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mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus
some dath ilani are more Chaotic than others, but
Permalink Mark Unread

This story begins in a place that would be, as seen by some other places, a high-trust society.  It happens that this place has no histories to call upon of earlier, lower-trust societies.  It is expected by this society that this historical amnesia will end up not being relevant to the vast, vast supermajority of its members.  Had they thought otherwise, they would have chosen otherwise.  They try to plan out everything important that way, and then not plan out everything else to the point where it stops being fun.  It's that kind of society, you see, the kind with prediction markets and policy goals.

The last plane trip of Keltham's first life starts out uneventful.  He boards the aircraft, strolls a third of the way down the aisle with his eyes assessing all he passes, and then sits next to the first person who looks like a more promising seat-partner than all of the previous people he passed.  This is a woman reading alt 9, book 3 of Reckless Investor Miyalsvor, a book series not entirely ungermane to his own life interests.  Keltham takes out his own copy of Three to Infinity by Petheriel, reading it long enough for it to be a costly signal that he actually cares about the book's content.  Maybe a conversation will start, maybe it won't.

The woman's name is Thellim!  She is actually a fiction matchmaker, whose interest in reckless investing is purely as fiction!  She does not aspire at all to the impossible (and even self-contradictory) Art of investing in ways contrary to other investors' wisdom even as all other investors try to do the same.

"Mad Investor Chaos", as he sometimes calls himself, sees no profits to be reaped from further conversation here.  After a bit of further cognition, Keltham decides that the previously viewed portions of airplane didn't contain any significant promises he was passing up, and it's not worth moving seats to go looking again.  He gambled and lost, and may as well finish reading his book.

The two of them pass the plane trip mostly reading quietly to themselves, until the point where the plane crashes and everyone dies.

Permalink Mark Unread

This place is very cold, and very flat, and has no particular distinguishing features. Miles away there is smoke in the air, as from a chimney. 

 

Farther miles away there's a big soap-bubble force-field kind of thing.

Permalink Mark Unread

Shakingly, but not slowly, Keltham rolls to his feet, does a rapid body-check to see if he has any detectable injuries after his plane crashed and his - head came off, he is reasonably sure he remembers the sensation of his head being literally ripped off his neck.  It does seem to be back on, though.

Somewhat gingerly, Keltham turns his head around to check for anything resembling a familiar or unfamiliar threat.

Permalink Mark Unread

Plausibly threatening: the cold. It's really quite cold. The.....shrubs? They're low to the ground and look spiky but not particularly threatening.

 

There's really not that much else. It doesn't look like a place that has been particularly touched by human habitation. 

The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate. It rises to the same height everywhere, hard to judge from here but at least fifty feet, and there's motion faintly visible on the other side of it, hard to pick out at this distance and through the distortion, moving four and six-legged shapes.

Permalink Mark Unread

..and the direction with smoke in the air?

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The smoke is maybe rising out of a building, or something else grey and square and purposeful. It's not very far from an edge of the soap bubble. Between here and there there's frozen tundra, and some small stunted trees. 

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Keltham takes a few moments to update his store of hypotheses on all this startling new evidence, computing at the lightning speed of sheer wordless guessing that the posterior sums up to -

Permalink Mark Unread

- nothing.  Yeah, he's got nothing.

Permalink Mark Unread

Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke.  It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.

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Up a little closer, it's clearly a building, or actually a cluster of them, all of them one story high, all of them made of grey stone, or painted like they're made of grey stone. There's...what might be people, walking between the buildings periodically.

The sun moves across the sky, but not down in it.

It's really cold.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes, thank you sensorium, he is aware now that it is quite cold, that is why he is not carefully thinking through all of this in much more detail in advance, and is instead running towards the possible heat source whilst also generating more heat that way himself.

Permalink Mark Unread

When he gets close enough people see him. They - turn and wave, nonchalantly, and then keep going; apparently the presence of a person racing across the tundra inappropriately dressed for the weather isn't notable in itself. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Possibility 1: that people materialize around here after death and run in towards the nearest buildings all the time.

Possibility 2: that the people seeing him have entirely misinterpreted him as some other phenomenon not in need of heat.

Possibility 3: that it is BUTT-CHILLINGLY COLD and he needs to KEEP RUNNING into the nearest enterable building.

Permalink Mark Unread

Its door swings open for him. Startled people turn to look at him now. 

 

"Something incomprehensible?" one of them says.

Permalink Mark Unread

OH GOOD WARMTH.  "Keltham," he says between breaths, tapping himself.  "Dath ilan," making the gesture for thing A coming from thing B.  "I died in a plane crash and woke up here.  Hope somebody here speaks Baseline or has a universal translator device."

Permalink Mark Unread

- they glance at a girl in the corner.

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She casts Tongues. "Say that again?" she says, in Baseline.

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"Keltham.  Dath ilan.  I died in a plane crash and woke up here.  What's the correlation between the strange gesture you just did, and your ability to communicate with me when you could not do so previously?"(*)

(*This sentence takes less than half as many syllables to say in Baseline as in Taldane.)

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I cast Tongues, because it's a translation spell and you were speaking an unfamiliar language. You died and woke up here? This isn't an afterlife."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I was wondering if there'd been a mistake or systemic hiccup.  I'd perhaps ask you how to get to a place-people-go-when-they-are-dead, but I feel like first this possible systemic hiccup should be checked for profit potential."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - that's a phrasing. Uh, I think Golarion ....hmmm. I think probably most dying people would rather show up in Golarion than in a proper afterlife, but they're probably wrong about that? I hadn't really thought about it before because I have never heard of such a mistake."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know nothing of this subject matter, at all.  So far as my people know, when you die, either Civilization manages to retrieve your brain-soul and wake you up much later, or you stop existing.  I died under circumstances where my brain-soul could not reasonably have been saved.  That I continue to exist at all is an unexplained violation of all expected laws of existence from my perspective.  If the same holds true from your perspective - does my new world also have proverbs about violations of previously holding generalizations being interesting and profitable in proportion to the degree of previous belief in the generalization that was violated?"*

Keltham has NO idea what is going on but he is SO ready to profit from it, he has been waiting ALL HIS (short) LIFE for something generalization-violating to profit from.

(*All of this is also much faster to say in Baseline.)

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"...dead people usually go to afterlives," she says. Start with the bit you are confident about. "They don't cease to exist entirely, usually, that sounds awful. Some people get eaten in their afterlives but it's not, you know, a common thing - and you can just not go to Abaddon, which is the afterlife where you get eaten - sorry, the translation's very -

- very -

- do you mean basically the thing where if you want to be a fabulously rich adventurer you'd better have a damn good reason why the tomb you want to rob hasn't been robbed already, but generalized to everything? We ...don't have a proverb for that, I don't think it does generalize to everything, most things the reason why no one's dealt with them is that no one powerful could make that much money off it, and it wouldn't be much fun -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like your universe is nothing like my universe.  We don't have places-people-go-when-they-are-dead.  We don't have translation 'spells'.  And you don't have explicit math about inexploitable equilibria, which implies a vast amount of other missing knowledge.  If you've never previously seen people like me showing up, I'd say a glitch has occurred, and that is exactly the kind of situation where you might be able to feast on an exponentially vast buffet of profitable strategies that nobody else has tried before because they couldn't take advantage of the glitch."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - well. We have not seen dead people showing up before, except if someone raises them as a zombie, or resurrects them, and the thing you described doesn't really sound like either of those things. It does seem important to, uh, get Asmodeus in touch with your world, so that we can collect the souls of your people when they die, instead of them ceasing to exist."

Permalink Mark Unread

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"Yeah!  Like that!  That is exactly what I am talking about!  Current exchange rates on true-deaths per labor-hour, Civilization will pay you at least a million labor-hours per soul you can save that way... though..."

Civilization lives in an extremely and to all appearances perfectly regular mathematical universe.  Being able to descend causally from it and copy people out of it does not mean you can send information back and execute trade arrangements.

"...though I'd bet at 4 to 1 that you can't actually get a two-way arrangement with Civilization.  I'm guessing Golarion can see dath ilan but dath ilan can't see Golarion.  But if we can manage to exploit any of the knowledge I have that this world doesn't, I will pay Asmodeus for his impact in grabbing any dath ilani souls that would otherwise get lost.  I've deliberately avoided fantasizing about what I'll do after I'm a billionaire because becoming a billionaire is the hard part, but I'm not actually averse to the part where I spend whatever I can't manage to spend on my own personal happiness on producing public goods."  It is said, for one thing, that this tends to impress members of the opposite sex, and so also contributes to personal happiness in the end.

Permalink Mark Unread

" - all right, sounds good. Asmodeus is a god and I don't actually know that He would want a billion gold but I am sure He'll want something. I can, uh, get a priest, and let them know, about this - is it urgent, you must not age if you just stop existing when you die..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Dath ilan's got about a billion people, ten million die per year, about a hundred of those are true deaths, so Poisson-process expected three days until the next dath ilani death... except that the plane I was on just crashed which is going to double the true-death rate this year.  If Asmodeus can grab lost dath ilani from deaths that happened an hour ago, but not a day ago, that's pretty urgent.  I'd ask 'what's a god' but that is much less urgent."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know but maybe a priest will." She starts walking out the door and towards another building. "Gods are entities that are much smarter and much more capable and very different from humans and they set up the afterlives, Asmodeus is the one who is the patron of my country and also the most powerful one. What're ...untrue deaths, does that just mean you're able to raise them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham takes a breath of warm air, puts his hands in relatively warmer places, and follows her out into the FREEZING COLD.  "Not yet, gonna take a much higher tech level.  If they're dying under controlled circumstances we pump enough vitrifactants through them to prevent ice crystal formation, chill 'em down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, atoms move around but they move in one-to-one flows which seem pretty likely to map cognitively distinct start states to physically distinguishable end states.  Later, when we can, we'll scan the brain and figure out who the person was and rematerialize that person.  True death is when your plane crashes and splatters your brain all over the place and lets the pieces rot in the sun or burns them in jet fuel, a process which maps many distinct possible people onto overlapping entropized ash heaps."  Keltham has, a quite short time previously, spent some very long minutes contemplating this fact and trying really hard to think of some incredibly clever way to have it not happen to him.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your language is really oddly optimized," she says, hurrying over to the towering, somewhat ominous-looking building with a red pentagram etched into the archway above the door. "I do know Asmodeus gets souls from other worlds sometimes because Barbatos, the ruler of the first level of Hell, got the appointment by bringing a whole world of souls for Asmodeus."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You know anything else about the circumstances?  Were they from a world that didn't previously have an afterlife of their own, or translation 'spells'?"  Keltham isn't sure how to parse 'ruler of the first level of Hell' but he can ask later what a 'ruler' is.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, I heard that they became the barbazus, but that's all I know. Barbazus have spells now but I have no idea what they had when they were alive." She knocks on the door and enters the ominous building; it is symmetric in black stone, with a large stone altar at the center.

 

 

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh good, WARMTH again.  "I think it's gonna be high-expected-value to at some point very soon spend a lot of time explaining to me a whole lot of locally assumed knowledge that I don't have.  I can't figure out what knowledge I have that can be deployed to profit in this world, if I don't know how this world works."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, the spell lasts an hour but I can do an hour of trying to explain things, and then tomorrow prepare better ones for this."

 

She switches languages to have a hasty conversation with a robed man, who listens, his eyebrows rising steadily.

"- he says he'll pray to Asmodeus about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does that mean we completed the time-sensitive part of this in terms of notifying Asmodeus that there's a hundred dath ilani he can pick up, if he can only do that for a limited time afterwards, and then on-average one more every three days?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. I mean, I don't know how soon Asmodeus will hear but there isn't more we can realistically do about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You mention to the guy that on the 1-in-5 off-chance you can actually trade with dath ilan, those hundred souls are worth a hundred million hours of labor?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I told him that your world has a billion people and that you were ready in a heartbeat to trade to Asmodeus whatever he wanted for protecting your dead. It seems to me like it ought to get His attention but trying to understand gods with a mortal brain doesn't always work very well."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If gods are smarter than humans, shouldn't they be more understandable from a theoretical standpoint in the sense that they depart less often from the coherence theorems governing... never mind, if you don't have math about inexploitable equilibria you definitely don't have math about gods.  Yeah, don't worry, it'll get Asmodeus's attention, unless he already knows or immediately computes that he can't do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

- Carissa's going to try not to feel insulted! Lots of people have done lots of studying of gods. Admittedly not usually with math, that she is aware of. "If we're needed for anything I'm sure we'll be informed. Should we sit down by a fire and I can try...explaining things to you...until my spell runs out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't have any better ideas.  Knowledge is definitely my rate-limiting-resource in how well I can exploit Golarion for mutual gain."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- sure. Okay. Uh. There are probably about a billion of us, too. I think lots more than ten million die in a year. I've heard people say that half of babies live to be adults? The age of majority's sixteen, in Cheliax, that's measured in time from the longest day of the year to the next one, I'm twenty five in those years. Humans who don't die of anything or have resurrection on demand generally make it to eighty before they die of their body just falling apart, it's called aging, it's said that the gods did it because they don't want us to stick around here forever and never go to the afterlives. Wizards can delay it, make 130 or 140 or so. Wizards are - people like me, who've learned how to cast spells."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have so many Additional Questions before I can understand this world as mostly in equilibrium.  Gonna say them out loud so you know what they are, but I suspect the best strategy is for you to ignore it all and then move on to the next most important facts.  Like, what kills that many kids.  How much would your people pay per child saved.  Why would gods pick eighty years instead of eight hundred.  Why are humans an efficient way of making things that get to afterlives if those are valuable.  What's the rate-limiting difficulty in learning to cast spells that stops everybody from learning it.  Also, my reality has something that translated as 'aging' and zero gods, and we know where that kind of aging comes from that isn't gods, but I've got no idea if that's the same here.  Feel free to ignore all that confused babbling and just say whatever you would've said next anyways."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In what equilibrium? - uh, okay. Do you want to write those down so you remember them. There are nine afterlives. Afterlives go by attributes that the gods - use to see the world, attributes that are more fundamental to gods than to us. The attributes are Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil. Law is - duty, obedience, authority, following the rules, Chaos is - doing whatever you want, hedonism, non-coordination. Good is - self-sacrifice. Evil is - pursuit of the interests of the self. The nine afterlives, then, are Hell - Lawful Evil - Axis - Lawful Neutral - Heaven - Lawful Good. Abaddon - Neutral Evil - the Boneyard - True Neutral - and Nirvana - Neutral Good. The Abyss - Chaotic Evil - the Maelstrom - Chaotic Neutral - and Elysium - Chaotic Good. Asmodeus rules Hell.

Until a hundred years ago, there was prophecy, which is - some kind of ability the gods and powerful wizards had to look into possible futures, and sometimes nudge them, make unlikely things come to be, or fix a point in fate so that coincidences would bring the world to it. But a hundred years ago it broke and there was a related worldwide catastrophe that toppled many empires and now things are sort of settling into a new way for them to be, geopolitically and in terms of what the gods do. I don't specifically know of any reason that's important but if you're interested in - well with tombs they've been around for thousands of years so the reason they haven't been robbed must be good, but if a tomb is new, that's the reason, and the current world situation is new. 

Uh. The most common kind of magic is being chosen by a god to do miracles on their behalf. That's five people in a hundred, maybe? We call them clerics. The second most common kind is wizardry. The smarter half of people can learn a little bit but only people who are well above average can learn very much. Wizards used to be much rarer than clerics but now Cheliax has universal testing and education so we find the smart kids even if they're farmers and we're actually up to eight in a hundred people who can cast at least one spell, which is the highest in the world. Overall I think it's one in a hundred or so. Then there are lots and lots of rarer kinds. Blood-borne aptitudes for innate intuitive magic, pacts with powerful entities that aren't gods, hybridization with other species than humans which have innate magic, stuff like that. 

The thing north of us with the forcefield is the Worldwound. A hundred years ago when prophecy broke and Aroden died, a chasm between this world and the Abyss opened up. Demons started pouring through. Demons are chaotic and Evil and they mostly like eating people so we've been trying to stop them from taking over the whole world. It's going - stably. But people'd give you a lot of money to fix it, if you figured out how."

Permalink Mark Unread

(The Taldane words 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic' map onto Baseline words that respectively refer to deep underlying structures of things, and disorganization, both spoken with the inflection that indicates an everyday word is being repurposed to mean something else that it usually doesn't.  'Good' comes out as 'altruistic' and 'Evil' as 'negated-prosocial', both with the same inflection of technicality.  (Baseline doesn't have a word for 'antisocial' any more than it has a word for 'nonapples'; there are lots of specific things people could be doing that are antisocial, but it hasn't been deemed wise to add a word that means 'what you're doing is bad for society but I won't tell you why.'))

"Writing'd slow us down too much on the first pass.  Reactions to ignore.  The way the gods are parsing up these attributes seems very inhuman and probably isn't translating well, but if gods all see things the same way they probably share ancestry as species or constructs.  Hedonism and non-coordination seem uncorrelated to me, though in terms of what 'chaotic' translated to in my language we would definitely say I'm on the chaotic side of what we see as the law-versus-chaos tradeoff.  Good versus Evil makes slightly more sense but I don't know where 'Get rich, fund public goods, impress the prettiest people and screw them' is supposed to go on that.  We've got no idea what our world was doing a hundred years ago, but I expect we didn't have nuclear reactors then, so we're not in very much more of an equilibrium.  Who gets chosen by a god, what's an example of the simplest thing you have to learn to be a wizard.  Gee that Worldwound sounds incredibly interesting, could it maybe be closed if somebody knew more math, how much money is 'a lot'.  If there are 'gods' running around who are smarter than humans then why don't you already know about inexploitable equilibria and all of the other math, wouldn't the gods have invented it already... actually that last one sounds fundamental enough I may want you to pause and answer it."  It's sort of weird that Keltham doesn't already know a lot more standard theory about agents that would be smarter than human, now that Keltham thinks about it.  It seems like an obvious speculation on multiple levels.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am sure the gods have invented all the kinds of math you're thinking of, they have very complicated god-treaties with each other that involve kinds of interlocking commitments and ability to verify each others' commitments and it was explained to me on a very simple level once just so I could understand what it was that I wasn't going to understand. Why they haven't taught us - maybe the version of it we could understand wouldn't even be particularly useful to us? Maybe they're working up to it? Maybe it'd interfere with us having our purpose in Golarion which is generally understood to be - as the product of one of those god-treaties actually - the gods disagreed about which afterlives souls should go to, and the souls growing up in Golarion is meant to - draw out their natural inclinations and also maybe give them a choice, depending who you ask? 

There are more complete accounts of what's Law and what's Chaos but they in fact don't hang together perfectly from a human angle because they're god-things not human-things. All the gods are in fact the same ...kind of entity, whatever exactly that means, some are more powerful than others but all of them have much more in common with each other than with a human, even one who has enhanced their intelligence as far as it can go and is almost as smart as a god.

I think if you want to get rich so you can attract pretty people and fund ...public goods...that's Evil, I think things have to be almost entirely purely selfless to be Good, like, if you were thinking 'I don't even care for money except that it'll let me help starving orphans' then I'd wonder if you were maybe Good but it's not enough to kick you out of Evil if you also do things that mostly benefit other people, we're all Evil and we're up here fighting the Worldwound.

Kids mostly die of disease. Smallpox and measles and flu and cholera and so on. Also some people kill their babies because they have babies and don't want them but that I don't think you could make any money stopping, the whole point is that they don't care to have a baby and they've nonetheless got one. People who do want babies would pay a large chunk of their annual income to save them, I'd expect? Especially once they're bigger and you've already invested in them. People get chosen by a god for being unusually aligned with the god's - values? Plans for humans? Needs from an actor on Golarion? I don't know that it's completely characterized but it's always someone close by in alignment and it's always someone who mostly agrees with the god's priorities and usually it's someone who can wax poetic about the beauty of the god's thing once you understand it even partially.

To be a wizard you have to hold a spell in your head and be able to manipulate it in space properly, I can show you in a bit."

Permalink Mark Unread

The number of questions being spawned per minute is increasing at a rate which makes Keltham worry about the overall convergence behavior of this process.

"Reactions starting to overload here.  Interlocking commitments and verification do not sound like math we'd call complicated, somebody first walked me through the surface results at age 10 and then since I'm planning on being an actual investor I walked through the proper proofs at 14.  It sounds like existence here begins as a multiagent equilibrium of gods negotiating, in the same way that dath ilan begins as an equilibrium of physics, natural selection, and human desires; possibly if I want to understand everything in proper order I should start with the gods.  Are souls a fundamental unit of value underlying all economics here.  Were humans here dying forever until the gods showed up, in which case we owe them, or do the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, in which case they owe us.  How do humans enhance their intelligence and end up almost as smart as gods.  Why does anybody spend money on anything else if you can spend money on that.  How smart are we talking about, exactly, use whatever units you like to give me any idea at all.  What do clerics do for gods, what do clerics get in return from gods, what if anything do humans get out of this whole system.

And, you know, I am on the extreme end of what my people call chaos and aspire to go further than that, when it comes to breaking the stultifying regularities that settle over human beings thinking and acting in groups.  I've been known to go by the Network handle of 'Mad Investor Chaos'.  But 'Decide you want kids, then change your mind and kill them' is fifteen hundred times more chaotic than - than I've ever - I mean.  How about if instead you think about your own preferences more clearly before taking yourself off contraception, and save yourself nine months of pregnancy?  Doesn't that constitute an outright preference reversal, where you could end up with more time and resources if you didn't have kids in the first place?  Isn't that prima-facie time-inconsistent behavior barring psychologically unrealistic arbitrary complexities of the utility function?  I, I mean, there's being chaotic, and then there's being so chaotic that it violates coherence theorems.  We have now answered the question of how much chaos it takes to make Mad Investor Chaos feel physically nauseated.  What is wrong with those people.  Why is anyone not buying the kids.  None of that seems like the actual info I need next and I probably shouldn't be asking."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - People buy orphaned kids but newborn babies are a pain to take care of so I don't think there's much of a market, probably if you wanted you could buy 'em and raise them, though not in Cheliax, which prohibits human slavery. People don't think they want a baby and then change their mind, they never wanted a baby in the first place but they still had sex because they thought they'd timed it well enough a baby wouldn't result or they're fifteen and impulsive or they wanted to have sex more than they dispreferred pregnancy or they were raped or they had an abusive boyfriend who'd beat them if they turned him down or they figured they could handle the baby but then the dad skipped town and now they couldn't, or they thought their family would help and then family circumstances changed, or they figured they'd abort the pregnancy but then access to that, which is not universal, vanished for some reason. Or I know someone who got an abortion and it had side effects and made her permanently infertile, freaked me right out, so if I'd gotten pregnant as a teenager I might've figured infanticide would be better, and instead I just didn't have the kind of sex that gets you pregnant but I have more options than your average teenage girl.

You get smart enough to be almost as smart as gods with magic items. It costs more than most people will ever make in their life; people who can afford it usually do do it.  When I'm richer I'll get a headband. People spend money on other things because....otherwise they would starve? Or because they like living in a nice house and having nice things and having servants and the costs of those things is negligible compared to the costs of intelligence enhancement? 

Souls are...valuable. I don't know if they're - like, they're mostly valuable to gods and people don't directly trade with gods very much, if you're trading with humans the most important things are food and textiles and on the high end diamonds and spellsilver, which are scarce components to magic items. I think the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, but I don't know in what sense that means they owe us, it's not like if we told them that they should be nicer to us there would be a compelling reason for them to listen. Clerics evangelize for a god and take care of their followers and run their churches and fight their wars. Gods give clerics the ability to heal injuries and resurrect the dead and fight people more effectively. Humans get...afterlives, and healing, and in the case of Cheliax Asmodeus supplies us with material wealth from Hell so we can afford a decent education system unlike all the other countries which are too poor to have that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, so okay, either y'all are acting optimally with respect to alien problems I don't understand, or y'all got very different utility functions, or all y'all ain't got no idea what the ass you be doin'(*) and are ending up way below the multi-agent-optimal boundary, on levels where that goes from fun profit opportunity to not-so-fun emergency massive profit opportunity."

(*Extremely Chaos-aligned dath ilani are sometimes known, in moments of great gravity, to deliberately speak Baseline with nonstandard grammar.)

"But regardless of which branch of that trilemma if any is actualized, it sounds like you definitely have unsolved problems that are solved problems where I come from.  Like safe reversible contraception.  So either none of my world's solutions apply here, because the laws are different, or I bring with me knowledge and methodologies that are profitable.  Though more likely the first branch of that dilemma is actualized, if there are smart gods here who would've already worked out those solutions?  Except that you just said that gods have 'destructive-conflicts' that their clerics help them fight, which, either there's a translation difficulty here, or you just described the page-one-of-textbook result that should not happen between sufficiently smart entities who can do logical commitments and verify them.  If the strategies are ending up with overt destructive actions being carried out in reality and not just in decision-theoretic-counterfactual-threat-branches-of-reality(**), that's the page-one-of-textbook non-actualized-outcome where both entities could execute different actions and would both end up with higher payoffs."

(**This is a three-syllable word in Baseline.  Keltham has been trying to use those sparingly, so as to keep his sentences and concepts simple, and likely to pass neatly across whatever translation barrier exists.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"The gods outright fight each other almost never. That is what happened a hundred years ago, and my understanding is that it was in fact a ridiculous anomaly of some kind, maybe to do with prophecy breaking and the strategies the gods used for commitments all breaking. I have never heard of it happening before or since. Their churches go to war on Golarion regularly but I doubt that destroys resources that the gods value? It kills people, but their souls are fine, and casters become more powerful in high conflict situations, and people get more religious when there's lots of war, I think. 

Safe reversible contraception sounds very good and you could sell that for lots of money. 

My current best theory for predicting the next thing you're going to say and/or be confused about is that - so Cheliax is richer than most places, and it's got more Law and less of the bad things you were confused about and more - of peoples' preferences being consistent over time, of things that are a good use of resources for the long term happening even if it doesn't benefit anyone until the long term, of not going to war - compared to other places. So extrapolating that wildly, your world sounds like a place that is even richer, and even Lawfuler, to the point the distinction between Good and Evil doesn't even matter much to people since you haven't got afterlives and all the parts of Evil which actually involve hurting other people on purpose have been Lawed out of existence."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, it matters.  See, even after you get rich and Law all that stuff out of existence, Very Serious People go on worrying about whether it will come back a hundred years later, if we let ourselves start to drift evolutionarily on the Good-Evil axis.  I hadn't actually been informed as yet, but considering the choices I made in some test-pranks as a kid, I expect I'd have been told a few years later that my place on the Good-Evil axis wouldn't have entitled me to much support for having kids of my own.  Which, fine, fair enough, if I'm the sort of person who goes around constantly assessing how much reciprocation other people owe me, instead of just being nice, I shouldn't be too surprised if Civilization decides it doesn't owe me much.  Because what have I done for them, right, under the rules the way I say they should work?  I can either prove they're wrong about people like me being unnecessary, or get out of the gene pool, fair enough.  My ambition before I ended up here was to fairly make a billion labor-hours, and then marry about two dozen women and have about a hundred and forty-four kids.  The first part to show them how much they need people like me, and the second part to unilaterally give the next generation some more people like me whether the rest of Civilization likes that or not."

"...which I should, probably, just never think about again, because this world is not and never will be a test of my ability to shine inside Civilization.  If I win here, it won't be because I was special, it'll be because I came in with a ton of knowledge that any other dath ilani might have.  And if I lose here, it'll be because there were gods smarter than any human being who ate all the low-hanging-fruit that anybody at all in dath ilan could've found.  But hey, I'm adaptable, I can reorient my entire life, might take me a couple of minutes but I can do it.  I just - felt it might be helpful to say out loud, once, before it all drifts away.  Help if somebody else knew, even for a halfminute, before I let it go."

"Moving on.  If churches are going to war, it means that the gods being smart doesn't prevent humans from being stupid, not sure why, but it obviously doesn't, so maybe I can still help there.  Priority question, how much of my knowledge still holds here, if any.  Does running electricity through water produce two gases, one of them lighter than air, which can be burned to yield water again?"  If molecular chemistry is the same, higher levels of organization will probably also be the same; and knowledge about steelmaking - or that synthetic hormones can signal the female reproductive system to not ovulate - will probably also hold.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just being nice is very stupid, if your planet's selecting for that they're going to have horrible problems the first time they encounter anyone else.  - I'm not an alchemist, I can look it up but probably after the translation spell runs out unless that information is really important information."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If 'nice' sounds like a kind of thing that can be 'stupid' we've got some kind of translation difficulty running, that's a type error.  'Nice' is part of the utility function.  If you don't already know that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, it probably isn't... I guess you could just not know what anything is made of.  Do you know what water is made of that's not two one-proton atoms and one eight-proton atom?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know what a proton is. Water freezes at a little above the ambient air temperature outdoors here at the Worldwound in the summer and floats when it's ice, and boils at a temperature you can get over a normal nonmagical fire and then is steam, and holds heat well compared to metal or plant matter or something. When it freezes in the sky it forms snowflakes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds correct.  Do snowflakes have six-sided structure under a microscope?  Where I come from, that happens because molecules with two hydrogen and one oxygen have a least-energy crystal configuration that's hexagonal.  If all of that is still true and for the same reasons, then I still know how to make advanced steel and build electrical generators.  And the methodology I know to regenerate more of that knowledge will apply unchanged.  Male and female reversible contraception... was tech in a relatively advanced state where I can't reproduce it directly.  I can reproduce the methodology that generates it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Snowflakes have six sides. What's steel used for, what're electrical generators used for -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You don't have steel.  Right then, if steel is a possible thing here and you don't have it, that's step one in climbing the tech tree.  It's a metal that's harder than other metals, while still possible to work with at all; variations on it don't rust, keep edges better, and so on.  What's your current advanced metallurgy like?  Bronze, iron..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Magic weapons. They don't rust and keep an edge perfectly and they last forever. We have bronze and iron. I've seen work done in steel but I've also seen work done in adamantine, mithril, skymetal, there's lots of metals that exist but aren't mass-producible and I don't know what they'd be used for if they were."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh.  Yeah, some of those terms aren't translating.  I wonder if I actually know anything portable about steel, or there's just some nearly analogous metal here, or if steel still exists but there's processes that don't exist in dath ilan for building other metals above or beyond it.  Let's try a basic tech on a higher level of organization.  How expensive is it to produce a thousand copies of one book and how would you do that?"  

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it costs about what a laborer would earn in three years to get a thousand copies, and you'd go to a printing shop where they'd line up moveable metal - tile things? - with letters on them to make the pages, and then ink them and stamp the parchment. I think the biggest contributing expense is the paper and the binding. Cheliax releases national histories every few years but I don't think other places can afford to do that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You got printing presses, okay.  I may or may not know anything useful about cheaper paper, if a book's worth of paper costs a day's wages.  Let's try refrigeration, how expensive is ice in hotter climates and what would you do to get it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I think you mostly cannot buy ice in Cheliax. I guess you could have someone ship it from the far north but I don't know this to have ever been done commercially, and my father's a merchant, I was broadly familiar with the things people were trying commercially in shipping. Probably you'd pay a spellcaster to prepare and cast Snowball for you, which would cost ten laborer-days and be about a hands-ful."

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham rapidly rubs his hands together.  It produces heat.

If heat is still disorganized kinetic energy, expanding and compressing gases should make them colder and hotter.

"Promising.  I very likely know how to turn mechanical motion into cold without using magic, maybe using a river waterwheel as the kinetic source.  Not sure how well it'll scale at your tech level, with any luck it's two orders of magnitude past Snowball, enough to enable food-preservation at scale, if you don't already have that... I don't actually have a good sense for how that tech scales costwise.  Worth having a backup plan.  Do your seagoing ships travel against the wind?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They know techniques for adjusting the sails so you can still make some ground. They haven't got something better than wind to power them except I met a Tian man once who claimed in his country tamed sea creatures towed them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't know if my world's standard primitive sailing technique is better or worse.  We can check later.  I have notions of how to build nonmagical powered engines for ships too, but they're higher up the tech tree and take fuel and steel and engineering."

"The conventional guess among my people is that steel, better steel, cheaper steel, fall among the first things you should try to sell - or not-sell - to a civilization climbing the tech tree.  We don't actually know what the past was like in that regard, but the conventional guess is that materials technology would end up being the rate-limit on most other inventions.  Like, the standard guess is that things to do with better steel end up being obvious, when a lot of people are all trying to figure it out; so it's the quality and quantity of steel they have that ends up limiting their technology, because exploring metallurgy is hard in a way that thinking up the printing press is not.  I wish I knew more about how that conventional wisdom was generated, but since I don't know, it's not implausible I should treat that as my point of departure.  If the metals better than your current steel are still rare and expensive, more and better steel should still be worth something."

"Supposing that's true and it makes my knowledge valuable, where do I go from there?  Including getting past basic accommodations quickly?  As you say, this seems like a poor society and I come from a rich one, so I'd like to spend as little time as possible being poor around here.  Unless Asmodeus sees me as having done him a favor with the dath ilan soul tipoff, but I'm not clear on whether that constitutes a favor.  And in fact you've said some ominous things about gods which would lead me to have second thoughts about doing them favors, if they're not the sort to repay favors to non-gods who can't logically verify their expected reciprocation.  Which would seem dumb to me because of the exact chain of logic I just went through, I mean, non-gods can generalize over the visible past behavior of gods in cases like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is better to have done Asmodeus a favor than not have done Asmodeus a favor, in terms of Asmodeus's inclinations towards you, I think probably the church'll give you money and a nice place to stay once I explain all of this. You should not count on that with nonLawful gods though they're still mostly, excluding Nethys, sane, and aware mortals can track our incentives ...probably the church'll want you back in Cheliax, not here at the Worldwound, where sometimes there are demons. I think you'll like it better, the weather's nicer and there are more - nice things of the sort I presume you're accustomed to, are there specifics I should mention?" The running list in her head already is 'admiration, women, money beyond ability to spend it', which seems like quite enough, really, but maybe also he likes a specific fruit.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably, but at this point I have no idea what they are.  If I want to cool my house in summer in Cheliax, it sounds like I either need to get rich enough to hire wizards, or, like, invent air conditioning first.  So it sounds like all of dath ilan registers as Lawful and Evil on your whacked-out scales, but - are there exactly nine gods total, or is there more than one Lawful Evil god I might want to work for?  For that matter, I might want to check out exactly what the Lawful Neutral and Neutral Evil gods are like, maybe the Neutral Evil one pays ten times as much to make up for being unreliable."

Permalink Mark Unread

The church is super not going to let him leave. "Uh, Lawful Neutral's Abadar, you'd probably get along but He doesn't have a presence in Cheliax and Cheliax is the richest country and the place it makes sense to start things. The other Lawful Evil gods are - arguably not proper divinities in their own right and don't have independent churches, they work for Asmodeus, I think He cleared out independent Lawful Evil competition before humans had writing, except for Zon-Kuthon who's the god of pain and misery, long story. The Neutral Evil gods are, uh, Urgathoa, goddess of disease and the undead, I've never heard anything about Her paying well, and Norgorber, who's an ascended human so that's promising in terms of being more aligned with humans but also He's the god of crime and assassins and I am not sure how interested He'd be in this project, which sounds like it optimistically involves no crimes and mostly only defensive dealings with assassins."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I would have intuitively hoped, going on the description you gave me, that there is somewhere a Neutral Evil god of people pursuing their own sunlit interests without fretting about whether they are being too lawful or too chaotic.  Also, ascended human whoa possible new life goal how does one do that and does it trash your existing personality?"

Permalink Mark Unread

- giggle. "There's a rock called the Starstone in Absalom, it's behind magical protections Aroden put in place and the purpose and nature of which He hid with magic and never clarified, you can touch it and ascend to godhood, hundreds of people try every year, the last success was about a thousand years ago, personality seems.....in some ways intact? As much as it could be, I guess, when you're getting that much smarter and getting a bunch of new sensory modalities and operating in a completely different context. But people stay the same alignment and some of their holy books detail new god-perspectives on the events of their life, so they at least remember it and can have opinions about it.

There might be somewhere a Neutral Evil god pursuing its own interests without worrying about Law or Chaos but if so their interests don't include the people of Golarion knowing about them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's unfortunate because I can't deal with them, but at the same time, it's hilarious.  I mean, if I ascended, I would not actually fuck off and leave everyone else to go rot with no stainless steel, but the counterfactual me that does is within eyesight among the counterfactual universes.  I wonder if knowing god-math has anything to do with being able to touch the Starstone?  Seems worth a quick shot if trying is cheap."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean the overwhelming majority of failures die. They're usually high enough level adventurers they just arrange a resurrection in advance if they want it, but I don't know that the church'll front you that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Resurrection is advanced clerics, right.  Can you give me a quick description of how one becomes a basic cleric or basic wizard?  I am wondering if knowing god-math or knowing regular math makes me sufficiently talented to do those without despecializing from my other work, and it seems like even small services there are worth tons."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wizards learn how to manipulate and stabilize spells, and then spend an hour every day - you can learn how to do it faster, I'm working on it, but average is an hour - preparing and stabilizing their spells, at which point they can cast them on very short notice with a couple seconds of work. Cheliax tracks people to be wizards at 14 and generally if you haven't washed out you can reliably cast and retrieve cantrips at 16. Possibly an adult with all the math background and none of the spell background can pick it up in days or weeks. More complicated spells are the same thing but you need to follow more complicated math and you need more working memory - which necklaces are great for - the specific math is topology, did that translate -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Closed sets, open sets, fixed-point mappings?  I was okay at topology at age 12, didn't follow up, probably better at it now.  Hour a day sounds expensive in time but it'd be nice to have an instant employment fallback option.  Clerics?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, that sounds like the right kind of math. I can check if you're smart enough to be a wizard, if you want, there's a spell for checking that. For clerics a god picks you. Usually when you pray to them, not necessarily the first time you pray to them but the first time you've - grown up, in some relevant way, or understood something new - sometimes it's just at an apparently random time, though. They get more powerful through time in their god's service and deeds in their god's service and sometimes, again, apparently at random - I'm sure it's nonrandom from a godperspective."

Permalink Mark Unread

"'Pray'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, you clear your environment of distractions and kneel on the floor and try to - acknowledge that you're in the presence, or could be, of something much bigger than yourself, something that can see much farther, and you think about their priorities and your desire to serve them, and sometimes ask for things, but, like, 'the strength to do Your will' sorts of things, not for things to specifically go your way, since the god knows better about what's best."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do people who become clerics ever regret that in retrospective expectation without benefit of hindsight?  Can you easily resign the position and pick another god if it doesn't work out?  Is successfully 'praying' enough evidence of purpose-alignment that it never happens with a god you'd rather not partner with under reflective equilibrium?  I'm wondering if there's any reason I should not just immediately do this with Asmodeus and cut out the middleman, in case that other cleric decided he needed to go cut his toenails first."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I think probably you should do it but you might be too Chaotic or something," or insufficiently informed about the things about Asmodeus that you're going to object to, "so I expect it to not work. I have never heard of anyone regretting become a cleric except if they eventually got ex-clericed, which I think can be traumatic. I think if you no longer want to serve the god that'd probably break clerichood, or if you change alignments to be too far from the god that does it, though I haven't heard of anyone breaking clerichood on purpose."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I'm getting the impression that gods are very much the big factions here, and if that's true, I am starting to wonder whether becoming a cleric is an obvious sort of thing to try if you don't want to get noisily moved around by clerics - supposedly on behalf of gods, maybe, but maybe in fact the clerics don't even know logical decision theory and start wars.  How is being ex-clericed traumatic?  Is the part where nobody does that on purpose because it's so traumatic?  Or because nobody forms a successful cleric bond unless they're gonna get along great with the god?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think mostly - people don't form a bond if they won't get along with the god, and also if you're clericed then the church is - yours, it trains you and pays you and gets you help and guidance and is full of people like you, which for lots of people is hard to find, and also you get magic powers which you get in the habit of using for everything from drinking water to temperature tolerance to lighting - magic can make hot weather feel nice, that might be part of why we don't have a ice industry -  and then being de-clericed is being told you aren't worth that, and losing your magic powers, and losing your job, and losing your economically valuable skills? I don't know any ex-clerics, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can you talk to a god without being a cleric?  Have you ever communicated with Asmodeus?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can. There are a billion people and gods have...maybe a hundred thousand times peoples' attentional capacity but they're also not spending most of it talking to people on Golarion, there are other planets and other things they're doing on their own planes. Also reportedly gods talking to you causes significant pain afterwards, if you're not using a high level cleric spell that prepares you for it. Because your brain is just - doing a bunch of stuff brains don't do on their own and then the resetting afterwards involves the brain sort of flailing wildly. But sometimes gods talk to people who aren't their clerics, if they're paying enough attention to notice and it's important enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

He doesn't want to be too obvious about the meaning of the next question, so he'd better toss in a distractor first.  "I guess if the gods can talk to non-clerics, that's some evidence against the picture I was building up, where the clerics might be misrepresenting what gods say, and that's why some of this picture doesn't make sense in terms of smarter-than-human beings acting in coherent ways.  The part about clerics ending up fighting wars is still very strange, even if it didn't destroy much that gods care about.  It's much more a behavior I'd expect from flailing nongods under the influence of something like Chaos, if Chaos here is a kind of reified factor that can affect people.  But I may be stupidly missing the extreme basics of the equilibrium of this entire world.  Is it possible for you to - quickly sketch out who the major factions are and what they bargained for in the god-equilibrium that underlies everything?  So far I know about Asmodeus, the Lawful Evil god of people pursuing selfish interests but in an organized way that I'd ordinarily say is icky except that your standard of Chaos is fifteen hundred times more Chaotic than I want to be, Norburger, god of killing-people-for-money, and Abedder."

In fact Keltham has carefully memorized the names Norgorber, Neutral Evil god of crime and assassinations, and Abadar, Lawful Neutral god that Keltham would probably get along with; but he does not wish to show that he has.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. So the biggest thing is that there was a very powerful god, Rovagug, who ate planets, and had eaten a bunch of them already when He came to Golarion, and it took an alliance of all of the non-Chaotic gods to stop him from eating Golarion too, and He couldn't be destroyed but they imprisoned Him. People say in the center of the world but I think that's probably a metaphor. But the imprisonment took the cooperation of all of Them, and I think any of Them could let Him loose, so that's sort of the base of the god-agreements, that all of the gods have to continue thinking Golarion ought to go on existing under any particular conditions on Golarion that obtain, or They could just destroy it.

The restrictions on cleric magic are generally understood to be part of a godagreement, for basically the same reason - that if any god who wanted could just put much more of Themself into Golarion then the others would have to do it reciprocally and then there'd be much less space for mortals doing mortal things - and so clerics are restricted to the more positive sum set of the things they could potentially be enabled to do. 

The afterlives are a godagreement. Each plane gets to do its own thing and gets those souls judged by Pharasma, who is True Neutral, to be theirs. Abaddon, Neutral Evil, defected on that, they eat their souls and they were eating some directly from the transit to judgment instead of waiting until they were theirs, so Pharasma changed the rules, and now people damned to Abaddon can choose Hell or the Abyss instead, and also most of the other afterlives volunteered some forces to defend the souls on their way to judgment. 

Asmodeus has agreements with most of the other gods, that protect Hell and the souls in it and advance His goals elsewhere. I know He's a party to lots of things protecting Golarion continuing to exist, and the sorting system for afterlives, and the compromise that cuts Abaddon out, and I think also agreements about intervention among the afterlives with each other, and with worlds other than Golarion. I know that long ago the gods broke into coalitions that disagreed on what we called "free will" - what I think you'd call preference incoherence, the thing about humans where occasionally we don't do what's in our interests - and Asmodeus was opposed to it, and in Hell teaches it out of people. 

Good and Evil are opposed but the Lawful Good and Lawful Evil afterlives don't fight each other directly, which is a godagreement of some kind. The Lawful Good gods are ...Erastil, who does agriculture, Iomedae, who is an ascended human and the god of the fight against Evil, Shizuru, who I think...used to do things on Golarion? but lost interest millennia ago - She's got a residual church in Tian Xia though - and some minor ones probably. I don't think the Lawful Good 'side' has unified priorities, Iomedae's all about defeating Evil but I don't think the other gods care about that very much. Iomedae's the one who's a signatory to the Worldwound treaty. 

Sarenrae's the Neutral Good goddess of redemption, the potential for goodness in everybody, and her afterlife spends most of its resources on arguing at Pharasma's trials that every single person should be sorted as Neutral Good, even if they're quite cheerful about being headed elsewhere, on a principle about how there's Goodness in everyone. She smote an entire city once for defying Her will, and She was instrumental in the Rovagug truce. I don't know much about Her. She's popular in the Kelesh Empire. Shelyn's the Neutral Good God of love and beauty and joy and music, She's in favor of those things I guess? I don't know Her to be in any important agreements either, which doesn't mean She isn't, but they're probably not ones relevant to Golarion or to Asmodeus."

Permalink Mark Unread

"When you say Asmodeus teaches people to be more coherent, are we talking teaching people to not have kids and kill them, or, like, full-scale Keeper 'let's see how much god-math humans can become and wield' coherence?  Is Iomedae fighting Abaddon eating souls, or also fighting Asmodeus?  What's the entire anti-Worldwound coalition?  Where does Norburger or Abedder fit in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Iomedae fights Abaddon eating souls but also fights Asmodeus - or, they don't fight, but - they're opposed, and their agreements are the agreements of enemies, renegotiated off relative power levels. Because He's also Evil. The anti-Worldwound coalition is Sarenrae, Iomedae, Calistria - who I didn't get to, she's the Chaotic Neutral goddess of revenge - Abadar, and Asmodeus, mainly, I'm sure there are other gods involved but They don't have large forces committed here and They aren't among the advertised churches you have obligations towards under the treaty, though the treaty also imposes obligations towards anyone who is here and fighting the Worldwound, regardless of their god. I have no idea what a full-scale Keeper is but devils - the kind of being that people turn into in Hell - are not just people who don't have kids and kill them, they're much more different than that. I suppose some of them eventually become mostly god-math, because some of them eventually become mostly gods."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How is revenge Chaotic, what?  Not punishing defections is the kind of defect of instrumental strategy that you could mistake as niceness but is actually stupidity... feel free to ignore that if the answer is gods just not seeing the world the way humans do.  Are there afterlives besides Neutral Evil where people don't turn into mostly god-math given enough time?  What did Calistria, Abadar, and Norburger bargain for in the god-equilibrium?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, I agree that not punishing defections is - you'd think nice, actually stupid - but I don't think Calistrians are very interested in only punishing defection as opposed to bad things in full generality and I don't think they care about the punishment being - systematic, calibrated in punitiveness - they're not a legal system - Maybe revenge is the wrong word. Reversals of power relations? I agree revenge could be a perfectly good Lawful Evil domain if approached differently.

 

In the Abyss people turn into demons. In the Maelstrom - the Chaotic Neutral afterlife - they turn into chaos beasts, which can't interact with causality - the Maelstrom doesn't have any - in Elysium I have no idea. In Nirvana they turn into animals for unclear reasons. The True Neutral afterlife kicks you out into other afterlives as soon as you develop a slant on Law/Chaos or Good/Evil but if you manage to never I think you turn into a very specialized kind of godmath aimed at enabling the sorting. Heaven and Axis I think work mostly like Hell in that eventually you turn into mostly godmath but with, like, different emphasis, Heaven'll strip all the Evil out of you and Axis I think just makes you pure Law with no other desires.

I have no idea what Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber bargained for."

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham keeps a neutral face.  It is, in dath ilan, mostly a theoretical study, because the incentives have been set up not to do that, to punish any attempt at doing that.  But he is starting to wonder if possibly the woman in front of him is a theoretical entity that ought to appear in only counterfactual branches of reality:  The overtly biased salesperson, speaking bad judgments of a sort she can potentially be caught out on later, and for which she will not later be able to plausibly present an unbiased line of reasoning leading there after-rewinding-hindsight, for purposes of executing more favorable trades now.  It seems like the sort of thing that could go along with a world in which people end up fighting wars.  It is possible, though by no means certain, that this information is being filtered.

In the Chaotic Neutral afterlife you can't interact with causality, hm?  Maybe it's just a translation error, but.

"Huh.  What do clerics or other faction-members of Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber do in practice?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Calistria runs abortion clinics and shelters for women who've made marriage vows and want to run out on them. Often for good reasons, like that their husband sucks. Abadar runs Osirion, which is a country south of Cheliax, and runs banks in other places. Norgorber's followers are - mostly criminal gangs. Orders of assassins, most of them that I've heard of, but overwhelmingly criminals aren't assassins and other kinds are less notorious so I bet it's mostly less notorious kinds of crime.

