This is like a nightmare about final exams. "...I think I'd expect you'd most want to ask what the Queen is like? Or - who you can trust the most, of the people here? Or, uh, whether you can get other truth spells cast for you so you don't have to think of it right now?"

Oh, right, that does remind him.  "What's the Queen like?  And how would you defeat a truth spell, and how would you defeat the defeaters of a truth spell, and where does that chain end up?"

"...I don't actually know much about her. She took power young, she was only sixteen. It's said Asmodeus invested in her development as a person when she was even younger than that, because she had potential. I think she's a sorcerer, but that's not unusual. Uh, a normal truth spell like Zone of Truth you can beat with a will save but I think that'd be visible in this case because the symbol would vanish...you could beat this one with an illusion of that symbol, I guess... you could beat that with something for seeing through illusions...I think among sufficiently powerful wizards they'd just have demiplanes in which the laws of magic are very limited and they can be sure of what they're seeing, and among everyone else you can only be mostly sure not completely sure that someone didn't think of something you didn't think of a counter to."

"What cleric spells up to fifth circle do you know of that can be used to see through illusions, and what would it take to defeat those cleric spells?"

Shit. 

She can't really pretend she doesn't know what Detect Magic is. But - stall, right, that's the thing to do, buy time - "Probably there's a book here somewhere with all the cleric spells, can someone grab it while there's still time left on the spell - uh, I know there's True Seeing, which shows you the world exactly as it is without any illusions and with transmutations shown for what they really are, and that's sixth for wizards but it's fifth for clerics. There are also items of it, you could ask for one, though they're incredibly expensive. There's - Detect Magic will at least tell you that there's an illusion spell present, except I haven't seen this particular truth spell before so I don't know if it shows up as illusion magic already." Ha. "It'd be unusual, for it to be a cross-school spell like that, but it's an unusual spell anyway. There's - I don't know the cleric spell list all that well, I'm sorry -"

Someone shoves a book in her face with the relevant page open. "Oh, you could use Dispel Magic to dispel Silent Image, and then if that does anything you know someone was using Silent Image. You could use Greater Detect Magic to see all spells cast in the area recently - that wouldn't work here because we've all been spellcasting all day but you could do this again tomorrow somewhere which looks clean to start."

"Tell me that you haven't left out any obvious other tactics I could use."

"I haven't left out any obvious other tactics you could use."

He was planning to do this part anyway, but having her mention Detect Magic puts him on a timeline, if there's any defeaters they could use against Detect Magic, that they didn't already start planning for before he showed up in the library today.  "Wait twenty -"  Taldane doesn't have a word for the dath ilani time unit he wants, of course.  "Wait around ten times as long as this interval: Open........close.  Then say that everything you've said so far was the truth.  Oh, and then, everybody else who's got Detect Magic, please cast that, slowly and one at a time, that so I can watch you catching the cantrip, I'm still trying to figure out cantrip-catching."

And Keltham casts Greater Detect Magic.

The girl under the Truth Spell is pale and distracted. Counting in her head to twenty. 

Greater Detect Magic translates the vague sense of magic one can get from concentrating on trying to feel it into something visual. It's stunning. Humans are wildly better at interpreting information in this format. The room appears to be draped in glittering spiderwebs with half-familiar structures. Some of the spiderwebs are lively, tangible, looking almost strong enough to hold someone; some of them are made of dust, gradually drifting away but still retaining its rough structure. Some of them glow much brighter than others. The area at the door is glowing a lot. 

There is one enchantment on the girl. Its pattern is recognizable; it's the one he cast.

"Everything I've said so far was the truth," she says shakily when she has counted to twenty. 

Elias Abarco tucks a used scroll neatly away in the pocket dimension he's wearing as a belt and surveys the girls to see who was impressed enough by his ability to find a scroll of Greater Magic Aura in a magic shop in Absalom in under three minutes including both teleports, getting back with a minute to spare, that they might fuck him while Keltham's delaying for sperm negotiation reasons. 

Keltham tries to memorize what he can about the spell structure on the girl, to be checked later against what happens when he casts it on himself or when he has more ideas about magic.

Then Keltham turns to look at the other Research Hordettes so he can watch cantrip-casting.  He'll think later about what this all adds up to; right now he needs to maintain concentration on the spell before he tries, for example, to experiment with talking at the same time.

The girls all have Detect Magic and are happy to demonstrate cantrip-catching! They can do it while talking, while standing on one foot, two of them demonstrate that they can do it while kissing each other...

Under any other circumstances Keltham would let himself notice more his reactions to this, or wonder about the local prevalence of bisexuality because they wouldn't have sent him strictly homosexual women he doesn't think, but right now he's trying to watch how cantrips work and not lose concentration on his spell.  He's thought of one other test he can try, here, let's see if he can talk and maintain Greater Detect Magic at the same time.

When he's watched the way to catch the cantrip, however many times, Keltham turns back to the truth-spell-subject and says, "Try saying out loud:  'This sentence is false.'"  Did he manage to maintain concentration during that?

He's still holding on to his magic detection.

The girl nods.

Wait what should a truth spell stop her saying that or not? - she's going to guess yes? It's a good thing they did some attempts earlier so she knows what the spell feels like when it stops you. "This sentence is -"

"Repeat:  This sentence is true."

"This sentence is true." Maybe that one shouldn't have worked either but her first guess was that it would and she doesn't exactly have time for two.

It's not much of a test because it almost surely goes by whatever the girl believed the answer was supposed to be, but if Keltham later gets to try this spell on himself and it allows him to say 'This sentence is false' that will be an iota of evidence, anyways.  Or if he tries that query pattern on subjects outside of Cheliax and never gets that pattern of answers again.

(He still has concentration on Greater Detect Magic, apparently, though he was working hard on that.  Yay him.)

