meta.

"Say what you think is the question that I would most, from my own perspective, want you to answer under truth spell, with your statement including your stated belief that it's what I'd most want to ask."