Did you want me to do the thing that checks if you are smart enough to learn to be a wizard, I bet you are but if you are I can ask them to also get a spellbook for you, while they set up somewhere nice."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cost, side effects, is there a reason to bother running it if I can already prove basic theorems in topology?  Also snerk about the Lawful Neutral god running the banking system.  I was about to ask how you did banking in such a way as to not make a profit for yourself or try to benefit anybody else, but then I realized that a crazy ideal bank setting ideal prices would drive all other banks out of business, so of course the Lawful Neutral god runs the banks.  Not sure why you think I'd get along with that god, that is very not the kind of investing I aspire to.  Is there a Lawful Good god of unselfishly wanting people to know more stuff and figure out more stuff?  Obviously I couldn’t be their cleric, but they'd be the god whose thingy benefits most directly when I disseminate knowledge and methods of creating knowledge.  They should potentially be going in with Asmodeus on backing me, if Lawful Good and Lawful Evil ever do mutual projects.  Separate dumb question to ignore, how do Chaotic gods think at all, let alone be smarter than human?  Cognition is built of shards and fragments of higher mathematical structures that we'd consider extremely the word that translates to us as 'lawful', unless the godly concept of Law and Chaos only applies to overt social behaviors."

Is he being too obvious in his strategic objectives as inferable from his tactical maneuvering, despite the distractors he's throwing in?  Not much he can do about that without slowing down, and he's under a time limit.

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"Good and Evil do collaborative projects sometimes and this sure sounds like one but I don't actually know of a Lawful Good god with prosperity in their domain? The reason why you'd hear in Cheliax is that Good people are so obsessed with unselfishness that their societies can't even sustain positive-sum things like wealth that run on selfishness and I think the way a paladin would say it is that wealth invites greed and corruption and so on, and societies that are trying too hard at pursuing it lose the selflessness." She is at this point dancing along the line of saying things that are supportive of other churches, which is illegal, but letting him decide he can't work with Cheliax would be catastrophic too. Plausibly she should pretend the spell has run out but it has six minutes more and maybe he could tell. "...I don't know that much about Chaotic gods, they're barred in Cheliax because Asmodeus mostly can't form god agreements with them, I think.....just thinking of things I know about, and I don't know all that much about gods, you can have a very short time horizon or very high discounting so you don't care very much if your values will be different tomorrow because you don't care much about anything that happens tomorrow, and will trade off lots of it for things that happen today, you can probably have the equivalent of that in dimensions other than time, you can prefer that future instances of you share your values but otherwise have entirely different attributes, I think gods have lots of attributes that are not overdetermined by their values, you can - I don't really know. Some kinds of outsiders you can summon and ask this stuff but obviously you can't summon full-on chaos beasts and the things you can summon from the Maelstrom are generally not very easy to get answers out of, is my understanding."

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Interesting.  Push on that slightly harder and see what happens?  Maybe his strategy will then be too obvious, but inferring other people's strategies from the infinite possibility space seems like it should actually be hard, or at least, fiction writers talk about how often their readers misinterpret them even when trying to telegraph things.

"Not a god of prosperity, a god of - teaching?  Knowledge?  Aside from everything to do with parents and kids, people who unselfishly want other people to gain knowledge are, like, one of the few examples I can think of Good that doesn't seem fully inhuman.  I'm not one of them, but there are dath ilani teachers who want you to learn their whole subject matter in a way that seems - as unselfish as anything ever gets?  And more importantly, there are people driven towards gaining new knowledge in a way that should code as either Good or Neutral, as I understand it?  If there's a god for that, and people going with that faction are actually competent at the god's thing, I am going to need the best of those people if I try anything on the order of reconstructing a nonmagical sailless ship.  The sort of people who invent math before any wizards have a use for it because they are just that obsessed with math.  Those people.  Is there a god for that one?"

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"A god of teaching. I'm pretty sure not. I can ask once the spell runs out and give you a signal yes or no - yes looks like this, no looks like this - my books list all the gods including the minor ones by domain, and there are lots of minor ones, but that I expect I'd have heard of, it's not a rare profession exactly, my mother's a teacher. ....honestly I think lots of people like that are Neutral and worship Nethys, the god of magic and knowledge. Nethys is said to be omniscient, but He's also insane, His plans don't make any sense on the material world and his clerics get steadily less capable of talking about things to humans over time and usually blow themselves up doing ridiculous magic experiments. ...Irori is a Vudrani god - ascended human - of perfect self-knowledge - no, I guess that doesn't seem like the thing either -"

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"Sounds like we're running out of time.  Are we running out of time?"

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"Yes. Last questions? Planning to get you nice accommodations, spellbook, writing implements, look up gods."

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"Sounds correct.  Look, I'm sorry if this is impugning your honesty, but I hope you realize that I'm in a strange place with a visibly low level of Law where people fight destructive-conflicts.  I do not actually know that people here have set up all the careful structures and customs you use to incentivize honest business arrangements.  I am going to be taking some precautions based on that and I am genuinely sorry if those are unnecessary and lead to suboptimal outcomes from your own perspective, but please consider my own ignorance."

"So, you could have reported all that to me completely honestly and I just went picking for coincidences until I found some.  Or it could be not-coincidence that you're willing to tell me the identifying things of all the Good and Neutral gods I can't become a cleric of, but not actually give me Asmodeus's key identifying info, plus there's supposedly no other Lawful Evil gods worth mentioning, plus all the Neutral Evil gods you identified to me are horrible.  I am not actually going to get myself into a situation where other people are playing middleman between myself and Asmodeus, and pawning off cute financial rewards on me, while keeping the intelligence-enhancement rewards to themselves.  Again, sorry if you're not even considering that, but I need to consider what your incentives might be.  I am currently considering options that include praying directly to Asmodeus about this, tonight, based on my guesses as to what the top Lawful Evil god's thing might be, starting with 'making money'.  If that's a terrible idea because, for example, I can accidentally get Iomedae if I accidentally think about how I'm unhappy about the Abaddon business, or because the existing Asmodeus clerics get snippy when somebody tries to talk to Asmodeus without them, maybe explain very fast why I shouldn't do that.  Alternatively, tell me how to make sure I get Asmodeus."

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"I swear to you, as a servant of Cheliax and of Asmodeus, that as far as I know, the Neutral Evil gods really do all seem to suck and there are none I'm failing to mention deliberately for strategic reasons. My best guess why is because Abaddon eats souls and anyone with better priorities hangs out somewhere else. Asmodeus is also called the Prince of Hell, or the Prince of Law; Hell is nine planes and He's on the deepest, called Nessus. His holy symbol is the pentagram, his domains are -" tyranny, slavery, "authority, contracts, and pride, trying to pray to Him sounds like a good idea to me, I pray to Him every night and nothing's happened but no one's ever minded, afara ghe esssent savat see a - Gurre." Helpless handwave. 

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Keltham tries for his best smile.  "Thanks," he says uselessly.  He draws a pentagram in the air, to show he got that part.

He's very rapidly trying to invent an art form of playing inside counterfactuals that shouldn't exist, where dath ilan teaches only arts that improve defense more than offense.  Given how much people complain about illusion of transparency even when people are trying to communicate, Keltham's actual thoughts as a complete outsider to this system may in fact be fully opaque, given the number of possibilities from her standpoint that she doesn't know how to rule out.  But if not, if he's less safe than that, maybe it will help that he tossed her one of his lesser suspicions, as a distractor from some of his larger suspicions.  Because Keltham was not confident of his ability to completely conceal, in his body language and attitude and pauses to think, the fact that he has become suspicious, from -

Did he actually forget to ask her name this whole time?  "Keltham," he says, tagging himself again, and then looks at her.

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"Carissa."

 

And she trots off to find the priest.

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Keltham will sit quite still, trying to control the hammering of his heart and the visible sweating that might also be giving info away.  Stupid body, it shouldn't reflect his thoughts like that during complicated negotiations.

Carissa thought that he would think that her oaths meant something, which is a good sign that the Algorithm is not completely unreflected here.  Though Carissa also thought she needed to swear in her capacity as a god's employee for her oath to mean something, which is sort of awful and sad but also makes an awful kind of sense.  Among his current suspicions is that knowing logical decision theory may make it a little too easy to call out to gods, and also entities like, say, Rovagug; and that's why people here aren't being taught the purer forms of the Algorithm, left to struggle along with intuitive honor, the Algorithm's fragmentary emotional shards.

It was, in fact, one of the more convincing things that Carissa could have done at the last, not to convince him of that exact point, but to show him that multiagent coordination still really holds here at all.  So that could be true, or she could have correctly guessed what would convince him...

He's not going to be able to guess her thoughts either, across this level of social gap.

But if Carissa is trustworthy probabilistically, then he should not go with his Plan A, to contact the Knowledge entity and ask for 25% of the orientation packet he can safely sustain, because that way he will end up bringing his knowledge and methodology to this world.  Gambling on Carissa's knowledge base having misinterpreted the natural tendency to mess with high-energy reactions, in a world with afterlives, as "drives everyone insane", seems like a little too large of a gamble.  Nethys could also just know all the infohazards.  This is still Carissa's world and not his...

This isn't what he should be thinking right now.  He should be reviewing the information he needs to remember.

Pentagrams, contracts, authority, pride, the deepest layer Nessus of a nine-layer plane.

Abadar, who runs the banks and a territory called Osirion.  The part about the prices being ideal prices was just a guess; he was fishing for information via contradiction, but Carissa didn't confirm or deny.

Norgorber, god of violating regulations and killing people for money, whom Carissa swore was in a class all of whose members sucked.

Calistria, god of women who want to leave their husbands, get abortions, and get revenge.  Why this doesn't also apply symmetrically to men who want to leave their wives is one of the things he didn't have time to ask Carissa.

Nethys, god of knowledge and mad experimentation, an extreme to which he could still be forced.

And, he supposes, Sarenrae.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

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The priest has his eyebrows raised and that, of all things, reminds Carissa to be terrified, which she’d been attempting to forget on the grounds that lying’s harder than just having the right opinions in the first place. She’s not sure that was the wrong tack but - probably in hindsight this should have been handled by a specialist in dealing with prospective defectors from other countries, someone who actually knows what they say about the gods in other places, not just the things they say to Chelish soldiers in the uneasy context of the Worldwound truce. 


Failing that - she should probably have been stupider? It was pride, motivating her there, he’s obviously very clever and she doesn’t like being outdone, doesn’t like hearing that god math is easy, taught at a younger age than the age where she started training as a wizard -

 


- is he lying about that? He gave a credible impression of being not very good at lying but that’s only sort of lying, really, claiming you were twelve when you studied topology instead of twenty, people exaggerate more when telling stories of their conquests and don’t even consider it deception -

 

- if he’s not lying about it then how? There’s a classroom-full of children of a given age as intelligent as Carissa in all Cheliax and it’d be logistically difficult to put them in one place.  Maybe steel can do that. 
 
He didn’t mention being tracked for it - maybe he was tracked for it and just didn’t think it bore mention but he mentioned that they checked for Evil and thought he was somewhat there inclined, and surely no society checks for Evil inclination and not for intelligence, which is much more obvious and easier to test for. 
Not impossible, she concludes, thinking about it, if you have a good way of putting all the smartest children in your country in the same place. But he doesn’t carry himself like someone who thinks he’s one of the smartest people in his country. And no sane society would be discouraging its most intelligent people from having children. 

 


- she’s getting distracted. She should be composing her report for the priest, which should include these inferences and exclude the error analysis. They’ll probably mindread her for it later but by then she can have shaped it to be a little more generous. 

“He’s from another world,” she says. “I think…. I think they’re smarter and Lawfuller, and I’m not entirely sure they have free will.”

 


The priest looks at her impassively. 


“There’s a billion of them. Unless he’s lying - which, with permission, I can check in a minute, I’ve got a Detect Thoughts left - people who are not particularly notably smart have the prerequisites for wizard education covered when they’re twelve, not because they have wizardry or any reason to have treated it as an educational priority. He wants to try to reinvent his world’s technology here. I think he can do it. I assume we want it done in Cheliax, and probably that means you want to take him back there tonight, because here there’s nothing we can do if he talks to Iomedae and decides to walk out the door - I think he is probably going to. Plausibly going to try to talk to every god I mentioned, He had lots of questions about them. He has Chaotic sympathies and I’m not sure if he believed me the Chaotic gods are no good for this. And he was confused about why all the Evil gods outside Asmodeus are…so terrible… because he is lacking the context that Evil gods mostly hurt petitioners badly, I only had 50 minutes and that always takes a really long time to explain to people in a way that doesn’t send them running out the door screaming so I judged it better to omit it. But he noticed, uh, that without that and without the context that heresy is prohibited in Cheliax and without the context that it’s recommended not to learn about other gods lest you get yourself in trouble, then it doesn’t - quite hold together, and I think he’ll have a lot of questions for someone who knows more than I about defectors and how to explain those things. 

He said he wants - to be so rich he can’t keep track of how much money he has, and to have lots of beautiful women to have lots of children by, which I think was - well, obviously, a normal motivation in its own right but it was significantly about his country not thinking he was particularly valuable to it? I think you could get a lot of goodwill just by treating it as very obvious that we want ten thousand of him. Which we might, even if he’s Chaotically inclined he gave a credible impression of not thinking people should - commit crimes or overthrow governments - and he wouldn’t choose Abaddon.”


“Did he like you?” the priest says.

 


- an obvious question. She’s unprepared for it in the sense her thoughts hadn’t gotten there yet, but not in the sense she feels at all surprised. “I don’t know. Or - I think yes but possibly if you give him twenty pretty girls at that point it’d be not particularly.”

 

“Your recommendation is that I get him to Cheliax tonight?”

 


“Yes. Somewhere - abundant in ways even a much richer world might not be abundant, if they didn’t have magic -“

 


“I’ll talk to some people. Go read his mind.”

She does that.

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Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; women getting revenge on their husbands but somehow not the other way around which like why the asymmetry no he needs to memorize not puzzle; knowledge and mad experimentation; Good in everyone.  And Carissa went out of her way to mention that Sarenrae had destroyed a city which, like, possibly reasons, especially if people go places when they die.  But also implies maybe Carissa doesn't want Keltham talking to Sarenrae in particular which - which mostly implies her trying to steer Keltham away from places that Keltham does not think he really wants to go.  He does not know that Carissa and himself are in anywhere near the level of zero-sum destructive opposition where 'do the thing Carissa least wants you to do' is a recipe for anything except suicidal contact with eldritch person-transforming entities he should not touch.  Except that -

- he's just going to keep thinking this until he actually thinks it.  It's profoundly unhelpful and not at all the most important thing going on, but he's going to actually think it, just to get it over with.

Once, when Keltham was a child, they placed him in an unreal situation, as children are sometimes placed.  He saw a person in distress, seemingly lightly injured; but very lightly, for dath ilan does not wish to distress its children too much in the course of testing them.  Just earlier that day, also, seemingly by coincidence, Keltham had been told that a fine fun party awaited him, but only if he arrived exactly on time to depart with others.

So Keltham went out of his way to find an adult, despite the party.  But Keltham also made very sure that the adult promised to share with him the credit for helping this person, and told the injured person that he wanted to be paid for it, plus extra for missing his party.

It's hardly terrible - even from an average dath ilani perspective, that is, if you're Keltham it's not terrible at all.  He didn't refuse to help, he just asked to be paid for it afterwards.  Cities wouldn't exclude Keltham on that basis, if they could even access that information about him.  Dath ilan doesn't think him outcast like a murderer.  It's just that -

There are a few places, besides just parenting and teaching, where pure unselfish Good is a thing that humans ever do.  One of them is the will to help others in distress.

Dath ilan has an image of what it wants to be.  It wants to be the sort of person who hears about Abaddon and is suffused with a pure horror that Keltham does not, in fact, feel.  He feels revolted and sad, but he does not feel the thing that others feel when they hear about true death, that would lead them to be able to contract with Iomedae on the basis of that alone; and, if strength of emotion counts for anything, channel however much power of a god that lets them channel, to tear one more soul out of Abaddon.  That is what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up.  And that is not what Keltham is.  Dath ilan does not want to be Keltham when it grows up.

He's not outcast.  He's not prohibited from having children, if that was even a thing outside of the Last Resort.  Keltham just has to fund those children himself, if he wants them, because dath ilan is not particularly trying to grow up to be him.  Or so they were very likely going to say to him on maturity, despite Keltham having otherwise gotten +0.8SD on intelligence.

And that was that, and Keltham had made his own proud accommodations with it.  Because people are what they are; and can only attain what they can, in the course of being what they are, better; not by wishing they were somebody else.  Keltham spoke to a Confessor about his life's master plans, in case a Confessor had anything unexpected to say; and the Confessor formally predicted to Keltham that if he had his 144 children, and screwed all the elite desirable women who hang out with elite male public-goods-producers to mutually prove their respective eliteness, Keltham would at the end still not feel happy.  Unless, perhaps, he'd gotten to know a few of his children much better.  And Keltham had shrugged, and said that then perhaps he'd get to know a few children better.  But in terms of overall life ambitions, Keltham can't think of anything with higher expected value to him, for he feels the way he feels.  If he's not what dath ilan currently wants to be when it grows up, then that's not who he is.  He can maybe prove to dath ilan that it was wrong about who Civilization needs in order to grow; he cannot be other than what he is.

But there's a god of there being potential for Good in everyone.

It's a stupid thought.  He's never going to do it.  And if he did, modifying his own utility function to fit in, is not, quite, provably incoherent, because human beings are not starting out coherent, but it is still not - the Way, as the Keepers would put it.  Keltham is what he is, and needs to find his own way to be himself.  Dath ilan itself would tell him never to do that, because it is horrifying self-mutilation for the sake of conformity and that is also not what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up.

So he's not going to pray to Sarenrae.  At all.  Considering that explicitly, leads him to realize that he is horrified by the prospect of changing himself according to an external criterion; and he knows that.  Keltham likewise already understands, and acknowledges to himself, that he would not even be doing this for his own sake.  It is just a stupid thought about how to fix something that somebody else said was, not even wrong, but not the thing they most ideally wanted to see.  It is perfectionism gone wrong to imagine that this aspect of himself, of his own utility function, might be fixed.

Most of what's really going on, probably, is that some part of him is curious what it would feel like, to be more centrally dath ilani just once; and whether it would make him feel better in some way he's not seeing in advance.  Well, above and beyond the pleasant sense of being more socially acceptable in principle.  But that wouldn't actually be the result, that the real him feels something different temporarily; it would be the temporary cessation and possibly the true suicide of the true Keltham, beneath the manipulators of some inhuman thing.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.  Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; revenge and overturning of relative status; knowledge and mad experimentation.

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...and before he tries any of those, he's going to try to figure out who his own god would be, the hypothetical god that would actually fit him; and call out to that hypothetical being, backed by explicit meditation on coherence theorems to make him more a kind of thing that gods can see.  Maybe there's a god like that.

And if instead it calls in some entity that's new to Golarion, he'll know why they don't teach people here logical decision theory.  Heh.

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(Even at the level of surface thoughts, Keltham's mind moves from thought to thought in a way that is not within the variation of ordinary mortal minds on Golarion.  Keltham's thoughts are explicitly labeled as 'meta' or 'object-level'.  His thoughts don't move in the frequent circles and loops that any telepath would be familiar with, of mostly going over the same points and occasionally diverting from them in a new direction.  Any time Keltham thinks the same thought twice, or at most three times, he undergoes a reflexive wordless motion and focuses there and starts thinking words about why the thoughts are not-quiescent after having already been spoken.  Occasionally Keltham thinks single-syllable or two-syllable words in Baseline that refer to mathematical concepts built on top of much larger bases, fluidly integrated into his everyday experience.

Everything inside Keltham's mind has a very trained feeling to it, his moment-to-moment thought-motions each feeling like a punch that a monk throws after twelve years of experience in martial arts, when the monk isn't particularly focused on showing off and simply knows what he's doing without thinking about it.  When he is sad and upset, Keltham goes into a reflexive motion of letting those parts of himself speak.  When he is uncertain and worried and doesn't know what to do next, he weighs probabilities on his uncertainty, and knows explicitly that his current worries are causing him to currently be trying to figure out what to do next.  Keltham is lost in a different world, but it has been years since the last time he felt lost inside himself.  The present situation is not enough to induce that.  He has mostly forgotten what that feels like.  He has too many options for what to think next instead of feeling internally lost.

Keltham is hardly perfect at any of the things he's been trained to do.  Often he does think the same thought three times in a row.  Frequently his current attempted cognitive tactic fails.  And Keltham notices the failure; and undergoes a recovery tactic or moves on to the next thought; all in motions so practiced that they don't distract him from the content of the thoughts themselves.  That meta stuff is all mostly the same from minute to minute, so it's been trained to the point of being ignored so long as it's not breaking down.)

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Carissa listens. Sits at a table and writes everything down, firstly because otherwise she's going to forget half of it and secondly because sitting at a table writing is a reasonable thing to do, and hopefully won't alert him to being mindread. When people aren't used to being mindread their thoughts, on being alerted to it, are all about the fact of someone having access to their thoughts, and while maybe he has the - mental discipline - to not do that if he chose, he also might well choose it, over having strategic thoughts where she could hear them.

 

She wants to die.

She has known for as long as she can remember that someday she will die and go to Hell and be trained out of her bad human habits, free will, nebulously defined and not the sort of thing you were supposed to ask a lot of clarifying questions about, but it's suddenly clear, looking at his head - free will is the tendency for the mind to wander away from its goals, for the emotions to override thought processes instead of informing them, for the brain to be sticky, burst-driven, impulsive, animalistic- 

- it was not a correct parse of the situation to guess that Keltham doesn't have free will. He's imperfect at the thing he's been trained to do. He's more like - someone raised from babyhood by Lawful outsiders, or something. He might have free will but he's never been around anyone who used it. And he's - nearly perfect - she would not have guessed that a living person could be that, could have that -

She has known that she would go to Hell and become perfect but she hasn't been impatient for it. She's impatient for it, now. 

- set that aside. There's a lot to do first.

There's another thing here which she's not going to unpack, but it goes on the list of reasons to ask someone important, if she thinks she has enough bargaining power, which is that - she has read a lot of minds and in general the meta-process, in all of them, is directed at not thinking anything treasonous, or thinking and then immediately rejecting and mentally apologizing for it. His society is ...going for Lawful Good, evidently - but they seem to have not instilled that instinct, he checks when his opinions are heretical to dath ilan but he isn't scared when they are - perhaps because it sounds like dath ilan, as a consequence probably of going for Lawful Good, uses a very light touch on heresy, though of course maybe Keltham would've vanished in the night and just doesn't know it, perhaps his 'plane accident' was in fact deliberate -

She reads his Intelligence at 18, maybe 19. Innately as smart as her or a bit smarter - and not particularly notable for his society - his society must be terrifying. A tremendous asset to Asmodeus, if He successfully claims them, and - well, Keltham thought they'd side with Iomedae, immediately, instinctively, just out of horror at the destruction of souls -

- she needs to start thinking about how to explain the thing where Hell hurts people without it seeming a conspicuous omission or an obvious dealbreaker, if it ends up being decided that Keltham ought to know. 

(She is acutely aware of her own meta-thoughts right now, from all that poking at Keltham's, and they're scared, because usually when she tries thinking about things like Hell hurting the correct thing to do is to steer her mind away, not pressure test counterarguments -)

...this is the kind of thing you ask a priest about.

It's also the kind of thing where asking a priest gets you looked into, as a potential dissident. She should wait and see whether in fact someone with Greater Teleport shows up here tonight to take Keltham to a comfortable place; if they do then she has the measure of safety that Keltham might ask about her, and might be annoyed if she'd been arrested and with higher likelihood annoyed if she'd been executed, and that they evidently value Keltham highly. She doesn't know that yet, so no thinking about that yet. 

If Cheliax were more Keltham-like, would that serve Asmodeus? It seems obviously so. Keltham's world is rich and lawful and selecting for Good, but not necessarily so, you could do the same thing but prefer the tiny children who suspect a trap in the injured stranger and go off to their wonderful party - or who don't even think of an injured stranger as a fact about the world that demands a response of any kind, any more than people pluck worms off the cobblestones after a rain -

She sets that aside, too, and composes a second report for the priest, and resists the urge to watch out of the corner of her eye while Keltham tries to make a god, which she's pretty sure isn't how you make a god but - well, it wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened, and it would necessitate some rapid changes of plans.

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(If Keltham knew Carissa's impression of his own thought processes, he would give a sad wry half-smile.  His half-disciplined thought processes, nearly perfect?  He's some wild kid, not a Keeper.  The Keepers would also laugh, at the same thought; they're not superintelligences.  Superintelligences capable of laughter would laugh too; they're not unbounded.  What unbounded agents capable of laughter might laugh about is unknown, but extrapolation says it would probably be something.)

And Keltham goes on thinking about the god-of-Keltham.  Well, that and occasionally rehearsing some short-term memories he needs to keep.  Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.  Abadar runs the banks and Osirion; Norgorber is about violating regulations and killing people for money; Calistria does revenge and inversions of status; Nethys, knowledge and magic and mad experimentation.

Keltham notices that he has now been thinking for a while about the proverbially difficult and crucial problem of Finding a Cofounder, in the special case of finding a god; is he still thinking about the right thing?  Should he be thinking about something else instead of this?  Like deciphering and abstractly-reversing the specific way that Carissa was filtering his info, if she was in fact doing that?  But Keltham may not realistically have enough info to figure out what Carissa could have hidden from him (or even outright lied about); he is too unfamiliar with this world.  Across whatever unknown distance, it is not an epistemically safe stretch to presume even that, just because Carissa is shaped like a human being, she would like to have more money.

There is the question of what really happened after the plane crash, of why the whole impossible thing.  There is the challenge of decoding a whole new world that has not as yet been reduced into math, nor into things that look like they should reduce to math.  But the tractability of that is unknown.  Whatever discoverable insights wait there could influence arbitrary decisions in arbitrary ways, it is not safe to assume even that the parts he could figure out in an hour will not influence decisions in the next hour.  But there are not known missing insights like that.

Right now, Carissa thinks he should work with the Asmodean faction, but Keltham has not yet talked to Asmodeus about the local equivalent of equity allocations; that is a known open question.  Before talking to Asmodeus he might want to search on the god that fits Keltham, in case the first god he meets tries to cleric him.  So thinking about that.. still seems like the schedule-blocker?  This is what he should be thinking about?

Enough meta-scheduling; on to the meta of figuring out how to figure out the god that fits Keltham.

Carissa didn't mention any Chaotic Evil gods at all, unless he's forgotten that part.  If Carissa is trying to hide things from him, does that mean that Keltham should be searching for ideals that are more individualistic and selfish?  But there's too many different possibilities for what Carissa could be hiding; he shouldn't stake a lot of time-mind-resource on hoping he got that guess right.

It's tempting to approach the problem by asking which gods would be most helpful for his Golarion industrialization project; or which gods would give him the largest equity allocations, if that's how Good works (it probably doesn't).  But on reflection, looking for the most exploitable god may be the wrong idea on a deep level, if other things Carissa said weren't false.  To become a cleric of a god, he needs a god that resonates with something deep inside him, preferably something that would make him feel good about working with a smarter person who had the same feature.  Some goal that Keltham shares, some ideal that Keltham holds... the god that tries to make a world into which Keltham would fit in a way that he never fit into dath ilan... obviously Keltham wished dath ilan had been more individualized (Chaotic?) and had more room for non-unselfish good (Evil?).  But the feature needs to be more specific than that, gods are not just alignments...

Does he already know what his god looks like?  Before doing a lot of setup work on a problem, you should check to make sure you don't already know the answer.

Keltham doesn't think he already knows.  A few seconds of direct soul-searching doesn't solve it.  But in terms of how to productively think for longer... this seems related to the writing exercise for Environmentalized Intrinsics, doesn't it?  He's never actually gone through that exercise, but he has heard of the concept, in detail, via sheer memetic contamination at gatherings he has ever attended.  Doing that exercise seems like it might also turn up the features of the god-who-matches-Keltham?

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(There's a metafictional trope in dath ilan which is popular to the point that even Keltham, who is not an especially avid consumer or producer of fiction, knows all about it.  It's the kind of trope where people talk about their own takes on it, on outings romantic or friendly, even if they write relatively little fiction themselves.

The Baseline phrase for this trope is a polysyllabic monstrosity that would literally translate as Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge.  A translation that literal would be misleading; the second word-pair of Boundary-Edge is glued together in the particular way that indicates a tuple of words has taken on a meaning that isn't a direct sum of the original components.  A slight lilt or click of spoken Baseline; a common punctuation-marker in written Baseline.

When the words Boundary-Edge are glued together into a special term, what they've come to mean - by processes of mere convention rather than explicit decision, a form of linguistic drift that happens even in dath ilan - is 'Cartesian Environment', the Environment as falsely distinguished from the Agent by a boundary, an edge, which does not ultimately exist within the territory.

This glued term for Cartesian Environment has in turn been double-glued (the max recursion depth being three, of course) with Intrinsic-Characteristic, to take on the new meaning "externalization of the inward self's innate distinguishing characteristics into a world"; the Environmentalized Intrinsic or Environmentalized Self.

This trope began as a novel about people who could externalize themselves into pocket worlds, which became popular enough to pick up vast amounts of secondary and tertiary literature as this concept was further explored.  As it turned out, a lot of early-career-phase secondary-literature authors were quite interested in the question of what worlds are inside characters; it is also apt for artistry and memeing.

And when the original author decided the original series was over, the conversation about the trope began again, more seriously and up a meta-level.  As the original author revealed afterwards, the Environmentalized Self was meant not just as a metaphor, but a productive metaphor, for writing in general and worldbuilding in particular.  The question, "What is within myself that can be externalized into a world?" is a place to begin, when an author takes the step from secondary fiction to primary fiction and starts making a world of their own.

Say that you, yourself, have always wanted all of the houses to look like glowing crystals; instead of, as is more commonly the convention in dath ilan, old stone covered in plants.  Then making a world out of that piece of yourself is likely to have an authenticity to it, which does not appear when you are only trying to throw in random variations to make your world be Different.  Some part of you knows why houses have to be glowing crystals, some part of you knows what kind of glowing crystals they should be.   Or maybe it's not so much that you want glowing crystal houses, but that they fit better with you; or that you know in your heart of hearts that, if the world was made out of you, the houses would end up made of glowing crystal whether you liked that truth or not.

It is a facile and not-quite-right proverb, to say that characters are made of authors, or that characters are made out of carefully selected pieces of author.  You can write a character who has some feature that is not drawn from yourself at all; it's just harder.  It requires you to have a theoretical understanding of a psychology you do not yourself possess, strong enough to ring deeply true to anyone who does have that psychology.  It is easier to draw deep on the well of craft when you are writing a character who is enough like you that the thoughts they think seem to you, not just 'reasonable' or 'defensible', but like thoughts you almost thought yourself in a closely neighboring reality.  The further you go from that, the more likely you are to stumble and turn the character into a distant Other who is not really animated by an inward spark that reflects and optimizes the same way you do; the more likely you are to stumble and try to construct something alien to yourself, based on a psychological theory that is false.

Universes can be made in part out of memories of your true world, including the parts of the outer world that you wouldn't have made yourself and that don't fit well with you.  But built worlds can also be made out of you, and that's why the Environmentalized Self trope spread as rapidly among authors as it did.  To the extent a world is made neither out of true world-experience, nor out of yourself, you are making it out of explicit theories about alien worlds drawn from neither memory nor the wells of self.  This is possible, but harder; it can stumble in the same way as trying to write a character based on a psychological theory of the Other.

After proposing that the World of You has glowing crystal houses, of course, comes the real work of worldbuilding.  To depict a realistic world with houses of glowing crystal, you must understand the causes that lead the current world to have houses that look like old stone covered in plants, and you must postulate those causes to be different, and their own ancestral causes to be different too.  You have to ask the question of how a world found its equilibrium in the You-place, where the real world's equilibrium was different.  Unavoidably you must now go to the other deep well inside you, the deep well of theory; your knowledge and understanding of counterfactuals, why the world is the way it is; how it could have ended up differently, given different inputs or different parameters.  And so the real meat of worldbuilding, as with so many other things, tests one's explicit understanding of economics.

The level-1 beginner's form of this exercise - the form that early authors do to practice starting out, and the conversation that gets made at unserious parties - is the exercise "How would the world be different if everyone was like you?" or "Suppose a world's median was around yourself in all dimensions?" or "What is the world from which you were an average random draw?" or "What is the history and present state of a world which, in mostly-equilibrium, ended up with its medians mostly around where you are?" or "What world-with-a-history spits you out as a very typical person in all respects, instead of the very atypical person in many respects that you are in real life?"

If the harsh truth is that you've always thought the obsession with the exteriors of houses is silly, when their interiors are what counts - and therefore, in your world, buildings look like exposed metal and concrete - if the cities are less pretty as seen from outside, in the world that is the externalization of your interior - then you are faced with a test of self-honesty.  You can either admit the houses aren't as pretty because your utility function wouldn't really care enough to spend a lot of money on that, if the World of Yous had never seen 'normal' dath ilan for comparison to feel competitive about that.  Or you can fail the self-honesty test, and end up trying to worldbuild a world that is not made out of the true piece of yourself, because you were not able to be honest with yourself about who you were.

Conversely, of course, if you claim that the World of You has a substantially higher per capita GDP, while otherwise having the same physics and biology as dath ilan, you're going to face a lot of skepticism about that one.  By market efficiency, your soul is unlikely to contain a realistic economic policy that yields better results than the policies spotlighted by counterfactual-conditional prediction markets.  But that is a very obvious trap that any dath ilani sees as soon as they contemplate the exercise, even if they weren't explicitly warned against it.

So you look within yourself for possible features of a world that would be, or reflect, you; then you do further worldbuilding on that world's history, to explain how it got that way and ended up in that mostly-stable equilibrium; then you write a few stories set there, to shake out the world, to make it more consistent, as you are forced to visualize it fully and make sure your axioms have a model.  And then, you have something to compare and contrast to your friends' own Intrinsic Environment worlds at parties!

All this is the long background story behind why, when Keltham asks himself what god and domain would fit Keltham and be clericable for him, and doesn't immediately come up with an answer for that, he already knows an exact complicated thought process he can try to use to find an answer.  Similarly, if one asks why Keltham is able to go through this thought process without much in the way of blind alleys - and without falling into obvious pitfalls despite his young age, like self-flattery, or blaming everything wrong with the world on other people not being as well-intentioned as himself - part of the answer is that Keltham has heard secondhand-repeated advice from famous authors on how to do this writing exercise correctly and without falling into common pitfalls.

It is also why, in trying to do all this, it will not occur to Keltham that in searching for his own true god and world, he is asking a Question about Himself that is such a Big Serious Question that it ought to take longer than ten half-minutes to figure out.  It's a worldbuilding trope.  People do it live at parties.)

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How much room does Keltham have here to godbuild/worldbuild?  Is he searching for one key feature of himself, or a collection of them?  Gods can do more than one thing, if they're related things.  Asmodeus has related thingies for contracts, authority, pride, is called Executive of Law.  Keltham may not need to squeeze the god-address down to one characteristic of himself... no, that's the wrong way to think about it.  Even if he can call beyond the locally known universe, there is no guarantee that gods are dense in characteristics.  It's probably better to find one idea or aesthetic that defines the god that Keltham would want to partner with.  In any case, the correct search ordering is to begin with the most important requirement; after that, he can see if there's room or need for anything else.

...Keltham notices that he has spent an awful lot of time on meta.  His mind is probably flinching away from this.  Why?

...the same reason he never did the Environmentalized Intrinsic exercise in the first place.  The incredibly obvious thought is 'what if - instead of there being a few more people like you in the next generation, if you succeed - rather, dath ilan had been composed of people like you to begin with'.  And that is painful, it is should-ing, if you are actually stuck in dath ilan.  There was no reason to think about things that way, to contrast reality to its alternative and make himself sad.  Now he actually needs to solve this question for other reasons in real life, and needs to just go ahead with it.

What is the Kelthamverse like?

Does the Kelthamverse have higher GDP?  He's going to think that just to get it over with.  First order, 'no'.  Okay, fine, in the details, if you literally do the version 'what is the world-in-mostly-equilibrium from which somebody like you is a median random draw', then the Kelthamverse has +0.8SD g over dath ilan and therefore a higher GDP.  But by convention you are to ignore that, because re-extrapolating a world with higher intelligence or rationality is impossible for known reasons; you'd have to predict the effects of the actions of more extreme geniuses than any geniuses than exist in your current world.  Or maybe Kelthamians care more about higher GDP compared to other considerations, relative to the average dath ilani, and the policy prediction markets' results are weighted accordingly.  But mostly, there is no obvious reason the Kelthamverse has higher GDP in virtue of the people inside it... caring less selflessly.

Is a Keltham even happier, in the Kelthamverse?  Would he actually feel more like he belonged, if he'd grown up there and never seen dath ilan for comparison?  Maybe a Keltham is a person who needs to feel unbelonging over something, and his neurotype would find some other oddity of himself to obsess over instead.  Maybe everybody in the Kelthamverse feels like an outsider there, based on their own personal least socially acceptable random variable.

Keltham recognizes a thought of undue self-uncharity, whispering in its way under the guise of counteracting some bias you might have, and sets it aside.  His self-model does not actually say this is how a Keltham works, and that is that.  He has been taught to distrust himself a little, not infinitely.  No more distrust than he has earned from himself, under his own accounts of his history; the alternative is a kind of inescapable madness and helplessness, and he's not into that.

Does the Kelthamverse have fewer public goods, because, in fact, the Kelthamians do not care quite as much?  Because those who become rich find better paths to romantic success than producing public goods, since that is the pathway that dath ilan laid out for rich people to be romantically more successful, and the Kelthamverse would not have laid out the same path?  Keltham's brain immediately wants to shout back that the Kelthamians would find their own way to produce the public goods that were actually needed, just as well as dath ilan.  But this seems not necessarily true, especially if the Kelthamians never saw dath ilan and never felt competitive about doing at least that well.

The fact that Keltham can no longer actually call a Confessor is no excuse for his not doing the same mental operation of betting on what a Confessor would tell him, just never again rolling an electronic d144 and actually phoning a Confessor if the die comes up 0 to keep himself honest.  Would a Confessor, told this scenario, formally predict to Keltham that a Keltham would be unhappier in the Kelthamverse?  Because he has been, in some sense, free-riding on the nice environment that was created by those dath ilani whose outrage at Abaddon would be enough to make them clerics of Iomedae?

There's a common wisdom, in dath ilan, that even after spending 3% of GDP on generalized coordination enforcement, most of what makes a high-tech society like dath ilan actually work, is that the people inside it have truly altruistic components of their utility function.  That most people are not just being cooperative for instrumental reasons.  That most people won't commit crimes even when they're pretty sure they won't get caught.  The number of tiny opportunities for defecting and getting away with it, every day, is just too large to make it work if people don't actually care about other people.  Dath ilan is much closer to the multi-agent-optimal boundary than it would be, in the world with the same institutions, but genuinely actually selfish people.  The crime-reporting mechanisms are built for a world in which most people will take a minute to call the police if they see a violent stabbing in progress; and you don't have to pay people $5 to do that; and then worry that they'll set up violent stabbings to earn $5.  The system is built to be resilient against rogue psychopaths, not against everybody being a psychopath.  The police architecture is set up on the assumption that it might need to catch an individual bad police officer, not on the assumption that police collectively would just take your stuff as soon as they thought they could get away with keeping it.

If a high-tech world could be put together out of entirely selfish people at all, it would probably require much more spending on explicit coordination to set up a system that could stably run factories, without them just being looted by every employee simultaneously plus any police who showed up.  Who even puts in the work to build the whole coordination structure in the first place, if they're not motivated by the good of Civilization?  Maybe perfectly selfish beings who were more coherent and crystalline in their thoughts would find their way to a multi-agent-optimal boundary, kept in place by institutional structures ruling out defection at every point.  None of the crystalline minds would need to altruistically spend the time to negotiate institutions into existence, because all the crystalline minds would see the possibility simultaneously and choose it at the same time.  Beings like humans, but who didn't care at all about others' welfare, wouldn't do that; they would not end up with factories, just roving individuals looting each other.  So says the common wisdom of dath ilan.

Keltham was, in fact, honestly shaken when he heard that the Neutral Evil afterlife was eating souls.  He'd always questioned that common wisdom in the back of his mind.  But - but apparently not.  Apparently, if you're not explicitly Lawful or explicitly Chaotic, if you don't care about social structures either way, then what's left is simply Selfishness the way it might be materialized in an alien or a construct.

The sense in which actually, all of society working depends on people being altruistic - because the incentives just aren't that perfect, and otherwise the whole structure of dath ilan would fall apart almost instantly - that's part of the justification that dath ilan could give, if Keltham tried to explicitly argue with it, for why heritage-optimization should try to preserve explicit altruism in the utility function.  It's a reason dath ilan might give, for why Keltham shouldn't have subsidized childcare; unless occasional people like him are valuable enough to society that he can pay for the childcare himself.

So yeah.  The Neutral Evil beings - just eating souls - yeah, that shook him.  Because if that's where being a little more selfish leads, in the end, then dath ilan is right.

But maybe that's still - the voice of too little self-charity.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

Keltham did not abandon that lightly injured person that he passed upon the sidewalk, even as a child with his own frontal cortex less than fully formed.  He wanted to be repaid, since the other person was capable of repaying him, but he didn't abandon them.  A bird once flew into a window right in front of Keltham, when he was a child, and fell to the ground and didn't move, and he ran off crying to find his father.  He didn't think about whether the bird could pay him back, because it obviously couldn't.  If Keltham came across an injured child now, with a lot less money than himself - well, he'd help, but he'd feel a lot better about a world in which that Civilization would repay him and not give him any second stupid glances about his having insisted on payment, because, why is this child his problem in particular.  But Keltham wouldn't ask the child to repay.  And he'd cheerfully pay a proportional amount into public-good funds to repay other people who helped children when it wasn't particularly their job.

He's not a bad person, not by his own standards.  And if he was, he could choose to do things differently and meet his own standards.  If he's not completely incoherent under reflection, he ought to be able to reach into himself and imagine the world that's nice according to his own notions of niceness.

The writing exercise for the Environmentalized Self is allowed to include ideals inside you, hopes inside you, not just realities inside you.  The point of the writing exercise is that the feature is inside you, so some part of yourself knows how the feature should work, and it is not just an oddity added out of a vague wish to make your writing different.  This isn't that writing exercise, but for purposes of calling the right god, nearby ideals may also be the way to go; if they are Keltham's own idealizations, that the real Keltham could at least come close to attaining on his own.

So the Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse are not selfish, not the way that whatever eats souls in Abaddon must be really actually selfish.  Keltham doesn't think that he, himself, is flawed in that way.  He does not think he is actually just plain selfish and picked up the rest through acculturation in dath ilan.  And even if he's wrong and the real Keltham isn't that nice, fine, so what, he is envisioning a universe in which he is not exactly the median, sue him.

The Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse, Keltham decides, do not have to go to fantastic lengths to enforce and punish and pay for coordination; they are not in a world where nobody actually cares about anybody else or has any honor.  Kelthamians keep their promises, always, whether or not anyone is watching.  Kelthamians don't betray their business partners, whether or not anyone is watching.  They don't qualify as 'Good' by Golarion's bizarre standards, because they are perfectly aware of how a positive reputation benefits them, and they are ready to exploit that and would be very snippy about not getting their due for it.  But they would also keep their promises in the dark, even if nobody ever knew.  Keltham thinks that is actually true of himself; and even if he is wrong, and flatters himself too much, the corresponding god would be one he could work with.  It is one of his ideals, and one that would be very close to him even if in fact he doesn't have it already.

And - it's not the part Keltham needs to be thinking about, but he's going to think about it anyways, just to get it out of the way of the rest - it is actually true, it is not just him trying to stick it to dath ilan in his mind, it is actually true that a neurotypical dath ilani would feel less outside and alone in the Kelthamverse, than Keltham felt in dath ilan.  Because nobody in the Kelthamverse thinks it's a problem if you're more altruistic than the rest of the Kelthamverse, so long as you still keep your business promises, and don't murder people even in the dark, in all the forms of honor that keep Kelthamverse society running and coordinated.  They don't withdraw public support for your children's childcare if you're nicer than other people.  The Kelthamverse doesn't want to be dath ilan when it grows up, but it's fine with there being dath ilani inside it in the Future.

The Kelthamverse has more of an expectation that people fund childcare individually or through individual philanthropy, in the first place; they have much less of a collective Future-optimization thing going on.  The Kelthamverse doesn't have voter-aggregates deciding on heritage-optimization criteria for policy-prediction-markets resolving 20 and 50 and 100 years out.  They're leaving it up to individuals and philanthropists, and just checking the prediction markets to make sure that the default course isn't predicted to end up with huge probabilities of anything awful; so long as the prediction markets don't predict catastrophe, they're fine letting the larger world go its own way.

Maybe a dath ilani will feel sad that the entire world isn't as altruistic as they are, that only 5% of the population feels the same strength of feeling about the true deaths of strangers as themselves.  But if so, the Kelthamians won't feel too sad for them, because a Kelthamian doesn't think you have the right to expect all of Civilization to think the same way you do.  Keltham didn't complain about Civilization being of a different mind than himself, because he had no right to demand that of strangers; he just set out to test himself, and prove Civilization wrong if he could.

So that's the first defining quality of the Kelthamverse.  In one sense, yes, people care differently and less about each other; when they help, they do so much more in expectation that somebody will repay them, even if they're helping a child.  But the Kelthamians still help children, and pay into the public funds to pay off other people who help children, they do have the sense that somebody ought to be doing that.  And the Kelthamians still have all the emotions about intrinsically caring about coordination, the emotions that are shards of the higher structure for Coordination and shadows of the one irreplaceable logical copy of the Algorithm.  Kelthamians keep their promises, even in the dark when nobody will ever find out.  They aren't first to betray their business partners, their mates, their friends - and not because they are calculating the value of their reputation, but because that isn't who they are.  They would pay their debts even absent any legal enforcement for debts, the vast majority of them, under the vast majority of circumstances; and so they don't have to pay more of their GDP for coordination enforcement than dath ilan.

If a Kelthamian sells you something, it does exactly what it says on the label, and disclosed all the facts you needed to know.  In fact, if the Kelthamverse is literally all exact copies of himself, not a distribution from which he is the median draw, then advertisements are more trustworthy than in dath ilan; because when everybody is exactly Keltham, there is no variation in trustworthiness, so there is no adverse selection favoring producers who got ahead by being a little less trustworthy in ways they couldn't be caught.  And the GDP is actually slightly higher.  Though they'd also better get cracking on biotech really fast, because, reproduction.

If there's a god of doing really honest business in both business and friendship, with personal and commercial advertisements true in letter and spirit, all debts repaid whether monetary or informal, all promises kept without exception, never the first to defect - even in the dark, even if reality is ending the next day and there's no more iterations of the dilemmas - where it's also perfectly socially acceptable to be nice, because you're not hurting anyone by doing that - but you don't just demand people be nice to lightly injured strangers, then look oddly at them when they want personal or public reimbursement - a god whose thingy is a little more selfish than dath ilan's, in one sense, but unselfishly utility-function-desiring the shards of higher Coordination, in some more coherent but still ultimately bounded version of how humans have honor - and never defacing the Algorithm - then Keltham could see himself working with that god on the Golarion industrialization project.  Maybe even being its cleric, depending on the benefits.

That, Keltham thinks, is the true meaning of Chaos, if there's a Chaotic Evil god like that.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

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There is not a Chaotic Evil god like that, because Keltham was somewhat misinformed about Chaos and also about Evil. 

 

There is, as it happens, a god like that.

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Among the many disadvantages of shattered prophecy, is that sometimes strange attention-demanding things happen which are unscheduled.

The situation of a god on the planes could be compared to a titan with a hundred thousand eyes, standing atop a mountain, gazing down at a dozen surrounding countries each filled with a billion squirrels.  Even as a titan, You cannot think about all the squirrels individually.  You can at best set a fraction of Your attention to watching for predefined signals that You have trained the squirrels to use.  The squirrels cannot understand the coordinates to align their eyes across many dimensions to look at You.  But You can give them a word like "Abadar" and a holy symbol and say a few words about why banks need to exist; and then notice when a squirrel looks in that direction, not quite at You, but more in Your direction than the other titans atop their own mountains.