Can he think of anything else he should try while the truth spell is running, and they haven't had as much time to prepare against it as they will later?  Keltham is having trouble thinking of anything -

"I've been having trouble contacting whichever god clericed me.  What could be preventing my god from talking to me?"

"Uh, your god might be too alien to humans to successfully communicate with us. They might think you're on the right track and don't need additional guidance. They might have an agreement of some kind with other gods about limiting intervention. They might be trying but your mind is too weird or your soul is far away because you started in a different universe or something. I don't know that this really needs explanation because gods talk to one, maybe two, people in the whole world in a year..."

"Were any books conspicuously missing from this library?  Any book or class of books you'd expect to have seen in a library like this one, but they weren't here?"

"I don't think so? The Archduke doesn't have much of a wizardry collection but the likeliest explanation is that he's not a wizard, which is also publicly claimed about him, so I wasn't very surprised. The library at school is bigger but that's probably because it has several copies of books, and more wizardry books."

Keltham has already been feeling guilty about the level of stress he might be putting this girl under.  Unless she's the local equivalent of a Keeper trainee as part of a massive government confusion operation.  But if she's not, then he's not unaware of how this might be stressful for her.

Ironically enough, it's the question of 'How mean have I been to her, exactly, and how much of a favor do I owe her now?' that suggests his last query.  Maybe she doesn't think he owes her a favor at all.  "On a scale from 'way too little' to 'way too much', would you say that I'm currently being more suspicious than is appropriate for Golarion in general and Cheliax in particular, or not suspicious enough?"

"- uh, I -

- it's a little like you are charging off in a direction no one has ever travelled before, and asking whether you're going unusually fast or unusually slow? People go faster on ...roads...because there are roads....I don't - know if that -

- uh, I think if you are trying to make a lot of money and not get cheated you are probably being more suspicious than is appropriate and if you were trying to, uh, assassinate the Queen and overthrow the government and become ruler of southern Avistan then you are not being suspicious enough for that."

"That's all I can think of for now, then.  I'll leave the spell up in case I think of anything in another minute, but for now you don't need to say anything.  I'm sorry about all the fuss, and in the event that my interrogation there represented an undue imposition of stress, relative to the amount you have been paid or are being paid for this, I consider myself to owe you a favor in repayment for it."

She - nods. Doesn't say anything, because he said she didn't need to.

"I expect the spell has less than a minute left," Carissa says. "You must be fourth circle, not third, or it'd have run out already." Or would, if it were still in effect, instead of it being a spell of Abarco's that he's going to dismiss at the right time. But Keltham didn't know they knew he was fourth circle so it running out at the right time should be mildly persuasive to Keltham, if Keltham knows enough to know how spell durations are linked to spell circles. ...she has a headache and she hasn't even been doing anything. That poor girl. Perhaps they should have something like this in standard classes at that age, teach the kids to handle themselves under pressure.

Great.  Keltham didn't realize he was giving that away based on duration - should've realized, some spells he was reading had similar timing-by-caster-circle - but too late.  "Over soon enough, then."

This next part is embarrassing.  But if anybody catches you covering up an embarrassing mistake, that's much more undignified.  And if you do it by violating something you were deontologically obligated to do, that is a lot more serious.  So it doesn't particularly occur to Keltham not to do what he does next.  He owes somebody a favor, and so he must -

"Also, and I'm sorry about this, your names all sound unhelpfully similar in my native language, there's two of them per person, and you don't wear convenient labels stating them so - can somebody else say what's her name, again?  So I know who it is I owe a favor?"

"That's Tonia Barrero," someone else says. "Should we, uh, wear labels with our names on them, we can -"

Tonia Barrero.  Tonia Barrero.  Tonia Barrero.

"Yes, please, actually.  It'll speed up my ability to, uh, recognize you individually.  So long as we're throwing around truth spells and clearing the air, you all - from my perspective - have a lot of collisions inside the same corner of the appearance volume.  I expect if there were dath ilani here, a lot of them would look to you like they were the same person as me, because the facial recognition area of your brain wouldn't be trained to distinguish over the variances there?  And on that embarrassing note, I think my next step is to sign a preliminary agreement on disclosure of basic info, before I can come back here and disclose some basic info to y'all."

The girls seem mostly nonfazed by this and carefully tear paper out of their notebooks to pin to their uniform lapels. 

"Tian people all look the same to Avistani people," Meritxell Narbona says. "But if you say that to them they'll say, what, he's obviously from a completely different country -"

Tonia Barrero sits down in a way that is only a little bit like collapsing to the ground. 

Carissa is pretty sure that the team of people who finagled that Truth-Spell sequence are decompressing right now and unlikely to be giving her advice, which is inconvenient, because this seems like a situation where some advice would come in handy.

That looked like Abadar's symbol. She has seen it at the Worldwound, His clerics use it as a spellcasting focus.

Abadar is Lawful Neutral. Which fits, Keltham thinks he's Chaotic Evil but he's really not very evil except by comparison to his society which sounds unbearably Good and he's really not Chaotic except by comparison with - with Lawful outsiders that don't have free will. 

Abadar and Asmodeus get along. They have similar goals, insofar as humans can understand god-goals. They want civilization, they want cities, they want agreements and they want those agreements enforced. This should be good news, except - if Abadar was reasonably pleased with how things were proceeding, he would not have dropped four cleric circles on Keltham. That's a thing you do if you might want to fight your way out. Maybe Abadar's offended that they're lying to Keltham? In which case, wow, they just dug that hole really really deep, there's no credible way to not lie to Keltham at this point - her fault, she's the one who initially decided to elide everything that usually makes foreigners look pityingly at you, and she's not sure she can explain that decision and presumably everyone important didn't just go "oh, we'll follow Carissa's lead" but maybe she constrained their options -

- she's scared -

- well. Not saying anything about the symbol is not the thing a cooperative Carissa would do in this situation but it's not incontrovertible evidence of hiding something, Abadar has lots of symbols and it's not like she's been to one of His churches. - though also she won't be able to explain why she obviously hasn't been to one of his churches, she has a feeling Keltham will disapprove of gods that ban the worship of other gods, on the same sort of utterly bizarre grounds that he disapproves of ...she's tempted to gloss it as 'people in authority acting in their self-interest' but is entirely sure he'd object to that characterization -

"We should look up the symbol," she says as a middle ground. "I could swear I've seen it somewhere before."