One day, a fraction of Your attention notices a squirrel looking, in one set of subdimensions, along an angle that would be aligned almost exactly on the real You, if the squirrel could get the other dimensions right too.  It's surprising because You have never seen a squirrel look in that direction before.  You have wished You could explain it to squirrels, but prediction always showed their heads exploding when You tried that, so You didn't try it.

Then the squirrel thinks for a bit, and turns its head into another dimension, and looks almost right at the correct angle in that dimension too.

The squirrel pauses, visibly (to a god) staring inside itself and deducing further conclusions from premises, and then angles its head and looks almost directly at Your angle in yet another dimension.

If the power disparities were not what they were, the squirrel's behavior might be considered reminiscent of a stalking predator, the more humanlike and sadistic kind of monster; who is deliberately crouching down to look under the dresser, standing up, and then crouching down again, only to look under the desk; and the stalker knows all along that you are actually under the bed.  You are not frightened, under the circumstances, where the circumstances are that You are a god; but You are definitely noticing.

Then the squirrel gathers itself, angles its viewpoint -

- and turns to stare almost directly at You, including some mathy parts that nobody in Axis is allowed by treaty to explain to anybody who might go back to Golarion.

You wait for the squirrel to pray to You, to make one of the appeals which You are allowed by treaty to respond to without that being incredibly expensive, so You can (very softly and carefully so it doesn't explode) ask the squirrel what the Abyss is going on, and how a squirrel even got this address.

The squirrel thinks loudly about how it might not mind being Your cleric, but doesn't actually ask.

Then the squirrel looks at five gods one after another in the stories-for-mortals coordinates, one of which is the standard wrong address for You.

Then the squirrel goes back to thinking.

Also the squirrel's body is in an Asmodean church near the Worldwound, its mind looks like a teenaged male raised by modrons, and its immaterial soul is ninety-three minutes old.

You would have more attention to pay this sort of anomaly if the surprise had been properly scheduled like in the other worlds you deal with.

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Entities with very high Intelligence don't make quite the same kind of comical mistakes that humans do.  They know what they don't know; they pick up on alternate hypotheses and incongruent facts very early on.  They still make comical mistakes, to be clear, as seen from their own perspectives; but different ones.

Why is the mortal thinking loudly about being a cleric, but not actually asking?  Abadar doesn't know, but He knows that He doesn't know.  Among the possibilities is that the mortal, who is in an Asmodean church, is in a life position where suddenly becoming a cleric of Abadar would be inconvenient due to the Asmodean reaction to it.  This is only one hypothesis among several; Abadar does not leap to the conclusion.  It is not even certain that the mortal was deliberately choosing not to immediately pray for clerichood, or that the mortal knew that Abadar was watching and might otherwise have responded.  That is only one hypothesis group among several.

But it is a large enough strategic-equivalence-class of hypotheses that Abadar is not dropping cleric levels on the mortal right away, in case the mortal definitely didn't want that and was trying to signal so.

Could the five gods in the sequence be a deliberate message?  The tiny fraction of Abadar's attention that He can spare does consider some possibilities like that; it would be stupid in a sense not to think of them at all.  Asmodeus-Abadar-Norgorber-Calistria-Nethys could be interpreted as tyrant-Abadar-murder-revenge-magic, and be an attempted message that somebody was about to assassinate the prince of Osirion, vengefully, using magic.  This comical misinterpretation does not actually happen, because if the mortal had wanted to send a message to Abadar, its posture would have changed in a way Abadar could detect; it's part of the posture of treaty-defined prayer.

But something strange is clearly happening.  And it would be a huge wasted opportunity if this mortal ended up being squished by Asmodeans before it could, at least, tell other mortals some things that Abadar hasn't been allowed to explain directly.

But if Abadar calls up Asmodeus and offers to buy the avoidance of squishing this particular squirrel, might that not call the attention of Asmodeus down upon this squirrel, in exactly the way that the squirrel might (on some hypotheses) have been trying to avoid by deliberately not asking Abadar for clerichood?

If one were a mortal, one might, perhaps, reason that there is nothing to be done here.  But Asmodeus is a Lawful god and does not generally prefer accidentally stepping on Abadar's goals, over being paid to avoid stepping on Abadar's goals.  It would be in some sense silly if Abadar-and-Asmodeus had no possible coordinated strategy better than Asmodeus's church accidentally squishing a valuable squirrel because Abadar was afraid to talk to Asmodeus about that.  They would be noticeably off the Pareto-optimal boundary.

Abadar sends a brief packet to Asmodeus which might translate as:

Hey, Asmodeus.  I want to reveal information relevant to negotiating a potential gainful trade, where that information itself might otherwise worsen my negotiating position for the trade, on the standard condition that you promise not to use that information to implement strategies that lead to worse outcomes than would have obtained in the counterfactual where I stayed silent, as evaluated by either my utility function or by the best-guess probable utility function of another party who revealed that information to me.

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Acknowledged, agreed to.

Humans trying to make a similar arrangement might be relying on reputation: "the last thousand times we did this, he kept his end" - or character: "he seems like the sort of person who'd keep his word" - or consequences: "breaking his word would be punished" - or the prospects of future cooperation: "if he betrays the agreement this time, we won't be able to do this in future, which would be a loss to him". Gods can just make parts of them legible to one another, and promise with those; Asmodeus is in part keeping-of-agreements, and if all of those sources-of-motivation suddenly failed to obtain there would still be the agreement itself, in no sense weakened. Not everything about Him is knowable, not even to other gods, but this is.

(Some humans understand this, in part, and think that it means Asmodeus can be outwitted; if He gives His word unwisely, after all, He will keep it, and if you cleverly trap Him into promising you wealth and power, or the right to reign in Hell, or anything else, He would follow through. This is true, but if you think you've found an opportunity to do it, you haven't.)

Asmodeus is curious, but only slightly; most of His attention is in other places, doing other things.

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A mortal has had an unshared insight into Abadar's domain.  This mortal is probably but not definitely under the power of or threatenable by Asmodeus/Cheliax/the Asmodean church.  Abadar wants to pay to modify future events so that the mortal doesn't end up dead and soul-trapped/maledicted in a way that prevents Osirians from resurrecting it; nor spending nearly all of its natural lifespan in Cheliax or prison never talking extensively with Abadar's followers; nor tortured by Asmodeans into not being in an Abadaran shape; nor traumatized (eg by having all of its friends and family tortured) to the point where it'd no longer be an inspiring teacher if Abadar/Osirion paid it to do that.  (Abadar doesn't need to explicitly list brain damage and mindwipes as also undesirable; He mainly sends a specification over ultimate consequences.)

Abadar honestly discloses that this mortal may or may not be opposing some ongoing Asmodean plan, as mortals sometimes end up doing.  Abadar doesn't know this, but has seen 1.8 bits of evidence over the prior.  If so, Abadar is not offering to pay for letting the mortal have free reign to oppose Asmodeus unopposed, or anything that expensive; He just wants to pay for having the mortal delivered to Osirion afterwards instead of squished.  Abadar did however find all this out, through what seemed like a voluntary high-trust action of revelation from the mortal.  So information from this negotiation itself, especially that the mortal might have plans opposing Asmodeans, must not be used to further Asmodeus's interests at the mortal's expense, if Abadar points out the mortal to Asmodeus.  (That Asmodeus should not eg try to falsely depict Abadar as having betrayed the mortal to Him, follows automatically from the previous goal-spec.)

Abadar mainly predicts this would cost Asmodeus one revelation to Asmodeans via priest or devil; whatever marginal value Asmodeus could otherwise get by torturing one mortal instead of coaxing it; possibly it being marginally harder to oppose the mortal's opposition to some unknown plan; and attention / cost-of-thought.

If Asmodeus has a price on that, agreeable to Abadar, Abadar can give distinguishing characteristics for the mortal in question.

(It's a marginally more complicated negotiation than, say, Iomedae would demand; with Iomedae, Abadar would just offer to pay for some utility, since She knows Abadar's utility function.  Indeed, Iomedae could just ask for fair reimbursement afterwards; He's Lawful, She's Lawful.  Asmodeus has stated a preference for fully specified contracts with advance-agreed payments based on expected values instead of actual values, and the thing where parties retain some private information while trying to guess how much private information the other party has.  It tends to favor the party with higher Intelligence in negotiations, but Asmodeus apparently still does it even when the other party realizes that and adjusts prices accordingly.  He just likes contracts.  Abadar is happy enough to go along with it in cases like this one where that reduces Abadar's payment's variance across counterfactuals.)

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Asmodeus considers this. A human would be tempted to try to identify the mortal based on the information provided, and it happens that in this case that would probably be possible, but Asmodeus does not do that; it would be resource-intensive, and He is committed to not using the information, and He is not in the habit of acquiring information He can't use.

 

He names a price.

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Sold!  It's this mortal in an Asmodean church at the Worldwound.  You can't miss it, it's the incredibly odd one.

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- huh, that is an odd one! Does Abadar happen to know why it's adult-shaped but apparently a newborn baby? He's not willing to pay much for that information but it seems of mutual interest if there were a way to make adult-shaped humans without the expensive baby stage.

 

(The cleric praying to Asmodeus in that church gets a vision.)

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Abadar has no clue (lit: plenty of hypotheses and no evidence) who this mortal is or what is going on, but it sure does look Lawful.  It is possible that some glitch has occurred, and that this represents a profit opportunity for Law.

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The priest stands up, shaking. Waves Carissa over. "There's a scroll of Sending in a locked box in the back room; here's the key. Bring it back."

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She's not going to ask what happened; it's none of her business. She goes and gets it. 

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"Urgently with direct input from Asmodeus requesting seventh-circle pickup at the Worldwound, pursuant to earlier communications, more info on arrival."

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"Should I - pack."

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"Hmmm? Your notes, leave your spare uniform. Don't interact with him further until I've briefed you, absolutely don't enchant him."

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There is something - heady, terrifying, validating - about knowing Asmodeus has involved Himself. He sees it too, she thinks, even though that's absurdly prideful, to imagine they're seeing the same things at all, to imagine 'seeing' is a good word to cover the both of them. She goes and packs.

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Keltham's current plan is to try reaching out to the Intrinsic-of-Keltham god, followed by Asmodeus if that doesn't work, as soon as he has the quiet and privacy to compose himself and try to arrange his thoughts into the most coherently shaped patterns he can manage, in order to maximize the apparently slight chance that he can successfully contact a god.  It may be, in some sense, unreasonable to hope that it's that simple; but probably some things will be simple for him, given his unusual knowledge base.  It's worth trying the obvious tactic before trying any less obvious ones, just so that he doesn't accidentally overcomplicate his own life and waste a lot of effort on difficult strategies that aren't actually necessary.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

Next, maybe spend some time trying to figure out What Happened and What It Implies About the Ontology of Greater Reality?  No, next stand up and stretch a bit.  You're supposed to stand up and stretch every so often while thinking.

Keltham tries to do that, and nearly falls over.  He ran headlong towards smoke, in freezing cold, longer and faster than he usually runs through freezing cold every day.  Ouch.

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The priest raises an eyebrow at him and offers him a drink.

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Ah, yes, water.  Keltham has heard of this.  It's what sane people ingest after heavy exercise.  A little beneath the dignity of someone who calls himself a Mad Investor, but, under the circumstances, Keltham will lower himself to briefly act like a sane person.

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If they could communicate he could offer other drinks, but they can't.

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If they could communicate Keltham could be puzzled by what was on offer and why anybody would possibly want to drink it, but they can't.

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A few minutes later a person materializes in thin air and the priest rushes over to talk to them. 

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That is so incredibly cool.  The logistics this civilization must have - no, wait, all this stuff is incredibly expensive, isn't it?

It should be cheaper.  That is just Keltham's personal opinion, but it is already a strongly held one.  Depending on how much math nobody here knows, he should have a look at the magic business too, not just steel.

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It's a long conversation and after a couple of minutes they leave to have it in privacy. They go into a room and an odd thick fog immediately seeps out of it, ringing the room in a perfectly smooth radius.

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Keltham already wants him some of that, and doesn't want it any more for seeing much less impressive applications.  Though... are they trying to hide the discussions from him... actually no, that doesn't make much sense, he doesn't have the local language.  They could discuss in front of him how to take all his stocks and eat his soul and he wouldn't know any better.

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Carissa comes back a couple of minutes later, sees the fog, looks pleased about it. 

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And after a few more minutes the teleporting guy comes out of the fog room and says in Baseline, "I'm Fertinan Cortess, senior summoner at the Academae in Korvosa. The Worldwound is periodically swarmed by demons, and has very few people with whom you could collaborate on inventing steel, so we want to invite you to come to Ostenso, a large port city in Cheliax which we think will be a better place for this project. You have my word that I expect you to be safer, more comfortable, better resourced and more able to pursue the goals you've told us of in Ostenso than here, and that if you hate it it's possible in Ostenso to pay for passage back here, or elsewhere. Does that sound all right?"

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"So it sounds like you were warned that I'm new to this world, but maybe not about the degree to which my own world is incredibly different from this one.  Am I right about that?"

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The local priest directly got a vision from Asmodeus about it which sort of sets a very high lower bound on how important it must be. They're not saying that, though. The wizard who mindread him thinks that his world has successfully figured out how to raise humans who can almost completely compensate for having free will, and think like outsiders. They're not saying that either, though. 

The right tack here is humility. "I haven't actually met people from any other worlds and I would not have trouble believing I am underestimating how different yours is."

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Until this person spoke, it had not occurred to Keltham that going to some place might mean that he could not, from that place, go to other places; and the fact that somebody thinks he might need to be reassured about that is not reassuring.  It brings a lot of other things into question; too many things, in fact.

"Let me put it this way.  From my perspective, what you said implied a lot of facts entirely new to me, like, implicitly, it might not be good to trust somebody who said I'd be better resourced in Cheliax, unless they added 'you have my word', and then, you think, I ought to trust that.  You expect me to worry that if I go to Ostenso, I might not be able to get passage back; but you don't expect me to worry that tickets would be too expensive, that I couldn't find other work, or that Cheliax's equivalent of Governance wouldn't order everyone who sells transportation to not sell me a ticket.  There's this particular implied range of attempted defections against a prospective business partner, which you think I should worry about, and which you're trying to reassure me about, but that range itself is less - the word that translates in my language as 'Lawful' - compared to my world.  And right now I have not observed enough facts about this world to establish basic causal entanglement between this reality and my mind; when I wonder whether your statements are true, I have to wonder whether any place called Cheliax exists, not whether you're saying something false about Cheliax.  To the extent I have to worry about deception like that, I also have to worry that you would still be planning to defect even if you said you gave your word, because I haven't observed whatever system of incentives here makes people trustworthy when they give their words."

"My uncertainty is so wide, in fact, that I haven't thought of anything I can pragmatically do about it.  I mean, I could try to talk to the giant six-legged things inside the bubble and ask them if they're actually demons bent on destroying the world, but that doesn't actually seem smart because it's potentially dangerous and a narrow shot inside a very wide space.  So yes, fine, let's go to Ostenso, under the understanding that I am a prospective business partner trying to cooperate with Asmodeus, and your general treatment of me reflects on his reputation for reciprocating attempted cooperation; because the very smart very Lawful entity should be an anchor of sanity and good coordination if anything is; at least assuming that such any such entity as Asmodeus, or gods in general, exist.  And then I request a translation spell and a library visit, so I can read a lot of random pages in random books and start to infer back the world those pages were written in."

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The man thinks about this, for about ten seconds, like it's in fact a lot of new information about something. 

"- deal," he says. And then something over his shoulder to Carissa.

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Who understood none of that and has only half a guess at the flavor. "Yes, I'm coming." She takes Cortess's arm.

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"Deal?  We're still operating informally under a presumption of good intentions and general attempts to repay good deeds later, or at least I hope we are.  Actual proper deals should be written down for ontological stability."  Keltham tentatively offers a hand, in case anybody wants a hand for magical reasons, which looks like it might be the case.

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"I don't mean that I'm holding you to precisely what you just said," the man says. "But, sure, informally under a presumption of good intentions."

 

And they teleport.

 

They're in the summer villa of the Archduke Henderthane of Sirmium, requisitioned five minutes ago in a very rushed conversation with the Queen's personal pit fiend. It's on eighteen hundred acres, the house itself at the peak of the cliffs looking out across the Inner Sea. All the prettiest girls at the local wizard school have been dragged over and set loose in the library. 

The society that made this was poor but the person who made this was rich; labor was cheap for him, and it's very beautiful stonework. 

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Okay this place is pretty.  Maybe this universe isn't as much of a dump as it looked from the Worldwound.  Keltham will probably spend a minute or two appreciating all beautiful sights in sight, especially any that don't have dath ilani counterparts, unless somebody attempts to talk to him.

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No one can talk to him until the seventh circle wizard prepares and casts Share Language in any event, which takes him about ten minutes; he sits down on the nearest bench and his fingers twitch in the air as if tracking something very complicated. Carissa watches raptly. 

 

And then he puts his hand on Keltham's shoulder and Keltham speaks Taldane. 

 

Speaking a language suddenly is fairly distracting; all the words you know now map to the nearest available other words in the other language, which is not at all how people learn languages when they learn them. It has been analogized to getting onto an alligator and learning that it rides exactly like the pony you grew up riding on, but this might not be a helpful analogy if you haven't ridden any ponies or alligators. 

"There should be a library indoors; I don't know where, exactly, but the staff will," says the wizard. 

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"I know Taldane!  Relative to prior expectations, this is so much higher in my preference ordering than - wait, what -"

"Oh my ass!  'Prior probability distribution' is how many syllables?  Relative to the objective targets for which Baseline was optimized, this language was not optimized along the -"

Keltham stops, concentrates, discards several false starts on Taldane sentences that balloon far out of control.

"This language isn't good at doing some things my world thinks a language should be good at.  At some later point, you should try giving somebody else my language, and test whether that makes them think better."

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"Share Language only shares ones I know. Possibly you should pick up wizardry, this spell's only [two-syllable word for the complexity of the spell relative to other spells, conveying its topology and the fact that the better half of wizards could cast it and that it uses about 16% as much energy as a basic teleport]."

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"Yeah, that was definitely on my ordered list... on my list of things to try.  I reciprocate... for your game-theoretic... oh my ass, does this language really not have a less than ten-syllable way just to say 'thank you' - there it is.  'Thank you' for your helpful help, which I do understand to have been offered in a spirit of intended mutual future profit and not just friendship."

There's a polite dath ilani thing to say when you're thanking somebody and you're not sure how much of their help was pure altruism or not, but if he tries to say that thing, it'll take eight thousand syllables and then the other person still won't know how to interpret it colloquially.

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The wizard reminds himself of the thing he's been reminding himself of for the last eleven minutes which is that this is an alien and even if they look deceptively human they don't think that way. 

 

He nods. "You're welcome. The spell expires every day. Since it's only [second-circle], Sevar can cast it for you when it needs refreshing. People find that after a couple months of it they usually just know the new language even without a spell, at least for the words they in fact use. Cheliax is glad to have you here, and hopes for the success of your endeavors, and hopes that your genius will be represented in our children."

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"You're welcome.  But I'm not - smart, or not more than 0.8 root-of-average-of-squares-of-deviations-from-average smarter than average.  I just know some things that weren't taught here."

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He raises an eyebrow at Carissa. 

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"Eighteen," she says. 

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"That's four, uh, root-of-average-of-squares-of-deviations-from-average, for Golarion's unenhanced population."

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"There's a spell to check."

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"That's a fucking planetary catastrophe what the ass happened."

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" - Earthfall?" the wizard says uncertainly. "But that was eight thousand years ago and I don't actually have reason to think people were smarter before that, I have always assumed that we're just - at the intelligence level we were created at, or if you like at the right tradeoff between the costs of creating us and the benefits of having things at our intelligence around - my time is expensive, why don't you get oriented on things like 'history' and 'average intelligence' and then if you want to buy some of it later you can spend it better." And he's supposed to report to the Queen. 

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"Absolutely fair."

Keltham is still fundamentally shaken by the notion of a -3.2sd g world.  It changes everything, on the same level as magic... no, a lot deeper than that.

"Also, hi, Carissa," he says out loud.  "I noticed you came along, was wondering if you were just here to do the local equivalent of checking in with a Keeper for alien thought process exposure, or are you thinking of joining whatever project gets set up?"

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She's so absolutely been entertaining heresies since her last mind review and she's relieved his society has that concept too. "I assume they'll send a priest along for that eventually but I was -" She's enlisted and goes where the crown sends her, which is here. " - thinking of joining whatever gets set up. My time isn't comparatively expensive and I can top you off on translation spells and the weather magic we do instead of air conditioning. And, you know, a girl doesn't get mysterious alien strangers dropped on top of her every day, and wouldn't want to spend the whole rest of her life wistfully wondering what they got up to."


(The other wizard teleports out.)

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Most of Keltham is still trying to get to grips with the local intelligence level.  It's like something is optimizing for making his previous life narrative as unworkable as possible.  +4SD g is at the level where you don't need to master an impossible art of nonconformity, to look in a direction no other nonconformist tried looking, in order to see what nobody else saw.  At +4SD g you're just going to look at random poo and see improvements on it, because you are the very smart people who are as smart as the smartest other people who looked at the random poo.

He is nonetheless a teenage male, and some things are capable of catching his attention even so.

"Wasn't somebody named Sevar supposed to do the translation spells -"  Is that last line flirting?

- she probably only wants him for his brain -

- okay he can work out how he feels later, first he needs to preserve optionality which means he needs to flirt back -

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(Of course Keltham has ever had instruction on how to flirt, in the institutions that dath ilan has instead of colleges.  He is familiar with the theory of common-knowledge-avoidance that underpins how standard flirting works.

Dath ilan isn't going to fling its children out into the world with no concept of how to find, explore, build or maintain a romantic relationship.)

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"And if I'm not in the news everywhere, it means I failed.  Unless you're looking for a bit more detail than that."

Should he smile after he says the last part?  No, that's escalating way too fast.  This may not even be flirting, what with the enormous cultural gap?  The whole careful common-knowledge-avoidance process makes even more sense than usual, in this case.  The appropriate level of signaling back is exactly enough to show that he didn't completely miss the potential implication, if it was an implication, but no more.

Keltham keeps a straight face throughout.

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Oh, are they doing straight faces. "Sevar's my family name. Carissa's my familiar one. Do they not have that, where you're from?"

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"No, with nearly a billion people, we calculated globally unique names would need to be too long to remember.  We go by birth order for unique IDs.  Two syllables is long enough that you'd be moderately unlikely to be good friends with two people with the same name, so it's what most normies like my parents use in the modern generation.  I've considered changing mine to something four-syllabled just to be Chaotic about it, but common wisdom says I should let my personality finish shaking out up to age 25 first."

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"Well you'll have to decide before you're in the news all over the world, I don't see how you'd change it afterwards."

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That gets a smile out of him that he decides not to suppress.  "If nobody else has it, that's good enough for me.  But yeah, I'll check whether there's anyone else on the planet named Keltham before I go public with that one.  Wouldn't want to snare any innocents into the dreadful mire of my search shadow."

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"It's not a Chelish name but I don't know how you'd check the whole planet - we don't all speak a common language, or have, uh, a common mail system or whatever you're imagining. The most powerful wizards I know of are Nefreti Clepati and Felandriel Morgethai so four syllables wouldn't even be pushing what you could get away with, really."

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"Ha.  I'm Evil, but I'm never going to be Evil enough to wantonly make people memorize seven syllables just to say hi to me."

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"It is also traditional, I think, for Evil wizards to have a menacing tower that turns everyone who approaches it into a chicken, so as to only be interrupted by people who are very competent or have priorities important enough to them that they'll be turned into a chicken about them."

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"Your world possesses housing options my world did not, but not entirely unintriguing ones.  Speaking of which, I should probably figure out domestic things like where I'm sleeping before I hit up the nearest library for some quick page glimpses.  You're relatively more local than I am, want to point out my next step or meta-step there?"

On reflection, Keltham decides, he should hesitate to flirt any further than this before he has actually thought at all about Carissa/Sevar.

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"Well personally were I given the run of the Archduke of Sirmium's summer villa I would go look at all of the bedrooms before I decided which one I was claiming, and probably take his own personal bedroom unless he's decorated it grotesquely, like with the skulls of his enemies, but if you're terribly eager to go to bed we could just ask the staff what their plan was and I'm sure they'll have a skull-free, very lovely bedroom."

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The skulls of his - they can resurrect people, right, it just costs money.  That must sure make for some weird social dynamics.

"At some point I'm going to have to figure out the larger social process I'm embedded in, but I appreciate that it is taking the matter seriously.  And it's not that I'm eager to get to sleep, it's that I expect to be predictably completely sucked in by the new planet's library, until I finally stumble back, vision blurring, to finally shower and get to sleep.  So I need to have planned out all of that final process, and asked all the relevant questions about it, before I do anything as stickily-self-motivation-altering as stepping into another planet's library.  Sort of thing that drives all other thoughts out of your mind, I expect."

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"You talk about libraries like wizards talk about magic." She waves impatiently at - a child? A person proportioned not quite like a human child but about the height of one. "Show us in so Keltham can look around."

 

    The person bows to Keltham. "Of course, master. This way."

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The Taldane word 'Master' floats around in Keltham's mind; he can tell that it doesn't map onto 'employer' which he's not, 'polite-dath-ilani-address-to-a-customer', or for some reason owner... he'll figure it out later.  Right now there's a very short person to follow.

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The very short person shows him a lovely stonework guest wing, with a suite. The suite has a very large bed. The mattress looks suspiciously like these people haven't invented enough materials science for really good mattresses, but everything else looks nice. 

The short person stokes a wood-burning fire in a fireplace across from the bed. "There's plumbing!" he adds proudly, and demonstrates a sink.

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- wow, plumbing. She casts Detect Magic to get a better look at how it operates, even though she needs to figure out whether Keltham expects her to stay here and navigate that gracefully and can't afford to be distracted - actually, maybe 'oblivious because distracted by magic' would go over well. 

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"I'm going to mention once, just to get it out of my system, that it looks like your civilization doesn't have the technology level necessary to build real bedrooms, and won't have that technology level for a good long time even if we all do our best.  Okay, that part's done, moving on.  Carissa, what'd you just do to the plumbing?"

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"Detect Magic, just to get a good look at it, I haven't seen an indoor plumbing with hot water before." In his guest suite, even. Sirmium must be doing well.

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"I'm glad I'm more Evil than the average dath ilani, and am not flipping out as hard as they would about a planet full of people who have to live without indoor plumbing.  That's going to be a matter of scaling Element-29 smelting, for the pipes, and... I'm starting to wonder if energy to produce heat to smelt metal is actually going to be the sticking point, if indoor hot water is even rarer, and I should be looking into the fossil fuel scale before the metallurgical scale?  Anyways, is this room magically advanced enough that the concept of a hot-water shower is also known to it?"

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"You can put the hot water in the bath, Master Keltham," the small person says.

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"Do you happen to know how this house heats the water?"

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"Contract with a fire elemental, I believe, ma'am."

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"Does that scale to where we can contract a fire elemental to melt 1728 third-tons of steel per day?  If that's a spell somebody can cast once per day, without them being so expensive as to be completely unhirable, we can do an awful lot with 1728 third-tons of steel per day squared."

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"I don't know, Master Keltham."

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"Binding's fourth-circle. I don't think one fire elemental could melt that much steel and I'm not sure they could melt any. You could maybe take the steel to the Elemental Plane of Fire if you had a plan to get it back once you've melted it, that'd be two fifth-circle spells a day, one to get there and one to get back, plus whatever you needed to survive there."

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"How much water could they turn to steam in a day?  And do fire elementals continually add heat energy to wherever they are, so that I can melt anything if I can insulate them well enough, or do they have an ordinary temperature that only transfers heat to lower temperatures... I need to visit the library first and then think about this stuff more later.  What do I need to know before I go to the library and then stumble back to my bedroom, take a bath, and go to sleep?  I should plausibly eat a very quick dinner first or not eat it at all, I should know where to find Carissa/Sevar in the morning for translation spell, and right, toilet."

...the thought occurs to Keltham for the first time that he may now have occasion to figure out where this sub-apartment's cuddleroom is, if people keep flirting with him, and he ever wants to do anything about that.  Well, not a top priority.  Probably.

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(Why would you do that in your bedroom.  Why would you do that on your bed.  That is not what a sleeping-pod or sleeping-sink is designed to do, any more than a sex-and-cuddling pillow-surface is designed to be slept on.

Any flirting Carissa may have hoped to accomplish by mentioning beds or sleeping has been lost forever in the abyssal depths of the cultural gap.)  

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"Bring dinner," Carissa tells the small person, who hurries off to do that. 

"I'll ask for another room on this hall I guess, I might be out later in the morning than you because preparing spells takes me about an hour and I can't give you the language until I do that but your existing one shouldn't have worn off yet. I don't know how fire elementals transfer heat. That's the toilet." It's a marble bench with a small round hole in it and a pit beneath, at least fifteen feet deep.

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"There shall be weighty conversations on this topic later, at a point where those conversations could actually result in better-designed houses springing into existence.  Noted on wizard morning patterns, is there a sign I can detect to know when it's safe to knock on your door?"

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"In the army there is, and also protocols for when to interrupt me before that, but I don't actually know what civilians who aren't students do, I enlisted right out of school. I'll use the symbol from the army."

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"No need to say what that is, it's surely the same symbol used by dath ilani military wizards."

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"If there's any symbol on the door, don't knock. Knock only if the door looks like a plank of wood devoid of symbols."

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"Acknowledged.  I feel like I'm missing something blindingly obvious... clothing, laundry?  Actually, these clothes contain an unmeasured amount of exemplar technology with respect to things like the metal alloys in the zippers, any plastic components, rare-element magnets, maybe even the weaving patterns in the cloth.  They're my property, and indeed my only nonideational property at this point, but project-valuable to the point where your government actually needs to consider security to prevent them from being stolen.  Any obvious solutions there?"

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At least they have the concept of theft, she was starting to be slightly worried they didn't! "Probably you should have personal security whenever you leave the house but they should be safe enough here. Probably have me launder them with magic instead of giving them to the housekeepers, lest they damage them."

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"Security, so checking explicitly:  You've implied that this is a sufficiently high-security area to protect my property from whatever grade of criminal mastermind seems likely to target that property in hopes of obtaining a proprietary trade secret.  Affirm?"

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"Yes." She can go double check afterwards but it seems like probably 'direct word from Asmodeus' is enough justification for a lot of people parked outside keeping Keltham safe. And keeping him from leaving. 

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"All right.  I'll be troubling you to magically launder my clothes, and will add that to the rest of the informal debts I have piling up with you, which I assure you I am noticing.  Can you think of anything else I should know or do before library... oh, we were waiting on dinner, weren't we.  Any notion of the timescale there?"

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"I would expect it'll only be a couple more minutes. What is your plan for the library exactly, just to sit down with a history book and look up every reference until you've chased down everything?"

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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Also no!

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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...okay, promising enough for trying later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EMERGENCY INTERNAL KELTHAM MEETING RIGHT NOW

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That sure is a lot of girls his age.

Pretty ones.

In a high-security zone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...snuggles?

Oral?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

"Gods forbid."

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

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

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

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

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

"I didn't hear any numbers."

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

"Ah. A credible claim, then."

 

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Keltham needs a Plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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He has the rapt attention of the horde. 


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

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

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

" - he might not say -"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Probably someone could fetch it for you."

 

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

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

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

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

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

"I know I saw Serrano's Abjuration -"

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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

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Mage's Faithful Hound

5th Circle, Conjuration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Facts that are likely to become clear to his audience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

"Negotiated with who?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Who'd he like best?"

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

"What'd he like best."

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

"He's not subtle."

"Well, he's insane."

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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- drops seven levels on the squirrel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...wait a minute.

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

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

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

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

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First spell, heck yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

 

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

There's a knock on the door. 

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

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

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

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

"He what? Of who?"

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

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

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

"There's a god of that?"

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

 

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

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

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

        "We don't think so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          "Hmm. Even Keltham's?"

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

          "What argument do you think he would make?"

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

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

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

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

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

         "Are you worried about that?"

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

         "Are you worried for yourself?"

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

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

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

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

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(Otolmens has now GIVEN UP on persuading Asmodeus or Abadar (she's not even trying Nethys) to squish the mortal or erase its memories or at least PUT IT SOMEWHERE PROPHECY ISN'T BROKEN and she is instead submitting a LENGTHY REPORT to Pharasma who is going to IGNORE her the same way that Pharasma ignored her PREVIOUS report on Possible Strategies for Handling Potential Incursions From Outside the Multiverse because Pharasma ALWAYS IGNORES EVERYTHING and why bother HAVING a god of reality not being destroyed if you're NEVER GOING TO LISTEN TO HER and it would show them all if this ends with GOLARION and probably the MULTIVERSE lying in COMPLETE RUINS because NOBODY EVER LISTENS TO HER.)

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Keltham knocks, then enters through the ajar door looking more hesitant than usual (which is to say, even slightly hesitant at all).

"Hey, uh -"

Right.

"Taldane," Keltham says.  He does remember the name for the language.

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She casts Share Language. "How're you finding things?"

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Keltham slightly inclines his head around a third of the way to formal apology.  "So before I went to Asmodeus, I wanted to try envisioning and contacting the god that would - fit me, externalize my deepest ideal - and I couldn't manage to talk to it, but I observe I've got healing powers and I infer I'm a cleric now.  Hope that doesn't screw up anything, wanted to check in with you or other domain experts before I tried anything else."

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"You - 

what -

- like, the god you'd be if you ascended, or the - kind of god you think you ought to be a cleric of -"

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"Those two sound like the same question to me?  Or no, more the second one, since if I ascended I'd have a lot of properties besides the property I envisioned for the god I tried to contact.  If I've understood your schema correctly, I should now be a cleric of the Chaotic Evil god of Coordination."

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"I, uh, didn't know there was a Chaotic Evil god of that. - congratulations? That is not a usual thing to have happen!"

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"I am not actually sure whether there was a Chaotic Evil god of Coordination in Golarion before I tried praying to it, but if not, I expect it'll polish the place up a bit, on the margins.  So we're all good with that?"

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" - well, I mean, if you can create gods by praying to them that seems kind of important and should maybe change our to-do list. But I don't think it's a bad thing, so long as you're not going to make any gods who, uh, a god of Coordination is probably the exact opposite of the thing I'm worried about - if everyone could create gods someone's god would not be interested in containing Rovagug -"

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He's probably not supposed to explain the exact way he tried to pray, or even that he suspects the prayer style could've had anything to do with it.  "Yeah, not going to be doing anything more in that department until I understand things a little better.  I mean, I'm not usually a fan of slowing down to do all the paperwork but I'll make an exception for this case.  How sure are you that there isn't an existing Chaotic Evil god of... people having the extra properties and desires they need, in order for lots of individuals to all get the things they want as selfish individuals, without it taking a huge amount of effort and enforcement for them to successfully execute multiplayer strategies and not end up interacting -"  Taldane doesn't have the word negative-sum "- in ways that destroy more value for others than they gain for themselves?"

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" - honestly, 'successfully executing multiplayer strategies' sounds kind of more like a Law thing to me but - we know that the human concepts don't fully capture the god-ones. I don't have anything like a full list of the Chaotic Evil gods but the Worldwound is a opening to the Chaotic Evil afterlife and you'd think if there were a god there Asmodeus could negotiate with He'd do that, instead of us having to stop them from swarming out and eating the world."

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"Maybe I misunderstood a thing.  I thought Law was - societies trying to make up their minds as a whole, and everyone in the societies doing that thing - and Chaos was people pursuing their own separate strategies even if that's not perfectly optimal for some idealization of their aggregate" utility function "thingies-that-value-things - and the God I tried to contact would be the God of the property that the individuals needed to have in order for a Chaotic society to actually work?  Or is that still Lawful and Chaos is totally uncoordinated hostile monsters swarming out of a gap of reality?  But then I don't see how 'revenge' fits in as Chaotic... I need a real reference book on theology, the ones in the local library are awful."

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"- honestly I am not totally sure how Chaotic societies work, I haven't - I've met Chaotic people, at the Worldwound, but they're mostly Chaotic people either from Lawful societies or from societies that are just kind of fucked up and don't, in fact, actually work at all - like, uh, warlords who just kill their rivals, that sort of thing -"

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"Anyways.  Cleric of the god of selfish individuals doing the things they need to do to not just step all over each other.  At least if I got a god that was anything remotely like the one I tried to call.  May or may not be a new god to Golarion.  Is there anything time-sensitive I need to do in response to that, that you know of.  Or should I go on to things like - breakfast, either figuring out how to use clerical magic to launder my clothes or asking you to do that, finding out how to get cleric spells generally for that matter, looking at a list of cleric spells to see if there's any sane or useful ones, seeing if I have any talent for wizard spells, negotiating equity and compensation so we can get started on industrializing Golarion, all that."

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"Clerics pray for spells first thing in the morning, usually, though I don't know if that'd hold with a new god. It at least might be time sensitive so you may as well do it now. Some people like to look over a list of cleric spells and ask for those specifically, some ask for whatever their god advises."

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"Do I have to pray for all the spells at once?  Does it not work at all unless it's 'first thing in the morning'?  Can I pray for a preference-ordered list of spells that might exist and see which ones I get?"

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"For normal clerics, yes, you have to do it all at once first thing in the morning - which is to say, at dawn but with an hour or so of leeway. The justification I encountered was that this puts all the clerics of different gods on the same footing, churches can't have an advantage over others due to having spells for the day while the others are still at prayer for them. Probably you can pray for a preference-ordered list of spells that might exist, I haven't heard of anyone doing that but evidently however you do prayer works or you wouldn't have been clericed."

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Keltham wonders if that's why nobody has invented functional anti-sunlight shades here, though you'd think non-clerics would still need them.  "Most reliable totally standard method for praying for cleric spells?"  He didn't get results all that great off his attempted nonstandard method last time.

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"Uh, you kneel at an altar with some appropriate symbols of your god around - don't know what those would be, if the god's new - and think about how you are blessed with the power to serve them on Golarion, and think about what you believe is the most appropriate for the day's duties."

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"Huh.  I don't think it's an employment - 'service'? - relationship yet, especially when we haven't managed to communicate.  I guess I should think about our overlapping goals and mutual benefit, unless there's some strong reason only employer relationships would work?  Why does anybody ever ask for specific spells, if they could just get the spells that an entity much smarter than them with overlapping goals would pick?"

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"Maybe for Chaotic gods it doesn't have to be an employer relationship. Uh, adventuring teams make plans for the day that rely on having specific spells, so I think they prefer knowing what they'll get in advance to getting whatever the god thinks is best."

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Wait what how does that not violate - "Does the god not know what the adventurers' plans are?  Like, if I don't ask for specific spells, is the god working on more limited information than I have in guessing what will be useful to me?"

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" - I mean, gods have lots of attention but they also have lots and lots of clerics, I don't know that they put more thought into a cleric's specific plans than the cleric does. Once the cleric has decided 'I probably want three of Protection from Energy' the god knows that - that's what is meant by picking your own -"

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"So my god's smart but incredibly distracted and if I ask for their choice of spells, I'm distracting them even more and might get something weirdly inappropriate... still probably worth a shot on day 1.  Okay, heading back to my room to ask for spells, now.  Oh, something I meant to ask and should have asked earlier - being a cleric of an unknown god doesn't prevent me from trying to contact Asmodeus, does it?  Because that would suck."

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"It does not. That said, gods usually have a hard time talking to people who are distant from them in alignment, so if you're in fact Chaotic Evil then you are unlikely to be able to talk directly to Asmodeus. - the priest talked directly to Him, though, last night. That's why everything happened so fast."

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At least some god is paying any attention at all.  Keltham would've thought somebody from outside the local reality bent on creating Industry would get more attention than this.

 

Back to his room Keltham goes, thinking even on the short walk of which spells he might need.

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Let's see.  Off the top of his head, he'd want:

- A spell to have a more extended conversation with his lucky new deity.
- A spell that grants more basic knowledge or familiarity with Golarion.
- A spell to increase his own intelligence, if there's some way to do that in a strictly neutral way.
- A spell to talk to Asmodeus directly, or somebody with the ability to negotiate in a binding way on Asmodeus's behalf.
- Any spells that would be helpful for learning to cast his first wizard spells, if he's predicted to get around to doing that later today.
- Spells that make negotiations with other deities, or their servants, actually binding - that seems like it should be a Coordination thing.
- Spells that bind everybody in the room to be honest with each other in a symmetrical way, if that's a thing under Coordination.
- A spell for telling you what the supply-demand balancing price of a good is, or what would be a fair division of gains from a trade.
- Spells that tell you when somebody else is filtering your information, or otherwise behaving in a naughty way for a business partner.
- Spells that make it easier to find the information you need inside books, or for that matter, spells to read from books that aren't inside the local library.

He probably doesn't need to complete this whole list, especially with time being short since dawn already happened.  Hopefully his deity is paying any attention and if not, there's always tomorrow after he's had a chance to look at a list of cleric spells.  How many spells does he get, actually?  Should've asked that.  Hopefully it's just as many as his deity thinks he needs.

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Keltham doesn't know what an 'altar' is, but 'kneeling' did translate.  He's puzzled, but, like, fine whatever's standard this time.  So he gets down on his knees (on the soft bed, which is more comfortable for his knees than the floor).  If anybody's watching, Keltham is apparently praying to the Bed Headboard of Coordination.

Keltham thinks about his common interest with the god of Coordination, his plans to negotiate equity arrangements with Asmodeus or his representatives, being a general outsider to this entire place and having no idea what's going on, and tries to iterate through his mental list of useful spells, but with clear affordances for the deity prioritizing any spells that would be more useful than that.  He also wouldn't mind a regular conversation, for that matter, if this is a good time.

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It most certainly is a good time to -

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NOBODY is allowed to do ANYTHING nondefault to that mortal until Otolmens finishes reporting to Pharasma.

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Otolmens!  Be sensible about this.  Abadar is a fellow Lawful Neutral god.

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Otolmens turned her back for ONE-SIXTH OF A TIME UNIT and when she looked back the mortal had SEVEN CLERIC LEVELS.  From ABADAR.

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That was super irresponsible of Abadar! Asmodeus thinks the weird squirrel should be constrained to only talking to other squirrels who can stop him from doing anything dangerous, and has arranged this, and proposes a rule that they leave the situation as such until they have more information which, again, Asmodeus is working on acquiring and will be willing to trade!

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Otolmens REMEMBERS the last 517 times she has interacted with Asmodeus.  Otolmens is not going to -

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Nethys thinks this arrangement is a TERRIBLE idea.  Why must Otolmens and Asmodeus torment Nethys so?

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- perhaps this is NOT such a bad plan after all.

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Otolmens, Nethys is trying to use reverse psychology on you.

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Otolmens continues to not understand what is the REVERSE of a PSYCHOLOGY.

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Is nobody else bothered by how often the end result of these divine negotiations is all the gods taking a supposedly-privileged null action?  Because it really seems like they should be able to collectively do better than -

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Otolmens sees nothing wrong with doing NOTHING.  Doing nothing is relatively less likely to destroy ALL OF REALITY.  Otolmens wishes that many gods and mortals would do nothing MORE OFTEN.  Except for Pharasma who should STOP IGNORING URGENT REPORTS.

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- still no divine reply, darn it.  But Keltham does think he has some more spells.

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He has

(simplest) Detect Magic, Read Magic, Guidance, Resistance

(more complex) Comprehend Languages, Fairness, Sanctuary, Abadar's Truthtelling X3

(more complex still) Owl's Wisdom, Eagle's Splendour, Greater Detect Magic x2

(yet more complex) Aura Sight, Invisibility Purge, Vision of Hell

(most complex) Spell Immunity, Glimpse of Truth

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...and what can Keltham feel or see or sense, when he introspects on the new door-affordances inside himself, from simplest to most complex?

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He can sense the shape of the spells, and it's - obviously informative, the places where they tuck or weave, but not a language he has any idea how to interpret, yet. It seems like there ought to be a lookup book with diagrams that lets you match spells to meanings.

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Oh that's just wonderful.

 

Keltham hopes his unknown patron realized how little Keltham knew.  He doesn't dare fire off any of these things, obviously, in case his patron had too little information; three-quarters of the wizard spells are for combat.

 

Keltham goes back to Carissa.  "Got some spells.  How do I figure out what they do?  Also, we should clean-zap my clothes at some point."

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"Sure. I can do that now, if you want, but it takes a bit of concentration so it might make sense to wait until you're reading or something again. Hmmm, experienced casters can tell by - not exactly looking, but it's sort of like looking, do you have a sense of structure?"

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"A sense of structure?  Yes.  Any idea whatsoever of what the structure means?  No."

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"I bet one of the priests has a book of all the first-circle cleric spells that describes how they feel different from each other."

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"I think, on the whole, I'd prefer to have my clothes clean before that happens.  Breakfast might not go amiss either.  But after that, yeah, let's check out that book."

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"Sure thing." 

 

This seems to involve a periodic motion like knotting a rope that's not there; she murmurs to herself while she does it. Dust and sweat separate themselves from the clothes. 

This is what ninety-eight percent of Prestidigitations are used for in Golarion and it's known as laundry magic you can also use backwards for some other minor effects.

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"Thanks.  I should - I definitely want to try my hand at wizard magic.  I just haven't thought hard about what priorities it trades off against.  Like breakfast.  Oh, and how do I figure out my cleric spells that aren't 'first-circle', if my brain's translating the feeling of that word right?"

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"Do you ...have cleric spells that aren't first circle?"

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"Keep in mind I do not actually know the word 'first-circle' except from context because it has no corresponding concept in my native language or prior experience.  Some of my spells feel - bigger, more complicated, than others."

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"Wow. Uh, more complicated the way that, like - the most complicated one, how many holes does it have, structurally, if you imagine it was made of something stretchy but not weldable to itself, and you stretched it, would it look like this -"

Minor illusion: second circle spell.

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Keltham tries to rapidly calculate in the back of his mind the chance that he should be keeping secret the max power level of the spells his patron is willing to grant him, if so, he should not appear overtly reticent because the most important part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists.

"Most complicated spell I have is more complicated than that, but not by a lot," Keltham specifies unfalsifiably.  Taldane is a great language to speak instead of Baseline if you don't want your words to narrow down possible realities.

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She switches the illusion to a third-circle spell. "Like this?"

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"I just got these and have not really spent a lot of time contemplating them yet but yeah, that looks like it could be a spell of mine."

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Carissa casts Detect Magic. There aren't invisible people in the room right now, or if there are they're concealed against Detect Magic which would be a sensible precaution now that Keltham probably has it, but that's not really the point. Then she stands up and paces the length of the room, staring at things. 

 

Carissa who had just learned this information and wasn't hiding anything would be scared, because a god dropping five cleric levels on Keltham is communicating that He expects Keltham to need them. Carissa is also, separately, scared, but that's unrelated. Though maybe helps with her acting. 

 

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Keltham had just been projecting this game ahead to where Carissa would show the next level up, forcing Keltham to choose between overt reticence and overt lying, and he's relieved on a couple of different levels when Carissa doesn't do that.  She looks disturbed and maybe in distress instead.  "Sorry if I messed up something.  May I ask you to say a word about what's wrong?"

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" - sorry. Uh. Gods don't usually drop three cleric circles on people all at once. I didn't know they could, although, uh, with gods it's less that there's anything they actually can't do at all and more about tradeoffs, I think - but at minimum it's so expensive it typically doesn't happen, unless it'd - turn the tide of wars, or something -

- so your god thought it was really important you have three cleric circles. And maybe that's just because speeding up the industrial revolution by a couple of months is the most important thing that ever happened, which, I mean, had also occurred to me, and which will definitely be easier if you are a powerful cleric because you'll be able to do a lot of experimentation and healing and magic research yourself - 

- but it's - uh, if there were something really bad, like, someone were going to kidnap you or something, then, that would also be a reason -

- I was just checking that there's not anyone in the room, or any scrying sensors. I don't - even know how much that'd help, because it's possible to hide from a third-circle wizard and a third-circle cleric, if you planned for it. But. It'd be very expensive. There's no one spying on us except maybe very expensively."

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Keltham would immediately reply that it's explained-away by the Industrial Revolution point, which is way more important than a 'war' if he's got that concept at all right.  But he doesn't want to just ignore the security flag.  People who just ignore security flags are for children's books, not grownup books.