Keltham looks away from Tonia Barrero - he'll think later about likelihood ratios for whether that's an appropriate amount of stress for somebody to display while under truthspell by an alien you're not planning to betray, that also would've been a nice thing to decide in advance instead of in hindsight but oh well - to Carissa.  "Yeah, let's - get somebody on that, I guess?  Also Carissa - if you're the right person to ask this - how do we go set in motion the thing where I meet a proper government authority and sign a baseline contract governing credit for the disclosure of ideas too basic to be proprietary?  No point in wasting time about that part, and until it's done, all I can do is read books, or I guess maybe try studying wizard magic earlier in the day rather than later."

"I'll check on that," she says. "I suspect they're here and just waiting for you to want them." And she turns around and walks out like she knows where she's going, because presumably security will intercept her soon enough.

They do. 

"He wants to sign a -"

       "We heard."

"Do you know what god that might be?" Obviously they do, but even here where he can't plausibly hear them it's smarter to say it this way.

       "We're looking into it." 

So no decision yet on what to tell him. "Do you need my help?"

        "I don't think so. Why don't you walk Contessa Lrilatha in."

Fuck fuck fuck fuck that's the devil provided personally by Asmodeus to the Queen as an advisor why is Carissa here she is so much likelier to die horribly than she was three days ago and she did not evaluate her escape options at all, she was thinking about how to make it work rather than whether there was still an opening to stay clear of it, and now there isn't. "I'd be delighted," she says immediately.

While waiting for Carissa to come back, Keltham tries to dismiss his own truth spell, if that's a thing he can do.  He tries not to give any outward sign; maybe if they cast an illusion, but the real truth-compulsion is a kind of spell he can dispel at will, the hypothetical illusion-casters won't know to remove their illusion.

The spell does not seem to vanish.

Another datapoint to check later.

...what did he think of that whole affair?  Is it likely that they had an illusion spell, plus whatever it takes to defeat Greater Detect Magic, ready and prepped by some wizard hiding behind the library walls or out of phase with the material world?  Just in case the alien suddenly turned into at least a second-circle cleric who had both a truth spell and Greater Detect Magic, which is apparently itself not a thing that happens very often?

Definitely Governance in dath ilan is competent enough to have prepared for everything they can possibly prepare for, if for some reason they need to do something of the sort.  But Golarion does not have their shit together the way that dath ilan does... and if intelligence around here caps out at Keltham's level... would Keltham have managed to prepare against every contingency like that?  Maybe.  And intelligence headbands are a thing too, supposedly.

Like a lot of other things, it's hard for him to guess, but at least it's evidence.

He does have a certain intuitive sense that - somebody actually under a truth spell - should have stumbled over herself a little more than Tonia did, occasionally getting blocked on bad phrasings or whatever?  After he started asking real questions, she didn't sound quite the same as when he was asking the test questions.  But that is also something he can check by truthspelling himself later.  And the trouble is if you go looking for enough tiny signs like that, you will eventually find some, whether they exist or not.

Contessa Llilratha is a stunningly beautiful woman with sharp cheekbones and a twelve foot wingspan. The wings are feathered and black. Even without them she'd look a little inhuman. She says nothing to Carissa, which in Carissa's opinion is the best thing that has happened to her all day, and proceeds to the library to meet Keltham. Even folded, the wings make it impossible to walk abreast with her in these hallways; Carissa walks behind.

They enter the library. 

"You said you wished to negotiate a contract with the Executive collective of Cheliax regarding formal and informal rights of information and its dissemination.  I am Contessa Lliratha, advisor from Hell to the Chief Executive of Cheliax, and my signature is binding upon the Executive collective of Cheliax." Contessa Lliratha says in Baseline.

(Carissa casts an extremely discreet Tongues of her own so she can follow what's going on.)

Okay whoa they do not go out of their way to avoid sexual superstimuli around here, because that is the hottest humanoid Keltham has seen ever.  She's dressed in what he guesses to be the local equivalent of body armor, and makes it look better than would be legal in most cities outside of a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  There's something about her that makes the armor look more dangerous than dath ilani actresses in movies have ever managed to do with their own body armor, as seen by him across a screen.  Keltham has never realized before that he would like to add that to his list of positive mate qualities.

(Keltham is not even remotely considering hitting on her; she's busy, and Keltham hasn't proven himself anywhere near that far and knows it.  She might also not be of a species that can mate with his, come to think.)

Keltham tilts his head in a brief but formal dath ilani gesture of acknowledgment, such as would be appropriate for a medium-size business owner greeting a Legislator.  Markers in Baseline say that 'Contessa' is her title, not her name, but he has no idea what that title means; it didn't translate.  "I'll endeavor to waste your time as little as possible, and apologize in advance for those inevitable wastes of time that will occur anyways due to my profound ignorance of this world and uncalibration over how cautious I need to be.  I observe that your physiology is outside of what I know as the human range-of-observed-variation; if your cognitive-psychology is correspondingly outside the human range-of-observed-variation, is there anything I should know about that to make this conversation proceed quickly and effectively?"

Being able to speak Baseline again is a relief; he can say what he actually means, and not have that come out in enormous long sentences full of enormous words.