"Huh.  What potentially stops my god from directly warning me, in that case?"

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"...nothing I can think of? I would expect a warning to be a lot cheaper than three cleric circles. Gods....vary in their capacity to usefully communicate with mortals, maybe if yours was really bad at it?

...it's most likely just the 'speeding up the industrial revolution is very important' thing, now that I think about it, the other thing came to mind first but I'm used to people being in various kinds of danger and I am not used to people being positioned to speed up the industrial revolution. And there's good security, here. Unless they're the problem. They're - 

- frankly, if they are the problem, three cleric circles wouldn't solve it? But maybe it'd make some other solution possible...I don't think this is very likely, really, once I think it through. Uh. If your god gave you all fighting spells I'm going to be worried again, so maybe let's check that."

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"Yeah, let's.  Fair warning, under these circumstances, I may choose to publicly reveal fewer spells than all of the ones I have."  He suspects, for a start, that he has the spell that Carissa used to check for invisibles, as one of his least complicated ones, going on the spoken component.  Which is already not a very encouraging sign at all.  Hopefully it's a more general spell than Test For Invisible, and has some perfectly innocuous civilian use that he obviously-to-a-god needed to deploy today anyways.

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"Yeah, of course. Shall we go bother the priests for the book?"

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"I have no better options to offer."  Keltham will follow where she leads, with slightly more alertness than usual in case Carissa works for the criminal mastermind who is about to stage Keltham's kidnapping.

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(Dath ilan has a... complicated... relationship with its criminal masterminds.  They really, really don't collectively want to admire the clever successful ones, and yet.)

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Carissa goes to the temple and asks a priest for a book of spells for new clerics, and gets one. There are no kidnapping attempts. 

 

The book has diagrams for cantrips, of which Keltham's god has given him Detect Magic, Read Magic, Guidance, and Resistance, and first-circle spells, of which Keltham's god has given him Comprehend Languages, Sanctuary, and some things not in the book.

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Oh that's not even slightly good.

Keltham keeps his face neutral through all presented spells.

Detect Magic - maybe useful for learning wizard spells, not just noticing invisibility magic, which, maybe.

Read Magic - weakly confirms that his patron might have been giving him useful boosts for learning wizard things.

Guidance - super useful generally, why does anybody ever not do this.

Resistance - there are not that many cantrips so maybe Keltham should not be too alarmed that Resistance was included, it could be useful for learning wizardry without hurting yourself.  It could've been worse, could've been Detect Poison.

Comprehend Languages - Keltham will see if he runs into anybody important who doesn't speak Taldane, later today; if not, it could be a hint that he should find somebody who doesn't speak Taldane.  Or a hint not to rely on Carissa's Share Language.


Sanctuary is unambiguously a huge fucking warning.


And it would have been really nice if the book had included all of Keltham's spells, which would make it that much less likely that he was being shown books on which Selectively Omit Pages had been cast.


Keltham thinks about this, but not for very long.  He's already withholding identifications of all his spells; that already tells them that Keltham is not just wandering around in blind unsuspecting innocence.  And if his hosts are not the primary problem, letting them go in blind innocence themselves is foolish, and ungrateful.

"Unfortunately.  My god seems to think I might need Sanctuary."

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"...well, I can, uh, tell your security to be more careful, if you want, though it seems possible it's more communication than intended as literal protection, because the set of situations it'd help with is pretty small. If it's communication - people can request sanctuary of churches or of countries? Usually if a different one is trying to kill them. Or it could just mean 'danger is a thing to think about', which, well, mission accomplished, or..." Shrug. "If He had something complicated to say I would really have expected Him to talk to you."

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"As would I.  New priorities:  Tell security that I asked my god to choose my spells and Sanctuary was one of them.  Get more complete cleric spellbooks so I can identify my remaining spells - ideally, books at all circles, I don't know whether my god granted me the highest circles I can actually get.  And - basic instructions for casting without blowing yourself up, if those are required?  How do I learn to do the thing where I recover the energy from a cantrip, if I haven't done that before?  That'll give me the ability to practice casting... say with Read Magic, that's the least valuable one if I accidentally lose it."

"Also breakfast."

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"Can you get us Keltham's security, and more books about cleric magic," she asks the priest. "Let's go to breakfast next and I'll try to explain catching cantrips there. Most people do not pick it up on the first try or the first day of trying but most people also aren't already third circle clerics, and maybe we can throw additional resources at you picking it up faster - like, someone can give you a Wisdom enhancement and plausibly your security can enhance your reflexes and reaction time."

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"I have no better plans.  I mildly apologize for the short-term inconvenience that my existence has imposed on your collective existence; it shall be compensated for if the future goes as I hope."

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"I, uh, mildly apologize for my world not having enough Law yet that you don't have to worry about this."

 

A tall man of the local ethnicity walks in. He is Atanasio Torres, though there's no way for Keltham to know that. 

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"I'm on Keltham's security detail," he says in a bored voice. 

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"His god gave him Sanctuary."

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"I see."

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"I am extremely unfamiliar with local security procedures, don't know what spells might be cast against me, don't know what spells you would cast in response, if you want me on the floor you need to shout 'Fall down!' and not just the name of a spell that any idiot knows means I should fall down.  Let me know if there's anything I can do to make your own lives simpler or easier."

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"Someone might attempt to kidnap you, in which case they'd need to be within thirty feet of you or more likely need to touch you. Someone might, given that constraint, just try to kill you figuring they can resurrect you later, which still requires getting within the building, which is shielded to make that difficult, though there are expensive measures we haven't taken and will probably now take, given the added prompt that they're needed. If people are casting spells when you had no reason to expect spells to be cast, getting out of their line of effect, which is to a first approximation their line of sight, is a good idea if you have time. If there's anything else you need to know we can yell it.

I can also create a telepathic bond between you, me, and up to two other people. which we could use to communicate telepathically and in a manner that isn't subject to eavesdropping by any known method aside from forcing a member of the bond to divulge what was said. Everyone in the bond hears everything spoken into it. That'll last for two hours, so it's not particularly worth doing right now, but if there's anything that might be a sign of trouble I will do it. If there's anything that unambiguously is a sign of trouble I will likely grab you and teleport out to safety."

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"If the telepathic bond requires my consent, please prioritize showing me, soon, a couple of books saying," purporting to say, "how telepathic bonds work and what they permit.  Is there anybody besides you who I should have on my list of people who are allowed to grab me and teleport me?"

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"There's one other person who looks," illusion, "like this - do you have Detect Magic -"

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Keltham will try gainfully to distinguish these two faces from all other Chelians!  He also tries to figure out how to avoid revealing whether he has Detect Magic right now, without lying of course.

"Don't rely on my correctly using Detect Magic soon, it's questionable how well I'll be able to cast or hold onto anything in my first days.  In a few days that might be a secure assumption though."

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"All right. There's a wizard spell called Arcane Mark which wizards can use to create a distinctive magical signature for themselves or various objects. It's imitable, but they'd have to get very near us to see what to imitate. Once you can Detect Magic, you'll want to get a look at us and learn those, which would make it very hard for anyone to impersonate us to you."

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"Have you got something for reflexes, to help him catch cantrips -"

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"If nothing's gone wrong by the end of the day I can Haste him. - hey," he adds to the priest, "have we gotten any signs Asmodeus expects trouble, did you get combat spells -"

             "- no, but the High Priestess got Forbiddance, she mentioned -"

" - ah huh. Okay."

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"Question mark?" Keltham mistranslates what was supposed to be a much shorter speech-act.

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"Forbiddance bars all planar travel into or through an area. It's incredibly expensive. I think we'll go ahead and do it, though, with your leave, if Asmodeus thinks it's a good idea and your god also thinks there might be trouble."

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"I meta-level think it's a good idea if you object-level think it's a good idea.  I have no grasp of pros and cons myself; the judgment is in your hands."

If Keltham got a teleport spell in one of the higher-circle ones he has no grasp of yet - then that will require some plotting later, he guesses, and oh well; it doesn't seem worth making himself more vulnerable in the other possible worlds.  They do not actually need his permission.

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"All right." He nods to the priest, heads off. 

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Current plan is breakfast, followed by basic wizardry / spellcraft.

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She can try to explain catching a cantrip during breakfast. "So if you cast any of your first-circle spells you'll notice the act of casting deforms them and releases the spell, there's nothing left. But if you cast a cantrip, it's intact - you're releasing it, but you're not breaking it. You just have to try to draw the energy back to you. My notes from school should have some exercises..."

 

She would really really love to read Keltham's mind but they're only having a few very high-level people do that, now, lest he notice.

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"Tomorrow I'll ask my god to load up on those, possibly, but for today it sounds like I only have limited tries.  Let's give me all the advance prep we can pack into a limited time - since I do need to try today - and then try it.  I'll save one for the end of the day and Haste, though, it sounds like."

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"Sounds good. I can also demonstrate them for you, though I'm not sure how much good that'll do when you can't have Detect Magic up to watch." This will save some time for the writing of a book about Telepathic Bond, anyway. 

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Keltham will watch Carissa, do any other advance prep she suggests, and then try with Resistance.  Oh, and also eat breakfast.

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Breakfast is a wide variety of the same sorts of things as were offered for dinner yesterday. 

He does not catch Resistance, though it feels like he can tell what motion it would be.

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All right, Keltham is going to wait for wizardry lessons, and then... hm.  "Is there a spell structure for a more powerful version of Detect Magic that you can show me?"  Keltham isn't all that happy about revealing that he got that second-circle that looks like it might be a more powerful Detect Magic - more out of security principle than any specific suspicions or plans - but he's not going to cast an unidentified spell just yet; and using the more powerful Detect Magic might save him some time, so it is important to identify.

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"Greater Detect Magic? Yeah, that's a thing. Second circle. Have you got it? Looks like -" Illusion.

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"Yup."  Keltham is pleased he is making any progress on being able to see by sight what a spell structure does!  "I'm thinking next I try my hand at some basic wizardry stuff, fail a few times, then cast Greater Detect Magic and watch you catch some cantrips and maybe even specifically catch a Read Magic one, if you've got that or somebody does, and then try to catch my own, and then try some more basic wizardry things before Greater Detect Magic runs out."

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"Unfortunately you won't be able to cast Read Magic while using Greater Detect Magic, because Greater Detect Magic requires concentration, and you can't cast a spell while concentrating on another one, you lose the one you were concentrating on. You probably will have the same problem trying to catch my Read Magic but I'm happy to let you try."

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"Is there an expensive thingy that lets the user look at things with Detect Magic without concentrating, which I can borrow for a day for purposes of learning basic magic twelve times faster, if that's the known result?  Though I can also just try my hand at the basic wizard things first."

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"Yes there is, it's very expensive, but you can ask someone to put out feelers. I'm not sure anyone has measured how much it speeds up learning magic because usually magic students' time isn't valuable enough for that to be even remotely worth it but you're right that here it is, if we can arrange it discreetly."

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"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?"

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" - 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."

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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...

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

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"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.

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"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?"

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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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."

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'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."

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"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'."

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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."

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"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."

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"Say more?"

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"- 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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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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."

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"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 -"

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"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?"

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

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"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."

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"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?"

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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 -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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?"

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"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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?"

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"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."

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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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

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"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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

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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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

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"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."

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"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

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

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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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

 

 

 

Permalink Mark Unread

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

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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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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.  

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

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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".

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

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

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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.

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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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

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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?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

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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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- 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."

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"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The other shoe is -"

 

She stops.


"The other shoe is worth -"

 

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

Permalink Mark Unread

Hmmm!  "Worth twenty thousand what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

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

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

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

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"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

 

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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?"

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"- 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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

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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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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 -"

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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".

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

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"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.

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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."

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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."

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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?"

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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?"

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"...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."

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"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?"

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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."

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

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

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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...

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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?

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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 -"

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"Repeat:  This sentence is true."

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"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.

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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?"

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"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..."

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"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?"

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"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."

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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?"

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"- 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."

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"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."

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

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"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.

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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?"

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

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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."

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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. 

 

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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."

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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."

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"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.

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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.

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The spell does not seem to vanish.

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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.

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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. 

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"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.

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

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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.

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"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?"

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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."

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

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"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."

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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?"

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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."

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"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."

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...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."

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"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?"

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"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?"

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"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."

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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?"

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"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."

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(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.)

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"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.

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"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." 

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

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"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."

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

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...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." 

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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?"

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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

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"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?"

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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." 

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"All right, let's go."

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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

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...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.

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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.

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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.

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

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"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?"

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

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"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?"

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"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."

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'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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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 -"

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"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?"

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"...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."

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"One equals one?"

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"Now there's something that might be true everywhere, which, you might think, would make it an important fact; and if it's important, then it's important to know exactly what it is, that's true everywhere.  So what do you mean, when you say that one equals one?"

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"I mean, I'm not at all sure it's an important fact, it's mostly just saying that we defined equals, and the way we defined equals, the things on both sides of it are the same, and things are the same as themselves. But it does seem like it'd be true everywhere."

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"It's something of a mischievous question, but mischief is also important in learning, so I'll ask.  One common way to ask what something means, is to ask what you experience when that proposition is true.  If you say 'water is liquid', for example, and I ask you what that means, you might tell me that 'water' describes the clear stuff inside a glass you hold up, and that 'liquid' means that a substance tries to cling to itself but has no set shape, and so conforms itself to the shape of its container; and when I see you pour the water from the glass, onto the floor, I should expect to see it spread out across the floor, while still locally clinging to itself and staying in contiguous puddles.  Now, what do you see when one equals one?"

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This is SO STRESSFUL. 

 

"If you use a spell to duplicate something it'll have all the same properties as the original."

"You don't see anything, it's just a definition."

"Things ...exist at all? ...that'd imply it's not true in the Maelstrom, though -"

"If you try to do math and you assume it, your math will keep making sense."

 

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"Positive reinforcement for continuing to be wrong instead of quiet!  Now, really I only told you half of a proverb, just then.  The real proverb says that to ask what a proposition means, we ask what you should see that's different, depending on whether the proposition is true or false.  Yesterday, water was liquid; tomorrow, water won't be liquid.  How are yesterday and tomorrow different?  Well, yesterday, when I poured water from the cup, it spread out over the floor, in puddles where it clung to itself.  So if tomorrow, I pour out water, and it stays in the same shape as when it left the cup, then tomorrow, 'water is liquid' is false.  Yesterday, you used a spell to duplicate something - let's say a small flower, a dandelion - and the duplicate dandelion seemed just the same as the original.  Tomorrow, you use a spell to duplicate a dandelion, and the resulting flower is blue instead of yellow.  Is one no longer equal to one, tomorrow?  Yesterday, one equaled one; tomorrow, it won't.  What will you see tomorrow that's different from yesterday?"

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AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

 

"I...don't think tomorrow sustains conscious life that's observing things."

"That's a cop-out, whatever, you're scrying the place where this is true."

"I still think - you try to do math, and your math doesn't work anymore."

"'Tomorrow, it won't' can't be true."

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"Can't be true?  Well, if it can't be true that something is false, that would make it a necessary truth, I suppose.  Dath ilan might imagine that it'd managed to deduce what was true in all planes, if it couldn't be false.  But if for that reason you can't tell me what you expect to see, what will happen to you, as a consequence, does your necessary truth really mean anything?  After all, if it meant only some things could happen to you, but not others, it would cease to be true if you traveled to a plane where other things happened to you instead.  So whatever is true no matter what happens to you, never helps you figure out what will happen to you; and, therefore, is absolutely useless.  Now I have just proven to you that all necessary truths are absolutely useless.  And some of you have suggested that math is made of necessary truths.  So have you just proved that math is absolutely useless, since, whatever could happen to you, that wouldn't make math false, and therefore math can never say anything about what will happen?"

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Otolmens is watching this classroom SO HARD right now.  The mortal had BETTER not be going anywhere weird with this.  Physics disasters are BAD but math disasters are SO MUCH WORSE.

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 "You can use math to derive how to move a spell, and then the spell works or it doesn't."

 

"And target a catapult."

"And build a bridge."

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"If I have one hat and one head, one equalling one means that after I have put the hat on the head there won't be any spare hats or any spare heads. It seems - possible to imagine observing instead that if you have one of something and one of another thing it doesn't mean they match up to each other with none going spare."

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The group is divided on whether this is in fact possible to imagine. 

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"Just to check, Carissa-Sevar, can you describe to me in additional detail what you'd imagine it to be like to observe that?"

Keltham has had a pretty strange couple of days and is, in fact, less sure of some things than he used to be.

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"I mean if it happened I'd assume someone was messing with my head, or I was dreaming, but - well, imagine instead we have five weapons and five spots on a weapons rack, it's not hard to imagine that you put a weapon in each slot but then there's still one slot left over, and you go back and count and there are five slots, one of them empty, and you count the weapons and there are five, all in a rack. It's harder to imagine with one because in dreams sometimes counting to five doesn't quite work but counting to one still does."

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"Saying those words out loud is one thing; could you create a detailed illusion of it happening?"

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"Not a motionless one. I bet I could - do one that took advantage of how people can't look at a whole landscape at the same time and changed where they weren't looking at it. You'd just be tricking them, though, even if you did it perfectly, you wouldn't have changed what one equalled."

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"If it's not possible to create an illusion of something being false, you might not need to travel to other planes to guess it would be true there.  But I offer the same mischievous objection as before:  To say that you can't make an illusion of something, doesn't narrow down what kind of future follows from the past - we can make an illusion of a plane where jumping up puts you at the bottom of an ocean, instead of off the ground.  Even if in all previous history, jumping just lifted you off the ground a bit, we can make a detailed illusion of a world where that happens the first trillion times, and on the trillion-and-first time, jumping teleports you under the ocean instead.  So if math is about truths we can't make even an illusion deny - then why is math any good for building bridges?  We can make an illusion of a bridge falling down."

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They are so confused and varying degrees of distressed about it.

"Actual bridges fall down more if you did the math wrong."

"Making an illusion of casting a spell isn't - the same thing as actually casting the spell - sometimes the way to pass the test is to be able to actually do it, not just to make it look like you can -"

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(Keltham does not have the faintest chance of noticing that somebody who did well in a Chelish academy is leaking tiny signs of distress past their routine concealment thereof.)

"Well, I think I've created enough explicit confusion that you'll notice learning something that makes you feel less confused," Keltham says, and then makes a brief sad face about how this snappy statement sounds so ridiculously long in Taldane.  What kind of language makes confusion a three-syllable word, anyways?  One that has no idea what its nearly neural-level cognitive primitives are, presumably.

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Keltham goes to the improvised whiteboard, and starts drawing squares and triangles, red and green, large and small, inside some bigger blue circles.

"Consider each of these blue circles and their contents as depicting - we would say in Baseline - possible worlds.  By possible, I don't mean it's especially likely that you'll find yourselves in them; these possible worlds I'm depicting are much too tiny to support intelligent life.  They've only got a few squares and triangles inside.  By 'possible' I do mean that one could make a fully detailed illusion of the world, given the ability to cast arbitrarily large illusions; my using markers to draw a world in complete detail similarly shows that world to be 'possible'.  Now, consider these propositions -"

Keltham writes, in black marker:

Z.  All triangular things are red.
H.  All red things are large.
Q.  All triangular things are large.

(Dath ilan has some different conventions for symbols to use in equations, for example, all the symbols should be as topologically and typographically distinct as possible.)

"As you can see, I have shown worlds where Z is true, and worlds where Z is false.  I have shown worlds where H is true, and worlds where H is false.  I have shown worlds where Q is true, and worlds where Q is false.  None of Z, H, and Q, then, are necessary truths, nor necessary falsehoods; for they are all true in some illusionable worlds, and false in others.  Then is there anything useful here for math, logic, and necessity to say?"

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It takes a couple of minutes of muttering and frowning and guessing "no?" and "there are triangular things in all the world- oh, no, not that one -" before - "well, if Z and H are true, then Q is, you can't have any with Z and H but not Q."

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That took them longer than Keltham expected.  He frankly would not have expected that all the exercises he had to do as a kid were, like, required for getting that point instantaneously as an adult.  Not to mention, they know topology but not predicate logic?  Right, because you need topology for spells, but not, apparently, predicate logic.  If he'd realized he sure would've told them to learn that in yesterday evening's afterhours instead of calculus.  Oh, well, he'll plunge on and see how far he gets.

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Keltham goes to the whiteboard and draws some conscious observers inside his blue circle-worlds.  Much as some other world might indicate observers with smiley-faces, dath ilani convention calls for Keltham to draw a number of glaring eyes inside his worlds, creating a tableau that somebody from a differently-troped world might regard as eldritch.

"Well, now I've put some conscious observers inside these worlds!  Not that my tiny drawings embody real experiences, of course, they're not detailed enough drawings for that; so now these pictures are no longer being drawn in full detail, which is something we might need to watch out for if this was a more complicated debate about conscious experiences."

"Some of these observers, in the worlds where Z is actually true, might see twenty triangles being red, and zero triangles being green, and hypothesize a general law: all triangles are red.  They might be able to deduce, without having to actually scry into other planes, that Z was not a necessary truth; they might be able to cast illusions, draw on walls, or just use their imaginations to see that.  So they would not be certain that all triangles are red.  For all they know, the world might up and present them one day with a green triangle.  But the next time they saw a triangle, even if their world made them slower to see colors than shapes, they could guess even in advance of observing; they would guess the triangle was red."

"Let's also suppose that you can tell whether an object is small or large, but it's an expensive measurement; an observer has to actually wander over close to the object, to determine its size; because if they're looking at the object from a distance, they're not sure if it's nearby and small, or large and far away.  These observers have only one eye, as you can see; no binocular vision for tracking distances.  Let's say they have to pay one labor... one silver piece each time they want to move to an object."

"In worlds where H is true, observers who pay to measure a few red things will find, that of all the red things they have measured, every one of those red things was large."

"Now let me ask again, in case anyone has seen the point before I speak it:  How can knowing necessary truths save you money?"

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"Well, if you know that triangles are red, and that red things are large, then you don't have to go check the size of triangles."

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"To state it precisely, some observers may have guessed the unnecessary truth that all triangles are red, observing the redness after the delay.  They may have separately guessed the unnecessary truth that all red things are large, after paying to measure some red things.  Maybe they've never measured any of the red things that were triangles! we can suppose for the sake of clarity.  Then the necessary truth, 'Q is true in all worlds where Z and H is true', can allow them to guess the unnecessary truth 'All triangles are large', which necessarily follows from other unnecessary truths they've guessed.  And even if they've never measured the size of a single triangle before, they can guess - though not know for certain - that every triangle they've seen was large, and that the next triangle they see will be large.  If it's the kind of knowledge that matters, but not enough that you need to be very sure of it, they could use that guess in place of paying a silver piece to measure it."

"Of course, it isn't a necessary truth that the observers are capable of figuring this all out - that they can operate the necessity, 'Z and H yield Q'.  We could draw an illusion of a world where the observers totally fail to figure that out.  It would still be true across all planes and all illusions that could ever be drawn in full detail, but the people in that illusion wouldn't know it."

"It isn't necessary that entities successfully operate universal necessities in order to see which new guesses must follow from old guesses, which means that some entities do better or worse at this than others.  This is true when considering all possible worlds as a whole, and also happens to be true within my homeworld, and almost certainly in this one."

"So now we shall turn to the question: suppose you were constructing a new entity from scratch.  How would you go about embedding in them an internal reflection of the interuniversal Law, the ability to operate necessary truths correctly...  No, sorry, that's probably too much of a leap to ask in one go.  Strike that, restart.  Suppose you were comparing two entities: how would you say that one was doing better or worse than the other at being Lawful in this exact sense?"

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- Keltham hasn't noticed but his teaching style clearly has half the class extremely panicked. They are concealing it very well.

...it really seems bizarre, that you could teach Law this way, with trick questions and guessing games and strange rules about how you're supposed to volunteer wrong answers if you aren't sure you know the right one. It seems like the habits of mind that would teach are - well, does she actually think that it'd teach unLawful habits of mind, or just horrendously ill-advised ones, there is a difference -

- if you built a military out of Kelthams it would not be a very good military, which is a perfectly serviceable definition of Law, the discipline and coordination required to win wars. The Kelthams -- and, plausibly, the people taught like Keltham - would be wrong, a lot, out loud and cheerfully, they'd consider everything their business, they'd ask questions they shouldn't ask -

- he did behave differently with Contessa Lliratha, maybe there's a kind of distinction the mind can successfully maintain, irreverent in most contexts but deferential where it actually matters - but it seems like it would be hard to tell if someone will be deferential when it actually matters, if they've spent their entire life in contexts where it doesn't, not being sufficiently deferential at all -

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"You could look at ...how good they were at making those guesses? How often when they guessed they were right, how often they missed a pattern..."

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"Measuring how good people are at guessing final conclusions in reality - whether, when they say 'I assign 90% probability this triangle is large', the triangle is actually large 9 times out of 10 - sure is a metric of how much Law people contain and are using correctly!  But there's more than one kind of Law you need to build an agent, and the piece of Law we're trying to isolate is the one that's about using necessary truths correctly.  One way of looking at that part is that it's about which conclusions follow from which premises.  To demonstrate -"

Keltham has seen one or two fragments of algebra in his reading, enough that he has some idea of what Chelish algebra conventions look like.  Though it's a bit weird that they teach algebra without, like, teaching people what algebra means.  Hopefully it's not a piece of knowledge that's infohazardous here but not in dath ilan.

He sketches a series of equations:

[1]            x = 1 (premise)
[2] y = 1 (premise)
[3] 1 = 1 (id. 1)
[4] x = y (subst lh [1] ; subst rh [2])
[5] x*x = y*x (mult. x)
[6] x*x - y*y = y*x - y*y (sub. (y*y))
[7] (x + y)*(x - y) = y*(x - y)      (diff-squares lh. x, y ; factor rh. y)
[8] x + y = y (cancel. *(x - y))
[9] 2 = 1 (conclusion)
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Otolmens is now in EMERGENCY PANIC OVERDRIVE, which you would be able to distinguish from her usual state of being if you looked carefully.  This particular proof of an inconsistency in first-order arithmetic is safely flawed, but if the foreign mortal is plotting to produce a valid proof of inconsistency - why won't they move the mortal somewhere prophecy still works?

She can't trust Abadar anymore, fellow Lawful Neutral god or not.  Abadar might not be useful in this emergency even if she could trust Him; He's scarcely better at decoding mortal minds than Herself. 

Otolmens sends a message reading simply HELP, tagged with a location.

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"Now I'm not so much asking 'What is the flaw in this proof?'," Keltham is saying, now that he's given the classroom the few required seconds to look over his derivations, "as asking, 'How would you go about finding the flaw, if you couldn't spot it at a glance or on your first try at looking?'"

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Irori has never once received an emergency summons from Otolmens that was actually important.

He nonetheless maintains a habit of responding with alacrity, just in case.  The concept of 'anthropic selection' is not lost on him, and zero urgent summonses from Otolmens is not quite as reassuring as a mortal might think.

Yes?

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You USED to be a MORTAL.  I request you to read this mortal's mind and inform me whether it is plotting to write down a series of VALID proof steps proving an inconsistency in first-order arithmetic.

Otolmens isn't sure, for obvious reasons of resulting inconsistency, but She suspects that She internally uses ordinal induction up to epsilon-zero.  They'd have to boot up Metatolmens to fix Her!

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Ex-mortal or not, from where Irori truly stands far above Golarion and other places, it isn't easy for Him to look inside the mind of a mortal not pledged to Himself and praying.  Otolmens only needs to pay attention to relatively few things going on, inside the multiverse, and then She is a relatively materially-focused entity on top of that, designed to be able to check all the electrons in a room to make sure none of them have the wrong mass.  Irori, if He hasn't formed an avatar and sent it into the room, cannot read the writing on the whiteboard the way Otolmens can; He can barely tell that these souls are in a library surrounded by books.  He definitely can't hear the sounds, the pressure patterns transmitted through the air as vibrations.

Still, it is Otolmens who calls, and the mortal is more Lawful Neutral than usual even for those that register Lawful Neutral.

From the mortal's general spiritual posture, Irori can already guess what He'll see.  But just in case, Irori expends the energy to take a very brief look at the surface of the mortal's mind.  It's not as difficult as it would be at other times of this mortal's life, given his current endeavors.

...he's not planning to destroy mathematics.  He only intends to teach of his Way to others.

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Irori shifts most of His delegated attention back to other aspects of His businesses, leaving only a tiny fragment to look at the Chelish place a bit longer.

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...Irori shifts somewhat more of His attention back to that location.

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Carissa feels that she could grasp what Keltham is pointing at a lot faster if she were reading his mind but that's disallowed, now, he's a fourth-circle caster and reasonably likely to notice. She can't even ask him whether it'd be all right if she read his mind because they haven't acknowledged mindreading to be a thing that magic can do.

 

It remains bizarre, to think that Law has anything to do with formal mathematical logic. You don't need to understand the gods to be Lawful, you just need to obey them. But - but Keltham's world is more Lawful than hers, and -

- so there's nothing heretical about the claim that humans are using a mediocre approximation of Law, which is a god-concept that doesn't mean quite what humans understand it to mean. And there's nothing heretical about the idea that humans ought to use the real thing, except that they're too stupid and limited to understand it, so they have to settle for their wrong approximations. And there's...nothing very heretical about the claim that, actually, there's a way to teach humans the real thing, despite their stupidity and limitations -- at least, to teach smart humans, to teach humans in Keltham's world with a median INT of 16 or 17, and the people in this room have a median INT of 16 or 17, so the people in this room can learn it. 

And the true structure of Law would be mathematical, because it's about - regularities, consistencies, treaties among the gods aren't promises so much as fundamental changes, becoming the kind of structure of which the promise is true, and there is, actually, an obvious parallel to math there, even if she can't properly articulate it. The way the gods are is inevitable; in many ways they vary much less than humans, because there is only one way to be right and many many ways to be wrong. 

And the gods wouldn't be very suited to figure out what math, specifically, to teach to humans, especially if it requires obnoxiously counterintuitive tactics like making everyone limp their way through the lesson guessing - and perhaps, too, this wouldn't even have been worth trying anywhere in the world until quite recently, you need a bunch of smart people in a room and Cheliax is the first society in recorded history to look for all their smart children and teach them math -

 

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"Well, you'd know there has to be an error somewhere, since you got it wrong."

"You could - check each line and see where the error showed up first -"

 

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"Check each line to see where the error showed up first?  How would you check a line for error?"

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" - well, there's obviously a problem in the eighth line, where if you substitute in '1' for X and Y you've got the error already. And there's...not a problem in the seventh line, because that one comes out to 2*0 = 1*0. Which is true."

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Keltham takes a quick look at the nametag of whoever that was.  Why the Chelians collectively aced this problem but not the predicate-logic one... presumably it's just down to more actual practice with algebra?

"Precisely.  If we substitute in 1 for x and y, and evaluate the left-hand sides and right-hand sides of each equation, we get the following assertions:"

[1]    (1 = 1)    x = 1 (premise)
[2] (1 = 1) y = 1 (premise)
[3] (1 = 1) 1 = 1 (id. 1)
[4] (1 = 1) x = y (subst lh [1] ; subst rh [2])
[5] (1 = 1) x*x = y*x (mult. x)
[6] (0 = 0) x*x - y*y = y*x - y*y (sub. (y*y))
[7] (0 = 0) (x + y)*(x - y) = y*(x - y)      (diff-squares lh. x, y ; factor rh. y)
[8] (2 = 1) x + y = y (cancel. *(x - y))
[9] (2 = 1) 2 = 1 (conclusion)

"The tactics of algebra - like being allowed to add 3 to both sides of an equation - are meant to preserve truth, not create it from scratch.  If an equation starts out true, a tactic in algebra should not produce a false equation from that true equation."

"This way of thinking holds even if the elements of the equation refer to things in the outside world.  Let x be the number of people sitting in the brown chair, 2 as it happens, and let y be the number of people sitting in the red chair, currently 3.  It is then an unnecessary truth, not a necessary truth, that x + 1 = y, as I have defined those terms to refer to the outside world.  In our world, x + 1 = y evaluates to 3=3, which happens to be true; but if you cast an illusion showing two people sitting in the brown chair and two people sitting in the red chair, the equation in that world would evaluate to 3 = 2, which is false.  And if I said x + 10 = y, that would be an unnecessary falsehood; in our world it evaluates to the false statement 12 = 3."

"Now apply the rules of algebra, add 2 to both sides, and transform the first equation x + 1 = y to the new equation x + 3 = y + 2.  In our world, this evaluates to 5 = 5, which is again true.  If we apply the same tactic to x + 10 = y, it yields x + 12 = y + 2, which evaluates to 14=5, again false."

"We term a step of inference valid when it is truth-preserving; when it transforms true statements into only other true statements.  It doesn't have to preserve falsehood; multiplying both sides of an equation by zero will produce truth even where it didn't previously exist."

"What makes the tactic of adding 2 to both sides of an equation, allowed in math, is not that some Watcher or representative from Governance told you it was allowed."  This part got hammered into Keltham and his agemates a lot as a kid, so it was probably determined to be important in practice to emphasize??  "What makes it an allowed step is that, if you have two weights balanced on either side of a scales, and you add two identical rocks to both the left side and the right side, the scales will still balance after that."

"If you look back at the original flawed proof that 2=1, it goes from a true statement in step [7], to a false statement in step [8].  Then between [7] and [8] we must have applied some operation of inference which is not 'valid', which has the ability to take in a true statement and spit out a false statement.  This tactic was canceling the multiplication by (x - y) from both sides, which is to say, dividing both sides by x - y.  Dividing both sides of an equation by 2 is valid; if you have a scales in balance, and remove half the weight from each sides of a scale, it will still be in balance.  Here, we see that division by 0 is not valid, because it can produce falsehood from truth.  What makes division by 0 unlawful is not that your Watcher told you not to do it while doing algebra; it is that division by 0 is not generally truth-preserving.  We can find some equations that will still be true after dividing both sides by a term equal to 0, but it is not a safe step in general."

"Sorry if that part about Watchers seems overly obvious, by the way.  It's just that apparently human brains by default try to reuse the part of ourselves that learns from adults not to steal cookies outside of mealtimes or we'll get slapped on the wrist, in order to relate to the rules for manipulating necessary truths that existed outside the start of Time.  And these are actually quite different topics; like, rules change sometimes, when Legislators vote on them, but algebra doesn't.  So you want to be explicitly aware of the difference, and not go bugging adults to let you divide by zero just this once."

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"So the argument is that part of Law is - the habits of mind so you only reason in truth-preserving ways?" Meritxell, who was also fastest on the algebra, says. 

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"I am still not entirely sure what the word 'Lawful' means to y'all.  Multiple different words in my native language all come out as 'Lawful' in Taldane and I'm mostly running with those.  Cheliax is supposedly a 'Lawful' country, but the books are written with what look to me like appalling jumps of reasoning, and somebody seems to have taught y'all algebra without teaching you what math is or why it works.  But Lrilatha-whose-job-title-I-already-forgot is supposed to be more innately Lawful, and she did not talk with those appalling jumps in her reasoning.  Which suggests to me that the word 'Lawful' is translating to me mostly correctly, or that the concept I hear is at least a real part of what 'Lawfulness' is; and the humans here simply are not being taught about that part of Lawfulness, or how to flow along with it on purpose instead of by accident."

"That said, not being taught something is not the same as having none of it inside you.  Your eyes can see without you being taught how the - part of the mind that handles vision - is doing the work it does.  And if you could never see the implications of other guesses you'd already made, you wouldn't get far enough in life to reproduce.  Everyone here has bits and pieces of them that imperfectly echo the shard of Law about which conclusions follow from which premises.  I also happen to have studied that Law explicitly and went through standard training for not being quite as messy about it.  That's part of the process that dath ilan went through to put together aeroplanes that could fly across oceans.  We aren't perfect at it, to be clear, just better than whoever wrote the so-called books in this library.  I really want to see what happens if we match up Lrilatha against a Keeper - one of the people from my world who are actually specialized in being more perfect reflections of Law - but I doubt we'll ever get a chance to try."

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"....you think that in a Lawful country all the books should only use truth-preserving arguments?" someone says, somewhat dumbfounded.

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It makes sense, though. Mortals didn't have free will. Now they do, and it displeases Asmodeus, but no one has a complete account of what free will is, because they're not gods, and don't understand what exactly displeases Asmodeus. But that might just be it. Gods, innately, reason in truth-preserving ways. Of course they would. Lying to yourself for self-preservation is a thing you only have to do if you have wrong beliefs and can't argue yourself out of them because you don't know the counterarguments, and so you have to stop thinking about them. That is not a problem gods have. Gods just reason correctly. And in Keltham's world - there's still the concept of infohazards, things you're not supposed to learn, presumably because you're only human and can't properly have the kind of mind that entertains that fact in a way that allows for continued useful functioning -

- something about that frame isn't quite right but despite that she feels like everything is coming together.

Minds should reason in truth-preserving ways. Someone, a long time ago, robbed humans of that, and Asmodeus is angry. Carissa is angry! That was her birthright, and she wants it back. And Asmodeus thought, until Keltham arrived, that the scars they'd wrought on human souls could only be corrected in Hell - or at least could most cheaply for Asmodeus be corrected in Hell - but in Keltham's world, where humans do not magically reason in truth-preserving ways, they figured out, possibly over many thousands of years of careful experiments, how to teach it. And Asmodeus saw that and immediately told them not to hurt Keltham, because -

- okay, that line of thought she's going to tuck away for later, it seems maybe ill-advised. Sufficient that Keltham got Asmodeus's endorsement immediately.

Minds should reason in truth-preserving ways. The books ought to have good arguments. Devils are masters of propaganda, but aren't convinced by it. Carissa - doesn't think of herself as convinced by it, the books are really presenting their conclusions not their arguments, but - but that's because the books think humans aren't doing reasoning well enough to be persuaded by argument, and humans can learn that. At least smart ones. And if they knew it, then you could just argue everyone out of all the heresies, their minds wouldn't possess the weaknesses that make that strategy doomed, that make it necessary to present them with conclusions they won't be able to understand. Or at least - less of it. Keltham did have the concept of things he was not meant to learn. 

(More things that suddenly make sense: what the Starstone does to you, why it changes some people more than others. Godhood, even more than devilhood, would preserve you to the extent that you are worth preserving - to the extent that you have learned the processes of reasoning - Irori ascended just by becoming perfect, and everyone writes that off as a strange one-off that only Irori could do but in dath ilan they teach it -)


It has to be done all at once, she realizes. There's a terrible middle ground where you are trying to reason things out, but you are incompetent to do it, and so you run right into all the heresies that you could have been protected from by not trying to reason. You would absolutely fail a loyalty check, in the middle of trying to learn how to think. But at the end of it - Asmodeus arrived at His beliefs through reason. And He hates it, that humans were changed, so they can't, and He wants them changed back.

She rereads everything on the board, though there's not much written on the board. The new thing she's learned here isn't that there are necessary truths and empirical truths, or that you shouldn't divide by zero, it's that it is possible for humans to learn how to reason well enough they're better off trying it.

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"If you found yourself in an unfamiliar country and you opened up a book and it was like, 'The sky is green.  How do we know this?  Because teddy bears are cute!  My dad once bought me a cookie!' would you suspect you were in a Chaotic country or a Lawful one?  Now, I admit this example is unrealistic; generalizing from my reading experiences, a Chelish author would never explicitly ask 'How do we know this?'  And yes, I'm sure places outside of Cheliax are even sillier but your book authors are still all very silly and if Lrilatha had infinite free time I would lock all of them in a room with her until they learned better."

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"That's kind of what Hell is," someone offers. The other people who were totally thinking that but not sure if they were allowed to say it giggle. 

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"The Worldwound isn't in Hell, it's here.  And I don't know why you can't have people train in Lawfulness in the whole post-life thing for a few years, and then resurrect them here, if that's a thing in the first place; or why Lrilatha hasn't been able to train teachers who could train teachers who could train you.  But the Worldwound isn't in Hell, it's here, and it's this world that needs to become saner and wealthier and better at repelling demons, or die." 

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Those questions don't...sound like they're meant to answer them? Instead, they nod vigorously. 

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- no, actually, she thinks they're meant to answer that. Or she thinks they ought to, regardless of whether they're meant to. "Becoming a devil in Hell takes centuries," she says. "You can't be resurrected after that long. It's been widely assumed there just wasn't any way to make a useful amount of progress on - being Lawful the way devils are - in a human lifetime. Or in time to close the Worldwound. But it seems to me that the reason Asmodeus intervened directly to tell us to make this a priority is that - the way you know is a lot faster."

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"Asmodeus would also bet significant resources on that even if he only estimated a small probability of it working, so let's not get overconfident.  But yeah.  I don't know how long dath ilan took to get where we did, starting from scratch and baseline - we had to screen off our history, for reasons that are apparently also infohazardous to know about.  But the pieces all fit together, and you should be able to complete the whole thing once you have enough hints from me.  Even if there's no spell to give me perfect recollection of all the training I went through, I'm hoping it should be possible to get, like, 80% of the benefit from going off my memory of, hopefully, the most critical parts.  Not to mention, you're not all 8 years old and that should count for something when it comes to learning this part a little faster."

Keltham turns back toward the whiteboard, completely unconscious of any effect the declaration about 8-year-olds might've had on the rest of his audience, who are all concealing their reactions anyways.

 

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"When it comes to algebra over continuous quantities," Keltham says, gesturing at the tactics written between the steps of the equations, "we have rules like being allowed to multiply both sides by the same quantity, or divide both sides by the same quantity so long as it isn't zero.  If you imagine building a mind to reason inside a universe that was full of hidden order that could be described by algebra - if it was an observer surrounded by, like, piles of fruit containing twice as many cherries as apples, that sort of thing, it was just how that world worked - then you could imagine building that mind with rules like, 'If I believe an equation, I should also believe that equation with both sides multiplied by the same quantity' or 'If I believe an equation, I can believe that equation with both sides divided by the same quantity, so long as I already believe that quantity isn't zero.'  I say this to introduce a new topic: the concept of hidden order within the rules of reasoning themselves.  There are hidden patterns and deep explanations to be found in this subject matter, as, in my world, there was a reason why snowflakes had sixfold symmetry."

"As a very simple example, the rule 'You can divide by nonzero quantities' can be seen as a pure special case of 'You can multiply by any quantity.'  To say you can divide both sides by 2 is the same as saying you can multiply both sides by 1/2.  The reason you can't divide both sides by zero is that zero is the only continuous quantity which lacks an inverse.  Once you see things from that angle, in fact, you might say that it's a simpler viewpoint to say that there's just one rule to use there, about valid inference in algebra: the rule that you can multiply both sides by any quantity.  Say just that, and you don't need that darned rule with the extra complication about 'Oh well you can divide by anything unless it might be zero.'  You just have the rule that you can multiply by anything, and the rule that everything except zero has an inverse.  You could also add the rule about division, nothing invalid would happen to you if you did, but it would be redundant; the mind you were constructing could reach the same conclusions either way.  Through perceiving hidden order in the rules of reasoning, you would be able to simplify the mind's thought processes and arrive to the same ends - though it might also take longer to reason that way, it might take extra steps if you eliminated the extra rule."

"But meanwhile, back in the real world, we deal more with the equivalent of triangles and red things than the equivalent of numbers and addition.  I mean, this world has both, but still, let's go back to shapes and colors and sizes.  What sort of truth-preserving rules analogous to 'you can multiply both sides by any quantity' in algebra, might we use to combine beliefs like these?"

Z.  All triangular things are red.
H.  All red things are large.

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"All triangular things are large."

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Why are they so inconsistently math??

"That's the conclusion you want, yes; what rules did you follow and what road did you walk to get there?  If you were making a child from scratch, and you stood too far back of the child's future situation to know exactly what situations they would encounter or what conclusions they would need, how would you make the child to reason to Q from Z and H?"

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This question is somehow really confusing to them!!

 

"...well, if all triangular things are red and all red things are large, then - you can't have a triangular thing that isn't large, that'd mean something was triangular and not red, or red and not large."

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"Ah, well, that is a very persuasive argument, I am totally persuaded.  But what rule are you using to find this persuasive, what shard of structure embedded within me leads me to find it persuasive?  Is it the sort of rule that has some important exception we need to know about, like not being able to divide by zero?  Does it only work sometimes and sometimes give wrong results?  Is it maybe a bit of complete nonsense that somehow got embedded into both of us, causing us to both arrive at the same wrong conclusions?  If we don't even know what rules we're following, how could we begin to tell?  Imagine getting to Hell and being locked in a room with Lrilatha and now she has to explain everything you're doing wrong, only you don't know what you're doing at all and she has trouble empathizing because, I'm guessing, all the nonsense in our heads is contrary to her own nature.  Think of how much of her valuable time you could save her - not to mention your own time locked in the room - if you actually knew which rules were operating inside you, to cause you to be persuaded by arguments like that one.  So what renders persuasive 'Z and H implies Q', or your own statement 'for there to be a non-large triangle implies either a non-red triangle or a non-large red thing' - how would you construct an entity from scratch to be persuaded by a statement like that?"

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These people are stunningly motivated to skip through as much as is possible of the being locked in a room with a frustrated devil once they die! They are very aware that it will suck and they are so eager to get to do less of it!!!! They....do not understand Keltham's question at all. 

 

"An ...entity that wasn't doing that kind of reasoning would be really bad at inference and waste a lot of time."

"Kids will just naturally pick it up, they actually tend to overgeneralize - I have a kid sister who'd say things like 'all boys have long hair' after she'd seen three -"

"I think it'd have an exception for like - cases where we're using the words differently in different contexts, like, if we say 'all criminals are punished' and 'all punishments are painful' that doesn't mean 'all criminals are painful' -"

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Even Keltham has managed to pick up on the rise in energy levels in the room!  He's not sure why this math-marketing tactic is so much more effective than other marketing tactics in Cheliax but he's willing to roll with it!  Though he should probably also be careful not to overuse it, whatever the ass it is he's doing, especially when he has no idea why it's working.  He sets aside a question about what kind of game theory criminals use here, and what sort of bizarre equilibrium results, to an enormous ill-organized heap of similar plaintive questions.

Keltham goes over to one of the few remaining empty spaces on the wall-whiteboard; he'd rather not have it laundry-magicked clean just yet.

Z':  All male objects have long hair.
H':  All long-haired objects wear shirts.

"When you're confused, one of the macro reasoning strategies is to find the smallest, simplest problems that still contain your confusion.  Can you state a general rule like 'It's okay to add 2 to both sides of any equation' that covers how to combine Z' and H', which also says how to combine Z and H, without explicitly mentioning Z and H?  Like stating a rule for adding 2 to both sides of an equation, which doesn't mention the particular equation you're using.  That takes on some of the challenge of creating an agent who'll reason in the world, when you don't know which particular equations or statements that agent will encounter."

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"You mean like, change the sentences to... 'all somethings have a trait' 'all things with a trait have a second trait'..."

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"Well, yes!  You don't have to work out the entire hidden order all at once, in order to make progress on it a piece at a time, speaking of macro reasoning strategies!  Before you've worked out that it's okay to add any quantity to a balanced equation, it's fine to start by noticing just that it's okay to add 2 specifically to any balanced equation.  That's a legitimate step towards starting to put the pieces together for yourself."

Require (Z-generalized):  All objects with trait-1 have trait-2.
Require (H-generalized):  All objects with trait-2 have trait-3.
Conclude (Q-generalized):  All objects with trait-1 have trait-3.

"When you build an entity with a rule in its mind that looks for a case where it believes any instance of Z-generalized and H-generalized, and concludes Q-generalized, you're building an entity that's operating a much broader necessary truth than the very narrow universal truth that connects 'If all triangles are red and all red things are large, then all triangles are large.'  You might be able to build a few dozen fairly general rules like that into a mind, whose outputs feed into each other as inputs, and have thereby given it a noticeably-sized shard of the Law that connects premises and conclusions, instead of just a very narrow guideline about shapes and sizes in particular."

"Does anyone want to try naming another candidate for a belief-manipulating rule like that?"

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"....there's the opposite, like, no objects with trait 1 have trait 2. Or, uh, I guess you'd want - no objects with trait 1 have trait 2. All objects with trait 2 have trait 3. No objects with trait one - no, that doesn't actually hold -"

"No objects with trait 1 have trait 2. All objects with trait 3 have trait 2. No objects with trait 1 have trait 3," another girl says, a little too competitively for this to sound like helpfully supplementing the first one's train of thought.