"I am a devil; unlike humans devils are uniformly Lawful Evil and do not tend to possess internal contradicting impulses. Devils possess a correspondingly better understanding of Law but it is reported your society has gone unprecedentedly far in inculcating that in mortals anyway. Do you prefer these negotiations happen unobserved, or that witnesses commit to not sharing their contents?"

Keltham restrains himself from asking how Golarion manages to be this messed up if there is anyone sane around; she's a busy woman.  "I would wish the outputs of the negotiation to be witnessed in their translation.  If these negotiations are to be carried out in Baseline, it makes no obvious difference to me whether incomprehensible words are witnessed or not.  You may optimize this for your own convenience, or for the benefit of, or protection of, those who would otherwise witness it."

"Your security has translation magic readily available to them and by default would observe you."

"I again have no objection."  Keltham isn't even sure why she feels the need to clarify this point... well, there's one possible hypothesis?  "I do not intend to conduct myself in any fashion I would not wish known widely and written in history."

She smiles very slightly. "My understanding is that you possess information - on, among other things, teaching mortals Lawfulness - and that you wish to negotiate terms under which it will be disseminated within Golarion, subject to whatever restrictions are necessary to protect peoples' safety here?"

Keltham starts dumping his local utility function, step one of expeditious negotiations.  "It seems to me in my ignorance that this world is faced with a problem, the Worldwound, which requires of it a superior level of collective competence, on pain of its possible destruction.  I have information that will perhaps be helpful for this; should I succeed in conveying such, I wish to capture for myself some small but fair fraction of those gains.  I may, then, sell some of my information, of that type which would soon be profitable to its possessor, and perhaps sell it excludably to that possessor alone for as long as it takes to be rediscovered elsewhere."

"But of the types of information I have in my possession, it seems to me that there is much information which would and should end up disseminated beyond Cheliax even in the short term, having the character of truly basic knowledge that is the foundation of too much else and too much further research, as may need to happen in other places for the Worldwound to be expeditiously defeated.  Nor is it likely in the long run that this world shall converge to an equilibrium in which Cheliax alone knows the more advanced equivalents of basic math.  Nor is it particularly appealing to me that many people of Golarion in the long run should end up ignorant, even if I gained twice as much money thereby; if I am at all useful and I capture the smallest fraction of the resulting gains, I expect to saturate my uses for money, and so the remainder of my utility is in my concern for the aesthetics of my deeds.  Even if Asmodeus deemed it in his interests that Chelish alone know the ways of Law-aspiring thought, a hundred and forty-four years hence, it is not yet obvious to me that this is my own interest in the affair.  Then much of the information I have, forming the foundation of that which I wish to sell, is that which should be disseminated; and though it not be sold exclusively, I would yet wish the credit to myself, and to my world which taught me, for the sharing of that knowledge and the benefits it brings.  Such gratuities as might be legally due to it, would be due to myself, with middleman's fees to Cheliax only for that part which Cheliax actually played; and such informal gratitude as might be due, would be known to be credited to Keltham of dath ilan, and to Cheliax accurately for whichever role it actually played in conveying that information further."

"And yet it has been observed to me by Carissa Sevar that I am ignorant of this world and may not understand the consequences of sharing such information.  Nor have I the experience to negotiate a lasting contract with confidence.  As a hedge against both this folly of mine, and the imperfect overlap of our interests, I had thought to suggest a baseline contract establishing a point of departure and next-best alternative to renegotiated agreement, under which information I share freely with Cheliax must be made available to those factions which presently contribute to the fight at the Worldwound, after a period of one month, known to have come from Keltham of dath ilan with the help of Cheliax; unless that contract is renegotiated before then; with exceptions for such information as may be designated infohazardous by a majority vote of whichever Worldwound-fighting deities, known to be able to speak on the subject, may make their opnions known on that subject.  And then if that turns out to be stupid and you can make me see it's stupid, it could be renegotiated before the month was up.  This would not be the only contract that needed signing, but it would let me get started on teaching the basic structure of reality and the way of Law-aspiring thought, while I gained the knowledge and confidence to sign other contracts."

"I suspect the aesthetically satisfying way of doing this in your world would not be aesthetically satisfying in ours, either in implementation or in results. 

Cheliax lets people in. If they hear we are doing something better than what everyone else is doing, and they come here, or go to a church of Asmodeus somewhere else, and they say they want to come here, or want to learn these things, we would not hesitate to teach them.

There are a dozen things that I can think of offhand that could go wrong with telling those nations at the Worldwound whatever your procedures are, but to name two representative ones, there are organizations at the Worldwound that do not make and will not keep commitments. There are also organizations that will try but not be very good at it. There isn't a meaningful difference between 'the organizations at the Worldwound get it' and everyone getting it, except in who is getting a head start. 

Taldor mostly sends criminals to the Worldwound, to be rid of them, and I think some people there are there for taking part in an effort to overthrow the government of Taldor, and it seems likely that if they were more capable and possessed with a valuable resource they could trade onward there would be a war.

Aside from that, it's a fine set of people to get a head start if we want to give it to everyone at all, which I am uncertain of. The society you describe is different from ours, in many ways, and it seems possible that the ideas you are describing do not work as the foundation for a society of humans without some other behind the scenes implementation, screening or emergency-response we don't have.

Asmodeus thinks Cheliax should chance it. But if Cheliax chances it and then it's a terrible idea, Chelish provinces will break off to be independent, or Chelish people will leave for somewhere else. If you do this everywhere, there won't be a somewhere else."

...This is exactly how Keltham expects a Very Serious Person to talk.  It stands in extremely sharp contrast to the gibberish written in the library books.  It's making Keltham wonder whether this is sheer convergent evolution of agents who think more sanely - or if somebody is precogging him, or reading his mind, or if something smarter than human looked at transcripts of everything he's said and deduced what sort of arguments he would respond to.

Also, why must everything in Golarion be such a mess why why why.

Okay.  Do they have obvious incentives?  Yes.  They have obvious incentives coming out of their ass.  They probably do not think Keltham is not supposed to notice this.  Lrilatha has met smart people ever and possibly met Asmodeus.

Is Keltham going to ignore reasonable depictions of potential catastrophe because they could be incentivized lies?  Realistically, no.  That would be wantonly stupid in possible worlds that are way too large to act wantonly stupid inside them.

"Suppose I put to you as an alternative suggestion that Lawful factions at the Worldwound receive such information, and may of course restrict its use while testing is underway in Cheliax, should they themselves deem that wise."

"Is this the kind of information that could plausibly leak through carelessness, or forgetfulness of the exact terms under which it was shared, or intoxicated pillow talk, or would it be impossible to share unwisely with someone who plausibly should not be an early recipient without soberly and deliberately deciding it was a good idea to teach them?"

"I do not understand your people and their prior knowledge base well enough to guess what is memetically contagious over a significant fraction of the population.  I would not have thought the basic concepts difficult, and yet the process by which they were imbued in me does in retrospect involve training from earliest childhood.  That training being absent here, the inspiration of Law is also absent to a degree that baffled and shocked me.  Perhaps Law is not so contagious, even if what I try to teach for redistribution is only the most basic elements of Law-aspiring thinking for human beings and the most simple features of reality.  It is hard for me to see the pathway by which people becoming saner would leave them worse off - as you may or may not already know, the Law itself proclaims that should not happen among agents already Law-abiding - but Golarion is - still very baffling to me.  I had not thought to share dangerous information, I was not in my own society one of those who held dangerous information in their keeping.  But if what is not dangerous to us, is dangerous to you - I don't know.  I haven't considered good concrete examples.  Do you have one in mind?"

"The information in combination with a particular set of values persuades most people to immediately commit suicide and mortals get aggressively selected for inability to understand Law. - it seems possible to me that this has already happened or something adjacent is an operative constraint on our mortal population in some form. The information in combination with a particular set of values persuades some people that the universe ought to be destroyed and they should aid Rovagug in escaping, or otherwise try to bring about its destruction ...people do decide that and try that sometimes and, obviously, always fail, but until a century ago the gods had Foresight and so there was not even the chance they would succeed. Now the gods don't have Foresight and it is required that the cultists not be competent."

Sighgreat.  "In my world there are those who hold all such secrets in their Keeping, and even I would show them deference for the many oaths they've sworn.  I don't suppose there's any analogous such institution here, to send one of their own who has already sworn neutrality in all conflicts between factions and corporations?"

"I think a world has to build many other strengths, first, before a mortal could take those oaths and be expected to mean them and have a reliability at keeping them that approached what would be required. Devils would call on an axiomite, but I know of none of those on this plane and it seems plausible they could not survive in it. They are found in Lawful Outer Planes."

(Axis. They're found in Axis. Perhaps even Contessa Lrilatha is unsure whether to make it clear to Keltham that everything about Keltham is found in Axis.)

(Someday she's going to die and if she is EXTREMELY brilliant and EXTREMELY perfect then someday after that she will get to be like that and it'll be worth all the agony in between.)

"The lower Keepers have broken their oaths in recorded memory, but not the highest Keepers, in my world.  But if they don't exist here, then that's the fact.  Are there leaders of Law-aspiring factions in enough direct contact with Law-abiding gods that they, at least, could be entrusted with potentially dangerous information?"  He's suspicious of the notion that he managed to drop in on the only faction that could safely handle incredibly valuable information, but not infinitely so; whatever force dropped him here could have made a choice of destinations.

"The pharaoh of Osirion is in very close contact with Abadar and very likely to be truthworthy with this." And they think He knows of it already. "The leadership of Nidal is likewise in close contact with their Lawful god but their Lawful god is Zon Kuthon, the one who had his values inverted by the void. I recommend handling Nidal and Zon Kuthon's church differently than you'd handle all the other churches and factions. The imperial line of Minkai claims descent from Shizuru, Lawful Good goddess of the sun, and I expect - though less confidently - they could be trusted as well." 

(Shizuru stopped taking actions in the Material Plane several thousand years ago. Minkai is isolationist and eight thousand miles away.)

"From my own perspective I desire to prepare against the contigency that Cheliax finds it of utility to monopolize knowledge that I have no utility in Cheliax monopolizing.  Suppose then a contract which, if not renegotiated by mutual consent within a year, at the end of that year sends a copy of all recorded underlying-knowledge I divulge, to the leader of Minkai and the leader of Osirion; Cheliax may not, without my own consent, broadcast that knowledge in any form which fails to credit it to Keltham brought of dath ilan.  Should it begin to spread in any case, this putative contract requires you to inform me of this fact as it becomes apparent and to give appropriate credit then, unless otherwise renegotiated.  And though this was also said informally before I came here, Cheliax nor Asmodeus nor their agents may not hinder me from departing at any time, should I choose to do so, nor from earning such money as may be required to pay my passage, nor from trading for such passage at its customary fee, nor by any magic or other means take my knowledge from me or prevent me from retelling it.  With the intent being that I am not hindered from spreading the information myself, should it seem wise, and should Cheliax refuse to do so."

"What would you propose that Cheliax do, should we learn that you intend to imperil our world?"

...fair, if he tries to take their perspective on the alien.  "Shizuru, Abadar, and Asmodeus or their representatives may by their unanimous agreement annul this contract?  Or, nothing in the contract shall be construed to prevent me from being stopped or imprisoned as authorized by majority vote of the Lawful deities of Golarion - which is probably a weird way to put it, but I'm not sure what the usual way is of stopping people out to free Rovagug.  I'd hope there'd be some sort of interfactional treaty on that, which, if so, no agreement merely between Keltham and Cheliax could or should hinder." 