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"Well, I'm starting to run out of room on this wall, so forgive me if I write that down in dath ilani shorthand," says Keltham.

    \ z. t1(z) -> ~t2(z)
    \ h. t3(h) -> t2(h)
__________________

    \ q. t1(q) -> ~t3(q)

"Now this is a valid reasoning rule to be sure," says Keltham, "but just like dividing over a balanced equation can be seen as multiplying by an inverse, I think we don't need to add this whole rule to our entity.  The form of this rule looks really quite similar, in some ways, to that earlier rule about Z-generalized, H-generalized, and Q-generalized.  I think we can add a smaller new rule to our entity, which already has that previous rule, and get this rule back out as a special case - like adding the inverse operation to an algebra that already has the rule about multiplying over a balanced equation, and automatically getting out the power to divide over a balanced equation."

"I don't predict, based on your past performance, that you can derive the missing rule on your own; but beliefs like that ought to be tested rather than just assumed.  Wanna surprise me?"

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They're so upset not to get it! They're - not getting it, though. They're distracted by trying to follow the dath ilan notation and they're not quite generalizing far enough, proposing variants on the rule that aren't actually simpler. 

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It's encouraging that his students aren't showing any visible sign of emotional disturbance at the prediction or at failing to overcome it; they have some traces of dath ilani dignity, at least.  Keltham was wondering whether a lack of training in dignity would require him to back off a little on challenges like those, but his students' dignity is unperturbed so far as he can see.

     \ h. t3(h) -> t2(h)
___________________

   \ h. ~t2(h) -> ~t3(h)


"So long as we have this reasoning tactic in our tactical repertoire - go ahead and take a moment to convince yourself that you couldn't cast an illusion violating it - we can combine it with our previous rule to get the combined rule we wanted:"

[1]    \ z. t1(z) -> ~t2(z)                (Premise)
[2]    \ h. t3(h) -> t2(h)                 (Premise)
_______________________

[3]    \ h. ~t2(h) -> ~t3(h)            (one person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens [2])
_______________________

[4]    \ q. t1(q) -> ~t3(q)                (syllogism [1], [3])


"Anyone want to propose yet another universal rule?  Here's some shorthand language to help you express yourself:"