It is a concession on top of what was communicated by Asmodeus, which was just that they had to let him go eventually, and not torture him, or cause him comparably incapacitating kinds of harm. She probably has to make it, though. If they can't hurt him they need him cooperative and he is smart enough to notice if she has a brilliant justification for not giving him even the most reasonable of the things that he wants, and to treat that as information, of which he already has rather too much.

"Cheliax, Asmodeus and our agents may not hinder you from departing at any time, should you choose to do so, nor from earning such money as may be required to pay your passage, nor from trading for such passage at its customary fee, nor by any magic or other means take your knowledge from you or prevent you from retelling it, except insofar as this would contradict normal procedures for protecting the world from destruction, which do exist. The other terms are in broad strokes acceptable to us. Shall we work out the details?"

"Yes, let's.  I apologize for the expense of your time but I need to know a little about what is covered by 'normal procedures for protecting the world from destruction', which, for all I know, authorizes, say, you personally, to imprison any person in Cheliax at any time for any reason."

"On an alert from Asmodeus or a god allied with him that a person poses an immediate threat to Golarion's continued existence or habitability for humans, we stop them. You have my word we would not kill you or take actions against you beyond containing you, even under those circumstances, but we might not release you until we had appropriately addressed the avenue by which you threatened the world."

"Is Asmodeus a kind of entity that simply does not issue such orders falsely or by playing with the definitions of terms?  Anything is a threat to the world on a line of sufficiently low probability."

"If you meant any of the things you said about the Worldwound, the expected lifespan of the world should be longer given your presence in it; if that were true, then arresting you would obviously not qualify as protecting the world from destruction. If you want to oblige Asmodeus to get additional gods to agree with Him we can write that in; gods don't differ on predictions they've had time to think about."

It wouldn't have occurred to Keltham to imagine that Lawful gods could have common knowledge of disagreement before they'd had time to think... no, she must just be talking about convergence of gods' first-order opinions, or their empirically observed convergence times under conditions where they can't share info.

"I think I'm happy with you having the right to stop and contain me but not otherwise kill me or take actions against me, upon Asmodeus alerting that he swears the world is predicted to have a net lower probability of surviving the next century if you don't thus stop me, for reasons irrespective of Asmodeus or his agents having deliberately decided to promote lower survival-probabilities in that conditional."  As near as Keltham can figure, that should only break if Asmodeus swears falsely, in which case this whole treaty is empty paper.  "I'm also happy to hear about more standard agreements and treaties protecting the world, into which you believe this treaty should interface."

"That's satisfactory to us. There's an extension of the Worldwound treaty, with fewer signatories, committing that in the event of an imminent threat to the world of greater magnitude than the Worldwound, signatories will extend the Worldwound treaty's provisions for coordination to that automatically, and cease hostilities against each other; you might want to look it up but I don't think this would need to interface with that. There are other agreements I'll make you aware of if you seem to be on a path to discovering the vulnerability they guard against."

"Please do.  I am not, as I understand it, Good, but I do have business ethics that forbid destroying other people's private property, or the entire planet they live on.  Are there other provisions to be negotiated, or should we start writing up?"

"I'm prepared to start writing up an agreement along the lines we have just outlined. "

"I expect your speed to exceed mine and am happy to have you do so.  May I have your assurance that you will not write with intent to include terms, phrasings, or conditions which would be interpreted by any relevant entities in ways that would surprise me, or have consequences favorable to yourself and unfavorable to myself which you mostly expect me not to notice?"

There are six people on the planet with the Sense Motive skill to notice that this devil feels this is the most egregiously joyless contract condition ever devised, clearly devised by people with no sense of honorable competition.

"That is very reasonable. Of course. You have my assurance that I will not write with intent for any of the contract's conditions or terms to be interpreted in a way that would surprise you, or in a way counter to the agreement that we just devised, or with detrimental consequences to you that I expect you not to notice." 

"All right, let's go."

She plucks a feather off her wing, sharpens it with her teeth, and starts writing. She writes very quickly, apparently just limited by the necessity of pausing every line to blow on the ink so it dries. She has very beautiful handwriting. 

Keltham comes from a world whose fantasy novels developed in such fashion as to not include any tropes under which writing a contract with a devil's ichor would have supernatural effects.  Contracts are shadows of the one irreplaceable Algorithm and breaking them might get powerful supernatural beings angry at you for peeing on the Algorithm, but this would be totally unrelated to the ink in which those contracts were written.  History has been screened off, and the best-guess shared-false-historical-world fiction that developed afterwards, doesn't include the best-guess that people used to use feathers as pens - that's not a trope either.

Keltham is staring at this trying to figure out whether she is an artificial organism designed in such fashion that her anatomy just happens to include better pens than could otherwise be supplied on short notice to a Government negotiation in a secure facility.

She regrets the necessity of not answering this question for him because she's not acknowledged to be reading his mind. 

The contract is three pages, when she's finished it. She hands it to him. 

Keltham reads it over in a relative hurry, mindful of the expensive time of the Very Serious Alien sitting across from him.  He still takes time to carefully scrutinize three important-looking sections, and randomly samples two innocent-looking sections for scrutiny.  It's not written like a dath ilani contract would be, but that hardly surprises him; the point of a contract is to be written in a standard language for the locale in which it will be interpreted, to have predictable effects on the arbiters who will interpret it.  Dath ilani contract language would not be predictable in this region.

It basically seems to be what they discussed?

"Sorry but just to check:  Was this document indeed completely authored by you just now, and was it thereby covered by the assurance I heard regarding an absence of detrimental terms you expect to surprise me?" Keltham says.  He did notice, having had a few moments to think about it, that if Somebody else stepped in and wrote through her, the given assurance wouldn't hold.

"I wrote every word on those three pages, and the assurances I gave you are intended to hold for everything in the contract."

...which could always be an auditory illusion but then she could also just not be a Lawful being in the first place if they're lying about that.  At some point you have to notice that these eight million doomy possibilities are all highly conditionally dependent on each other, meaning that the world in which they're all false has a decent-enough probability.

Keltham signs.

She signs as well.

She sets the quill, under its own power, to producing a copy; it does this even faster than she wrote the first version. "I will look forward to working with you in the future," she says, while it writes.

This happens to not be a standard dath ilani business pleasantry, prompting Keltham to start analyzing the statement for possible hidden meanings that she'd want to communicate to him; the obvious baseline interpretation, that it'd be of positive expected utility to have future interactions they'd both deemed to be of positive expected utility, wouldn't seem to communicate much extra information.

She's not... also flirting with him, is she?

If so, Keltham's kinda got enough to worry about in that department already.  Maybe someday when he's got a lot more sexual self-confidence.

"I hope and expect there will be future business opportunities worth your time," Keltham replies with ambiguity-leaning-negative.

She takes the second copy, and walks out; everyone in her path steps well clear of it.

"Now there goes a female entity who actually acts like a sane person," Keltham says in Taldane.  "You know, I frankly don't understand how your planet manages to be so screwed up if people like her are even around.  Do you just have a custom of not asking them what you're doing wrong, or what?"

No one is quite sure how to answer that question and it shows for a moment. 

"Well, it'd be stunningly presumptuous to talk to her, which I guess is a way of saying 'yes'? What would you expect, I don't know, the Worldwound, to look like, if people listened to her about things?"

"Didn't get the chance to observe it in detail, remember?  But in broad strokes it sounds like the Worldwound military expedition is one of the most functional parts of your entire planet, presumably because it's backed by relatively more attention from highly intelligent gods.  I'd expect the rest of the planet to have better coordination and more advanced material - you know, this is just going directly into the lecture on the basics that I can now start giving.  Anyone want to take a minute to get set up, before I start covering, like, the basics of Lawfulness so someday you can be as awesome as her?  Oh, and I should've thought to have said this earlier, but I can't cast illusion spells yet, so I need -"  Taldane has no word for 'whiteboard' or 'multipen'.  Lovely.  "- an erasable vertical surface to draw on, and if available, thick erasable pens in multiple colors."

'Someday be as awesome as Contessa Lliratha' is a very compelling pitch - Hell does not in the typical case produce results that good - and everyone gathers excitedly around. Vertical surfaces are by default eraseable if you have Prestidigitation, and pens in multiple colors can be found with slightly more scrambling than that.

Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think.  It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.  Keltham was stupider, then, hopefully stupider than these people are now, because he sure doesn't want to spend years painstakingly teaching all that stuff, with like a dozen dozen dozen carefully composed exercises whose exact details he can't possibly remember unless there's an intelligence-enhancing spell for that.

Maybe he'll just, like... rapidly state as true, all the things that are true, and see if that just works for most things, before he tries to do anything more difficult than that?  In accordance with the classic dath ilani proverb-heuristic which says:  Try things the easy way first; if you succeed, you won't need to try them the difficult way; if you fail, you'll know the first part that makes it difficult instead of guessing that in advance.

The proverb itself puts Keltham in mind of the Watchers-of-Children who first spoke the proverb to him.  Mostly, of course, children learn from older children, but there are adults who know more to oversee the process, and prevent any semantic drift that might otherwise occur.  They are not full-fledged Keepers, those Child-Watchers, but they are in a profession that calls for an oath or three.  Children matter a lot, what happens to them is one of the causal lynchpins of everything else that makes Civilization work.  And the Watchers who specialize in teaching foundational subjects are those who are selected (among other qualities) for being able to hold very basic truths in reverence, and operate them with joy.

Keltham is not usually a reverent person, but it has never particularly occurred to him to question the attitudes that his Watchers took towards the deeper truths of reality and thought, when Keltham was a child.

Keltham remembers, then, how things are taught to children, especially those ideas too important and precise to be entrusted to the teaching of older-children alone; Keltham draws those feelings about himself.

And Keltham holds forth upon the Way.

Even when you truly expect and anticipate that something will happen to you, sometimes, something else happens to you instead.  "Beliefs" are the name given to those things that control your anticipations; that which gives to you your actual experiences is termed "reality".  Sufficiently young children have not yet developed the capability to appreciate that their beliefs, the beliefs of other people, and reality, are three distinct objects of thought; they are not capable of distinguishing between what they know themselves, and what other people know.  Comprehending this marks a threshold in what is taught to dath ilani children.  Keltham thinks everybody here probably understands that already, so he's going to skip over that threshold and the exercises leading up to it, but people should let him know if this starts being a sticking point.

Reality possesses both overt order and deeper order; surface appearances, and facts behind them.  Deeper order can be obvious or nonobvious.  When you observe that Jennith resembles her mother Merwen, you observe a surface seeming; when you say that daughters often resemble mothers in general, you are observing a deeper order.  If you could peer at things that were arbitrarily small, like being able to look at a bug as though it were the size of a bird, and smaller yet; and you saw tiny twisting spirals inside Jennith, all carrying the same very long intricate pattern; and you saw that half of those tiny twisting spirals appeared also in Merwen, and the other half of Jennith's spirals had come from her father Eveth, you would have discovered a nonobvious deeper order, something with the promise of explaining the obvious deeper order.  Baseline has a separate word by which to speak of the nonobvious deeper order, the hidden order.  Behind a hidden order may lie another hidden order.  Even when you are not told about a hidden order, even when nobody knows what the hidden order is, it may still exist and be the secret factor that has organized the seeming chaos of the experiences before you.