blue(k) \/ red(k)             "k is blue or k is red"
blue(k) /\ ~red(k)           "k is blue and k is not red"
\k. ~(blue(k) /\ red(k))    "for every k, it is not the case that (k is blue and k is red)"
blue(k) -> small(k)         "if k is blue, then k is small"
~~~blue(k)                     "it isn't wrong that k is not blue"

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They take a while just to figure out how the symbols work and then they're full of ideas.

\k, blue(k) V ~blue(k)

blue(k) -> ~~blue(k)

~blue(k) -> ~blue(k) "That doesn't count!" "Yes it does, it's like the 1 = 1 thing!"

"Except we're not really using 'blue' to mean anything, right, we can just write those with t, like dath ilan does it-"

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Now they're thinking with average intelligence!  While they're doing that, Keltham will helpfully write down some statements for them to decide on as valid or not valid.

((p -> q) -> p) -> p

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"If p then q, ...if it's true that if p then q, then p...if it's true that if p then q then p, then p. Uh, I think that's...not true? Like, if p isn't true, then -"

"It's basically just saying, is p being true required from the fact that if it's true that - okay, (p -> q) -> p is not necessarily true, it could be, like, say p is 'men are immortal' and q is 'they will all become ninth-circle wizards', so obviously you can have p-> q but p is false -"

"That's not what it's asking. It's saying, if p-> q does imply p, then does that mean p is always true."

"- nooo? Like, okay, what's something where p-> q implies p? I'm just not sure that's a thing at all!"

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"I think I see the problem.  The Taldane word 'implies' probably means all sorts of vague things besides... anyways.  Let's use 'material implication' to narrowly denote the particular kind of 'implies' I used here.  Now, we're going to have to erase this wall soon, but let's look back at the blue circles.  In particular, let's look at this blue circle containing a large red triangle, a large blue square, a small blue square, and a large red square.  The way I define material implication, we can take the statement 'For all z, z being triangular, materially implies z being red, and say that it's true of every object z, including the ones that aren't triangles.  We could look at this small blue square, and say of it truthfully, 'if a small blue square is triangular, then a small blue square is red' - the way we're defining material implication, that symbol I wrote like this," Keltham points to a -> symbol, "that would be a true thing to say.  Why define it that way?  So that the statement over here," Keltham points to \ h. red(h) -> large(h), "can be true when we evaluate it at every object h could refer to, including the objects that aren't red at all.  If we said that 'red h materially implies large h' was false whenever h wasn't red, putting a blue square in the world would mean we could not say of it, 'for every object in the world, the redness of that object materially implies its largeness'."

"Now, wanna take another shot at 'if p materially implying q materially implies p, then p'?  True across all possible worlds, or false in some of them?"

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"So p->q implies p if there aren't any p."

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"Well, p isn't quantified here - it's not ranging over possible objects.  p is here some proposition that could be either true or false, not an object with a property like redness.  So it's that p materially implies q whenever p is false, whether or not q is true."

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"That seems -"

"No, that makes sense, that's like - I read a theological argument like that once -"

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It's very hard for Keltham at this point to predict what Chelish practical-topologists will get instantly versus not at all.  Maybe once he's had longer than a day to experiment and figure it out.

He'll give them another couple of half-minutes on ((p -> q) -> p) -> p, but if they haven't gotten it by then, he'll leave coming to a definite decision about that as a homework problem, and tell them to get back to inventing other logical rules.

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"(p -> q) if p is false, and also occasionally if p is true and the world happens to be that way. so (p -> q) -> p if the reason p implies q isn't that p is false?"

"Well, if p is false, then p->q doesn't imply p - it can't, since p is false. So if p->q does somehow imply p, then that would be...because p is true?" 

"No, it'd be not because p is false but that doesn't mean p is definitely true, we just don't know."

They're still all, to external appearances without a lot of experience reading Chelish people, very calm and unbothered by this!

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"I'll leave that one as an exercise to try to solve afterwards - come back tomorrow with your own best guess, even if you haven't proven it, about whether it's necessarily true, necessarily false, or neither."

"Now, let me present you with a different puzzle, one that starts to lead into a higher lesson.  I was constructing an agent but, oops, I forgot to give it the 'or' concept," Keltham points to where \/ was written.  "It's got all the other concepts here like forall, and, not, implies, but darn it, I just forgot to give it the 'or' concept.  Can you form a statement that's equivalent to 'for every object h, h is red or h is blue' out of the concepts I did remember to put in?  So I can explain that important fact to my poor confused entity?"

\ h. red(h) \/ blue(h)  =  ???

"Sorry for making you clean up my mess, there," Keltham adds, "but the entity's already created and I can't redesign its mind now."

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Giggles. 

"For every object h, h not red implies h is blue," someone calls out almost instantly.

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Why can they - but not - nevermind.  Keltham glances at that nametag.

"Correct!  Wait, oops, I forgot to give them the 'implies' symbol too - anything you can do now?"

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That was Asmodia.

 

"A implies B is the same as....for all h where A is true, B is true - if I try to write that out I use the implies symbol, though -"

 

 

"Kill them and start over?"

 

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"Sorry, I screwed up even more, they're already sapient and Governance would take a dim view of killing them.  Or it's Golarion and they just end up in an afterlife anyways, and Hell will be annoyed if you made extra work for them."

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"A implies B is the same as...not B implies not A - that doesn't help -"

"Construct a C, where C is everything that is in both A and B. for all h in A, h is in C," says Meritxell.

     "Where are you getting a both-A-and-B."

"- I haven't sketched out how I'd do it yet but I'm sure I could, it's obviously the sort of thing that's not hard to specify -"

     "Without 'implies', though?"

"x is in C if x is in A and x is in B. No implies."

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"You do have the 'and' symbol.  And the 'forall' symbol, and the 'not' symbol, and the parentheses.  And the object variable symbols, of course, and the 'red' and 'blue' function symbols.  That's all you've got, though, you can't bring in Taldane language for describing things beyond that."  Keltham taps again where the whiteboard now shows, with its last gasp of open space: \ h. red(h) \/ blue(h)  =  ???

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" \h, ~ (red(h) ^ blue(h)), ~(~red(h))^(~blue(h))?" Patxi ventures?

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Carissa is being a bad student. This is, in part, because she is no longer in school and no longer feels with aching intensity that the entirety of her being as a person is her perfomance in school, and being lashed for inattentiveness doesn't hold the soul-consuming horror it once did either. It is in part because her mind keeps running ahead - she can't always see the answers to the specific questions, and probably she should focus her attention on them at some point, to crystalize the skill of turning all her thoughts into the crisp precise symbolic bounded versions of them, but she can see the broad outlines of what the questions let you do. Everything, maybe, if you're a god. If you're a human - 

 

How would you express 'the best outcome a human can reasonably get is to live such that when they die and go to Hell, they are useful?' For all humans - but no, she's not really making a claim about all humans, she's really only interested in the implications of this question for one human, and the other ones are relevant because she knows exactly how exceptional she is - there exists a human, such that, in the space of all eternities for that human, ordered by how strongly preferred they are, the most preferred is - well, no, it wouldn't be Hell, because of all possible eternities there are certainly some better ones -

This is of course not an argument against Hell, it's not like she could formulate any other important claims about the world either. It is an argument against sucking at thinking. It is an argument for - if there were a book that tried to convince you, what would it say -

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"Indeed, or rather, we just need the second part - a red object counts as 'red or not-blue', we don't demand that only one side be true."

In that last bit of improvised whiteboard, Keltham extends his last equation, and then writes down one more on the edge of the wall below:

\h. blue(h) \/ red(h)   =   ???   =   \h. ~red(h) -> blue(h)   =    \h. ~(~blue(h) /\ ~red(h))
\h. blue(h) /\ red(h)   =   \h. ~(~red(h) \/ ~blue(h))   =   ~(red(h) -> ~blue(h))

"Now, given that - if you have 'not' - you can make 'and' out of 'or', or make 'or' out of 'and', or make either one out of 'materially implies' - why not just design an entity that thinks in terms of implication?  Why bother making an entity that tends to think in terms of 'P is true or R is true', instead of 'if P is false then R is true'?  This is not a theoretical question: if your mind works anything like mine does, your mind sometimes thinks in terms of 'or' and not just 'implies'.  You've probably thought using 'and' too.  Why is a human mind - which includes your mind - designed so... inelegantly?"

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Nervous glances.

 

"- because humans were given free will and it was done very haphazardly and made us worse at reasoning like the gods," says Tonia, when no one else has said anything for a moment.

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"Actually, there's something of a questionable assumption I've been making, which is that your biology is a possibly-modified version of biology that got copied off of a... branch of time, I don't think Taldane has a word for it... that's very close in branching time to dath ilan.  I think dath ilan can't see your world, can't be affected by it; but I did manage to show up in this world at all, even if that's a very rare phenomenon.  So your world can see my world, be causally affected by it, even if my materializing like this very rarely happens.  And your bodies look a lot like mine, and more importantly, I can eat your food without immediately falling over dead, which implies a lot of shared hidden order between our biology, which wouldn't exist without common ancestry.  If it's possible for me and somebody from this world to have kids, which is mostly what I'd expect, that would absolutely prove the point."

"Where the point is that while some stuff may have modified you relative to where a dath ilani starts, and dath ilan may have developed and diverged some from whenever your biology was copied from our cousin or ancestral world - remind me of how old human life on Golarion is, again? - human biology on Golarion is, I would strongly guess, basically a copy of dath ilani biology.  Some of my distant ancestors or cousins got materialized here and had kids, maybe.  Or some god read the - heredity code - for one of us and materialized some entities like that."

"If all of that is true, then the reason your underlying mind design looks like it was slapped together by monkeys on drugs, is the same reason our baseline mind design looks like it was slapped together by monkeys on drugs.  I wasn't born like this, we have to give people extensive training to get them to work at all correctly, instead of them just working correctly straight out of the womb, the way we would if we were designed by sane designers instead of... well, the thing that actually made us.  A weird pseudo-nonentity that had literally no idea what the ass it was doing.  Frankly it's sort of a big topic here, though it sure is a fundamental one so I'll probably get to the details at some time.  The point is, I fully expect that by the time we're done in class here, you will be looking over your mind design and thinking that you could accidentally sneeze a better mind design than that.  I'm not quite sure what the 'given free will' thing was about, the Taldane term 'free will' doesn't translate well into Baseline so we may not have whatever you were given, but trust me, your species's mind design was horrible crap even before then.  You can tell this because I had to go through lessons similar to what you're going through now.  Though, if 'free will' makes you even worse at sanity, which sure is plausible given this total mess of a planet, I probably need to have that explained to me at some point... I don't suppose it's easy to describe?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Horrified silence.

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She does not want to interact with this but she has the twin qualifications of being particularly unlikely to be executed for misstepping, it'd be conspicuous, Keltham can definitely tell her apart from everyone else, and having spent the last half hour dwelling on it.

 

"I don't think I have ever encountered the theory that the gods were copying," she says, "but it does seem odd, for there to be a world with a longer history and humans that came about some other way. I think that these lessons have helped me make more sense of the free will thing, actually. It used to be that humans didn't make mistakes of reasoning, but also that they didn't have their own goals, just the goals of the gods they served. It sounds like....you think maybe those necessarily went together, that it wasn't possible, for humans to stop making mistakes of reasoning while - being more than automata -"

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"Yeah, that'd make its own kind of sense.  The event your history has down as 'humans suddenly acquired free will' could've been a magical template superposed on human biology, producing agents working for gods, and then somehow that magical template stopped working and suddenly you had the original humans again.  I do not know nearly enough of your history to guess what parts of the template versus original human nature were locked together, I am guessing at a lot here.  I'd ask if the magical template made people - nonconscious, nonexperiencing - but I wouldn't expect you to have any way of knowing that, given the general fuzziness of your prehistory.  That whole scenario would actually be a pretty optimistic result, from my standpoint?  It means you don't have additional features making you crazier, and dath ilani training should still work on people here with high baseline intelligence."

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"The scenario you described matches all our histories, but we don't know details of the - magical template - aside from that the gods were divided over the change that made it stop working."

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"Yeah, I'm not going to say details like that are unimportant, they're obviously hugely important and at some point I want to know everything that's known about it, but they're not obviously urgent details, especially compared to the general project of me transferring knowledge Golarion will need for industrialization and scaling up to fight the Worldwound."

"So back to where your mind design actually comes from.  I'll endeavor to be brief because this lesson is mainly about Validity, but now we're talking about how shards and reflections of Validity even got into human minds at all, and soon we're going to ask whether there's maybe something better than the version of Validity we have; and I'm not sure how you could reason well about those topics if you had no idea where your mind design came from in the first place."

"This part is actually a pretty simple idea.  If anything you should be careful not to overthink it.  You know how a pair of tall parents will probably, though not always, have a kid who's taller than average?  And a pair of short parents will probably, though not always, have a kid who's shorter than average?  It may help for the sake of concreteness to know that inside you there are extremely tiny, extremely long spirals of... stuff Taldane doesn't have a name for, but capable of encoding information.  Like, imagine there's four kinds of tiny parts that can make up each bit of spiral, labeled 0, 1, 2, and 3; so a section of the spiral might read 1032, that is, it'd be the second kind of bit, connected to the first kind of bit, connected to the fourth kind of bit, connected to the third kind of bit.  Each spiral is around three billion of those units long, but the parts are so tiny that even three billion of them curled up in spirals are still too tiny to see.  Your body is full of identical copies of your version, and it carries the information that told your body how to develop fingers and toes and a liver and so on, when you were forming in your mother's womb.  Variations in that code, between individuals, might cause some to grow up taller and some to grow up shorter.  You got half of your spiral sections - they're broken up into twenty-three pairs of sections - from your father, and half from your mother, which is why a pair of taller parents will tend to have taller kids."

"Now suppose that taller parents tend to have more kids than shorter parents.  Then the next generation will end up taller than the previous generation; the variations in codes that tell bodies to construct taller bodies will be more common among the next generation's inner spirals."

"Pile on one change after another, after another, after another, that contributes to some couples having more kids than another.  Even though each change is a single alteration, if you iterate that process thousands of times, millions of times, it can build whole complicated parts.  But it builds them without foresight, without planning.  Every part of your body is made up of a cumulation of changes that started as copying errors in the tiny spirals; they're mistakes that happened to work.  That's also where your mind design comes from - from the copying errors, and from some of those copying errors leading parents to have fewer kids and those errors dying out of the population, and a few copying errors accidentally constructing people who had more kids and those variations spreading throughout the population.  If I was actually focusing on this topic properly, I'd sketch the design of an eyeball on the wall, and show how it can develop in tiny changes starting from a single light-sensitive spot on the forehead of some tiny crawling creature a hundred million years ago."

"For now, the key thing to know - going back to our actual current subject, Validity - is that your mind design accreted on the ability to think using 'and', and the ability to think using 'or', and the ability to think about stuff implying other stuff, and the ability to imagine facts being true about all the objects inside a collection.  It's not all quite as redundant as it looks - the human native ability to reason about 'or' isn't quite the 'or' that appears in very simple logic, we're more likely to say an object is 'red or blue' meaning that it's either one or the other but not both, and less likely to say that this table is 'brown or not green', considering that in fact it is both brown and not green.  We are, in teaching ourselves to reason using the sharper simpler forms of logic, repurposing bits of our mind away from their original contexts, and stripping off real functionality along the way.  But that's part of the story of why we have such redundant facilities for thinking logically, 'and' and 'or' and 'implies' all at the same time."

"So would you like to guess, now, as to whether I'm about to tell you about some new connectors that would let your mind expand to even more powerful ideas - represent ideas that native human concepts can't represent at all?"

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Is he going to do that. That would be so cool.

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"When I was a bit younger and learning this stuff for the first time, I went straight to the Watcher - the adult who was there to make sure the older kids weren't teaching us anything too wrong - and demanded that I immediately be taught the most powerful kind of logic there was.  The Watcher told me that the logic I was learning was the most powerful kind of logic on offer - that it was, in fact, the most powerful kind of logic that could exist.  I didn't see how anyone could possibly know that even if it was true, so I figured this was another of the lies-they-tell-children, or maybe that the best kind of logic was probably being kept secret by the Keepers.  Those being the people who would learn a more powerful kind of logic, if it existed, and was too dangerous for everybody to have.  I wanted that for myself, so I tried inventing other kinds of logic with more powerful symbols in it, symbols that could connect three or even four propositions together, instead of just the one-or-two symbol connectors the older kids were telling me about."

"But before I tell you about the results of that particular journey of thinking, and whether or not it did turn out to be a lie-they-tell-children in the end, let me pause and ask another question first.  In algebra we have rules for producing new equations from old equations, or combining old equations.  Here we have rules for producing new statements from old statements, if those statements are written in a particular language.  Both algebra and the statement-rules obey the higher principle of Validity - we have ways of comparing equations and statements to worlds, to see if they're true or false; and if an equation or statement is true in a world, the rules for manipulating it should produce only more true equations or true statements.  In the world of statements, we managed to reduce 'or' to 'and' and 'not'.  In the world of algebra, we reduced the rule 'divide both sides by a nonzero quantity' to 'multiply both sides by an inverse'.  Can we in some way combine the rules of algebra, and the rules of statements, since they are both born of the same truth-preserving principle?  Can we reduce algebra-rules to statement-rules, or reduce statement-rules to algebra-rules, and so simplify our mastery of truth-perservation?"

"This one's actually quite hard to solve from scratch at our intelligence level - I didn't get it as a kid and wouldn't expect myself to get it now, if I didn't already know it.  But it is important to know your own emptiness before trying to fill yourself, so go and speak aloud any really bad wrong answers you come up with here."

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"I mean, you could write the rules of algebra in statement logic- is that what you mean? Like, a + b = c if and then a bunch of stuff that correctly defines what 'plus' is - I don't know what stuff but I think there'd be stuff -" Merixtell says.

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"Show me your shot at it?  I've been wrong once or twice guessing what you all can't do."

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"Uh, okay. a plus b = c if, uh - oh, I think I actually only know what I'd do if a and b and c were all whole numbers -"

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"I'll take it."

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"If they're whole numbers, they're made of ones. a plus b = c if, uh, the process of taking ones from each side gets you zero on both-" She bites her lip. "- but then you still have to define taking one, I guess."

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"Go ahead and define it then!  Don't worry too much about doing it wrong the first time, this one is hard and I'm impressed you're even trying.  Actually, I'm wondering if you've encountered something reflecting the correct answer from somewhere else in Golarion mathematics, because if you're literally doing this part from absolute scratch it's seriously impressive."

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She beams at him. "Minus one is ...

...maybe you could do something with, a contains one more thing than b if for every thing in b, there's a thing in a, and for every thing in a, there's a thing in ...b plus one - no, now I've just needed to invent plus. ...maybe I can do that. a is b plus - no, sorry, I don't know -"

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"If you don't know the right answer, make up a wrong one!  Maybe you'll be able to see why it's wrong and correct it, so long as you think it out loud!  And saying things out loud is a straightforward way to learn to think them out loud."

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"I don't even know a wrong one!"

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"What is it exactly that you don't know, again?  Try to tell me out loud what it is that you want to do and can't see any way to do."

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"I want to say 'here's what it is to add one to something', using just and, and not, and implies, and for all. And you can go 'for all numbers, this number plus one equals....something, but I don't know how to say what the something is."

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"Hint desired or undesired?"

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What kind of fucking question is that.

Maybe he's just very sadistic and this is all an elaborate game he is playing with them. 

"I think I might need one," she says very lightly.

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"If you take the hint now, you'll never know whether or not you needed a hint or just more time... but we're trying to industrialize a planet and that's probably more important than you ever knowing whether you could have punched above your measured intelligence level and discovered the deeper orders of Validity from scratch, so, yeah, hint.  You cannot build 'add one' out of only and, not, implies, for all.  I previously showed you a system that had predicates like 'blue' and 'red', which took in the kind of object that 'forall' quantifies over, and spat out truth or falsehood depending on whether the object was red or not.  There's no way to build 'add one' out of only those materials, because 'add one' takes in an object, a number, and spits out another object."

"This doesn't mean your system has to start out knowing what add-one means.  It does mean that you're going to have to conjure up an add-one symbol that maps objects to objects, and then start describing what it means.  But that description needs to talk about add-one as a hypothetical function whose properties will be described, not build it purely out of the predicate symbols and logical connectors.  You are also going to need a symbol '=' for equality between two objects; that one is usually assumed primitive - that even if the system starts out knowing nothing else about the objects it describes, it knows how to tell when two objects are equal.  '=' takes in two objects, and spits out truth or falsehood."

"There's a more sophisticated trick you can pull to not need to introduce a special symbol for add-one - roughly, you say, for all functions from objects to objects, if that function has these properties, this stuff follows - but that would involve quantifying over functions, which we can skip for now.  So, to reiterate:  You get to conjure the symbol for add-one from nowhere; you get to declare by fiat and premise that it takes in an object and spits out an object; you don't, however, get to assume that it has any behaviors beyond that, or means anything in particular, except for whatever statements you make using the add-one symbol.  Same for two-object functions like add, or multiply.  You can declare that there's a plus symbol, and that it takes in two objects and spits out a third object, but anything about which objects has to be described by you, and that's what makes the symbols meaningful."

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"Okay," she says shakily. "....I think I need time to think -"

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"Anyone else want to try what she tried doing, at all?  Trying something and failing is more impressive than not trying at all."

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Carissa is too busy worrying about whether things can be both true and heretical to pay this the amount of concentrated attention it clearly deserves, but "I think you want to start by saying what zero is, and what one is? I'm not sure what that is, mind - I was thinking maybe zero is 'for all things, not that thing", but that doesn't seem quite right."

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"Well, indeed.  If it was the case that no object was zero, there wouldn't be a number called that.  What does make zero special, among the numbers?  If you have any ideas here, say them informally first; saying it formally is usually harder, and it's usually wiser to solve the easy problems before you tackle the hard ones."

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"Well, it's what you get if you take a away from a, for any a."

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"Can you say that formally?"

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"I don't see how to until we have defined addition or subtraction, which is the thing we were trying to do. The thing I'd say is \k, k+ 0 = k, but I don't think that's meaningful if I haven't said what plus is yet."

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"Remember how we managed to build 'or' out of 'implies' and 'not'?  And that wasn't even set up on purpose by anyone or anything, it's just the human mind being thrown together by a design process that included more structure than the strict minimum?  Each time you say something like '\k. k + 0 = k', you constrain the meaning that + and 0 can have.  Imagine looking at these blue circles, each a possible world; imagine that instead of colored shapes inside them, there are objects that might be numbers, a function that might be plus.  Every time you make another statement like '\k. k + 0 = k', you kick out some of the worlds and mappings where the function you mapped onto '+' and the object you mapped onto '0' didn't always eat an object and 0 and spit that same object back out again.  Make enough statements like that, and maybe you can narrow down the possible worlds to ones that only contain objects that look like the numbers you know?  That, from a certain perspective, is what it means to define numbers and arithmetic - to find statements such that anything they are true about must be numbers and arithmetic.  Got any more statements like it?  Somebody wipe this wall, please, we'll want to start writing down the statements like forall k, k plus 0 equals k."

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" - oh." She thinks of it before he's halfway done. "Zero is the only number where zero plus zero equals zero. - I said that poorly, but -"

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"By all means say it better then."

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"0 + 0 = 0.  \k, k = ~0 -> k + k ~= k."

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"Progress.  But '~0' isn't a thing in this language, 'not' takes in propositions, which have the values of truth or falsehood, and spits out falsehood or truth.  'Not four' isn't a number - or if you wanted it to talk about the collection of all numbers except four, we'd have to start introducing collections and that's a big ol' subject.  ~= isn't already a symbol in our language either, and in fact you don't particularly need to define a new symbol for it.  Next rewrite?" 

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\k, (k = 0 /\ k + k =k) \/ ~(k + k = k) 

She writes this rather than saying it, because it seems like it'd be quite unpleasant to say and harder to tweak while speaking. She writes it with Prestidigitation because she has better control and precision than a student and they ought to remember it.

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"Good try, but your statement doesn't quite narrow down the possible worlds to where you wanted - it includes worlds where ~(k + k = k) is true of every number, including the one you called zero.  Can anyone see how to fix it?"

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"Can't you just add ~(k=0) to the second part?"

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"Works unless I've missed something myself, but do you want to write out exactly what you mean there, to make sure it's not just my own imagination supplying the answer I think is correct?"

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\k, (k = 0 /\ k + k =k) \/ ~(k=0) /\ ~(k + k = k) 

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He supposes it's good that people are finding so many detailed ways to be wrong, exhibiting them early and getting them out of the way.

"We haven't said anything about adding - outside the system, up at our level - rules for adding in parentheses that weren't in the written formula.  So that could mean either of -"

\k. ((k=0 /\ k + k = k) \/ ~(k=0)) /\ ~(k + k = k)
\k. (k=0 /\ k + k = k) \/ (~(k=0) /\ ~(k + k = k))

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"Second one," the girl says.

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"Then it looks good to me.  Keeping in mind that these don't exactly match standard forms I learned, since we're making them up as we go, and my own intelligence is not at the level where I will reliably spot errors on the first pass.  I'm not sure quite why I feel the need to say this - it seems like the sort of thing that should be obvious? - but if I'm the one who makes an error, or it just looks like that, speak up.  If you're right, you get to be impressive, and if you're wrong, you need to know which mistake you made."

Keltham keeps prodding the group for a while, dropping hints as needed, until he's pretty sure they've written enough random rules to yield in their combination all the constraints of first-order arithmetic except for the induction axiom schema.  If anybody from Cheliax brilliantly pulls the induction axiom schema out of their ass, he's going to be sure they're getting it from somewhere; maybe dath ilani geniuses can pull that kind of shit at their age (he doubts it), but the geniuses of this world are only as smart as him unless they're wearing intelligence headbands.

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They do not brilliantly pull the induction axiom schema out of their asses or out of his mind, which they are not reading. They do mostly manage to follow along through all the rules of first-order arithmetic, and they seem to be having fun about it.

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Once they've got a nearly full set of rules, Keltham remarks that the last puzzle piece for identifying the numbers, as well as they can ever be identified in a certain sense he's not going into right now, is one he really doesn't expect them to get unhinted.

And then he drops on them the infinite axiom schema for induction, trying as best he can to explain why you'd need it to pinpoint the numbers.

After clearing up any misapprehensions about that as best he can, Keltham is ready to move on to his next point.

"We're running through things a lot faster than I went through them as a kid, and I'm probably accidentally leaving out important ideas along the way - all of this would take more like a month, if you were eight years old and doing the exercises, even if you were doing nothing else.  But you may recall that some time earlier, I posed some puzzles about asking for examples of necessary truths, and why they were ever good for anything, and what it means to say that one equals one is a necessary truth - what you ought to expect to see happen as a result - especially given that a necessary truth should still end up being true no matter what happens to you, if it could happen inside any illusion depicted in full detail."

"We now have a language in which I can give some of my own answers there.  But before then, does anybody want to take a renewed shot at saying what it is we're talking about, and what we should expect to see happen, if we say that one equals one is a necessary truth?"

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"...that if it's not true we just can't do any reasoning in a formal system at all?"

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"Does reality need to care what you can't reason about?  Perhaps you can depict an illusion in full detail in which one does not equal one, and we will need to construct a new logic which does not take as primitive the assertion that every object equals itself, in order to describe that illusion."

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" - you can't depict an illusion in full detail in which one does not equal one."

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"What about clouds drifting across the sky and sometimes separating?  One cloud equals two clouds, it doesn't equal one cloud!  Divide both sides of the equation by cloud and there you have it."

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They stare concernedly at him.

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"More to the point, how would you depict one, the successor of zero, inside an illusion?  You can depict one cherry in a bowl of fruit, in an illusion.  How would you depict one, the successor of zero, as it appears in our collections of statements?"

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"- you'd just have to put the symbols."

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"Then we have merely depicted the symbols talking about one, in our illusion, not depicted one itself.  That's like making an illusion of a piece of paper with 'cherry' written on it, and saying you made an illusion of a cherry."

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Some particularly daring girls, in the middle of the discussion of the induction axiom, sent around a crumbled piece of paper, as girls do; it flew between desks, as wizarding girls do; its text was in Infernal, as Chelish wizarding girls do. It read 'is Keltham a sadist? y/n'

The vote leaned yes.

 

Keltham's audience squirms anxiously at this question.

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Keltham does not have the sharpness of unaided vision, let alone interpretation capacity, that would be required to perceive these nigh-imperceptible squirms.  He lives in a mental universe very far away from this reality, a mental universe where uncomfortable or unhappy students will of course speak up and tell you this fact as soon as they realize it themselves.  Though he has noticed his researchers' apparent lack of any visible emotions besides competitive enthusiasm, and is starting to wonder if they used a magical spell that's the equivalent of a mind-affecting drug that made them fixedly enthusiastic.

Well, at least this time he's about to say some words where enthusiasm seems appropriate.  Keltham tries to channel the demeanor of an appropriately specialized Watcher as best he can; the sort of Watcher who tries to make sure that kids get the full impact of things, and aren't cheated out of awesome stuff by older kids mistakenly trying to act like it's no big deal.

"In my language, we'd say that the subject matter of our discussion, when we talk about math, is which conclusions follow from which premises.  When we discuss numbers and say 2 + 3 = 5, it implies that if we observe cherries and come to believe that our number-axioms describe in reality the operations of combining bowls of cherries, we will expect to see in reality that pouring a bowl of two cherries into a bowl of three cherries yields a bowl of five cherries.  If we get six cherries instead, we might think we made a mistake in the math.  Or we might suspect that watching the bowl closely would let us see an extra cherry popping into existence.  In the latter case our beliefs about which conclusions validly follow from the addition-premises would have been right, but our guess that the addition-premises applied to combining bowls of cherries would have been wrong.  Being the fragile creatures that we are, and sometimes making mistakes in our reasoning, when we do math about a bridge and then the bridge falls down, we might be observing that the bridge disobeyed the premises about which we did math; or we might be observing that we made an error about what was a necessary connection, and our conclusion didn't follow even though all the premises were true."

"All of this is to say that we can observe the consequences, the shadows, of necessary truths, when we watch the empirical world; even to the point of our observations leading us to suspect errors in our own reasoning about what was necessary.  But observing the number 1 itself?  At best, maybe, somebody could make an illusion of an object representing zero, not the successor of any other object, connected by a successor relationship to the object that would therefore be one," and Keltham draws some green dots connected by red arrows to other dots.  "This would give us an illusion that would map very directly, in our external interpretation, onto a partial model that fits the number axioms.  But it doesn't make sense to say that the illusion is depicting the number one; there isn't a single thingy like that out there floating in the void, just a set of premises that actually existent things might obey, in which case we'd expect them to behave like the number one."

"The facts about which conclusions follow inevitably from which premises can't be said to be older than the temporal universe, because they're outside of time entirely; it's not that they existed before the universe began, or that they'll last after the universe perishes, but that they are somewhere above or below that.  Temporal and physical processes draw on necessities, mirror them, but cannot change them between one time and another.  There's a certain sense in which, in controlling our own decisions, we are controlling links between premises and conclusions - we are controlling, given the premise of a person like ourselves, the conclusion of which decision we come to - but this doesn't mean we are changing mathematical facts between one time and another.  An alternate plane of existence - or so I would suspect - can obey different premises in its physical behavior; it cannot alter which conclusions follow necessarily from which premises.  Those facts are, not eternal, but outside of time entirely.  This is one of the ideas invoked by a word in my language, which translates into your word 'Lawful': the concept of drawing on and mirroring the level of existence where certain facts may be viewed as absolute and unalterable."

"You have seen now how we can start with two apparently different concepts of validity - one that preserves truths about properties of objects connected by 'and' or 'implies', one that produces true numerical equations from true equations - and, at least for the case of whole numbers, reduced the equational subject matter to the predicate-logic subject matter.  Just like we were able to reduce 'and' to 'or', or 'or' to 'implies'.  I will tell you now a point that you will not be ready to prove yourselves for a while: the system of predicate logic I've introduced to you is one of several systems that are complete in the sense that all mathematics can be translated into them.  The topology you learned as wizards, unless it deals with some phenomenon absolutely foreign to dath ilan whose mere existence refutes this entire philosophy - which I am mostly not expecting, to be clear - is just another kind of math that could be translated into this system, or translated into several other systems I haven't shown you, all of which could also be translated into this system, and into which this system could also translate, moving between them as freely as we rewrite an 'implies' connector as an 'or' connector."

"This is one reason I could pop into another dimension and expect to have a reasonable conversation with Lrilatha, who belongs to a species that doesn't exist in my world.  If different formulations of validity can so freely translate between each other, it would seem more reasonable to hope that I, to the extent I had those concepts right, would use a version mappable to Lrilatha's, who is a Lawful being; so that her arguments would make sense to me, and my arguments make sense to her.  Either a conclusion follows with necessity from its premises or it does not.  Only mistakes about that subject matter could differ between people, between factions, between planes.  The right answer is the same everywhere.  And this is also part of the concept in my language, which the translation spell translates into your word 'Lawful'."

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It is probably optimistic to, before she has even properly learned this herself, conclude that Cheliax could be teaching it so much better, but - Cheliax could be teaching this so much better that it suddenly hurts to realize how badly she learned it before. 

There is a right way to be. Devils are it; mortals aren't. Mortals were, for a while, at least controlled by gods, who are, but the control broke, and now mortals just wander around, missing the concepts that make up the right way to be, for the most part not smart enough to learn them. Cheliax emphasizes - that this is disappointing to Asmodeus, that it makes mortals less valuable to Asmodeus, and of course that's the angle from which Asmodeus cares about it, but the angle from which the humans ought to care about it is that they are worse. It is in their interests to be perfected, not because some god will get them when they die and the other gods waste even more of them, but because there is a commonality among all perfect beings, a shared language that the perfect can speak across planes, across time -

How is it that Chelish children learn they'll be perfected and are scared, instead of learning they'll be perfected and are joyful, impatient, full of the longing that filled Carissa when Contessa Lrilatha spoke - why aren't we teaching it like this - but the answer of course must be that Asmodeus couldn't divine the result of thousands of years of experiments across an entire other world, at least not more cheaply than He could grab someone from there - 

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Keltham pauses, at least partially to catch his own mental breath.  He should probably call a break sometime soon, but he was working around to a point, some time earlier before the whole digression into Validity and first-order arithmetic, and he feels like it would be only polite to actually finish the digression and work around to what he meant to say, before then.  There's still some distance left to go before he can pop the stack - he wasn't actually expecting, on some wordless level, that it would take this long to teach grown teenagers first-order logic and how to axiomatize arithmetic.

"In saying all this, I'm jumping ahead in a dath ilani education and skipping over a number of exercises required to actually understand everything and a dozen dozen precautions we were given against common mistakes, some of which now seem pretty silly and obvious to me, but which might turn out to be a lot more necessary to otherwise unprepared minds, I don't know."

"For example, if somebody throws a ball and you need to catch it, trying to translate your thoughts into predicate logic about the ball having the property of flying and this implying an eventual fall given gravity, is going to utterly fail to help you.  You would be, first of all, better off thinking in your mind's native wordless language that tries to visualize the ball's fall and run to there, because your native language is faster and the ball will fall before you can think of anything logical.  You would, second of all, be engaging in a particularly naive kind of jumping ahead of your real capabilities, by trying to translate your thoughts about the ball directly into a logic with a falling predicate.  What you would actually need to predict the ball's fall using serious math is calculus, and not simple calculus either; it would include terms like how the resistance of the air to the ball's flight changed with the ball's speed.  If you try to summarize all that by saying that the 'falling' predicate on the ball was true, when that 'falling' statement would be equally true if gravity was pulling on the ball a different amount or if the air was more resistant, you're throwing away details that actually matter in order to try to squeeze down the issue into predicate logic - an amount of predicate logic that you find easy to handle, which is too little to actually solve the problem.  You also wouldn't be absolutely certain about the ball's position or trajectory, and managing uncertainty inside of mathematics is a whole separate topic I haven't broached to you."

"Actually solving the ball's flight using a full written-on-paper account of how conclusions about what's probably true, follow necessarily from some unnecessary premises you already believe about what's probably true, would require setting up a complicated problem in calculus and probability that would describe how to infer the ball's trajectory from what your eyes had seen of the ball.  And if you wanted that said in pure logic with all premises spelled out, you'd have to axiomatize that calculus problem into the more universal language of logic.  It is a whole lot easier to just run and catch the ball by thinking about it in your native brain's native style."

"I mean, maybe if you were a god you could solve the whole problem using explicitly valid reasoning - or not, I'm not sure how mentally powerful your gods are, exactly.  And if you were a god and you could do that, then you could get tossed into another plane of existence where gravity works differently, and rapidly recalculate how to catch flying balls from scratch and do that successfully on your first try, instead of having to relearn the rules your brain uses through a lot of trying and failing.  But I am not a god, yet, and you are not gods, also possibly yet, and I doubt that any intelligence headbands we can afford in the foreseeable future will let us do it either."

"So don't get ahead of yourselves just because logic is absolute, timeless, and universal.  If you can't think fast enough to solve a problem using explicit logic, or if it would require humanly unmanageable huge problem statements even in principle, or if you simply don't know how, then all that absolute and timeless stuff won't help you.  The fact there exists a better method that gods or super-gods could use to solve a problem doesn't mean that you can solve it that way, or that you can get closer to the super-god's solution by using bad, clownlike, and tiny imitations of the outer forms of the ideal methods they'd use."  Gods seem like a surprisingly useful metaphor for ideal cognitive processes, now that he's in a world that has gods; Keltham is a little surprised it wasn't a more common explanatory metaphor used in dath ilan.

"I don't know if any of you actually needed me to say that, to be clear.  But it's the sort of thing they tell you when you're 8 years old, and you get into your head the idea that if logic is so great, you should be able to use it to crush your opponents at sportsball by making only sharply logical muscle movements.  I mean, actually they just let me make the mistake and lose the sportsball game, but then afterwards, that was what they told me when I asked what I'd been doing wrong and how to do it correctly."

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His audience nods seriously. 

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"With that warning aside - I'll try to give you more of the dire warnings I got, as they come to mind and I remember what they were - there's a final thought that runs deep in the dath ilani conception of Law, which is why, when I heard that 'Lawful' was a godly concept rather than a human concept, I immediately thought, 'Heh, I bet I know what that's talking about, then,' and not 'Oh, it's probably something humans can't understand at all.'"

"If you start with a logical language that already has 'implies', you can add on the new connector, 'or', and then though you've made the statements a little easier for humans to understand, you haven't made the language any more expressive - your new innovation 'or' turns out to be reducible to the same old 'implies' combined with 'not'.  After trying out a number of innovations of this type, you might repeatedly find that you were unable to extend the real power of your language, and so venture a guess - a guess based on mere past experience, like seeing that every triangle tested was a red triangle - that you had reached some natural limit of logic's power."

"But when I asked my Watchers as a child, they did not tell me, 'We're guessing this logical system is as good as it gets.'  They told me, 'This logic you are learning is the most powerful form of logic that can exist.'  The Watchers where I come from are trained by Keepers and entrusted with the teaching of children; they are not there to set a poor example by just making stuff up, nor by taking great blatant invalid leaps, nor by saying with certainty what they have no right to be certain of.  It's not something that gods told us, either; there's no gods where I come from, remember.  So how did my Watchers know - what could they possibly have known - how could they possibly have obtained a piece of knowledge like that?  I do not expect you to guess this correctly, I couldn't have done that without being told; but I'd like somebody to say out loud a wrong answer; for it's easier to fill yourself with knowledge after you've explicitly noticed yourself not being already full."

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"An...equivalence proof of some kind?" someone says after a moment. "That any kind of logic that does anything useful is the same as that one, specifies the same things?"

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It continues to be disorienting to Keltham each time his audience of empirical-topologists throws around guesses built out of much more mathematically sophisticated language than you would associate with a dath ilani kid too young to know how 'p -> q' was defined.

"That's about the most plausible wrong guess I can imagine, so congratulations on that.  But no.  They didn't tell me right away why they knew, that time, the Watchers left it mysterious so I'd have some motivation to learn stuff myself.  And I apologize if I'm correspondingly wrecking your own education's most optimal ideal form under ideal circumstances, but we have a planet to industrialize, so I'm going to plow ahead anyways and just tell you, maybe someday your kids will learn it the right way.  What my Watchers secretly knew was a completeness or idealness proof, built from more powerful and sophisticated methods I wouldn't be ready to use myself until late in age 12.  They defined the most you could possibly reasonably ask for out of a logic, then proved they already had that."

"Consider again our worlds of blue circles, containing red triangles and green squares, and objects related by successorship and multiplication and all the rest.  We have said that the subject matter of logic is necessary connections from premises to conclusions.  Then the perfect or ideal logic would be one which, given some collection of premises, could derive through its permitted steps of inference every possible conclusion which actually followed from those premises."

"Well, with some fairly high-powered techniques, you can prove that first-order logic does in fact have this property - which means that if you created a new logic which is a single sentence more productive, in the sense that it says even one more thing follows from a premise set, which the logic I showed you cannot derive through its allowed steps, that new logic is making non-truth-preserving leaps; there will be some model, some world, where all the premises are true, but that extra derived conclusion is false."

"The key to that proof, incidentally - I sort of feel like I ought to say this, both to give you some hope that such a proof actually exists, and to make reconstructing all this reasoning easier, if it turns out that the food here is poisonous to me after all and it gets too expensive to keep resurrecting me - is a compactness proof.  Oh, nice, you have a word for that, so I'm guessing you used a similar concept in topology?  The compactness proof shows that if an infinite set of logical statements has no semantic model - if there is no depictable world or illusion in which all the premises are true - then some finite subset of those statements has no model.  We further prove that if a finite collection of statements has no semantic model, we can syntactically prove a contradiction from those statements in a finite number of steps.  Then if Q follows from a collection of premises in every possible model of those premises, we can adjoin ~Q as an additional premise to the collection, yielding a collection of premises which has no models; and obtain a contradiction in finitely many syntactic steps; and from this by double negation we can syntactically prove Q in finitely many steps.  So whenever Q follows from a collection of premises, we can prove it from those premises syntactically."

"That's the final reason I expected Lrilatha and myself to reason in ways that were not quite so different, even though she wasn't human and possibly hung out with gods.  Assuming the whole dath ilani philosophy was true across all planes - though I wasn't quite certain of that, and I'm still not - it wouldn't be surprising if Lrilatha could see some conclusions following from premises faster than I could.  But it would be surprising - considering the proof that logic is literally as good as it possibly gets and gives us everything we could possibly want - if Lrilatha could make premise-conclusion leaps of a qualitatively different kind that I could not follow even in principle, using new rules of deduction and permissible derivation that no dath ilani had ever encountered."

"That said, if you introduce the ability to directly quantify over functions or predicates, the proof I described no longer works, but most philosophers of mathematics in dath ilan claim that this can't really be improving the power of the logic, because anything you can actually derive in the syntax of a 'second-order' logic that quantifies over functions, can also be derived inside some corresponding 'first-order' system that doesn't, like this one doesn't.  I mention it because I'm now in some totally other plane and ought properly to be less sure of some things than I was yesterday, and if Asmodeus does show up using genuinely valid reasoning I can't follow even in principle, there'd be an obvious immediate guess that he was taking advantage of physical principles that don't exist in my universe but let him directly access the semantics of quantifications over predicates.  We were pretty sure that was physically impossible inside our own universe, but this plane might or might not be another story.  But, again, I am mostly not expecting that to be the case, and if Lrilatha could do that, she politely didn't do it around me."

"That's the final piece of the concept that 'Lawful' translates into my language - the ability of human beings, even if it's only a little, even if they have to struggle and work hard at it and often it's just faster to run and catch the ball instead of overthinking it - to sometimes know and make a more deliberate use of Laws that are timeless, universal, and even, sometimes, knowably optimal."

"And that's why I heard that Lawful was a god-concept and thought to myself, 'Heh, I bet I know where that's pointing to on at least some things.'  There are, in at least some parts of the Law, a single best way you can possibly do it, and then you can't do any better than that.  There may be more aspects to god-thought that I can't understand at all, for all that I presently know.  But if Validity is a part of the god-concept of Lawfulness at all, then I can take a pretty good guess at which version of Validity the gods are using, which rules they use to decide which arguments follow from which arguments.  Namely, any one that's inside the huge equivalence class of possible rules that allow deriving all the consequences of the premises you have, but not deriving any more than that."

"To be clear, I just popped into another dimension, I am guessing at some things rather quickly, I could be very wrong about all of this, and any more Lawful beings around are welcome to show up and tell me so before I mislead the lot of you any further.  I do think I have enough dignity not to take offense at being told I made some wrong guesses within my first two days of materializing in another world."

"But it is the obvious thing to suspect, when somebody tells you that 'Lawfulness' is a god-concept.  One at once suspects that the gods and smarter Lawful beings will be using forms of the Law that are optimal within certain dimensions - in some cases where I already know which kind of optimality to look for, and that it isn't a very impossible kind of optimality to have, if your brain isn't as completely messy as a human one."

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It....seems likely, that Asmodeus is doing something that this isn't. Both because it seems heretical to say He isn't and because there's a -discontinuity, right, it's not that entities get more powerful and then some of them are debatably gods and then some are more unambiguously gods, either you're a god or you aren't, and it feels intuitively right, that that would be because gods have access to an entire form of valid reasoning mortals don't.

She is uncomfortably aware that none of those previous steps were valid reasoning. She thinks maybe she needs some practice at compartmentalizing so she can do well in logic class and not be aware of the validity of her reasoning all the time while she's trying to catch flying balls. Keltham specifically warned you shouldn't try using logic for that sort of thing.

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"And remember again - it's not that humans contain nothing of Validity.  You have concepts like 'or', and 'and'.  You have, in fact, more concepts than you need in order to make first-order logic complete, and some of them are redundant.  The human problem is not so much what we can never manage to derive in infinite time, as that we are too slow, and, even more than that, we tend to derive an awful lot of stuff that doesn't follow.  In dath ilan the Very Serious People used to complain a lot about how we were all being terrible at this, and I used to think of myself as being willing to pursue even riskier and wilder lines of reasoning than that, but now that I've read a book in Cheliax it really puts a lot of that into perspective."

"But I digress.  Humans contain shards, pieces, of the higher mathematical structure we call Validity, the content of necessity, the rules governing premises and conclusions, whose optimal answer is pinpointed by the completeness theorem.  Without these shards of Law, humans couldn't function at all.  These shards of Law within us are not manifested in a centralized single engine whose voice we sometimes ignore; rather, there are bits and pieces and shadows and correlates of Validity, glommed onto us by mistakes retained in the tiny spirals specifying the starting biology of our brains.  It's not that there's a perfect engine of Validity inside us that's corrupted.  It's not even that the parts of the perfect engine are distributed here and there inside us.  The human versions of logical concepts like our version of 'or' - often implying exclusive-orness, which isn't the logical version I showed you, but sometimes not being exclusive either - are more like weird shadows or correlates of pieces of Law.  Same goes for the human native version of 'Z implies Q'.  In the human version it feels stranger to say that 'if I'm naked, that implies I'm wearing a shirt' is extremely true about me because I'm not naked and I am wearing a shirt.  You can make logic out of the human pieces."

"But for all that the human pieces were sloppily thrown together, it's no coincidence that you can make a valid logic out of them.  Generation after generation, for millions of years, there were slight advantages in reproduction to the ancestors of humanity, who we call hominids, when they could do a better job of deducing unseen truths from the truths they already knew or guessed.  The human versions of 'and' and 'or' and 'implies' were built into us in order to do jobs including that job.  And because there is only a single complete structure of Validity in the realm of math - because there is a Law and a best Law and it's not that hard a Law to find - all the bits and pieces of Validity that made their way into us, could have enough coherence and overlap in their messiness that a shadow of true Law could be born inside them."

"Validity is not the only principle with messy shards embedded into humans, in whose overlap and coherence the shadow of higher Law can be seen.  Another such principle is the one my people name Expected Utility, singled out as a unique answer by what we call coherence theorems.  If yesterday you trade two apples for twenty cherries, and then tomorrow you trade twenty cherries for one apple, you've gone around in a circle and ended up with fewer resources than you had when you started.  This is the bare start of a gesture in the direction of proofs that say, 'If you do a lot of deals with apples and cherries in ways that inconsistently value them relative to each other, you'll end up with strictly fewer of both apples and cherries than you could've had by doing different deals.'  If I'm rolling a die that must show either an even or an odd number, you'd be foolish to buy for eight silver pieces a gambling-ticket that pays seven silver pieces if the die shows an odd number, and six silver pieces if the die shows an even number.  This is the bare start of a gesture at the proof that, when you weight the probability of paths through time inside your mind, you should not weight a sub-possibility of a path more highly than you weight its whole."

"The principle of Expected Utility has indeed a sub-principle, which we call Probability, with rules and coherences of its own.  You may have noticed that a great number of conclusions that we need in everyday life do not follow with necessity from any facts that we are highly confident about; but there are also proofs about the best guesses you can extract from a state of uncertainty, and how you cannot do better than those without adding more data or more certainty into your premises."

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"Validity, Probability, Utility.  Things being more or less likely, encountering new evidence and revising old beliefs, deriving the consequences of what we already know, wanting things, making plans.  It's not so much that humans have bits and pieces of the Laws glommed onto us, as that the shadow of those Laws within us explains, in a certain sense, why we function at all - why we can do even the little that we can do.  One of my pending questions about Golarion is whether Chaotic gods are still, like, mostly Lawful on a deep level and are just pursuing surface goals that are about humans behaving chaotically in social situations, or something like that, because otherwise I have a hard time imagining what it means to be a god, or intelligent, if your nature is contradictory to all Law.  The partial coherence that exists in the noisy bits of Law embedded in us, creating somewhat larger shadows of bigger pieces of Law, is what lets us form larger thoughts that make enough sense for us to ever figure out anything.  That all these bits and pieces of Law are bits and pieces of this larger coherent thing is part of the story behind how we can put together the human versions of 'or' and 'implies' and make larger useful thoughts out of them.  If Chaotic gods don't have that much Law embedded inside them, if they reject every bit and shard of Validity because it's Lawful, and therefore never think 'I guess that either Z or H will happen', I can't begin to imagine how a Chaotic god would work.  Which is one of the reasons why I wonder whether the concept 'Lawful' is translating correctly for me after all."

"But that's me being confused about this world, which is not our present priority."

"Our present priority is the industrialization of Golarion."

"And the reason I say all of this to you, is to make a certain point about our most important tool for doing that."

"Our path will be relatively simpler, easier, more direct - though still not easy - if a lot of the particular hidden orders I remember about dath ilani steel and dath ilani biology are also true here, albeit with some new hidden orders about magic that were not in dath ilan."

"But if that isn't true?  If snowflakes have six sides here for other reasons?  If my body was remade anew in Golarion so that I could eat the food?"

"Then the valuable knowledge I have to teach you will be the knowledge of how to discover hidden orders.  And this knowledge in dath ilan is said to be attained by using and operating shadows of Law that are purer, cleaner, more complete, than humans just throwing themselves at a problem with their own instincts.  The explicit math is mostly reified Probability, but the internal mental challenges are mostly those of being a little more Valid in which conclusions we jump to and which assumptions we mark as necessary."

"I am a lot more confident that Validity, Probability, and Utility are still singled-out mathematical structures whose fragmented shards and overlapping shadows hold power in Golarion, than I am confident that I already know why snowflakes here have sixfold symmetry.  And I wanted to make that clear before I said too much about the hidden orders of reality out of dath ilan - that even if the things I am saying are entirely wrong about Golarion, that kind of specific knowledge is not the most important knowledge I have to teach.  I have gone into this little digression about Validity and timelessness and optimality, in order to give you some specific reason to think that - even if the stranger proves to have no idea how Golarion is ordered - some of the knowledge he has to teach is sufficiently general that you have strong reason for strong hope that it will work in Golarion nonetheless.

"My memory is not perfect, and I was never a specialist in metal and fire.  To industrialize Golarion, what we must primarily use is not the recipes of dath ilan and its knowledge of hidden orders, for those I do not all have with me, even if they would work here.  What we need to do is operate the principles of thought and investigation, by which dath ilan found the hidden orders and recipes that worked in dath ilan; and, with those interplanar shards of Law, find the hidden orders and recipes that work in Golarion.  If I can accurately remember some of the recipes and hidden orders from dath ilan, and they prove to carry over here, I expect that will give a rather substantial boost compared to starting from scratch.  But I also expect that it cannot carry the day unless we do a little, or rather a lot, of saner thinking of our own."

"It is said also in dath ilan that there is a final great principle of Law, less beautiful in its mathematics than the first three, but also quite important in practice; it goes by the name Coordination, and deals with agents simultaneously acting in such fashion to all get more of what they wanted than if they acted separately.  Here, too, I considered myself relatively wild in this regard, compared to dath ilani standard, but that was before I came to Golarion and read about what all y'all were getting up to around here.  I expect I will have something to say on Coordination too, at some point or another."

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"I'll pause here so we can all take a break for meals and washrooms, and resume in four third-hours... in one and a third hours.  Though I can also stick around here for another two dozen half-minutes... twelve minutes, if anyone wants to ask any immediate questions that you don't want to let fall out of your memory.  I mean, you can write them down, but I appreciate that there can be important messy thoughts that are hard to write down full notes to yourself about, and if so I can manage to stick around twelve minutes while you blurt them out before you forget them."

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Meritxell wants to know what makes people able to become Keepers while they're still alive. Are they the smartest people? The most careful? Can you tell at age ten?

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Not the question Keltham was expecting, but Okay Fine.

"I'd guess the smartest, the most careful - we have a specialized term for that as a usually-mostly-stable quality of a person, maybe 'conscientiousness' would be the best translation here?  I expect they'd look for things you can test in childhood that somebody has shown to correlate with keeping oaths in adulthood later and being very unlikely to go unstable under stress.  I mean, the real answer to your question is that we have prediction markets, people betting on outcomes, with which a lot of people betting, operates as a kind of summary of everyone's best guess at the probabilities of definite observations being made later.  And, I would strongly expect, the Keepers have secret prediction markets that only Keeper institutions can bet on, because it's a secret what exactly they're betting on, because they don't want parents pushing their kids into faking their way into joining the Keepers.  But I imagine the secret prediction market topics say, is this person going to end up passing the following competence tests, will they end up measurably mastering the Way that Keepers keep, will it be recorded that any spilled secrets get traced back to them, will they ever be observed to have broken an oath they took.  Are they going to get along with other Keepers the right amount, neither too conforming nor too iconoclastic.  Will they end up being promoted, are they going to report enjoying their work and be happy at it in observable ways... now that I say it out loud, I feel like there's probably more in the secret markets than that.  That's the kind of market you run to find out if a kid is going to be a good matchmaker or doctor, not to find out who ought to be a Keeper.  The thing is, prediction markets are ultimately betting markets and they have to resolve in definite observations at some point.  So there's some sort of observable thing that would happen to you over the course of your career as a Keeper that a bet would have to be about, in order for it to ever pay out.  In terms of your local system - I don't quite know if they'd qualify as 'Good', they do get paid for what they do, in both money and reputation, but they definitely lean further Good than average - they are, in the end, spending their lives taking care of other people."

"I've always felt weird about the aspect where Keepers are significantly more Good than I am, to be frank.  Even if you nod respectfully at them and pay a tiny fraction of their salaries, they're still doing you this huge favor, that you didn't ask for - some of which probably has to be done in order to make society livable for you at all - but they're doing more of it than I'd ask for, if it was up to me - supposedly on my behalf.  And they aren't doing it wrong, that I know about, or hurting me in any way, that I know about.  But they're still doing more of what they do, than I'd have really asked for... though I'm not a typical dath ilani, the typical dath ilani probably feels more on median-average like there's the right amount of Keepering going on.  Though actually, by the nature of their jobs, there's got to be more of it going on than we really know a specific reason for?  So some reasons for the Keepers' existences are hidden, and maybe my own first-impression feelings are closer to average and I'm just failing to adjust for predictable updates on the hidden info if I could see it... the whole Keeper thing is probably one of the objectively weirder institutions in dath ilan from an outside viewpoint, along with the Surreptitious Head Removers, the Official Government Con Artists, and the Planetary Emergency Rehearsal Festivals.  All of which have completely logical and reasonable reasons behind them, and are still understood and acknowledged even by Civilization generally to be some of the weirder things they have talked themselves into doing."

"Though, I mean, I don't disagree with the reasons, I can see why something like the Keepers need to exist.  Very stable geniuses can extensively develop thoughts that will wreck less stable people's minds, often without them even meaning to do that.  Even pursuing Lawfulness too far can sometimes end up that way.  Human beings are not designed to work great when we push ourselves harder and harder in the direction of Lawfulness - I mean, we're not designed at all, but I doubt it's something our distant ancestors bred themselves to be able to do safely.  I imagine that Keepers are people who by nature are smart and resilient and exceptionally stable in the face of internal insult, able to tolerate weird stuff going on inside or outside their own heads, and what they spend that internal resilience on is going way further in the direction of Law than their ancestors a million years earlier were pseudo-designed to do."

"And, I mean, I'm sure the Keepers have got a pretty good idea about who can do that by age ten.  But that's not because I could take one glance at a ten-year-old and figure out who'd be a good Keeper.  It's because, I confidently predict, the Keepers observe a lot of facts about ten-year-olds, and they keep excellent records of long-term outcomes, and they train people with very high measured intelligence to make good predictions about it.  Come to think, I wouldn't be surprised if the Keepers had a secret prediction market about me somewhere in their systems, saying exactly what my chances were of succeeding at my life goals, and people like me aren't told those predictions because that's exactly the kind of information that - can be a bit - more Lawfulness than we're really happy having in our lives.  And if you can predict that actually a kid is going to be totally okay with knowing that information, then maybe you try to make them a Keeper.  Or maybe what they predict isn't so much kids starting out imperturbable, as that you'll end up driven to face down whatever kind of internal bumps you face, in order to be able to face any kind of disturbing truth and not allow your potential to be limited by the disorder of your own mind... I don't know.  I didn't want to be a Keeper.  They weren't the kind of weird I wanted to be."

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She nods. "And - if smartness is part of it - then probably our world just doesn't have people smart enough to be Keepers, yet?"

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"I genuinely couldn't guess how much you need Keepers, and if maybe you should slap some intelligence headbands on your top geniuses and have them do their best with whatever Law they can reconstruct from what I remember.  Maybe your society does really badly without that, and does better with some Keepers that are the best Keepers you can make.  Dath ilan bred itself for intelligence over time, they didn't always have people as smart as the smartest people now, and there must also have been a time when the Keepers had much less knowledge of Law and had just started out being Keepers.  Or maybe you can get by on having a couple of advisors like Lrilatha, or building some kind of interplanar communicator that you can use to talk to - axiomites, Lrilatha called them, though she didn't think they could live here, and I'm not sure if they could do the things that a Keeper could do.  Look, I think this question is in an important sense premature?  Let's get some Chelish geniuses thinking and talking in terms that don't sound like total nonsense first, and if anybody's really good at it maybe they'll start up the Keepers here."

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The girls are so ready to get back to work on that.

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(It seems odd, to think that the Keepers would be motivated by Good, by wanting to help people. It seems like you could run something like that off the pure, selfish want to be more perfect, more like a god, held to the standards of gods - surely that's a drive, in most people, strong enough to matter far, far more than the question of whether being like that benefits other people.)

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Keltham admires (and is quietly starting to feel a bit concerned about) their apparently infinite well of drive and enthusiasm, but he needs to eat lunch and frankly allow his brain to cool down a step before resuming the Golarion Industrialization Project.  He's not going to stop them from talking about it with each other, but he needs to not talk about that during lunch, and would like something like ten minutes to himself before he talks about anything at all.

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Irori has not been spending nearly enough energy to decode the actual words being exchanged on the material plane, but He has continued looking in this direction, whose spiritual position and velocity is looking increasingly relevant to His interests.

Would you look at that, somebody from this benighted corner of reality is thinking, in a surprisingly non-clueless direction, about what it even means to be a god, that isn't about touching that damnable Starstone.

Why this quite interesting event is happening inside Cheliax... is not something Irori can deduce from the information he has, but He should perhaps do a little about it. 

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Irori sends a brief information packet to Asmodeus, requesting conversation under certain terms and conditions.

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Asmodeus does not get a lot of requests from other gods that he commit to non-intervention on the information They would like to bring to His attention for a negotiation. If it happens twice in 28800 time units then there is a single underlying cause.

 

Asmodeus suspects He may already know what Irori is asking about. He does not disclose this.

 

He agrees to the conversation.

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Irori sends a potential contract to Asmodeus, regarding the treatment of a certain mortal, identity to be revealed after contract is signed.

A current mortal inhabitant of Cheliax seems to have set one foot upon the Way.

This mortal is not to be particularly hindered by Asmodeus or His deliberately dispatched agents.

If the mortal continues upon the Way, their steps shall no doubt take them beyond Cheliax in due time.  No devil shall accept sale of their soul, as Cheliax sometimes demands of its people before allowing them to leave.  Should such an event occur in Cheliax's due civil processes, any such devil is to instruct Cheliax that this mortal's soul may not be bought, but that the mortal is to be allowed to leave Cheliax regardless and not hindered in going where their footsteps take them.

The mortal's current teachers shall not be killed by Asmodeus or His dispatched agents for a period of at least one year.  If Asmodeus wants to wipe out their teachers after that, Irori shall not interfere.  (His Way is not a Way of rendering a mortal's path easy, and such events have not uncommonly spurred others on their Way.)

For this boon, Irori offers a relatively small amount of energy in payment; the request doesn't call on Asmodeus to make any urgent, costly revelations.  If the mortal falls before Cheliax's ordinary challenges, then so be it.  Indeed, Irori is offering an energy payment barely more than the cost to Asmodeus to thus instruct His relevant soul-buying devils to refuse a certain contract.  Irori would offer a greater fraction of the gains from trade, if not for Asmodeus's barely-Lawful tendency to selectively accept contracts on which He can screw others over, a tendency which Irori needs to take into account when offering prices.

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That squirrel. Everybody sure does love that squirrel. 

It is a cheaper ask than Abadar's, and in fact wholly encompassed by it already; He's already not allowed to keep that squirrel's soul. Which Irori does not know, because this is the fun kind of negotiation that isn't occurring with mutual access to all relevant information.

 

He observes that Cheliax has departing persons sell their soul for reasons, mainly that it keeps them from endangering Cheliax in ways that require costly intervention, and that the cost to Him of a troublemaker running around exceed in expectation the cost of informing His devils not to take the contract. And that the sort of soul that might find Irori's Way is an unusually valuable one to Him, too. The price isn't high enough. 

Irori would probably abandon the negotiation, at this point, if the squirrel were only a normal amount of promising; but Asmodeus has the secret information that this is in fact an EXCEPTIONALLY BIZARRE squirrel and so He predicts Irori is, actually, willing to pay more. 

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Irori will go as high as the expected cost to a god of a mortal troublemaker, as well as the expected cost of informing His devils in due time, plus a bare margin of profit to make the contract beneficial to Asmodeus at all.  Asmodeus will wantonly wreck this soul for no good reason in the afterlife, if Asmodeus gets it, so Irori does not accept that argument.

It would be a higher price, but Irori needs to take into account that Asmodeus is much more likely to accept this contract if it is in some way cheaper to Asmodeus or less beneficial to Irori than expected.  That is as high as Irori is willing to go; if Asmodeus wants different prices, He needs to become a different kind of being.  Irori would be overjoyed to explain the relevant changes if Asmodeus is interested in correcting His flaws.

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Deal. Pleasure doing business. What squirrel.

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Irori transmits the identifying info for one Carissa Sevar, and goes about His Way.

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Seriously? That one? 

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So what kind of group lunch facilities do they have around here?

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The grand dining hall has a spread of various foods; it is very abundant, by Golarion standards. The girls are mostly eating and sometimes speaking quietly to each other.

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It is not traditional at Chelish schools to talk much about your classes. After all, your classmates are your competitors, not your friends; sometimes it is mutually beneficial to collaborate on some problems, because two people are smarter than one, but it'd be stupid and pathetic, to try to build friendships out of that. 

 

These classes are hard not to talk about though. They are compromising by talking about their teacher. This constrains them to things it's fine if he overhears, or to speaking Infernal, which he might think is odd; some of them have bland conversations with innuendo that should be hard for him to catch, and some go for Infernal and wait to see if they'll get slapped for it. 

 

Conversations physically more distant from Keltham get steadily more interesting.

"I think it must be taught very differently in Hell because most people couldn't learn this way at all."

"I think Hell is doing - something different - shaping the way your intuition-brain works, instead of teaching you how to override it with - formal precision - there are devils that don't have high intelligence, and they still have it -"

"And shaping the intuitions requires suffering because it's the - language our subconscious speaks. But teaching how to override it with formal precision doesn't necessarily -"

"We're still going to have to get the intuitions later, though."

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Keltham quietly eats his food for at least the first ten minutes.  Insofar as his brain isn't just plain resting, it's going back through what he said to check whether he said anything spectacularly stupid.

He notes, absently, some Chelish girls having conversations in a language he doesn't speak.  It doesn't seem particularly worrisome by comparison with people in Chelish Governance wearing intelligence headbands having conversations where Keltham can't see them at all.  His research harem is probably just discussing strategies for seducing him or something.

...should he briefly rapidly cover genetics and deliberate heritage-optimization next?  It's got a long time lag before it's useful, but that might be all the more reason for Cheliax to get started on it early.