The understanding that reality is full of hidden order is the threshold that marks a mind's readiness to apprehend the Lawfulness of reality.  Once a child becomes able to distinguish between what they know, and what others know, and what is, that child can soon after apprehend that what seems to them like madness, confusion, noise, or simply a collection of boring unconnected facts, is only the appearance of a collection of unconnected facts, the absence of knowledge of an explanation if one exists; these children are ready to understand that their own bewilderment is their map of the world; and that the territory itself is never feeling bewildered, and that it is often full of hidden orders.

(It is possible to believe that something is a hidden order, and be wrong about that; maps of hidden orders are not thereby part of the territory, they're just maps of a supposedly deeper part of the territory.  Children are led through several exercises meant to help them appreciate this fact on a deep level: that you in your own mind are really impressed with a theory of hidden order is not the same fact as that hidden order actually being present in the territory and able to control your experiences.  This has always seemed like a really obvious point to Keltham now that his brain is mature, so he's just going to press on without doing a lot of exercises there, but people should speak up if that's somehow torpedoing the rest of his lecture.)

It was the way of reality, in the universe that Keltham knew, that complicated things possessed the hidden-order of being made of simpler parts: and in dath ilan, knowledge of this fact was power.  He's not quite sure that the same also holds true of Golarion, but Keltham did do some preliminary checks, and was told, for example, that snowflakes have hexagonal symmetry.  Keltham knows the hidden order underlying snowflakes in dath ilan, the tiny pieces that nestled together in sixfold symmetry there; so he's guessing that snowflakes have the same hidden order in Golarion.  And by extension, that Keltham's own body has the same hidden orders of the same kind rather than having been remade and rewritten on his arrival here.  There are a lot of hidden orders invoked within a dath ilani body.  It is a further guess, though not a certain one, that Golarion possesses all the same hidden orders of that kind - that the things here that Keltham recognizes, are ultimately made out of the same tiny parts that Keltham knows.

In Keltham's world, they don't have spells; some of the hidden-orders here must have been absent from Keltham's world.  In Keltham's world, when you want to go from one place to another place very far away, you get into a huge metal structure with fixed wings and powerful engines that push out air behind it, thrusting that 'aeroplane' forwards to fly across oceans and continents.  To build something like that, you have to understand the hidden orders of metal, in order to build sufficiently strong metal.  You have to understand the hidden orders of fire, in order to find dense-enough fuels that burn hot enough for the fuel on board the aeroplane to last for flying across the continent.  But these hidden orders are invariant within dath ilan; they work for everyone, not just spellcasters.  They aren't truths about the people using the aeroplane, they're truths about metal and fire.  For a quarter of a day's income, you can buy a ticket for an aeroplane trip across a pretty large ocean, going slightly less fast than the speed of sound in air, and get to the next continent in a quarter-day or half-day.  Keltham is not sure how much it costs to teleport the same distance here, but he gets the impression it is more expensive than that.  Artifacts that exploit dath-ilan-style hidden orders can be made without spellcasters.  They are economically scalable.  That is part of the change that Keltham hopes to bring to Golarion; and driving back the demons of the Worldwound will only be the bare beginning of its consequences.

But even if that part doesn't work out, because the snowflakes - it may turn out - are only a misleading resemblance born of other pathways, there's knowledge Keltham has which is more valuable than that, and which is even more likely to hold here; a collection of hidden orders that might hold even everywhere, though it is hard to be quite certain of that, without observing everywhere.

This is the knowledge of the Laws governing attempts to think, which have the character of - wait, Keltham hasn't explained the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths.  Does everyone here already happen to know the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths?  He's kind of guessing not, based on some previous exchanges about 2 + 2 = 5; if not, he can cover that too.  The notion of Validity is as good a place as any to give an example of Laws governing thought.

His audience is very attentive. Chelish school emphasizes not being disruptive or wasting the time of the best students by being one of the worst ones; no one has any questions. 

No one knows the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths, though from context one girl is willing to venture that empirical truths are those that can differ between planes and necessary truths must be ones that hold everywhere.

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Keltham is glad to see that anyone is paying attention.  "Good for guessing," he says, which is a common phrase in dath ilan.  "Now, I'm not quite sure how you define plane, here, but consider:  In dath ilan, no other plane has ever, to my knowledge, interacted with our own.  To see a thing is to have it affect you; we've never seen any other planes, seen anything else that has shown signs of interacting with another plane, and so on.  We are sensible people who prefer not to believe things for no reason.  How would we know that a truth was universal?  Why would we even have a word for that?  Even if you saw that something was true across every plane you'd ever visited, how would you make the jump from there to thinking it was true across all planes?  Does anyone want to venture another guess?  It's better to be wrong out loud than to be silent, as the saying goes."

Well if it's better to be wrong out loud then they'll do that!

"Maybe you can figure out the set of all possible physical laws that could support intelligent creatures and then if it's true in all of those it's true everywhere relevant?"

"You could - like, figure out the set of changes you could make to our plane where it'd still be true, and if it'd be true no matter what you changed then it'd be true everywhere -"

"Even if you've only got one plane you'd still have multiple planets and they might differ on some things but not others -"

"The topic of which laws support intelligent life is a separate interesting topic; we probably won't get to it today.  We're interested in things that stay true even in planes with no intelligent life.  Can you come up with an example of something that has to stay true no matter what laws of the planes you change?"

"...all first-circle spells have to be structurally isomorphic?"

"Their world doesn't have magic."

"So they wouldn't do anything but they'd still be isomorphic!"

"There could be a world with more dimensions for stuff to pass through itself."

"One equals one?"