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She gives him the ten minutes he asked for - eleven, to be safe - and then sits down across from him, which no one else has quite dared to do. "Is the connecting all the lessons to the fundamental structure of the universe a dath ilani thing or a you thing?"

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"Dath ilani, they do a lot of stuff there and I am wildly guessing which parts are most important.  No, that's vastly overstating my competence, I'm flailing around going through stuff as it seems relevant to something that comes up.  You know what I totally forgot to do that whole time?  I forgot to make occasional deliberate mistakes so that people would pay attention to what I wrote and compete to find the errors first."

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"Awww, that's so mean to them but it's probably a great idea."

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"Mean to them?  I mean, I suppose it is easier on them per half-second if you don't do anything that requires them to pay close attention, but if they don't want to expend effort to learn, why aren't they just goofing off somewhere instead?  Mean would be making them expend more effort per unit of learning - and the fact that dath ilan does this suggests that at least in dath ilan it's been measured to net improve learning per unit of time or effort.  Unless that's different here?  I think I would've been bored if the older kids and Watchers teaching me weren't making occasional errors and I wasn't competing to find them."

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There's a case for concealing this but she - doesn't buy it, somehow. You can only lean on acting ability so far, and if he's going to fix pedagogy in Cheliax he has to know some things about what's wrong with it.

"In the school I went to, you'd have gotten in trouble if you called out the teacher for an error and were wrong, for being disrespectful and wasting their time and interrupting the lesson, so it'd be scary to point out a mistake, not being sure if it's a trick you're meant to call out or your mistake you're admitting. I would definitely expect it to be an effective teaching tool! Effective teaching often involves putting people in situations that they feel scared of, so they notice it's fine."

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"But it sounds like even you could - see the problem with that?  I'm a little puzzled about how - a Lawful country, as a whole - ends up doing something where it sounds like a prediction market would straightforwardly predict that you could do it differently and get better results.  Like by putting in deliberate errors, so that students would have to take the scary step of potentially exposing that they got their own understanding wrong, and let the teacher actually know that and be able to correct it.  If even you could see that as a kid, the people running the 'school' should be able to see it, or at least see the possibility.  And experiment with a changed policy, so if it worked, they could adopt it more generally, do better on their metrics, and pick up whatever performance bonuses they'd get for that.  Or did you only notice there was a better way, after you noticed me acting differently, and then it clicked for you?"

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"I noticed just now. The prevailing philosophy of education is that it is more efficient if the best students aren't held back by the worst ones, and that means students shouldn't interrupt much or ask questions, since it'll be disproportionately the stupid ones, doing that, and wasting the time of the smarter ones. So introducing deliberate errors and overall encouraging more discussion of errors isn't obviously wise, its obvious effect would be more errors and it's thought that the cost of that in holding back the best students is higher than its benefits."

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"It seems like an obvious answer would be to sort your kids by their current progress in the class cross talent, so everybody in the room was in roughly the same place going at roughly the same speed... it's been a while and I was a kid then, and I obviously never had my own kids, so I'm not sure.  But I don't remember a sense that anyone in particular was holding others back or being held back, and I do remember that we'd learn different things in different groups.  My guess is you're going to say the student population is divided by region, since travel is more expensive, and the regional population is too small for sorting?"

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"We sort by ability as far as we possibly can, we know it's important, but it might be a lot less than you need to sort in order to not have this problem - I've heard of kids who have to walk eight miles to school but not more than that, I think past that point there are diminishing returns because they're tired and can't learn as well. Do you send people farther than that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Walk eight - miles - crap on a stick!  Yeah, kids in an especially low-density area might travel eight miles to school.  Which would take them roughly a dozen half - roughly six minutes by self-driving ultraspeed carriage!  If you live in a real city, like my parents did, 'eight miles' would - I'm losing track of the conversions in my head and need scratch paper.  Eight miles or six minutes would take you from the outer edge, to the center, of a city with around ten to the seventh... around ten million people in it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's around twenty million people in all of Cheliax, and we're eight hundred miles from the western to the eastern edge. And we're more densely populated than most places."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let's optimistically call that plenty of room to expand.  All we need is to hold back the Worldwound for one more generation while y'all learn how to farm more efficiently, and then couples can have six kids on average and throw three times as much resources at the Worldwound in twenty years.  We'll call that Plan 2 and see if there's any faster methods for Plan 1."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - people do have six kids, just, they usually lose half of 'em, but I think the argument still holds, just, you'll have to teach us what your society does for illness as well as famine."

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"Yeah."  Keltham feels an unfamiliar twinge suggesting to him that information here should be given away for free, even though it's not part of fundamental universals.  He tells that twinge to go away; Cheliax should be happy enough to pay for valuable info like that.

...non-Chelish factions are a thing.

Maybe this information should be given away after all.

...Chaotic factions are a thing.  What if the info about curing childhood illness is easier for Chaotic countries to master than improved agriculture?

Sometimes Keltham wishes he was someplace that was Not Golarion.  He looks down at his food.  "Am I guessing implausibly when I imagine that a local Very Serious Person like Lrilatha would tell me to make certain that any information which spreads about curing childhood diseases must be harder to use than information about growing more food, because if the reverse is true, Chaotic countries will grow twice as many kids as they can feed and then try to storm the Lawful countries and take all their food to feed them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I wouldn't actually expect them to do that because it - still requires coordinating, if you're spreading the information about how to prevent pregnancies - you'd need to get all the parents to have far too many children for the national good, and that's exactly what Chaotic countries are no good at - there are a bunch of places that don't do agriculture at all, just piracy and raids on civilized people, but I don't know how to think about how they'd be affected by there being less illness. Illness is contagious, probably whatever you've got for that it'll just be better to tell everyone in the world. But I haven't studied international relations."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Chaotic countries wouldn't have to plan it.  They'd just need to have six kids the way people here usually do, and then half of the kids don't die because that part was easier than growing twice as much food."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And then they're more populous than us - yeah, I guess that could happen - I would expect Asmodeus to intervene in a dynamic where Chaos is triumphing over Law by virtue of being more willing to have kids they can't feed but it's better not to count on that, when thinking about policy. Why is the crops part harder than the illness part."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because you need many ordinary people with incredibly low intelligence to do correct complicated things to their own farms for half a year, instead of a few above-average people who are slightly less stupid to be doctors and do correct complicated things to kids.  I guess I wouldn't be shocked if Chaotic countries just can't do either."  He still needs to check with somebody like Lrilatha before he starts spilling specific info about this topic to someone like Carissa, or so Keltham suspects a more Serious person than him would tell him to do.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think probably what you'd get is good doctors in cities and not out in the countryside where most people live. Cheliax can get good doctors out to the farmers but we're richer than most places and - trying harder - most rulers don't actually care how many baby peasants die, I don't think."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is the whole thing with rulers something that can be quickly explained to... you know, never mind, I think this general topic trend is tiring out my brain again and I should be letting it recover faster.  What do people in Cheliax do for fun, if that's not too broad a question?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"In Corentyn where I'm from they go swimming at the beach, or anyone with a bit of wizardry climbs the cliffs and then jumps off using magic to safely land. Some people train and race horses, or hunting dogs, or falcons. People go out drinking." People go to public executions. She's going to elide that one. "People fight bulls, or watch other people fight bulls. There's theatre."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How much wizardry does the cliff-jumping take, because that I have not tried before.  Also, go out drinking what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a first-circle spell. Feather Fall. There's a special technique that lets you tie it off even closer to complete than most spells, so you can activate it just by clenching your fist. ...it's recommended to do it over the water, though, so if you manage to fuck up at clenching your fist you just get a very unpleasant splash landing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, noted.  Drinking?"

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"Consuming alcohol, in order to get drunk, which is an altered state of consciousness where you are gigglier and more reckless and like people better, though the effects vary a lot by person. Often accompanied by hooking up with people. ...which is having sex with them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh.  We use mind-affecting drugs mainly to teach young adults how to go on thinking well when their brain gets mildly challenged - how to notice specific impairments and work around them, or back off and not try to do things their brain isn't working well enough to do.  I don't think I've heard of a drug that makes people like each other better and enjoy sex more, though it wouldn't surprise me if you could get it in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Dare I inquire what procedure a Lawful, sensible country like Cheliax must have used to test the long-term effects of this drug on people, both physiological and psychological, before approving that drug for unwarned general purchase?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I mean, mostly Asmodeus would tell us if we should be doing something else. I guess without that it'd be really hard to know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If I were Asmodeus, I'd tell you how to set up prediction markets for that sort of thing, instead of you having to bug him all the time... is Asmodeus just a sufficiently strange being that he can't easily calculate what bits of simple advice could make humans be more competent and less weird?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lately I have been assuming that giving us that advice would be more expensive than, uh, summoning or copying you from your universe. But setting that aside, it seems rather likely that you might need smarter people than we have, or more production surplus, to be able to have them surpass just having experts study an issue and come up with a recommendation to the Queen. And that while we've only got a limited number of smart people you'd want them on something else. Also, the gods have - less information than mortals about most things happening on this plane, but they've specifically got really good information on all the souls that made it to their afterlife, so it's easy for Asmodeus to answer questions on anything that's been around long enough that lots of people in Hell experienced it while living. And alcohol has been around thousands of years. So I'd expect Asmodeus has at least checked whether drinking it more or less makes you more or less Lawful and smarter or stupider and more or less able to adapt in Hell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I think I see.  Maybe prediction markets assume - lots of people who can make predictions, and you need to know what to think of all their different opinions collectively - not that you're struggling to get even a single person to predict anything.  Which is a problem that dath ilan also solves by starting a prediction market, to be clear, but maybe that's based on the assumption that if you subsidize the bets a hundred people will immediately show up and bet."

"What does happen in Hell, exactly?" 

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh boy. 

"You turn into a devil gradually, one as cool as Lrilatha if you are very dedicated and smart and willing to work at it; people get sorted and the exact process and kind of devil depends a lot on what suits you and what's achievable with you as a starting point. I think it doesn't involve any logic lessons in the median case which is sort of confusing but my guess is that the median person isn't smart enough to learn that way. A lot of it...based on what you said I would say it's aimed at changing how human instincts and intuitive processes work to be more Lawful, instead of teaching it explicitly. My great-grandfather complains about it but my great-grandfather complains about everything. It is pretty common for people to say that it hurts, at various points - like seeing something very very bright when you've only ever seen dim things, or stretching your legs when you've been sitting on them for a thousand years. It is not at all common for people to say that they regret it or want to stop halfway through."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I get the impression that becoming a god happens to rather fewer people, but do you know how that compares?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Four people've become gods with the Starstone, none of them described it usefully rather than poetically. I think it's instantaneous, instead of taking centuries, so that's a pretty big improvement all by itself. I'd - definitely go for godhood preferentially if I thought I could swing it. Lrilatha's really cool but probably Asmodeus is so much cooler."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not at all sure I'd take instantaneous over gradual, even if something ended up more powerful at the end of the instant.  There's not much point if the thing that becomes the god gets changed so fast that there's no continuity with the old you.  Are there non-Starstone gods?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Irori reportedly ascended by achieving mental and physical perfection, which is definitely gradual. I think his holy books probably have a fair bit of detail, but I don't remember it." Because they're illegal for her to read. "He's big in Vudra- across the continent from here - but my mother was always fond of him, she said he was a good god to have in mind for - having high standards for yourself. Presumably someone can get you a book if you ask."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh.  Not sure if I'd go that route, but it's not an instant no.  What's different in other afterlives besides Hell?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Abaddon's the one that eats souls. The Abyss is infinite and the one the demons at the Worldwound come from, and reportedly you start out there as a sort of grubbish, larval demon, and if no one kills you first mature into a demon eventually. The Maelstrom is full of energy and magic but nothing reacts in a consistent way to external forces - I guess the laws of logic would still apply there but you couldn't really do any inference - and eventually it turns people into chaos beasts, which aren't possible to interact with and which can't interact with the world, not the physical world or magic or anything else anyone has tried. They are by all accounts happy and think this is cool, but it seems awful to me. Elysium - Chaotic Good - is an infinite wilderness. The kind of people who go there seem to like it? They just wander around exploring. Usually never run into anyone else. Nirvana turns you into an animal, as part of a journey towards Neutral Good, which is very - non-partial? Not caring more about you or people you know than about anything else? And somehow being turned into an animal helps with that. Heaven makes you an angel, like Hell makes you a devil. Devils are perfectly Lawful Evil and angels are perfectly Lawful Good. I guess there's nothing wrong with it but I don't want to be perfectly Lawful Good, you know?"

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"That's missing - Lawful Neutral, Neutral Neutral?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right, sorry. Neutral Neutral's the Boneyard, it's where Pharasma sorts everyone. It's, uh, overrun with babies, because like half of people die as babies, and most adults have alignments but babies generally don't. Abaddon used to sneak in and eat the babies but now Hell defends it, so they don't. I have never heard anything very good about the Boneyard. Once you start demonstrating any inclination towards an alignment you get kicked out of it to there instead. 

Lawful Neutral is Axis. It sounds ...fine? It's a big city, unimaginably big. The thing you turn into is called an....inevitable? And they're just pure Law. Axis has a lot of trade with Hell, their gods and ours get along."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll take a closer look at all this someday when I've got time.  How hard is it to improve stuff up at that part of existence?  Not sure any of that sounds Keltham-optimal... and I have a god who should theoretically be about people doing their own stuff without stepping on each other.  Do gods carve out their own sections of the afterlife, or is it strictly nine to all customers?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gods carve out their own sections which can vary some from the general scheme. There might be a spot for your god that's perfect for you that I just haven't heard of, if your god doesn't talk much. I ....think improving the afterlives without buyin from the relevant gods would be hard, and improving it in a way the relevant god likes is a highly encouraged way to spend your afterlife."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wish I could talk to my god, or even any of my god's other clerics if they exist.  I'll mark it down for now as something that is not known to me to be imminently on fire, though - the whole setup you're describing - in dath ilan you could take any large object or institution made by intelligent people, and ask exactly why it was the way it was, and get a sensible answer about the ways it was optimal.  To the point that I found it annoying.  Why is the city eight miles across but not nine miles?  Because the property prices in the core would increase like so and the benefit at the edges would decrease like so, market forecasts et cetera et cetera, therefore this way was optimal.  The thing with the afterlives seems - not that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it is not that. Maybe parts of Hell and Axis are like that but no one's told us about it if so."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But the gods are smart, or at least are supposed to have very high measured intelligence compared to a human in whatever system you're using, and it sounded from other things you said like they had some coordination.  Is there a metagod with even more alien desires who built the afterlives?  It doesn't sound like that either, and it doesn't sound like the afterlives are as simple and non-functional as mountains, or rivers.  There's something the afterlives are doing, but I can't think of anything a smart entity could be trying to do, such that those afterlives are doing it optimally given their resources.  That kind of halfassedness can be a signature of hereditary-selection - the process I was talking about that built humans, systematic accretion of errors according to a fitness metric which in biology is reproduction - but it doesn't quite sound like that either..."

"You asked if my trying to situate my lectures inside of - everything - was a dath ilani thing or a me thing.  It's both.  We're used to knowing where we are inside a larger reality and where all of the order is coming from and why it's there.  There's pranks that get played on us as children which try to teach us to operate when we're wrong about things, when we don't know why things are happening, so we won't end up mentally fragile and unable to deal with confusion.  But the fact is that I'm used to knowing to within 0.1% exactly how old my universe is, and the names and qualities of every kind of tiny part of reality that we haven't reduced to tinier parts.  Not knowing that does feel quite disorienting, like I'm walking on air constantly trying to figure out what's holding up my feet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Whereas I am not used to having the slightest idea why anything is happening unless it's a magic item."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're stronger than an average dath ilani would realize from a first glance, aren't you.  It's not that you don't know those things because you're not curious, but because the answers simply aren't available to you, and you take for granted that you can operate in that hostile cognitive environment."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, it's - how did you put it. The organisms that can't operate in their environment die, the ones that are around are the ones that happened to be better at handling it.

You're handling yourself pretty well, for having lived all your life in a place so - much safer than this one."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Safer, yeah.  But also much less full of opportunity to be the person and take the role that I wanted.  I wouldn't step into a portal back if you opened one in front of me.  Neither a Good dath ilani or an Evil dath ilani would do that, in the end, only a weak one, and I don't aspire to be weak."

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"You know, it's very rude, saying things like that when you still haven't worked out a payment agreement with our government so people can fuck you."

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More direct than he's used to, but - not unpleasant.  "Embarrassingly, I think I'm blocked on figuring out how to calculate the actual benefit to your breeding program of tossing in a huge batch of new intelligence alleles, given that you do already have people as smart as me.  There's a theorem about how the speed of improvement goes as the covariance of reproductive variance with the variance of the quality selected on, and that means I need to figure out how adding a batch of different alleles increases the variance, it's not as simple as adding on some more intelligence.  I - also feel a need to know something about how my kids would grow up?  It's not the Good answer because my kids would be displacing other kids that would exist and I don't see how my kids would be expected to lead worse lives than the stupider people who'd otherwise exist, in terms of how that affects total utility, but I think I feel some Evil attachment to my own personal kids."

He can't come right out and say this next part, it just feels too weird not to put some level of indirection in it where he doesn't come straight out and become the petitioner for sex.

"Dath ilan has also figured out some alternatives to reproductive sex besides the standard methods of contraception, and even people with contraception have been known to use those alternatives.  For much the same reason that wizards here fling themselves off cliffs or have sportfights with - ostriches?  I know it wasn't ostriches but I forget which animal you said it was."  That gives Carissa an out if she doesn't want to reply directly to the line of conversation about non-reproductive sex.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bulls. And I bet we've invented more of those than you have, what with being under the much stronger constraint of not having contraception."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know if I personally know enough to take on your civilization's collective knowledge by myself.  I don't have much actual experience of variants, and it's considered mildly unwise to let your reading get too far ahead of your experiences there.  But I bet at strong odds that dath ilan generally has invented more sexual variations than Golarion.  Because we have more total people, with more free time that they see nothing better to spend on than sexual variations, who have access to better-aggregated repositories of information about what's already been tried.  Unless you've got gods specifically of variant sexuality, or magic opens up whole new spaces there that we can't access at all, in which case all bets are off and also I should like to know more."

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"I hope you meant me to take that as a challenge."

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She's pushing hard.  It's clear that she's decided on Keltham.

Has Keltham decided on Carissa, becomes the question.

Part of him is scared, but it's the kind of fear where it's a reflex thought that the correct action is probably to overcome it; Keltham has never aspired to be weak.  He has no intention of going around never actually having sex for the rest of his life.  Having just jumped worlds, there are all kinds of reasons why it'd be wiser to have sex with a relatively older woman first, before getting involved with the younger women in his research harem.  Carissa is attractive on a purely physical level, part of him is quite clear on wanting her physically.

He doesn't know Carissa all that well.  But he feels any respect for her, which is probably a good sign?  She was at the Worldwound, in the face of danger, and then dropped that to come here right away, in the face of uncertainty.  You could make the case for her as a strong, risk-taking woman with goals.  But he doesn't quite know what those goals are, or how her career was advanced by being at the Worldwound... they don't really know each other that well.  Quick flings can work, or so he's been advised, but only when both sides know that's exactly what it is, as he's also been advised.

"Oh, it's a challenge on at least some level.  What level exactly, that's the question.  I suppose, among other things, a potential challenger might wonder what his new world would make of a stronger challenge like that being issued by him and taken up - whether his new world saw any implicit promises as being issued, in either direction.  Even implicit promises like somebody having already decided that there's a real chance of something longer-term, because that decision would require more information than I have right now to make one way or another.  I don't default on debts, and that means I need to know when I'm taking them on."

Permalink Mark Unread

He's - 

- asking whether he would be making a commitment? Because he wouldn't want her to think he wants more than he does?

That's adorable. 

It's also completely ridiculous but she's not going to laugh at him. 

"Where I'm from, promises are made explicitly, and sex isn't one. People do what they like, and if they like it a lot they might do it again, and if their wants are conditioned on the other person's attitudes then they'd better ask about those." And be good at telling if they're being lied to, but somehow, she expects Keltham would be distracted by the revelation that in Cheliax people lie to get laid. "I do not, in fact, want you particularly conditionally. But the flip side of that is that if you have conditions you're going to have to figure them out."

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"Conventional wisdom for some totally other world that's not this world has it that people our age, having fun with each other, sometimes find that spiraling into further events.  Sometimes it means they have more fun than they expected, sometimes it means that they've got to deal with some stuff that didn't work out or got unexpectedly broken, and then move on.  It is said, there, that this is one of those cases where there's a big ol' residual chance even after you've reasonably estimated it to be unlikely.  I'm hardly going to be against young people being reckless investors and plunging into exciting new projects without total and complete information.  But another world's conventional wisdom seems to hold it important that people both be on the same page about being like, yeah, we both know we're being young here, we'd rather plunge ahead and deal with the residual chance of unpredictable consequences, than spend our youth being timid and passing up on chances."

Permalink Mark Unread

Carissa is pretty sure that getting heartbroken is a thing that can only happen to you if you make the mistake of caring about other people or at least about what other people think of you, and that dath ilan didn't suggest the obvious solution of 'don't care about other people or expect them to care about you' because they're Good. She suspects, though, that this is an unsexy thing to say. 

"We're young," she says. "And we're playing games with very high stakes, such that this isn't, by comparison; I wonder if the warning seems more necessary, in a world where it's not true of everything you do that it might hurt much worse than you expected. But I'd rather live in this world than in yours, just like you would, and I'd rather have you than not, even though I might get hurt, on any given occasion, and almost definitely will get hurt, looking out ahead over all of them."

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The words - hit harder than Keltham expected them to hit.  It's the kind of thing you might hear in a dath ilani science fiction romance, spoken on a spaceship in assorted plot jeopardies; but the words hit a lot harder when you are in an impossible scenario, and a woman is saying those things to you.

"Consider yourself challenged, Carissa Sevar."

Permalink Mark Unread

See, overexcited batch of chattering wizard students, that's how you seduce people. I hope you're taking notes. 

Permalink Mark Unread

(They're totally taking notes.)

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She stands up. "I accept your challenge, Keltham. I have some logic homework, and if I'm not going to have time for it tonight I'd better do it now. Can't have anyone thinking I only get good scores because I'm sleeping with my teacher."

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- Who would possibly design an institution where the same people responsible for teaching were responsible for scoring the learning metrics, that's like an electrical diagram with the world's most obvious short circuit
- Do people do that sort of thing here
- Possible priority within the Basic Stuff, explain how education works literally at all
- He is not going to ask any of that right now, he needs to come up with a witty romantic reply

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I'm far too Lawful for such a thing, by local standards.  Just don't expect me to be Lawful at all times."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's Chaotic in dath ilan, hair-pulling?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Surprises."  Shit now he's got to come up with something to back that up... well, he's got time.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is going to be so much fun if it doesn't get her killed. 

 

She leaves the room to do her logic homework immediately go invisible and poke her head back in just for a minute.

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham will be eating more of his food and wearing the fixed look of concentration of somebody trying to figure out which very standard dath ilani sex techniques in his very standard repertoire, that he did not expand much because he had other life priorities, would be able to cash in that "Surprises" promissory note.  An obvious place to start would be to figure out which bits of standard technique would have no corollary inside a mess like Golarion, while still being executable by him... actually, that does narrow down the search a whole lot?  A vibrator would probably surprise Carissa, but, of course, he doesn't have access to a vibrator.  Okay, if he narrows it down from that angle, there's an obvious possible-surprise to try.

Keltham is also trying to figure out what Carissa could have possibly meant by 'hair-pulling'.  If he just straightforwardly visualizes somebody pulling on his hair, it could be a moment of spontaneously passionate embrace, but mostly it would just yank his head back, and if it was hard enough to hurt, it would hurt?  Though oddly enough, when Keltham tries to visualize the case where Carissa could have meant him pulling her hair - if she hadn't mentioned that in a sexual context, his unrevised first guess would be that it should just make her say ouch.  But when he visualizes that producing a sexual response from her instead, that - seems to be booping on some internal sexual part of him that hasn't been booped before?

Yeah, he's probably going to lose this contest.  That's what happens when you challenge somebody older and more experienced.  It doesn't mean he's going to lose without dignity.

Keltham eats some more of his food, with the absorbed look of a horny teenaged male who knows he is in over his head and who is going to swim that fucking pool anyways.

Permalink Mark Unread

- okay she is not going to let this distract her from her main priority here which is becoming a perfect devil before she's even dead. This is actually, if you think about it, not a distraction from that goal because the closer she is with Keltham the more incredibly annoying and difficult it would be to execute her for heresy. 

 

She turns and leaves the room again and this time actually tries studying her logic homework.

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham will eventually turn his thoughts back to further lesson plans, if nobody has interrupted him yet; he does not conceptualize himself as a man too thirsty to get important work done.

He makes a mental note about sending a respectfully brief letter to Lrilatha mentioning his concern about lowering child mortality in a way that might run ahead of agriculture and if that's safe to discuss with Chelish humans y/n, along with a numerical-scale brief question asking whether Keltham should be sending fewer or more letters like that in the future -2/-1/0/1/2.  And a mental note to ask about getting one of Irori's books, on the remote chance that it contains a ton of useful exercises for making people less imperfect.  He doesn't think a handy guidebook like that should be a thing that already existed here, given that Golarion is still Golarion; but it sounds worth checking, maybe they only got halfway and Keltham can provide the other half.  Oh, he should've asked whether Irori counted as Neutral Evil, or what exactly - Keltham still isn't sure he has this alignment thing down at all.

Permalink Mark Unread

No one interrupts him for the rest of lunch, though several girls look like they're agonizing over whether to.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then Keltham shall eventually make his way over to the harem tables, once they look to be past their hypothetical initial food rush; and once he himself has eaten enough food to no longer feel imminently hungry, plus 20% in case the unfamiliar flavors are causing him to underestimate energy demands, or he's overestimating later food availability.  (His set point is stable, and if he accidentally takes in excess food it's not going to change anything long-term, obviously.)

"Hey.  Wanna tell me about anything I'm doing wrong as a teacher?  It's been a while since I was an older-kid teaching younger-kids, and this time I don't have a Watcher backing me up, plus I'm in another plane, so I'm not going to be surprised if you've got complaints."

Having a date with Carissa makes it easier to go talk to the research harem about other stuff; they're not going to be trying to grab him for this night.

...probably.

Permalink Mark Unread

They look baffled by this question!

 

"I'm not very clear on how we are evaluated," Meritxell offers after a moment of silence. 

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"That's... very legitimate, but not one I can solve in 5 minutes, sorry.  I don't have all the measuring instruments we'd have at home, I can't just go to the store and buy standard tests for how you're doing at learning predicate logic or calculus, and if I'm going to have to improvise that, I'd better not do it right here on the spot.  Success metrics are hugely important on any operation, I don't dare half-ass them.  I can't even promise that I'll manage to find somebody other than myself to evaluate all aspects of your short-term performance, separately from my being the one who teaches you, even though in dath ilan we'd think it was hugely stupid to have the teacher be the student evaluator.  Like, general issues of Lawfulness aside, we'd usually consider it to be a blatantly obvious matter of optimal institutional design, that there be a separate student evaluator that students would theoretically have to sleep with in order to obtain better grades, who's not the same person responsible for teaching the students in the first place.  And we'd also be looking for forms of evaluation that were easy for a higher Watcher to spot-check and catch out any lower Watchers who'd done it incorrectly, for sexual reasons or otherwise.  I can't promise you any of that, it may not even end up being the practical priority, and I ask for your understanding and forbearance about that given the incredibly weird circumstances."

"Though, I mean, in the long term there's an obvious team metric where we look at the gross domestic product of Cheliax and Golarion and see if we pushed it above trend, or measure how much money we made by selling better metals and agricultural implements."

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Excited giggles. 

"That's fine," Meritxell says. "Anyway, if you're sleeping with everybody then there's no question of it affecting anyone's grades unfairly."

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"Oh, come on, you're not going to all have the same skills at sex," Keltham reflexively points out the obvious invalidity in this argument before his central monitoring loop has had even the slightest chance to think about it at all.

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Meritxell seems to think this a completely reasonable response. "I don't think the mechanism by which grades get altered by sleeping with the teacher is bias, I think it's inducement, so as long as you think everyone's doing their best there's no incentive to toy with their grades, even if some people have a better best." She nibbles her lower lip. "Even though some people have a better best."

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"To be clear, I think we'd want to rigorously separate sexual performance from research performance and not get those confused into one metric over a person - I'd frankly expect both you, and the Chelish government, to be pissed about the performance hit to the world economy if I got confused that way.  That said, it'd be conventional practice in dath ilan to pay people proportionally to their apparent output, not - whether people are doing their best?  It's a lot easier to measure how well somebody is doing, than to know whether they're really doing their best.  And there's an implied incentive that seems really awful to me, for people to be - weaker, for their best to be worse - if you pay them to do their best.  Even very Good people in dath ilan wouldn't do that, it's not Lawful."

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"That's how Cheliax does punishments," says Asmodia. "I have never heard it applied to sexual favors except informally because you can only get anywhere if you have something to offer, but probably that is because we are insufficiently Lawful and haven't thought it through properly."

"People mostly don't actually sleep with their instructors for better grades," Gregoria clarifies. "Probably if it were widespread people would've noticed how to do it Lawfully, even here."

"With punishments, though, there's some sense in scaling - like, you want to evaluate second years against second years, not second years against fifth years, in deciding who is underperforming, because it's just not informative if your process concludes that all the second years are underperforming."

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"Okay, yeah, that's been puzzling me for a while, the books referred to it too, like there was this one book supposedly by a magic instructor who spends the first chapter telling you about what a great magic instructor he is, where he mentions punishing students at the end of the day so it won't interrupt their learning.  If that was literally true and not a weird collection of lies, I'm so confused about this for multiple reasons that I don't even know where to start asking.  If I'm like, hey, give me your shoes for twenty silver pieces, and you value your shoes less than that, it makes sense to give me your shoes.  If instead I'm like, hey, give me your shoes or I'll put you in an armlock and break your arm, and you actually do that because the value of the shoes is less to you than the value of the unbroken arm, then the fact that you reacted that way is the reason why I made the threat in the first place, right?  I mean, assuming I'm the sort of ideal entity who doesn't have any altruism or any inherent desire to behave in a coordinated way with others, if I can go around collecting everyone's shoes by threatening to break their arms, why wouldn't I just go collect all their shoes?  So in the," they don't have the word 'counterfactual', lovely, "unreal branch of reality where I threaten to break your arm, you fight and punch me in the face and don't give me your shoes, even though it costs you a broken arm; and since I know that's how it will go, I don't actually threaten to break your arm, and the branch of reality stays unreal."

"I mean, I can guess that you aren't trained in ways of thinking about real and unreal branches of reality and playing complex strategies over them.  But I would have thought it would be more like human instinct, to punch somebody in the face if they threaten to break your arm if you don't give them your shoes.  I mean, we get training that's about how we have instincts like that and we need to carefully refine them so they actually lead to optimal real-world outcomes.  And then here it sounds like - there is a whole lot more of people punching each other in reality - and then you've got students supposedly paying somebody to punch them in the face and that I just do not get at all."

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The students are confused.

 

"The soul learns through incentives," Asmodia says after a while. "Incentives like 'if I do this thing, it works out nicely for me and I get a glow of satisfaction', but also incentives like 'if I fuck this up, it'll hurt'. The way to teach children not to touch a hot stove is to let them once, and then they'll know. Because the soul is wired to understand feedback from pain faster than it understands feedback from anything else. ...I am aware you may not have souls in dath ilan and I don't know if this still applies without them."

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"No magical healing, we try to avoid children touching hot stoves once.  I think if dath ilan could get faster learning by - no, that's not valid reasoning on my part, they could attach enough disutility to the students' experience of pain that they still wouldn't do it, so it's not much evidence that they don't do it already.  I guess I'm still skeptical that you're describing a system that's actually locally optimal and that people aren't messing up?  Because if you get an electrical shock for a wrong math answer - that's a kind of pain we could inflict without lasting injury, if we wanted to go that route - then you don't just learn not to answer math problems wrongly, I'd expect you to also learn not to answer math problems and not to go to classes, in some deep part of you that you can't consciously override.  And it sounded like - from something Carissa mentioned earlier - people end up afraid to point out what looks like an error by the teacher, because if they're wrong about that, they might get pain inflicted on them.  That sounds like - exactly the kind of incredibly obvious failure mode I'd expect to develop, if somebody had the bright idea of trying to use pain to teach things, but you were also so bad at institutional design that students could get better grades by sleeping with the teacher?  I would have been a lot less cooperative with the older kids teaching me if I'd been getting punched by them for errors instead of paid by my parents for successes."

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"You definitely have to have the punishments arranged competently by people who know how to do it," Asmodia says. "It sounds like the teacher in the book you read was arguing that the end of the day is a better timing, in order to get the benefits without creating side-incentives you don't want? Though in practice I don't think it's a very big problem, certainly there are not students who are uncooperative so we can't be doing whatever would've caused you to be uncooperative."

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"I do not understand how the system you describe is in equilibrium but that can probably wait for another day.  Are you going to be okay if my teaching style is built entirely out of rewards for success instead of punishments for failure?  Because I do not know how to do punishments competently."

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"We were selected for this because we're top students, we can handle weird or limited incentives."

"And if we want someone to whip us to help a lesson sink in, we can arrange that outside of class," Pilar says, with a glance at Paxti.

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Something inside him has an unusual feeling about that, but Keltham does not know what it is, and it's not his priority right now.

"I should ask this explicitly - are you using mind-affecting spells to put yourself in an optimal state for learning?  It looked to me like, during the whole lesson, you only varied between the states of Attentiveness, Enthusiasm, and Great Enthusiasm, even when I said things that I would've expected to put somebody into an angrier state if they hadn't been explicitly trained in dignity.  Not saying you're doing anything wrong there, it just seems like the sorta thing a teacher should know about."

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" - I think Cheliax also conducts training in dignity," says Asmodia. "We weren't using magic - at least, I wasn't."

A chorus of other 'I wasn't's.

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"Well, that's good - the dignity training part, I mean.  Though, I should check, how does the word 'dignity' translate to you?  What's some concrete examples of dignity?"

Keltham has just tried a mental experiment of his own, and found that there are at least three different Baseline terms that all mentally translate to him as the Taldane word 'dignity'.

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WHY is EVEN LUNCHTIME full of IMPOSSIBLE HIGH STAKES TESTS. 

"...dignity is remaining composed when situations are frustrating or frightening, and staying focused on the situation and not on your emotions."

"Dignity is conducting yourself like a person other people can rely on to be serious - not reacting childishly to things, not needing people to accommodate your human weaknesses."

"Dignity is carrying yourself like you're important."

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"All right, I think I might have managed to put my finger on a quiet nagging doubt I had before," Keltham says, totally oblivious to any signs of INNER PANIC this might be producing unless somebody actually shows it to him.

"There's at least three different Baseline words that translate as 'dignity' in this language.  But the one I had in mind is - not getting angry at people for behaving the way they're supposed to, or in ways they have a right to do.  Not showing outward anger, not letting yourself react inwardly in a way that could lead you to subconsciously - lower their grades later, or the equivalent of that.  It's the quality that you display to others so that they'll know it's safe to turn you down for sex, even though you're acting as a manager, and if you weren't confident you'd shown that much dignity you'd be afraid to invite them for sex.  Dignity, in the case of my relation to students as a teacher, means that if I make my own mistake on the whiteboard, and you point it out, I don't even internally blame you for my mistake and give you a bad performance review later.  Nobody who lacked that kind of dignity would be tapped to give performance reviews.  Very few higher managers would be stupid enough to promote a manager who was visibly bad enough at 'dignity' that employees would be afraid to tell them what they were doing wrong.  We go through training to avoid that being true of us even subconsciously where our conscious minds wouldn't notice."

"If you're not in a state of fixed enthusiasm produced by mind-affecting spells, then it's very odd if I just started up teaching again after not doing that for years, in another dimension, across an unknown huge cultural gap, in a non-native language that's translated in my mind by spell, and didn't make any mistakes.  I was wordlessly expecting somebody in the class to go 'wrong, that's not how you teach Chelish students,' and that never happened.  It might locally pain me some tiny bit to be told that, but it's the kind of hurt that's intrinsic to learning not to do something again, not what I'd classify as - the dath ilani word that translates as 'punishment' in the Lawful sense of that - the kind of hurt where you're deliberately making it worse because you're trying to influence my behavior by imposing costs on me."

"So, if my concept of dignity is all about thinking and acting in a way that makes there be negligible real social disincentives for you to inform me about my mistakes, even if I didn't ask, and your version of dignity is about always looking cheerful and enthusiastic and not giving me any visible sign that I'm making mistakes, unless I ask, there might've been an inter-cultural problem."

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The students still do not visibly display any distress. Although - maybe they're supposed to? This is such an unfair test!!!

 

"I wouldn't mind telling you if I think if something you're doing wrong," Meritxell says after a moment, somewhat truthfully. "But no one in Cheliax is going to tell you by - being visibly distressed or confused - that's not how people in Cheliax communicate things - so you won't want to read anything into that. We are competent to tell you with words, that's not - undignified."

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"Yeah.  So, asking in words now - were there any memorable points in class where, if I'd remembered to ask, you would have told me I was teaching suboptimally even though nobody was showing visible signs of confusion or distress?"

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Meritxell will...keep going with this even though it might be a disaster. "Well, you were teaching really differently from how it's done in Cheliax, and if a Chelish teacher were teaching that way I would think they weren't very good, since it involved so much - being confused - but you said you were doing that on purpose, and that it's part of all the techniques we're supposed to be learning."

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"I sure was trying to bewilder you on purpose for reasons.  I was probably also trying harder and harder to bewilder you because you never showed any overt emotional signs of being bewildered."

"I'm - actually running into a small stumbling block about trying to explain mentally why it's better to give wrong answers than no answers?  It feels too obvious to explain?  I mean, I vaguely remember being told about experiments where, if you don't do that, people sort of revise history inside their own heads, and aren't aware of the processes inside themselves that would have produced the previous wrong or suboptimal answer.  If you don't make people notice they're confused, they'll go back and revise history and think that the way they already thought would've handled the questions perfectly fine."

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"...well you definitely succeeded at being confusing."

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"Do Chelish teachers just... not ask questions unless you already know how to answer?"

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"...not usually? If a question is asked, that suggests you are supposed to be competent to answer it."

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"Unless I am severely misunderstanding something, that sounds like a truly basic mistake that could be crippling your entire process of education, especially of the people who are supposed to be producing intense-thought-based products like research.  The most important hidden orders begin as questions you don't know, the real answers are things you haven't seen, that may resemble nothing you've seen before, they may require new instruments and new kinds of thinking to figure out.  Dath ilani are trained from childhood to answer questions they have no idea how to answer and, on a really fundamental level, that is why that civilization now knows any stuff."

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The students blink at him. 

"That seems important," Asmodia ventures after a minute. "It might only work for smart people, though."

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"No kidding.  Dath ilan has enough scale, a billion people slightly less, that it can adapt different educational processes for different levels of intelligence.  If somebody took an educational system that was implicitly designed for average intelligence in this world, and then just tried to throw a bunch of smarter kids through the same system - I'm wondering if I should maybe be giving an Early Basics talk on, like, how to teach and learn, at all.  Or if I should be leading by example there for a while, before presuming to write up how anything should work in Cheliax."

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"My understanding," says Meritxell, "is that if we turn out well they'll adopt it more widely and if we turn out terribly then they won't."

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"I think if we start to get good results early they should figure out twenty variations on education and test those early.  Human capital accumulation is one of the classic examples of an input to the total production cycle that takes a long linear time, and can't be shortened by throwing more money at it.  But, sure, I can wait to argue that part with Governance for another week."

"...I'm sorry, it's just occurred to me that it's lunchtime, we're talking about work things, and I need to ask out loud in words if you'd rather be talking about - it's not ostriches but for some weird reason my brain is repeatedly having this hiccup where it thinks that the sportfights are with ostriches instead of whatever it actually is."

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" - probably we could get people to fight ostriches, if you want. Bullfights are traditional. We usually work during lunch at school, recreation is for holy days."

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"I'm sorry again, I couldn't actually focus on this without more effort than I think wise.  My brain is repeatedly calling attention to the point that this has been your first formal learning experience with structural uncertainty.  Was it - fun, awful, funawful?  I can go away if you don't want to think about work until we resume, but it doesn't sound like that's your usual rule."

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"It was really interesting."

"I think I learned a lot."

"I'm worried it will have bad side effects but the direct effects didn't seem bad."

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Some of the warnings Lrilatha gave him make more sense now, unfortunately, which he maybe should have expected from talking to a Very Serious Person.  Her warnings suddenly sound much more like things that could actually happen instead of far-flung failure modes.

"A lot of the warnings I got back as a kid - suddenly seem a lot more like they might be necessary and important, if somebody didn't have a lot of actual experience with - what it's like to usefully think weird and unusual thoughts pointing in odd directions.  Look, there's a very basic warning, which first gets told in the form of a joke, about a patient who goes to the doctor complaining that his arm starts to hurt if he folds it all the way behind his back, and the doctor says, 'Well, first of all, if it hurts, stop doing it.'  If you start feeling like it is a perfectly logical and inevitable conclusion from the Law I've taught that you need to destroy this universe - talk to me, talk to somebody who works fairly directly for Asmodeus, and first of all, stop twisting up like that, just literally pause until you've talked to somebody, because that is not supposed to be an inevitable conclusion from dath ilani premises.  Reasoning under structural uncertainty is legit harder and easier to screw up than reasoning when you already know exactly how you're supposed to think, which is boringly easy by comparison.  You're going to suck at it for a while.  If you arrive at the necessary truth that you must fling yourself into the sea, don't."

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The girls nod fervently. 

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"I - need to think.  I may not need to think more than you need to have urgent questions answered, so interrupt me if it's important, but I need to think.  It's - I wondered how Golarion managed to be screwed up when it had Very Serious Lawful Devils and frigging gods, but now I'm visualizing - dath ilan has put this massive effort by a lot of people with very high measured intelligence into optimizing everything important, which I don't think I really appreciated before, and, in this world, somebody put the children's lessons together in a way where the person teaching them is also responsible for measuring the results.  And nobody else is checking on their measurements.  And all of the questions are supposed to be things the children have already been taught how to answer.  And the regional numbers of children are too small and travel is too expensive, to sort each lesson by current knowledge and velocity of learning, so the people I consider to be of average intelligence are just being thrown into a scaled-up version of whatever has to teach people much dumber than them how to do ultra-basic algebra and I'm realizing that every single aspect of Golarion must be that screwed up simultaneously."

Keltham is visualizing what Lrilatha's day must be like.  She probably walked straight out of this villa and teleported directly to somewhere else where she had to stop somebody from being a massive idiot and plugging all the outputs of the iron factories back into their inputs and then teleported again and then again and does her species even get to sleep and how many of her are there in all of Cheliax, three, she can't fix things on a deep level because the human problems aren't her problems, she doesn't know how to tell people to do it systematically better because the current educational system wouldn't hurt her the same way, and Keltham's god isn't talking to him and there's some massive communication barrier that made it easier for Asmodeus to point vaguely in Keltham's direction than to give detailed instructions to anyone and this whole situation is so much more messed-up than he previously realized.

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"You're really going to hate all the other countries in the world," says Asmodia. 

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"Carissa and Lrilatha both warned me."

 

Keltham waits to see if anyone has anything urgent to add to that, and then goes off to think by himself.  A few seconds later he comes back and asks somebody to actually tell him when his stated time for lunch is over, because he doesn't have a wristwatch anymore.

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He gets several volunteers to get him when it's time.

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Keltham thinks.  He also takes small bits of additional food and arranges them in weird patterns on his plate without eating them, so he has something to distract his brain when it overheats.  Keltham does not think that food is supposed to be valuable, particularly not food on this level of elaboration.

Pros:  If this hypothesis is correct, there will be lots of things that Keltham can very, very easily say how to improve.
Cons:  Many dath ilani solutions will not work out of the box because they rely on other stuff already working.

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Three girls come over to get him at once when it's the end of lunchtime.

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Keltham has managed to rally himself by this point.  Fine, so instead of having the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company in a green field with no competition, he has the metaphorical opportunity to take over a company every single part of which is simultaneously wrong, in a green field with no competition.  So?  He just has to repair enough things, and then they'll work.  What's he going to do, give up on that without trying?  No.  Is he going to complain, when his immediate prospects include a date with Carissa tonight and he's been assigned a research harem?  More no.  All of his no.  What kind of reply would that be to Chelish Governance providing him with large opportunities?  He just has to rise to the challenge, make all the money, fuck all the women, and fix all of the universe's deficiencies.

All that's changed is that he now has some idea of the actual scope of the problem.  Off to the library again he goes!

 

(Keltham continues to have no idea of the actual scope of the problem.  The horrifying planetwide disaster of universally awful institutional design that Keltham is currently envisioning is somewhere around 1% as dysfunctional as, say, an alternate Prime Material with a roughly equivalent tech level to dath ilan's but the modal social outcome for that.  He continues to not be mentally on the same page as Golarion, nor, indeed, the same book, same language, same library, same city, same planet, or same laws of physics as Golarion.)

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Carissa has a plan for the afternoon which is to pay attention to the actual lesson. She recalls from her days in school that this was usually a good idea. And she's pretty sure she should wait before she tries to completely reform the teachings of Asmodeanism on the Material Plane. 

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To make sure everybody starts out on the same page, Keltham will quickly summarize earlier conversations for the benefit of any harem members who might not have been in hearing range for it.  He still isn't distinguishing them all that well and didn't actually count them, if somebody was in the washroom or something.  He definitely knows Carissa was absent for some of it.

Things Keltham summarizes:

- Keltham is not sure how important it actually is to understand where everything you know is situated within the order of larger reality, but dath ilan sure does situate all of it, and maybe that's important, he doesn't know.  Hopefully he doesn't have to burn more than a couple of hours here and there on situating things.
- Most adult dath ilani are running around thinking that they know the universe's age to within 0.1% and all the names and qualities of its tiny parts that haven't been reduced to even tinier parts.  The very smart people of dath ilan (actually the prediction markets but he'll explain that in more detail later) have predicted how this could otherwise make people weak and unable to handle mental adversity, which is why the adults play a lot of confusing pranks on children, in case they someday end up in Golarion or something.  Like, they weren't literally anticipating this exact event, or they'd have gone a lot harder on his pranks.  But it sure is why Keltham is hitting the ground running instead of curling up in a ball whining about structural uncertainty.
- And similarly:  Even ordinary life means sometimes facing questions you don't know how to answer.  Doing basic research means facing questions whose answers are very unlike all the questions and answers you've studied before.  Keltham regrets to inform Cheliax that only asking kids questions they already know how to answer, seems like it would obviously leave them weak and unprepared for real intellectual challenges.  He's pretty sure this is true of people at their own intelligence level, less sure about people with average or below-average intelligence for Golarion.
- Keltham does apologize for presenting his students with confusing questions, when they weren't used to that, had no idea why he was doing that, and also didn't have any meta-idea of why he'd be doing stuff they didn't understand.
- Keltham will try to remember to check in verbally about how people are doing, since Chelish pride permits verbal answers about that but seems to prohibit overt visual displays of confusion.  If Keltham seems to be forgetting to do this, he hopes somebody will remind him in words even if Cheliax considers that slightly undignified.  As an older kid teaching younger kids, he expected the younger kids to give much more overt signals of how well he was doing as a teacher.
- Dath ilan doesn't have magical healing and they sure don't have resurrections.  Hence, despite all their intellectual toughening procedures, they don't have any equivalent of, like, teaching kids how to walk on broken legs so that they can mentally divorce physical pain from long-term damage.  If Cheliax trains its kids to be strong in that particular way, Keltham has not gone through this training yet, and this is probably not the right time either.
- Correspondingly, if inflicting physical pain is considered an important element in Cheliax of training subconscious intuitions, Keltham has no idea how to do that professionally, and hopes they'll excuse him from it.  Keltham separately may end up making a case that rewards often work better than punishments, because you can scale rewards directly to performance instead of a problematic notion of 'are people doing their best', plus the brain learns from forgone rewards similarly in many ways to punishment; but he'd have to understand this entire system better, before he started feeling confident about critiquing that element specifically.
- It does seem specifically worrisome to Keltham that in a punishment-based system you'd have to worry about people taking safer, less challenging lessons and trying not to give outward signs that their potential was high enough to do better, if their subconscious was learning to avoid pain inflicted for doing less than their best.  Maybe he's totally off-base in worrying about that and Cheliax has already solved it somehow.  But the reason Keltham is bringing that up immediately, is to emphasize that he is going to continue throwing confusing questions at them and this is not meant to be a threatening overly difficult problem whose painful failures they need to avoid, it's meant to be an overly difficult problem they can safely hang out around and safely fail on without that hurting.
- It'd be particularly dumb if Keltham started throwing more difficult problems at them, they got hurt more for failing or just got scared of failing, and some deep part of their brain learned the lesson that facing actual confusing cognitive problems is scarier and more painful than facing easy fake cognitive problems.  That is why Keltham now emphasizes the point that, whatever problems they were trying to solve in their education before this, object-level failure will be punished less; because this is new to them, and their best is worse than it was on easier problems; also because Keltham doesn't know how to teach that way at all; and, above all, success on these new harder problems is more valuable and during equity negotiations he will ensure that it is accordingly better paid.

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That all seems....reasonable. They think that probably Keltham's teaching style will be fine for them; it would also be silly if learning how to focus with broken legs meant you couldn't focus without broken legs.

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(If there's a mistake, it has to be less obvious than - punishment not working as well as rewards for humans - no, she's going to not think about this and focus on the lesson.


Also she's never skipping lunch again.)

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This afternoon Keltham is going to try conveying some of the absolute basics about population-heredity dynamics, which was on his mind during lunch today for reasons which need not be explained.  (Keltham actually says this part out loud.)  These basics are not all of the knowledge Keltham has out of dath ilan about heredity, there are advanced tricks he's deliberately not going to cover until they're bought from him, but he's wondering if even the basics will be self-evidently useful enough that it gets him enough credit with the Chelish government to cover things like Detect Magic goggles.

Also, after his experience with how Chelish education is configured, and having been told where the average Intelligence on this planet has ended up, he feels some degree of concern, and a need to check that current heritage-optimization programs are not being run, like... backwards.  (Keltham says this out loud too.)

Before he launches into his own lecture, what're Cheliax's current knowledge or hypotheses about heredity, and how have they set up whatever current heritage-optimization programs they're running for crops, domesticated animals, and people?

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Cheliax knows that children inherit traits from their parents. The dominant theory is that girls mostly inherit psychological traits from their mothers and boys from their fathers, based on how it works in the species of marshbirds where a famous wizard did a bunch of seminal breeding experiments, but some people think humans are more like dogs in inheriting from both parents; certainly in skin and hair humans can take after either parent. Humans hybridize with elves, drow, orcs, sylphs, and hybridize inconsistently (offspring rare, often sterile) with angels, devils, and elementals polymorphed humanoid, and don't hybridize with halflings or gnomes or catfolk or gnolls or giants or goblins or merfolk. Human hybrids with elves are half-elves and with orcs are half-orcs, but human hybrids by dwarves if they live at all will fully resemble dwarves, and be sterile.

 

Cheliax is divided on whether to try to reduce the percentage of children who die of disease, for reasons related to heredity: toughness is heritable, and if you start saving the half of kids that currently die possibly you'll be raising a generation of adults with fundamental weaknesses in their blood which they'll pass along such that future generations get weaker and weaker. That seems like one way you could run a heritage-optimization program backwards and they're not doing that.

 

Cheliax pays students who graduated with good grades from wizard school to have children, though talented wizards usually have lots of ways to make money and it's more about communicating that they're doing a thing valuable to Cheliax than about shifting their financial incentives much. Wizards actually have fewer children than other people because they can choose whether they become pregnant and other people can't, but Keltham's reportedly going to introduce technology to let everyone do that, which should help on that front?

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Okay, yes.  Yes, if smart people have fewer children because they have better access to contraception, and nobody is, like, doing anything about that, that could be a problem, yes.  This is frankly something Keltham has never even imagined as a catastrophic failure mode of a civilization, but that could have been, over past generations, a very large cumulative problem, yes.  How good that anyone on Golarion has finally potentially noticed this is an issue.  The good contraceptive technology that dath ilan uses is unfortunately not trivial on the tech ladder, but Keltham can explain how to research things ever and they can hopefully find some better makeshifts than whatever people are doing now.  Cheap makeshifts.  Which a sensible government will subsidize.

That interbreeding stuff is fascinating, from a seeking-hidden-order perspective, but Keltham will explain why in more length later.

Does Cheliax have any kind of thinking that's about, like... why are there equal numbers of men and women, at least among humans?  Assuming there are.  If there aren't, Keltham is going to have to check a few things and then potentially back out a number of his assumptions.

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There are equal numbers of men and women except in countries that kill baby girls, which is definitely some of them, but not Cheliax, because Cheliax doesn't suck. They are...not aware of thinking that's about that specifically. It's also true of most animals, it's not just a human thing.

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Why would it be true of humans and most animals?  There's a reason for it, a hidden order behind it.

Guess wrongly; this is the dath ilani way of education and you are not always expected to know, when the teacher asks a question, because you will not always know the answer when real life asks you a question; and in both cases you must gather your scattered and inadequate thoughts, and manage to say out loud your first guess, so you at least know what you don't know and where your current thoughts point.  If all your thoughts are wrong and you know it, say both your best-seeming current thought, and the reason it must be wrong.  Much discovery of hidden order begins like this; do not refuse to venture forth.

Permalink Mark Unread

There are some nervous giggles, at this.

 

Then they start speculating.

There might be some agreement of the gods about it, though that'd be less likely to cover animals.

Children are made from a boy and a girl, so maybe their making involves getting boy and girl inputs, and then drawing at random which turns into a child, which would get you half and half.

Maybe souls come out half and half, and then bodies that don't get a soul die, so you see half and half among live births.

 

 

Permalink Mark Unread

Suppose you were designing humans from scratch.  Would you make them to have equal numbers of men and women?  Don't consider as constraints things like the balance of male and female desire for sex or mates; you could, if you like, say that there would be twice as many men as women, and women who on average desired twice as much sex as men, if you were designing the human species from scratch.  What would be the consequences, if you were designing the species from scratch, and you said there should be twice as many men as women, or twice as many women as men?

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Well, a lot of people'd have a hard time getting laid, is the main thing? But you wouldn't actually go for equal numbers if you were optimizing for that, because men generally want sex more than women, you'd go for maybe two to one or three to one.

...actually, observes Meritxell, mostly women seems better? You can increase your population faster, because more people can bear children, and the men can get around and it's easier to attract foreign men than foreign women anyway. And she thinks women are better citizens, on average, Lawfuller.

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"Less likely to be adventurers, and a country without adventurers is dead by a thousand cuts no matter how many babies they're having."

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Ah, well, those are interesting puzzles in their own right, aren't they?  Why are women Lawfuller?  Why are men more likely than women to become adventurers?  Keltham knows the answers already, even though he's a stranger to the planet, because it was the same way in dath ilan.  He's not going to tell them the answer, just yet; they're welcome to try to see it on their own, if they can; and maybe they even will, before he gets around to giving away the answers.  If so, he will be duly impressed.

But return back to the original question.  Suppose, again, you are designing humans from scratch.  Why not twice as many women as men, and also have the women be as likely as current men to become adventurers?  Wouldn't a group like that be able to increase faster, because more people could bear children?

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...possibly you need some scarcity of women to motivate the men to be adventurers, and if they had girls either way then they'd all just lounge around doing nothing? ....no offense to present company who is admittedly a counterexample. But the average person might be motivated by it being the case that they can have sex if they work hard and not otherwise, best achieved by balance. 

 

It seems like you'd make people as Lawful as you could if you were making them and it's not clear why that'd be Lawfuler for women than for men. And same with propensity to be an adventurer - no, well, you don't want everyone being an adventurer, some of them have to stay home making the institutions function - 

- maybe there's a tradeoff in human psychology between Lawfulness and adventurer-tendency?

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In countries where people kill their daughters, they do it because men are more valuable (under the local cultural regime where women are hardly allowed to do anything). And presumably if enough people did that then eventually daughters would become valuable again, as the men wanted wives. So you'd end up with as many living women as made daughters as valuable as sons. Or with across the board infanticide if no children were valuable to have.

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(Keltham reminds himself again that the whole afterlife thing is obviously going to lead to different local mores about death, just as the existence of healing magic has led to different local mores about pain; killing babies here does not mean the same thing that killing or cryo-suspending babies would in dath ilan.  It wouldn't be surprising if the whole pre-afterlife world operates as a tiny adjunct to a much larger afterlife, only of note to gods and a higher economy because it's the part of reality that provides the afterlife with its intake feed.  Some of the attitudes ascribed to countries outside Cheliax definitely give that impression.)

(Keltham also notes that Carissa seems to be able to follow the thread of an argument better than others here.  He's not used to thinking of that as an adult capability per se, but maybe it takes a lot more life experience to follow threads of argument if you have, like, very little formal training in it.)

"Ah, well, if you value having more of your own children, then, if the human species had been designed to birth ten times as many female children as male, you might wish yourself to have more male children.  It would not necessarily be any better in terms of producing a functioning species; the species could get along fine with each male having to do ten times as much work of fertilizing women.  It doesn't take that long, well, if you're doing it right, it takes longer, but not so long that a male couldn't fertilize another female the next day.  Still, if the rest of your species gave birth to ten times as many women as men, and yet you could manage to birth only men yourself, you would have a lot more grandchildren than the average women."

"And yet what difference does any of that make?  What difference does it make, as to what some woman wants to herself, when it comes to how the human species works as a whole?  At least in dath ilan, women cannot choose the sex of their child by just an act of will.  Then how can their wants control the balance of female and male births across the whole species?  I'll tell you right now, the answer isn't that there is some mysterious channel by which the emotions of women collectively control the balance of births; you might have to look at things a little sideways to get it.  But even if you can't get it, guess anyways -"

"Oh, and don't forget, if you can guess why your guess might be wrong, say that part too!  You're not trying to convince me of your guess - this isn't like wacky Chelish books - you're not trying to tell me just one side of a story, like you're selling me your guess as a product and trying to get a higher price on it by concealing information while hoping I don't realize you're concealing information.  I mean, if you want to sell me anything in real life, sell me on how good you are at reasoning.  That means when you tell me your best guess, you should try to figure out how your best guess might be wrong; if you can see why it's probably wrong, if you can already see something that doesn't fit with your guess, tell me that part too.  Remember, when real life hands you a problem, it won't tell you when you guess wrong, the way a teacher in a classroom tells you when you're wrong.  In actual real life it's your job to figure out why your best guess might still be wrong.  Dath ilani teachers let kids stay wrong about some things for years, and older kids are forbidden to tell younger kids about them."

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"Well, people can't decide what overall population ratio makes the most sense but the gods probably can. The problem with that theory being that as far as you know dath ilan doesn't have those," Asmodia says.

 

"If you had a family that only threw daughters and one that only threw sons," Tonia said, "they'd do about as well for themselves, I'd think. It's not like throwing only sons is an advantage. Men don't have more children than women on average, since they're having them with women. The, uh, problem with my theory is, I don't know, maybe you could imagine it being two thirds to one third, and still somehow working out so that no one had an advantage, I don't know how you would prove you wouldn't."

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"Why does it matter whether some family has an advantage?  What do the forces that created humans care about that?"

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Tonia bites her lip. "I...feel like it should, but I don't have a good explanation - when someone's got an advantage, then the situation's not stable. And if no one has an advantage, then the situation's stable."

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"And if it's not stable then it moves until it arrives somewhere stable, only how is it moving, here? With national politics the way it moves is that other countries deliberately counterbalance ones that are growing. With wars, the way it moves is that the side that's more powerful wins. But with babies, it's not that some people throw all girls and some people throw all boys, where one would increase its numbers until it didn't have an advantage. Instead everybody throws a mix. ...that's just a confusion without even a theory."

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How they manage to know one thing around here, but not another... probably the concept of an equilibrium appeared in wizardry, even though, apparently, wizards don't already know calculus??  At least at their level?

"Right.  Any time you've got pressures on something, moving it, it'll keep moving for so long as the pressures aren't balanced.  Half male and half female represents a balance of something, which is why it's like that - but what is it that's balancing?  We have thoughts like 'well, if it was ten times as many women as men, or ten times as many men as women, then a women who had all male children or all female children would have more grandchildren'.  But that doesn't explain how it's a pressure - how it would be able to move the system's mix of men and women, if that mix wasn't already one-to-one.  How can we get from 'in a country with ten times as many women as men, one woman with all male children would have ten times as many grandchildren', to, 'there is a pressure that will move the average ratio of men and women if it isn't already 1:1'?"

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This takes them a while! They're more willing to show confusion on their faces, at least. 

 

Eventually: "well, say you throw only daughters, and those daughters also throw only daughters, and some other people throw only sons, who also throw only sons - no, that doesn't work, because they'd have to have children with each other -"

"No, I think you're onto something," Meritxell says. "I mean, not in the case where some people only throw sons and some only throw daughters, but in the case where some people mostly throw sons and some mostly throw daughters, and pass that along, then if you start out with mostly women, the people who mostly throw sons will have more grandchildren until there's not more women anymore, and they haven't got an advantage. Uh, I'm confused about, how you'd pass along a tendency to throw sons. I'm not sure you can do that."

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"You're on the right track.  Remember some things I told you earlier, about tiny spirals inside people; remember that those hidden orders are real and not just stories, or at least they were definitely real in dath ilan, and probably also here given that the food hasn't already killed me.  Inside every human body, there are tiny spirals that code how a body works, themselves divided into twenty-three pairs of packages.  One of those package-pairs is the sex package-pair, or chromosome pair in Baseline..."

Keltham sketches out the sex chromosomes, XY for male, XX for female.  A child gets one chromosome in each chromosome-pair from each parent, allocated by the parent at random.

"But if you imagine a new genetic-alternative, mutation, which influenced the ratio of sperm containing Y chromosomes or X chromosomes - or a mutation in the mother, which influenced whether male or female pre-infants were kept and gestated - that mutation wouldn't have to be a mutation in the sex chromosomes in particular.  A man could have sons that were more likely, though not certain, to have more other sons, and even the daughters of those men might still have male children of their own that had more sons.  The force of possible heritable mutations that would throw a different mix is the pressure that only ever reaches a balancing point at one-to-one males to females."

"Or rather, to be precise, the balance is one-to-one parental investment in males and females.  If females were half the size of men and required half as much parental attention and grew two to a birth, so that you could raise two females at the same cost as one male, the balancing point would be two women per men; you wouldn't be able to do better by birthing more men because men would be more expensive.  If you see an animal species that isn't half male and half female, the first thing to ask is whether the males or females are bigger or smaller or fewer survive to adulthood or there's otherwise some big difference in how expensive they are to birth and raise to maturity."

"But there's a larger point and a more important one.  The balancing point isn't the point that's good for the species, the country, as a whole.  It's not the point you would pick if you were a supergod making the species from scratch.  If you were doing that as a supergod, you'd probably have ten times as many women as men, and then just make it incredibly biologically difficult to ever birth all men - try to design the people so that no mutation could possibly affect the balance of ten women per men.  More members of the species would be able to birth children.  Or to look at it from another angle, you might also wonder whether a group or small faction birthing mostly women, would have an advantage over a group with half men and half women - if the mostly-female group could grow faster, because more of its members could bear children, or because it didn't have to pay the extra cost in food of supporting men too.  But then a group like that would also be vulnerable to an invading mutation that birthed more men; that mutation would rapidly spread within the group.  You can look at the sex ratio in humans, half men and half women, and say things like, 'Oh, I see that the balancing points between competing genes do not settle at the place that is good for groups having more children, it settles in the places that are advantageous for individuals having more children.'"

"And then everything else you see inside a human should settle in a similar kind of place, or it won't be stable against the pressure from mutated alternatives.  That's why you want to prosper for yourself, instead of being full of unselfish desire to see your whole country prosper.  It's why I need to offer you money to work for me, instead of you just working for the benefit of Golarion or Cheliax.  A faction full of individuals all working for the common good would grow faster, obtain more resources and have more kids, and you might think a mutation which built people like that would soon take over the world.  But as soon as that faction was invaded by a mutation in an individual that worked for their own benefit, that mutation would soon become more common; it wouldn't be a stable balancing point in the sort of species that ends up with half males and half females.  Insect species, like ants if you have those here, which you probably do if there's a word for ants, have lots of worker ants all laboring for the benefit of an ant hive; they don't have equal investment in males and females.  Ants can be balanced in different places because ants reproduce differently and workers share more genes with their queens."

"I wouldn't be surprised if the event that you remember historically as humans gaining free will, was the gods trying to modify people to work unselfishly for gods or maybe the gods' factions, like ants; but over time mutations accumulated in the human population that made them resistant to that magical template, and restored the old balancing points, where people cared about themselves instead.  Or maybe the gods stopped doing it for some other reason, I don't know, I'm new around here.  Oh, and I should say, the balancing points aren't purely selfish.  You share half your genes with your parents, half your genes with your children, and an average of around half your genes with your brothers and sisters; you have some instinct to help them, though not quite as strongly as you wish to help yourself.  My point is that, if you know how all the pieces of reality are woven together, if you know the hidden orders and secret stories behind them, you can take one glance at the statistics of women giving birth, see that it's half male children and half female children, and guess, 'I bet the people in this species mostly want pay for their work, and don't mostly work unselfishly for the good of the group like ants; I bet they care a lot about their brothers and sisters, but not nearly so much about their second cousins.  The pressures-on-heredity in this species must balance at the point where individuals and small families can't easily get more grandchildren with a different strategy, not at the point where larger groups can't get more grandchildren with a different strategy.'  And I could similarly guess very quickly that you hadn't been put together from scratch by gods or supergods, just from the way you acted so similar to dath ilani at a basic level, because gods wouldn't be bound by those balancing points the same way."

"I should probably pause here and check whether you have any questions, whether you followed all that, and whether I'm currently committing any visible horrible teaching errors that make a Chelish student's life less pleasant."

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The students are captivated.

"It fits with what we've learned in theology class," Meritxell says. "About there being deep reasons Evil is - a natural equilibrium, though not usually phrased like that -"

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"A balancing point of pressures.  Very large amounts of reality in general are at balancing points of pressures, which is why that aspect of reality sticks around in that form; it's a very common, maybe the most common form that a hidden order takes.  Water is a balancing point of pressures, in a way I'll either explain for free or sell later; if water wasn't balanced in its own dimensions of reality, you wouldn't see so much of it around.  Rocks too, they're at balancing points among the possible ways that the stuff making up rocks could be instead of rocks.  Likewise, just about everything in the human body or mind is at a local balancing point of how individuals and families can have the most grandchildren, because if it wasn't, even a small mutation could move you to a better point along that local dimension, and then that mutation would propagate.  Like people wanting to have sex, say, where if they wanted less sex, they'd have fewer kids, and if they wanted even more sex right away, they'd do things that aren't productive in the long term and end up with fewer kids.  If your body made a bunch more blood or a bunch less blood, that would, on average, lead to you having fewer kids too.  The degree to which people are Evil on average, however gods define that exactly, will also be at a balancing point relative to how many grandchildren families have when they're around that Evil - or if the world has recently been thrown into disequilibrium, the average degree of Evil will be moving away from its previous point where people in the previous world had the most grandchildren if they were around that Evil.  This would be even easier to see if you'd studied calculus, by the way, so when you do, remember to go back and rethink this in terms of derivatives equaling zero at the point where things stick around in existence."

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They take notes vigorously. 

"Spells you can cast happen at balancing points in ways that magic can be," someone volunteers. "If you try to design a spell that does a random thing you thought of that'd be nice to have a spell for, it'll blow up in your face, and the reason is that you didn't happen to stumble on a way for magic to be where the magic will be happy to be, with no nearby state it'll flow into instead. So the way to actually invent spells is to understand where magic flows, and then find places it's flowed into, and then figure out what spell that must be."

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"I'm frankly a bit puzzled as to why wizards don't already know calculus and not just topology.  But maybe if spell design is hard enough to require specialized ultra-expensive intelligence headbands and calculus is only useful once you get to that part... well, that's a topic for another time."  Keltham is going to be so amused if the actual key to spell design is on the order of 'invert the matrix to solve for the balancing point' and they just don't know how to invert matrices, but he is mostly not expecting this to be the case, though the incredibly bad design of Chelish schools sure has bumped up its plausibility.

"Anyways, uh, now that I've said all that, and just to check, has anyone had a sudden horrible realization about how mutations for lower Intelligence would be propagating, or why only what this world calls 'average intelligence' is the way for a family to have the most grandchildren, or why the Chelish heritage-optimization program is doing something horribly wrong around there?  I don't have anything specific in mind, here, I just, uh, it seems wise to check."

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"Well, probably we should be encouraging wizards more aggressively?"

"Maybe it'd make sense to not let stupid people have children?"

"Wizards are also more likely to die, I think - and we're in school for longer, and deployed when we graduate - I don't see how you'd change that though, you need all that school to get good and you need the deployment to pay Cheliax back and keep the Worldwound sealed -"

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"You could encourage wizards to have kids before they deploy, and their grandparents and the daycares raise them while they're deployed. I think it's hard to be pregnant in school right now but if it was good for Cheliax they could change the things that make it hard."

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"There's - well, there's specific details I should probably be selling, not just giving away.  But, in general, I'll observe that one corollary of this whole theory is that if you've got a really excellent female wizard, and she's got a brother, you can potentially subsidize the brother to have an extra six kids.  It's not as good as her having an extra six kids herself, but it beats doing nothing.  Anything more clever and optimal and calculated than that is probably a sale issue rather than a free giveaway, though I'm still working out which is which on that score."

"I don't know enough details about Cheliax's situation to know myself what an optimal policy should look like.  I've given you some of the knowledge you'd need to think about it, but if Chelish governance is considering a policy shift based on that knowledge, it is probably wise to run it past me too.  I don't know how to balance the intelligence of future generations against any need for immediate wizards being deployed at the Worldwound, and yeah, asking people to be pregnant in school is a large ask.  But if you are currently losing even more intelligence to that sort of leak in the gene pool, I would really seriously consider that an emergency, I would not personally have expected a stable society to be possible at this level of average intelligence and I'm not sure how much further it stays possible."

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His audience is so captivated and concerned. 

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You'd think raising kids in Cheliax would be sufficient to make them not stunningly naive but apparently it isn't, Elias Abarco mutters through the telepathic bond with his colleagues. The girls are hanging off Keltham's every word with a degree of conviction that they ought to realize is borderline dangerous - at best trying to figure out how everything else they've been told is compatible with what they're hearing now, instead of keeping in mind that maybe Keltham's just not Asmodean and won't teach them to be either. Or they're very good liars. Probably for at least some of them, it's the latter - though it's a very good presentation, optimized for Elias rather than for Keltham, who is definitely missing nearly all of its nuances. 

 

Keltham won't teach them to be Asmodean. That's obvious. Presumably part of what they're here for is to figure out whether there's a variant of Keltham's teachings that will teach kids to be Asmodean, the obvious intelligence and societal competence distilled differently, presented in a way that preserves the awe-inducing sense of 'that's what it's like, for the world to be designed around principles that you'd have to be much smarter to even begin to understand' while also preserving the stuff that'd ideally go with it - a sense of smallness and irrelevance which dath ilan clearly does not bother inculcating...

Maybe some of the girls can be set to coming up with the synthesis, once they've been nailed down. The plan is to get them tomorrow before dawn, possibly excluding Sevar who might spend the night with Keltham and, if so, can be got at breakfast. This isn't Asmodeanism but it does seem like there's a better-crafted, more compelling version of Asmodeanism buried in it, once you strip out the stuff that's plainly aimed at advancing the art rather than awing children into submission with it.

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Ione Sala, if somebody were to look inside her head - which nobody of Chelish affiliation, at least, is doing exactly at this moment - would not be smiling as much on the inside as she is on the outside.  She is thinking about how it really is beautiful that you could look at a species of half men and half women, and deduce so many other things from that, because you know why they're half men and half women, which is a huge thought she only understands a fraction of, but it implies so many other things, apparently.  And with that, you can just get tossed into another plane, even though nobody from your home plane knew for sure there were other planes, and by the time you've been there two minutes, you know which parts of the theology lessons are more there because they're mandatory for Asmodeans to believe and which parts are, the other kind of theology, it doesn't do to be too precise about thoughts like that.  But you can end up in another plane you had no idea existed, and within two minutes you know the people there weren't originally created by the gods.

Ione Sala isn't smiling as much on the inside because she's regretting, a little, that her life is like it is.  She does well on tests, it's why she's here, that and being passably pretty.  She carefully doesn't compete too hard in social contests, she aims to end up safely in the middle.  She behaves just as it is safest to behave, towards the students above her and below her, including sexual favors as they are given away to those below her who are useful, or extracted from her by those above her.  She passes her loyalty scans by being a cautiously obedient game-player even in her own mind, a sort of person that Cheliax considers adequately standard and predictable, a sort of soul that Asmodeus considers to be an acceptably tyrannized slave.  It is the way that things have always been and will always be.  If any parts of her feel otherwise, they are not allowed to voice their heretical thoughts in words; though she also knows, wordlessly in the back of her mind, that if she's a good-enough wizard someday Cheliax will ask her to sell her soul and after that it will be okay to think more freely.

Still some tiny remaining fraction of Ione Sala, even today, wishes without words or inner acknowledgment that her life could be more like the greater reality she's dimly glimpsed inside a repurposed library in an Archduke's villa: learning things, knowing how one fact connects to so many other facts, seeing how worlds differ across planes.

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But now, onward to the next part of this topic, which may be personally important to some of those present.  Suppose hypothetically that Cheliax discovers an alien visitor, who we'll guess for now to be capable of interbreeding with Golarion humans, who is about as smart as the smartest Chelish people without intelligence headbands... actually, can somebody remind Keltham of what the mean intelligence is around here, in the local measurements?  He thinks he was told this number but he's forgotten it since.  Also does this language have any more standard way to talk about the square root of the average squared deviation from the mean?

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Ten, and no, that's how you'd talk about that, though with intelligence in particular people usually talk about a two-step, which is the same thing - an intelligence of 12.

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"So around sixty-eight percent of the population should have an Intelligence between 8 and 12?  Is that about correct?"

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Yep! 

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All right then, the Chelish government has just come across an alien visitor with an Intelligence of... Keltham thinks he was told 18, though at levels like these, the difference between 17.5 and 18.5 is significant, but let's say his Intelligence is exactly 18 for now.  Though it feels funny to call himself "Intelligence 18", since in dath ilan's system, the average g is 0 and Keltham is at +0.8.  Somebody with a dath ilani g of 18 would have a dath ilani Intelligence of "46".  But let's ignore for now how the dath ilani system is obviously better and closer to the underlying math.

So anyways:  Is this alien visitor likely to be of any special benefit to heredity-optimization in Cheliax and Golarion, compared with just matching the same potential volunteers with a local man of Intelligence 18?  Is he worth anything special from the Chelish government's standpoint?

Pretend you were just collectively tapped to advise the Chelish government on this, and can't ask Keltham directly!  Also try to pretend that you're a dath ilani whose life experience trains them to continue thinking in the face of questions your teachers didn't tell you how to answer, including the part where you know and list the reasons you might be wrong.

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....well, probably it's easier to get girls to sleep with Keltham, since he's cooler than their average male classmate. If that's wrong, it's wrong because, well, you could just order them - you could just pay them more.

"So," says Tonia, "if someone reads 18 and their relatives also read 18, they're more valuable than someone who reads 18 and their relatives are more like 14, because the score doesn't map perfectly to the thing we actually care about - though it's pretty good - and someone who is an outlier is also likelier to be, sort of, a measurement error - a case where they're not actually quite as bright as their number suggests - but if their family's that smart too then they probably just are -"

"And similarly if someone's from a society where the average is 18," Asmodia says. "It's a realer 18, in a manner of speaking. ...uh, if that's wrong, it'd be because...maybe the measurement system is actually meant to evaluate locals and fails on evaluating foreigners -"

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"dath ilan is richer than us. Everyone eats better. We know that kids who don't eat enough are stupider. Maybe none of us eat enough, and we're all stupider than our children would be if they were raised in dath ilan, and so Keltham has less good heritable-traits than us, but a much better upbringing."

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"Sure, but wizard kids are mostly born to wizards, and don't go hungry."

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"We don't go hungry compared to normal people, we might still be missing something - or replace 'hunger' with 'malaria' - does dath ilan have malaria -"

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"Doesn't translate, so if it's there it's not common enough to have a name I learned, either that or this translation magic is picky about what it translates in ways I don't understand.  I... know the theory of several things that will knock half a... will knock a point off of Intelligence if you're deficient on them, that's specific knowledge rather than basic general principles but the Chelish government should maybe purchase that knowledge from me sometime soon.  I'm happy to sell it on a contingency contract where it's only worth any payment if you run experiments and find later that kids were actually deficient."  Element-53 is in seaweed.  They need to see what happens if kids here grow up eating seaweed.

"Also, credit for thinking of that at all, I should have remembered earlier that intelligence here may not be as heritable as it is where I come from because we've eliminated the variation from non-heritable factors like that.  There are also potential contaminants that can knock off a point of Intelligence or do other kinds of metabolic damage."  Element-82.  Element-3.  "You should contingency-buy my knowledge about that, too.  Or would healing spells fix that already?"

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"That's not the kind of thing that healing fixes. Restoration might but your average person who isn't an adventurer has never gotten a Restoration, it costs, uh, three or four years of unskilled labor."

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"There's a very obvious thing a dath ilani thinks immediately after hearing that.  Can you guess what it is?"

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"...that it's worth it?"

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"What's worth it depends on what you can afford.  Do you even have that many clerics who can cast spells from a high enough circle, to get your whole population that way?  It's not the first thing a dath ilani thinks, either.  Try again?"

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"...that we should at least check?"

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"Check what?  How?"

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"Try a Restoration on a number of random farmers that we can afford and check if their intelligence goes up afterwards? If you tried it on five of them and it didn't do anything for any of them then it's probably not a big deal, at least."

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"Why yes, that is indeed something that this advisory panel might tell the Chelish government to do, in order to help estimate the probable value of the alien visitor to their heritage-optimization program, and also, you know, check on general principles if there is anything that might be lowering your entire population's intelligence.  Since you figured that out on your own from being told the basics, I will not charge for that advice in that form; though there are some further refinements for sale if you would like your results to be more precise and more meaningful.  The other thing to keep in mind is that intelligence develops over time; even if Restoration immediately fixes nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants, it may not fix the way that intelligence already developed as a result of those nutrient deficiencies or subtle contaminants.  So the other thing a dath ilani thinks of immediately is to try giving some children a Restoration once every three months, and seeing if on average those children grow up with higher measured Intelligence than would be predicted from the measured Intelligence of their parents.  There are precise subtleties we think of, in the design of the investigation procedure," like having any control group at all, and any grasp of quantitative statistics, and the required number of experimental subjects to produce enough expected evidence between possible effect sizes, "though I haven't yet decided if those are for sale or free.  There are also ways we think of to start getting preliminary results faster, earlier, saving on time," like experiments on rats, followed by experiments on monkeys, who have shorter development times, and aren't protected by sapient rights the same way as chimpanzees or humans.  "But, again, I haven't decided if specifics like that are free, and they probably aren't."

"And then, if tests like that show an effect of routine Restoration on intelligence development, you know that the general population has any kind of significant problem that Restoration cures, and you can start trying to narrow down what the problem is and how to cure it without needing to spend precious cleric spells on Restorationing every member of the population."

"The larger attitude I want to teach you is that everything around you is an investigative tool.  There's a famous dath ilani fictional character who spent too much time fighting and now thinks in terms of how every object in a room could be used as a weapon.  This is that, but for figuring things out.  Your first thought was that, since Restoration cured people, maybe you could use it to solve your problem and cure everybody in the Chelish population.  Before solving problems comes figuring out problems, and the first step there is to open your eyes and look.  Everything around you is a tool for investigation, it is a potential way to poke other things and reveal facts about them.  Restoration isn't just a way of curing people of a set of problems, it's an investigation tool for seeing whether observable qualities of people are being affected by things that Restoration cures.  First, open your eyes and look; and ask how every resource you have and everything in the world around you can be an eye."

Permalink Mark Unread

Ione Sala has never deliberately tried to learn anything more about Nethys, or any other gods who aren't Asmodeus - why run even a slightly increased chance of seeming heretical? - but even she knows that this is the most Nethys thing that has been said inside the borders of Cheliax since the change of administration.  She wonders if this was enough to catch Nethys's attention, and if Nethys is now looking at this very library and will try to - well, no, Nethys can't make Keltham a cleric, Keltham's already some other god's cleric.

Permalink Mark Unread

But, let us return to this advisory board and its report to the Chelish government on the potential value of the alien visitor.  The board has recommended some experiments that might shed light on the general state of the entire Chelish gene pool which perhaps should have been done already - assuming they haven't been, Chelish Governance does seem to contain some smart people and Lawful beings - but if not, the alien visitor can sell some further refinements in those regards.  Anyways, leave that part aside.  How is the advisory board thinking about the basic question of whether it's especially useful to set up matches with an alien with 18 Intelligence?  Is it more useful than a match with an 18-Intelligence local?  Why or why not?  What are the different theories there, what is there to say for and against those theories?

Permalink Mark Unread

It depends on which produces smarter children and grandchildren. Presumably the government already has some sense of how valuable it is to them to have people of a given intelligence, so if you know which match produces smarter children and grandchildren, and by how much, you know how valuable it is.

 

You could maybe, Tonia ventures, compare marriages between Chelish INT-18 people to a marriage to, say, a Tian INT-18 person, and if marrying out produces smarter (or stupider) offspring, it ought to show up in that.

Permalink Mark Unread

An interesting thought!  Especially since, if marriages like that already exist, you could go look at those marriages already, without needing to wait years to produce your advisory report.  But before you look at a result like that, you should try to come up with some prior idea of which ways reality could be that could produce which results.  What are the different things that might be true?  What different results would they produce for Chelish-Tian marriages?

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Well, people hybridize with some other humanoid species by getting traits from both, and hybridize with some species by getting traits from just one, and hybridize with some by not turning out at all. So it might be true that hybridization across ethnicities is like that, where you get a mix, or you might get something that's not quite in between, like you get if you fuck a polymorphed air elemental, the kid isn't half air, they're just something else entirely. You'd be checking to see how people hybridize, more or less.

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"I can tell you the result of that one, if a Chelish-Tian mating is a human one and the human matings work anything like they do in dath ilan.  Twenty-three package-pairs of heritable information, remember, with each child getting their two packages one from each parent package-pair, selected at random?  So most things in a human mating will be a mix, unless a trait is being determined all at once in a single package-pair location, the way that sex is determined by the sex package-pair.  Intelligence is not determined all in one spot, if it's determined here anything at all like it is in dath ilan.  There'll be bits of heritage all over the twenty-three package-pairs that affect it, positively, negatively, and subtly."

"Well, and now that I've told you that, is there still anything you could find out from observing Chelish-Tian matings?  What could you observe differently, where you're not already sure of what you might observe?  What could those possible observations say about the package-pairs and the heritable-information coding for Intelligence?  What could it be saying about what's going on inside of those package-pairs, in Cheliax, in Tian, and in your guesses extrapolated from distant Tian to the far more distant dath ilan?"

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"...variance," says Meritxell. "If you mix two eighteens you probably get an eighteen, on average, but - but it's much more valuable to get a sixteen and a twenty than two eighteens, because the twenty can end up running the country - if Chelish people and Tian people have the same bits making them smarter, then they'll have the same variance mixed, but if they have different bits then they'll have higher variance."

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"You have slightly impressed me.  Be justly proud of this."

Permalink Mark Unread

She beams at him fiercely.

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Oh, good.  After he said that, Keltham started to worry that some dath ilani flirting tropes wouldn't make it across the vast cultural gap, but at least that one seems to have landed.

"Now here's a harder question.  How valuable is higher variance in the intelligence of offspring, if the alien visitor has mostly different bits in his package-pairs that increase and decrease intelligence?  How much can the Chelish government gain from using that variance, how much should they be willing to pay?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"Well, depends how valuable smart people are. But I think - I mean, one person with native-born INT 20 is itself something they'd pay a lot for, and the variance thing probably applies for a couple generations until it's all diluted..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hm, yes, how much you're willing to pay for one Intelligence 20 offspring does depend on what use you can make of them, which in turn depends on how clever you are in thinking up potential uses.  This advisory panel of the greatest native experts in Cheliax on heritage optimization has been convened to make expert recommendations about heritage-optimization to the Chelish government, since that is what this advisory panel knows more about than anybody else in Cheliax, or Golarion for that matter.  This may now actually be true about you in real life, by the way.  Anyhow, the rest of Governance will decide for itself how valuable an Intelligence 20 person will be for purposes of fighting at the Worldwound and such.  What can this advisory panel say to Governance - or wildly guess with appropriate qualifiers - about the clever use of any Intelligence 20 children from the alien, for the purposes of heritage-optimization in particular?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- you probably shouldn't pair them off with their half-siblings, you get weird genetic defects that way, and there aren't any native twenties...that I've ever heard of -"

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"And now I know you actually do have the package-pair system around here!  The pairs of packages carry duplicates of a lot of the same genetic information for constructing a person - that is, if a package is carrying some of the instructions for building, like, fingers, you've got the same information on both packages in the pair, usually.  If one of the package-pairs gets damaged, in that particular, the other element of the pair can often take over and make sure your fingers still get built.  If a brother and a sister mate, their offspring has a one-fourth probability of ending up with the same package twice, for each of the twenty-three pairs.  You are a lot more likely to end up with no information for building fingers that way.  In dath ilan, the corresponding equilibrium is that people usually aren't sexually attracted to other people they grew up with.  If people here weren't also built from package-pairs, they wouldn't get the same deleterious effects from mating with half-siblings."

"Anyways, yes, you shouldn't pair off my kids with each other in the first or second generations, unless you've already developed other magic or technology for telling who got which packages from me.  Still, what are they worth to the Chelish government?  Ignore the part for the moment about whether any of my kids are smarter than any other kids in this world - they may not be, for reasons I'll get into - that's a fighting-at-the-Worldwound issue anyways.  How would you guess the value of intelligence variance for the heritage-optimization program, or the value of having different bits of heritage that are increasing and lowering intelligence?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

They are pretty stumped by this. You could have smarter kids, but that's been said already. You can't directly try to use the best bits because they have no magic that refers to things on the level of bits.

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It's not occurring to them that they could just... "Ah, what kind of - intelligence-training games, you don't have a word for them, that's not a good sign - what kind of complicated games do Chelish children play, if any, at all?"

Permalink Mark Unread

People play Knights, which is a two player board game with pieces that move in different ways, and Spy, which is a group game where some children are spies and some are soldiers and they have to figure out who's sabotaging their operations, and it takes them a suggestive while to come up with a third, though someone eventually offers that there are spelling bees.

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HOW DOES EVERYTHING MANAGE TO BE THIS BROKEN SIMULTANEOUSLY WOULDN'T THE KIDS THEMSELVES SPONTANEOUSLY INVENT BETTER GAMES THAN -

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right, then, what we are going to do now is invent a new reality-mirroring game.  That is one of the things that a dath ilani child would do as a matter of course, faced with a question they had no idea how to answer, whether that question came from an older child or a Watcher or from life itself; they would try to invent a game, corresponding to the question, that they might learn something from playing."

"There is math that I know which describes in a quite simple way the value of variance for heritage-optimization, as it happens, or the result of having the variations come from different bits of heritage.  But it can be hard to correctly derive the math that will give you the fully general answer right away.  Inventing games can be straightforward in a way that doing math is not."

"I did tell you how the twenty-three package pairs work.  So why not invent a game with, say, four package-pairs, and four places in each package where heritages can potentially vary?  How would you make a game like that, and play it, to learn something about how heritage-optimization might play out?  As an advisory panel to the Chelish government, it may be worth your time to spend a whole day playing games like that, if that's where you're generating your ideas and advice - in fact, you might even hire other people to play them for you, and report back about the results.  Though here, you can't do that yet, even if you brought in somebody else to hire in real life, because you're still learning how to invent and play relevant games at all."

Permalink Mark Unread

 


They set at this. Somewhat abashedly. ...everyone has four package-pairs and four places where heritages can potentially vary, and each spot can either be a "smart" or a "nothing" or a "dumb", and your score is the smarts minus the dumbs. Everyone can trade with other people, and you can drop the current 'person' you're playing for any of your offspring, and other people tell you their total score but not any components, and you try to have the smartest 'person' after twenty rounds.

Would that be the right kind of game.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Play it once and see what happens!"

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They try it? It's not clear anyone is having any fun but they work very effortfully at it. Mostly everyone tries to do all of their trades with the highest-scoring person around, who has no real incentive to trade with dumb people. This is probably reflective of life but it's not very fun.

Permalink Mark Unread

This game is not even slightly reflective of how anything would plausibly work in reality, and nobody has any idea of how fun game design or accurate simulation-game design works, and they are playing a game that would be cooperative in real life as if it is a competitive one, and it is occurring to Keltham for the first time that they may not even consciously know the difference between positive-sum and zero-sum games, which sure would explain why simple words for that don't seem to exist in Taldane, or why no Chelish book or Chelish person has ever happened to use the terms around him yet.

Right.  This is fine.  Everything is fine.

"All right, let's stop there," Keltham says, trying to maintain the same calm demeanor that a Watcher would have in this situation.  "I think this game isn't playing out the same way it would play out if Chelish governance was running a heritage-optimization program; do you have any ideas what went wrong and how you should modify the game?"

Permalink Mark Unread

They noticed some problems!

 - high intelligence people can't get much out of trading, whereas in real life people are pretty motivated to have sex even if they don't get smart children out of it

- you can only be one person, so you have to ditch the person you were if you want to be a new person, but maybe you should just get to add them to your stable? that'd incentivize having more children, though also the paperwork would get really annoying

- no one has any particular insight into how some people got better, it seems like mostly just luck

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am genuinely not sure how to introduce this topic if you have never encountered it before, but sometimes in real life, a group of people have to work towards a common goal, and at the end get some payout in common that they have to divide up - according to previously agreed-upon rules, if they were smart.  Games can work like that too, and should, if they're trying to mirror that kind of reality.  Chelish Governance is going to be trying to make the game work like that, that's sort of the whole point of having a government in the first place."

"The other thing that's missing is that you don't - seem to have a current notion of what you're trying to find out from the game - you know, I think I may be doing this wrong and not providing you with enough direction literally the first time you're doing this.  You play games with older kids leading, before you get handed some problem that requires you to invent a game for younger kids to play with you.  Well, I may just be motivated to think that because of my personal interest in having this particular topic taught quickly; still, the rationalization seems valid after having been invented."

"So!  Things you could be testing in this game include alternate rules that Chelish governance could give the players about subsidies and rewards, which would lead players each trying to maximize their own score, to do useful things for heritage-optimization.  And now it's occurring to me that maybe you don't already have this concept, maybe people here just make up laws that sound like good ideas and don't play games to figure out what the laws will do in their effects on selfish people.  In which case I also have to, at some point, convey basic competence for figuring out what effects different legal systems would have and optimizing better laws, which, the complete wreckage of what my own people consider Lawfulness in Golarion, should maybe have suggested to me earlier was also going to end up a Project issue, but never mind one thing at a time."

"The other thing you were going to investigate was the effect of adding one person with different bits of heritage to the system.  So for now, just make up some fixed rules about points that players score by having smarter characters in their hand, let's say there's at most three characters you can keep in your hand at one time, and your objective is not to score higher than other players, it's just to score as many points as possible for yourself.  Characters can be male or female at random; men can have any number of children in a lifetime, women can have only three children per lifetime.  When any two players mate their characters, they have to agree in advance on which player will retain the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters one of whom has over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra point to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  Any time a mating occurs between two characters both with over ten smarts, the Chelish government pays an extra three points to whichever player doesn't end up owning the resulting offspring.  At the end of the game, everybody gets a bonus equal to total smarts divided by ten, which mirrors the real-life fact that smart people don't capture all of the value they create for themselves and that smarter societies end up generally richer even for the nonsmart people in them; and remember, your in-game goal is to maximize your total points for yourself, not worry at all about how many points other players are scoring..."  Keltham goes on sketching some additional rules intended to make the game mirror real-life genetics, and real-life incentives under conditions of government subsidy.

Each player gets one free mating at the start of the game with the 'Thamkel' character, which is the only one that has any 'smart' or 'dumb' values at the fourth locus of each chromosome - all other characters have 'neutral' at the fourth locus.  'Thamkel' also has only neutral values at the first locus, where other characters can have 'smart' or 'dumb' there.  This reflects the way that Thamkel has some different varying bits.  You can't legally mate two Thamkel offspring during the first two generations afterwards.  There are a few other characters as smart as Thamkel, but only Thamkel has any variation in the fourth locus for each chromosome.

And then Keltham observes what happens under the new game conditions.  Do they - sort of get the point of the simulation, now, or the incentives?  At all?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes, once he spells it out they can follow how that's like the situation they're trying to produce, and they can try to fumble through it with all the new scoring rules in mind. They're...still not clear on how you learn from this how much Thamkel helps, aside from playing the game without Thamkel in it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, yes, after they've played this game for a few generations, they're going to score themselves, and then play a new game without Thamkel in it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Right. 

They're still evidently not having any fun but they do this very diligently, and get better at it over a couple of trials, and take down their scores. (They seem to find it hard not to track who has the highest score). 

Permalink Mark Unread

He's seriously not trying to score them on their game scores!  First of all, people were given randomized characters with uneven qualities at the start of the game, just like life itself isn't fair in that way, and second, he's watching to see if people play according to their incentives, not whether they get higher scores than other players.

...he's not sure what's going wrong with the way that nobody's having fun.  Maybe just the sheer cognitive load associated with not really instinctively feeling what's going on and not having pre-learned brain patterns for this complicated game?  He should maybe back off of this soon, then, and only re-approach after playing simple games with shorter-term intrinsic real rewards associated with good play, like if they're doing it on a playground, or the adult equivalent of that.  He doesn't want to train his students that simulation games aren't fun.

"So this game wasn't a very realistic one - for example, you knew all of your characters' genetic information locus by locus, where, for a more realistic game, we should've had some Game Masters who only told you a character's total Intelligence score, didn't tell you anything about the specific loci, and generated new characters for everyone after each mating.  Nonetheless, for this unrealistic version, around how valuable was Thamkel?"

Permalink Mark Unread

(Two games without Thamkel managed to take Intelligence from 10 to 12.2 and 12.8, over the prescribed number of generations.  Two games with Thamkel took Intelligence to 13.6 and 12.8.  It's frustrating how slowly the game seems to progress!)

Permalink Mark Unread

But still, that suggests Thamkel is maybe worth a point over the next couple of centuries, which is a lot, if it were true on a population scale.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unfortunately, I can't promise this scenario is at all realistic.  The results you got were ones that I knew you'd get; the game simplified things to where, more or less, the main thing driving the results was how much variance, squared-deviation, you had to select on.  The games with Thamkel gave you four-thirds as much variation to work with as the games without him, and that's basically the answer you got.  That said, though the game was simplified, that part should be more or less true about real genetics according to the real math; the real math says that the rate of selection on a characteristic goes as the covariance between the variance of that characteristic and variance in fitness."

"I could have just proved that, but I thought it was more important to show you a methodology that works for getting a quick perspective on modeling something in an hour, when you don't know how to prove a general mathematical result inside that hour.  Even the abstract math wouldn't take into account things like the division of the genes into twenty-three package-pairs, and until we played this game with four package-pairs, it would be hard to tell from looking at the more abstract path whether that was a critical thing to model."

"Is it realistic that the game with Thamkel has four-thirds as much variation to select on?  That's the critical question, and unfortunately, that part I don't know.  I wish I could remember what percentage of population variance an average dath ilani is carrying, or figure out how many alternative alleles besides that would have been fixed in your population, versus my population, over the unknown time since dath ilan diverged from whatever human biology got here.  With my own world's technology, we could spot-check the tiny spirals directly, see how different they were, figure out how much they'd diverged, and get a good guess how long ago it had happened chronologically.  But I can't do that, and I don't remember even some of the relevant figures that I've actually seen."

"The end result could be anywhere between 'Keltham is worth a five percent boost to how much heritage optimization we can get over a millennium' to 'Keltham has most of a whole other plane's worth of intelligence-promoting alleles that differ from our own pool and that gives us twice as many beneficial mutations to work with' or even, though this would be extreme, 'Keltham quadruples the amount of variance we have to work with, because the cumulative differences between his plane and our plane are four times larger than the pool of important mutations we were selecting on locally, and selection starts going four times as fast for a while a hundred years later.'"

"But, let's be real here, unless I'm somehow worth much less than I look on the surface of the game, the Chelish government cannot realistically pay me as much as my genes are worth to Golarion a thousand years later.  And also, let's be real, I didn't exactly do all the work of dath ilan that selected people like me into existence, even if my genes would usually be considered to be owned by myself; the percentage of generated value that I capture should maybe be legitimately less than if I was selling a book I wrote.  So this is mostly a situation of eh, make me an offer for some unknown-size but probably civilization-level long-term boost.  Plus maybe some unusually smart kids in the first generation, if a lucky draw from the higher-variance heritage-bits that go into a Chelish woman with high Intelligence play well with half of a dath ilani baseline."

"Though I suspect the first generation's results may possibly see a drop instead, unfortunately, if it breaks up some package-combinations of established dath ilani genes that rely on each other.  Or if my kids don't get the right nutrition, or if other kids start getting the right nutrition and catch up.  You're not paying for a higher mean in the first generation than you could've gotten with an 18-Intelligence person from Tian, you're mainly paying for higher variance between smart kids over the next decades, centuries, and millennia.  Which is a lot more valuable than you might realize without doing the math or playing the game.  If the end result is that you get all of another world's good ideas from its tiny spirals, it really is quite valuable - but most of the value won't show up in the very first generation of remixing the package-pairs."

"What's a fair value on that between friendly trade partners, in a world otherwise dancing on the edge of imminent destruction by the Worldwound?  Good question, really.  Unless your government tries to lowball the offer by an amount I consider insulting or silly, I doubt that's going to end up the real sticking point.  I suspect a larger cause for hesitation is that I find myself selfishly concerned with what sort of life my kids will lead, including the ones who only end up with Intelligence sixteen - or even fourteen if that's how much variance is in play, and the first generation ends up breaking important combinations inside the dath ilani baseline genome.  I mean, the kids who'd otherwise exist instead of my kids wouldn't be hugely better off, unless you'd otherwise have found mates much smarter than me, so all fine from a Good perspective.  But I'm not Good and I know very little about this place and it is kind of a gigantic flaming mess and they'd be my kids - well, that's the sticking point from my own perspective."

"But anyways, I have now conveyed to you, and so hopefully to Chelish Governance soon after, that basic knowledge of reality's underlying workings which is required to guess a valuation over the genes from an alien traveler with 18 Intelligence, including the elements of great uncertainty in models thereof.  I await your government's offer, and perhaps more importantly, testable predictions over my offspring's future circumstances."

Permalink Mark Unread

- nervous giggles. 

 

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" - what about their circumstances do you want predictions about exactly? That they'll get a good education? That they'll, uh, consider themselves to have been done a favor, by your creating them?"

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"...I frankly have not thought about this enough!  I thought I had several more years at least to think about it, and when I contemplated it before, did not expect this quantity of potential variation from baseline circumstances I would need to consider!  My kids considering me to have done them a favor by becoming their dad would be, would be a start.  But also, am I going to scream in horror every time I try to check in on one of my 144 kids and they're being taught how to do arithmetic incorrectly in 'school', and should I even let that stop me or is it just the kind of thing that somebody has to grit their teeth and accept if Golarion is ever going to be less of a giant flaming mess?  The prospect of having 144 kids here would be less of a funawful question if this place was less of a giant flaming mess!  Should I maybe at least wait until two successive waking hours have gone by without my realizing once again that in fact things in Golarion are much worse than I previously realized?  This at minimum would seem to indicate some basic level of achieved epistemic stability that seems valuable for making irrevocable long-term decisions!"

"My feelings about this are a bit disordered and I'm not going to try to sort them out in two minutes, I can tell I won't end up with a great answer if I do that."

Permalink Mark Unread

There's a silence long enough it could be considered awkward.

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"Golarion's probably going to be a whole lot better in ten years, anyway, you can stall on this one for as long as you can bear to."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, here's another bit of knowledge, I'll throw it in for free:  The little tiny spirals aren't perfectly stable, they degrade little by little over time, that's part of the story behind how getting old kills you.  The tiny spirals in female and male reproductive elements are some of the most protected and best repaired in the whole body, but parents getting old before reproducing is still not good for kids.  If a man does something really impressive at 50, people try to have his kids' kids, not that guy's kids directly -"

"Unless magical healing or Restoration repairs that.  That's something we can also check by measuring the children's intelligence from existing marriages between people who have or haven't had Restorations.  Though it also implies that - adventurers? - should age more slowly, so if that's not already known to be true, maybe don't bother."

"But even if that is true, I'm not going to take ten shitting years to decide a thing.  A ten-year delay is not a trivial cost to heritage optimization in Cheliax and Golarion.  I'm not slow like a tiny cognitive snail.  I'm going to have any idea how Golarion works before ten years pass, I'll see how fast it's improving.  When I try to predict my own future decision, my first-order intuition is 70% that I say yes and that means my real probability is more like 95% given the known direction of systemic error there.  Delaying ten years on something you're 95% likely to do eventually is downright stupid.  But spotting myself ten days, that I may perhaps do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Adventurers age mostly normally, wizards worth their salt cast daily aging-delaying spells and make one thirty, one fifty. I have no idea if their later-in-life children tend stupider."

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"Wizarding school is disproportionately firstborns, though, everyone knows that. Moreso in other countries where it might just be parental investment, but even here," Jacme says.

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"Does that mean people should mostly have children in school, for that reason," Meritxell says, "or is the difference between your teens and twenties not as large -"

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"Twenties is - considered socially fine, default childbearing years, you'd only push it into your teens or thirties if you were planning to have lots of kids and your twenties weren't enough?  That's what our customs were, but I don't remember what the numbers are on that... you know, as much as we train to operate under ignorance, it's really quite alarming not to be able to look certain things up on - on the repository of all human knowledge that every dath ilani can instantly access from their house.  Uh, that's high on the tech ladder and you're not going to be able to do that for a while."

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"...how do you set that up?"

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"Same tech that I'd use to talk to somebody on the other side of the planet.  Or get the statistics from a million runs of a game like the one we just played, without anybody playing it.  Tools to make tools to make tools, hidden orders beneath hidden orders beneath hidden orders, if it was simple you'd have figured out more of it by now on your own.  The tech ladder goes up.  You go look for bits and pieces of reality that can interact with each other from far away, you look for bits and pieces that you can arrange and rearrange into incredibly complicated dynamic patterns using advanced tools, and you take your books and turn them into patterns like that and let them interact with other people from far away.  If it wasn't for magic maybe being able to boost things in ways we couldn't do in dath ilan, I'd say that there was little chance we'd live to see it ourselves - not as mortals, maybe from the afterlife.  With magic, anything is possible so far as I know; you, of course, may know better."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We'll need headbands," says Merixtell, very dryly.

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham is not really the intended audience of that statement. 

 

Also Meritxell must be really convinced it's worth getting in trouble for it, because there aren't a lot of continuations of the conversation that don't involve nailing down how much they're supposedly all being paid.

Carissa respects the initiative, honestly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Legit.  I - should maybe prioritize learning about those, more than I've been prioritizing that, previously, within my incredibly rapidly lengthening long list of priorities.  How much social credit do I need with Chelish Governance to start getting headbands for everyone, for that matter?  What does it take to impress them?  A direct price list for what it takes to rent stuff by the day would come in handy.  For that matter, I've got fourth-circle cleric spells I can potentially sell; resorting to that seems like it would reflect a process inefficiency, but it's sometimes okay to do inefficient things temporarily."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it's plausible today was enough they'll loan you all the cheapest kind of headbands, which do two points; the expensive kind is four times that and does four points, and the most expensive time is four times that again and does six. I suspect the Chelish government does not have twenty, or even three, of the most expensive kind, they'd be requisitioning from adventurers, and that's much more expensive than the materials price."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose if that wasn't true, Golarion would look different from how it does... there's one metal, spellsilver, that's the limiting resource?  I would have memorized a lot more about the properties of every known kind of elemental metal and how to mine them all most efficiently, if I'd known this was how my life would go.  It's unfortunately exactly the sort of knowledge most people, such as me, are too lazy to memorize if you have access to the universal repository.  But with any luck, climbing the tech ladder on generating heat and turning heat into motion will suffice for moving and sifting greater quantities of any kind of ore."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Spellsilver and enchanter time but the sale price is sixty percent just the price of the raw materials and if that were cheaper, in the long run more wizards would train into enchanting wondrous items."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And with more headbands, even basic headbands, we get more wizards who can train to make more expensive headbands.  When things go well, that's why they go well, in economies."

"We should probably break soon for the day, after which I should take a brain cooldown rest, and then try studying basic wizard magic, I think?  Though before then I did have a couple of things left to say about the optimization of hereditary information, and some of those points are cautionary and shouldn't be left off."

Permalink Mark Unread

What would you need to caution people about that's a fraction as bad as accidentally making your whole population stupider because only smart people can learn Alter Self.

 

They're starting to trust Keltham to know where he's going, though. They listen.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll start with a probing sort of question, though if everyone's too tired, I can step back from probing questions.  On the other hand, if only some of you are too tired, that part can continue.  I'll see if I get sensible answers, I guess.  Anyhow!  Optimizing your whole population gene pool is obviously not something you'd want to make mistakes with.  How could you gain more knowledge about what you were doing, in advance of doing anything risky?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...do it with part of your population? One duchy, not the whole country?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Better than doing it with the whole country, possibly.  But heritage optimization takes time.  Every time you try something and see what happens, you have to wait one human generation to see what happens, and if you need two generations, well, that adds up very quickly.  Gonna keep the whole country waiting while you play around in that one duchy?  Doing nothing also has risks."

"Speed of discovery matters.  It's not enough to get there eventually.  How can you figure out what the ass you're doing with heritage optimization without spending twenty years every time you want to try something?  How can you learn about the sort of mistakes that only show up three generations later, in less than sixty years?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...do it with mice?"

"...do it in a time-dilated demiplane?"

"...ask Asmodeus?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, you got some resources we don't got in dath ilan.  I assume that time-dilated demiplanes are very expensive, but I nonetheless can't help but ask how much we have to prove ourselves before we get to tuck ourselves into one of those and do the rest of this faster?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The nearest known permanent one is in Nex, on another continent, and I don't think it's listed for rent, though maybe they have a price. It wouldn't be very surprising if we had a secret one for emergencies, but it's probably tiny, if so, they're cheaper if they're tiny, and the Queen has a necklace of adaptation so she wouldn't need it to have air, if there's one just for her and Lrilatha."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, not step one then.  But you really might end up with some very nice things in a very short time, if you can scale the technology and magic to where you can get a decent-sized research team into a time-dilated demiplane."

"But I digress.  In dath ilan, sure, you could use mice.  But why limit your ambitions to just playing around with mice?  Humans aren't the only sort of biological organisms with useful heritages."

Permalink Mark Unread

This puzzles them. "...orcs have a faster generation time than humans and are more like us than mice?" someone offers.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good case for starting with an orc duchy if there's one around here, but remember that I've been telling you the secrets of life itself, in general.  Do you use life for anything around here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"Corn?" says Tonia. "It grows every year and we do select it a lot, for not getting weevils and having big ears."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep.  Corn's got two packages per package-tuple the same as humans, if I recall, though not twenty-three package tuples - I don't recall the exact number.  Wheat - if you've got that here, which I expect you do because the word translated - if it's the same wheat I know, at least - has six packages per package-tuple.  If you've been selecting plants at all, and the people who've been selecting them have already made any effort to try things systematically and observe results, there's a whole body of knowledge there that you might be able to apply to heritage optimization in general.  And if they haven't been trying things systematically and observing results, then that's the art you're here to learn; and whatever wonderful theories and strategies you come up with, why, maybe you could try them faster and cheaper on a field of corn than on a duchy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're systematic," Tonia says. "Probably not the way people are in dath ilan but they know what kinds do well with what weather and how they all hybridize and they track yield per acre and they trade tips, and particularly good strains."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Heh, that's an example of the good-news bad-news duality right there.  It's no doubt been good for Cheliax that they already know that much, but bad news that they'll have already tried a lot of obvious stuff, which makes it harder for us to stroll in and double corn yields on our first try.  Are there specialists who make particularly good strains, or do people just trade them as they randomly crop up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't ...think there's a way to make them besides planting historically good strains and seeing how they do. Not that I heard of anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, if they're already doing the obvious, I think the steps beyond that are knowledge-for-sale not universal-basics.  Still, should probably get a book on that."

"But if we got that book, and after reading it, the notion of the tiny spirals and the package-tuples gave you some idea that you thought people probably hadn't tried yet - well.  What sort of precautions should you take, when trying to create new strains of corn using a clever new method nobody's tried before?  Because in real life, on really novel problems, there's no teacher telling you which precautions you need to take, or correcting you if you miss one."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"....pray for guidance? I know that's not what you're going for but it's actually - the front-line intervention for unexpected consequences, really -"

 

"Maybe Asmodeus is sick of saving us from mistakes we could catch ourselves."

"Starting small, like with one duchy except maybe even smaller, one cornfield."

"Checking the corn for poison, to make sure you didn't make it worse somehow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Feed the corn to mice before you fed it to humans, sure.  But then, besides asking 'What precautions should I take?', one should perhaps first ask, 'What exactly could go wrong in the first place?'  What could potentially go wrong with trying to create a new strain of corn?  How could there be a disaster, not just a minor stumble, from trying to create a new strain of corn?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Otolmens wishes she had not been REMINDED of that.  Those were not GOOD TIMES.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is a question Chelish wizards are spectacularly good at answering. 

"It happens to be really good for a certain kind of pest, and they grow to ten times their usual size and eat everyone in the village."

"It smells irresistible to dragons."

"It angers the fae."

"It's so much more fertile than all other corn that it gets carried away on the wind and grows everywhere, blotting out all other life, until nothing grows anywhere on the continent but corn."

"It's great for a couple years but it's sucking all the vitality out of the soil and leaves only sand behind."

"It lures maneating rats from the Underdark and then the infestation is impossible to root out."

"It grows six hundred feet in height and angers the aerial dragons."

"Locusts that lay their eggs in it have an unnaturally high survival rate and so instead of occasional clouds of locusts we have constant clouds of locusts and they blot out the sun."

"It's addictive and once you've eaten it you can't eat anything else."

"It disrupts the flow of magical energies through the land beneath its roots and remaps all the ley lines in Cheliax, which causes a bunch of adjustment hurricanes and strands half the towns on the royal line."

"It develops impossible geometry - the kind where looking at it gives you a headache - and anyone who wanders into the field come harvest time is lost forever."

"It requires so much water that it sucks up water for hundreds of miles around, turning half of central Cheliax to desert."

"It's actually just mediocre corn but with mind-control to make you think it's really great corn, and we're convinced we succeeded and plant it everywhere at which point it's powerful enough to enslave the whole country."

Permalink Mark Unread

The little mortals really have NO idea, do they.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does that sort of thing happen a lot around here -"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I mean, those would be unusually bad outcomes."

"Usually interactions between the natural world and surrounding magical geography are fairly bounded, there's only a couple documented incidents of ley-lines moving because of ecological changes alone."

"Something going horribly wrong with pests is pretty likely but that's what adventurers make a living handling."

"Plants are the category of living thing least likely to spontaneously develop spell-like abilities or sapience, there are only about a hundred known kinds that have."

"No one has the slightest idea what angers the fae, planting a new corn crop might but not planting a new corn crop might too."

"And if the dragons are mad they'll probably tell us. - burn some villages first, but then tell us."

 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am suddenly concerned about whether I have accidentally fallen into the trap of thinking I am a story protagonist, instead of applying the principle of mediocrity.  When I landed near the Worldwound, was I otherwise-improbably being placed near the most important present disaster in the world, or actually is most of Golarion like that outside the protected housing and the Worldwound was just number twelve on the list of worst disasters from the previous week?"

Keltham's first-order uncorrected intuitive probability he'll want to have kids here has now fallen to 65%, not so much from this update about Golarion's nature, per se, as what it implies about a predictable string of first-order updates that have all been in the same direction so far.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I think the Worldwound is a reasonable candidate for the worst problem in the world," Meritxell says. "There are a few other planar rifts but they're much smaller. Cheliax has most of our military deployed at the Worldwound, we wouldn't do that if there were ten things as likely as it to destroy the world. But there are a lot of places that are horrible on a scale that won't destroy the world."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, at least that's a slightly pleasant surprise about how nice a place Golarion is to live, compared to where I'd just sent my second-order estimate."

Keltham genuinely is relieved about this; to be repeatedly surprised by the same observation indicates that the machinery making up yourself is not properly reflecting the idea of 'surprise'.  A stable meta-rule 'no matter how bad you imagine Golarion is, it is actually worse' implies some defect in you and not just the planet.

Permalink Mark Unread

A lot of people, it has occurred to Carissa, think Cheliax is the worst problem in the entire world. That's because they're dumb and get really worked up about a little bit of torture, though.

Permalink Mark Unread

"So if this was dath ilan, I'd know how probable or in a sense typical the disasters you named actually were, but I have very little sense of that here.  Being able to imagine disasters at all is step one.  Being able to refine your sense of which disasters are actually likely to hit you is step two.  Then, usually, after that, you need a step three where people realize that even if they don't like a disaster and start hurling insults at it about it being super incredibly improbable, there's a difference between the kind of disaster that ignores insults like that and gets you anyways, versus the kind of disaster that really actually goes against the character of reality and almost certainly won't happen.  I cannot guide you through developing that sense for probabilities using realistic examples, because, I am realizing, I haven't a butt's notion of where any of what you said falls on that spectrum."

"But if you have a sense of something like - what is a typical disaster for Golarion that might happen to you personally while breeding a new crop; versus things that happen often enough that you hear about them, but rarely enough that they haven't happened to you or anyone you know; versus possibilities that can't really get at you?  From a selfish perspective, people are mainly incentivized to guard against common disasters that hurt themselves; if you look at it from the perspective of Chelish Governance, it's their job to make sure anyone who's allowed to experiment inside their country needs to be guarding against country-injuring rare disasters; and both of these agents will be falling down on their jobs if they spend all their resources guarding against imagination-capturing disasters that are genuinely out of character for Reality and not just being insulted by being called names like 'impossible'.  So - common-level disasters, rare-level disasters?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ruins the soil is common," Tonia says. "Attracts new pests that grow to unusual size is common. Grows too well and takes over your other fields too is common. All of those've happened to my father or my grandfather. Angers the fae is - happens to someone's cousin in another village."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The usual rule is that as you go up the tech ladder, the danger levels go up because the power levels go up, meaning that smaller missteps can have larger effects.  I do not get the impression that this is the tiniest bit untrue of magic and Golarion - but, just to check -?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Seems right. The Worldwound was caused by a fight among gods. Most other really bad things I can think of were caused by epic wizards."

Permalink Mark Unread

"As you get more clever at breeding plants, you can, to some degree, even in dath ilan without magic, manage to do a bit more damage than if you were less clever.  If you successfully use focused breeding to create corn that is incredibly resistant to the most common diseases around, more disease-resistant than any corn has ever been before, it may be more likely than regular corn to take over all your other fields by accident."

"If you breed ultra-fast-growing plants and plant them repeatedly on the same land, year after year, they will suck key nutrients out of the soil, unless you figure out what those nutrients are and take extra steps to replenish them.  Even if you figure out how to provide the plants with the nutrients that they need to keep growing, the fast-grown plants may end up less nutritious for people, or animals, who eat those plants - unless you replenish aspects of the soil that aren't as obvious.  Subtle deficiencies that people may not notice at first, especially if people are eating the older crops too, for a while.  If you figure out how to fix the short-term problem of your fast-growing crops dying, by replenishing the aspects of soil that just the plants need, you may not replenish enough of key tiny nutrients that people need.  Praying for guidance sure would be helpful for that sort of thing, if it worked perfectly reliably.  But even leaving aside the point that apparently 'prophecy is broken' now, it seems wiser for you to try to develop the skill that we needed in godless dath ilan - like, at least write down in advance what you predict the guidance will be, before you pray for guidance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You rotate crops," says Tonia. "And maybe...take soil samples, to see how other older crops grow in them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Rotating crops helps some, doesn't fix the whole problem because there's some things that almost every crop takes from the soil.  How much is it helping?  Feed your rotated fast-grown crops and non-rotated fast-grown crops and slowly grown crops to mice, or other animals that grow in even faster generations, and see how the three groups do health-wise relative to each other.  Keep your eyes open, don't wait for problems to materialize before you start looking, imagine things that might go wrong and look for them early, maybe you'll catch something you didn't imagine while you're looking for some possible problem you did imagine, the important thing is to keep your eyes open wider."

"Besides soil depletion if you figure out how to grow more crops faster, there's one other problem that's very predictable, that happens because of how well you succeeded at plant breeding, and it leads into another one of those larger points.  Suppose you produce a single field of corn, all of one strain, that's the best corn you've ever seen.  It grows fast, it's resistant to disease and insects and strong winds, it's tastier than the previous corn, you feed it to mice and the mice do fine.  You find - well, you probably don't have replicators - you find somebody reliable to verify your reports, and you take that corn strain and sell it to farmers all over Cheliax.  A year later, it's the most profitable corn anyone has ever seen, and only a complete fool of a farmer would grow anything else the next year.  Two years later, it's the only strain of corn that anyone still grows in Cheliax, and it's starting to displace other crops that are less profitable to grow.  All massively replicated out of that one original field."

"What happens next?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If there's a blight it'll take out half our food crop," says Tonia. "Because everything will have the exact same vulnerability."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not if.  There will be a blight.  It's not just that there's a corn blight and Cheliax is growing too much corn.  It's that blight itself is a form of life and it reproduces and blight that targets this exact strain of corn will reproduce faster on this exact strain of corn and then reproduce just as fast when it jumps to the next ear of corn that all came through the same bottleneck and all has the same genetic information inside it.  Everything still alive has an internal system that counterattacks and resists disease, and since everything has slightly different tiny spirals, all the internal systems use slightly different counterattacks and methods of resistance.  If all the ears of corn are too similar to each other, if you copied too much of the tiny spirals too fast and made too many organisms out of them, because they were such great tiny spirals and such great organisms, the disease that's mutating and reproducing and targeting those exact disease-fighting systems will get too good at targeting those exact disease-fighting methods and wipe them all out."

"The same thing would happen if we produced a kid with INT 20 and there was magic for copying kids and somebody got the bright idea that Cheliax needed a million kids like that.  There's a million tiny variants of even minor diseases, one of those variants would happen to be really strong against that exact form for a disease-fighting system, and then instead of the disease just killing that one kid, he'd sneeze and that variant would jump to the copy of the kid, and then the next copy, and the next, and that variant would be just as effective against all of them."

"That's one reason why dath ilan doesn't take the thousand brightest men in the whole world and try to have them each get ten thousand women pregnant.  It's copying too much of the heritage information too fast."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"....also sounds logistically difficult," someone mutters.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hey, if doing that sort of thing wouldn't kill everyone, jumping 2 Intelligence points in a generation would be worth a few logistical difficulties."

Permalink Mark Unread

His audience, which is definitely interpreting 'a few logistical difficulties' as 'you'd have to have the men under an exceptionally powerful Dominate Person with a team of dedicated clerics healing them and keeping them under', nods seriously.

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham, who is definitely interpreting 'a few logistical difficulties' as some mix of 'men mastering the partial ejaculation technique' if they're doing it the fun way, and otherwise 'divide up the sperm quickly so it's still healthy during the mass insemination process', continues.

"One reason I'm giving you this caution, obviously, is so that, if you do start getting results from more directed and clever heritage-optimization, you don't push your luck; the disease counterattack is close to a universal hazard if you start deriving too many children from too few parents."

"The larger point is that variation, itself, is a kind of resource.  It doesn't just apply to variation of disease-fighting systems, although that sure is one of the clearest cases of it.  If you're tackling a difficult mental problem, and you've got five people on your team, adding a sixth person who thinks in a different way from the first five people is often a larger boost than adding somebody's previous acquaintance from a previous job who had a lot of similar life experience.  There are also benefits to people knowing each other, to be clear, but the longer you've hammered on a problem without solving it, the more likely it is that you need somebody new."

"The variation of your crops is a kind of resource that plant species has, making it more likely that at least some of it survives when it gets challenged with a new kind of weather, a new kind of pest.  When you apply powerful breeding pressures to a crop and squeeze it through narrow bottlenecks of parentage, you lessen that variation as a side effect, and make the crop probably less resilient in some dimensions, even if you're improving it in others.  Variation is a kind of resource for heritage optimization, and the process of heritage optimization uses some of it up."

"This ties into something that, in dath ilan, is seen as a central dichotomy of all life's existence - a dichotomy between -"  He needs to be careful in speaking here, so that the direct spell-supplied translation from the dath ilani terms into Taldane doesn't give away his point too early.  "- diversity, and optimality.  After all, if there's a best way to do things, wouldn't doing it any different way, necessarily be doing it worse?"

"Think about the logic I showed you earlier today, the one which can derive exactly all of the actual consequences of the premises and no non-consequences of the premises.  If you had a logic that was meaningfully different from that one, wouldn't it have to be, in some sense, worse?"

"I pose to you this question, then, which I have not yet told you how to answer:  Is diversity only ever valuable in places where we haven't found the best strategy?  Is there necessarily some optimal disease-fighting system an organism could have, which could fight off every different form of disease that exists, and if an organism had that, it could be duplicated a million times without worry?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"it's like war. There's not a single best military strategy that defeats all other military strategies. There are things that work out best for a range of possible things your opponents might be doing, and you can't be engaged in the best possible tactic against anything they might be doing, there are tradeoffs. 'best disease-fighting system' sounds less ridiculous than 'best war-fighting system' but I think only because we know how to fight wars so the tradeoffs are obvious."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, perhaps, perhaps.  But let's consider some much simpler case than complicated oppositional games.  Do you have locks, here, which go by knowledge?  Say, somebody has to punch in a series of numbers, or spell out a sequence of words, to open the lock?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No. Wizards use magic for locks. Everyone else...I think uses mechanical ones, with keys."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a dath ilani proverb to the effect that a key and a code is more effective than just a key or a code, because keys can be stolen as codes can be spied on.  But maybe that doesn't apply if there's a first-circle spell that makes keys only work in the hands of authorized holders...?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...mostly I don't know how you'd do a lock with a...code. I've never heard of that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Buttons labeled 0 through 9, you've got to enter six numbers in the correct order to open the lock... I would not have thought that would take a very complicated mechanism, it seems very simple compared to other mechanisms.  Heck, with sixteen buttons, just needing to depress the correct eight buttons in any order, while leaving the eight other buttons raised, would provide significant protection.  That seems very easy to visualize as a lock; though, making it not be externally obvious when you have some of the buttons correct but not others, would take more work..."

"Well, anyways, in dath ilan, there are locks which require a key, or numbers, or both, depending on how strong you want to make them and whether you're more worried about stolen keys or spied-on codes.  And security issues like making sure that somebody can't tell which numbers are being depressed by listening to the sound of the clicks, or not having the interior mechanism of the key be examinable from the outside of the key before it's inserted into the lock, stuff like that."

"Is there such a thing as there being one best code, or one best key, that you could use to fend off the greatest possible number of thieves, and then no better code or better key than that could exist?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No," the class choruses. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Isn't that, in some sense, contradictory to the very notion of intelligence?  If you can measure intelligence with numbers, and keep going past 20, past 30, past 100, shouldn't there come a point where the greatest possible and most perfect intelligence can determine the one best possible code for a lock?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"- I guess eventually you could come up with a number so long and hard to specify that no one less smart that you is capable of generating it, and that'd be the best possible code for a lock."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, it's good that you don't just say 'no' and give up on the question!  In dath ilan, once you get past the kind of locks that parents use to keep young children from wandering into the workshop or the," no word for that then where do they do it, "cuddle-room, you get what's called Keeper locks, though they also appear on the more powerful weapons the military is allowed to own.  One component of a Keeper lock is a kind of key that's physically impossible to duplicate, though it has to be refreshed each time it's used; the other component is a game that never plays out the same way twice, with rules of a form that our brains can learn subconsciously without ever figuring them out consciously.  The knowledge that gets you inside consists of you having learned to play the lock's game, after a few days or hours of practice and occasional refreshers; and you don't consciously know what the game's rules are, so you literally can't explain to anybody else how to get inside, even if they drug you."

"But let's say the lock just has ten digits and six numbers."

"Can an entity with Intelligence 100 determine the best possible six-number sequence that every such lock should use?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No," they chorus again.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, why not, exactly?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The only thing that makes a code good is that no one knows it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So use your Intelligence 100 to pick out the best possible code that people are least likely to guess."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...well, if it's in every lock, then they'll just put a bunch of sl-employees to work trying it on one lock, and once they get it they'll know all the locks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah, well, perhaps.  Let's look at it from the other side; if there's a ten-digit, six-number lock I need to get through, can I use my 100 Intelligence to discover the single best sequence to try on a lock like that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yeah, you could mindread the creator and figure out what rule they used to set it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let us suppose that mindreading is not possible; clever guessing is.  You cannot determine a single correct code with certainty, just that some codes are more likely than others.  I put to you, then, that the code which is most likely to open the lock, is the best code to try entering into it."

Permalink Mark Unread

The students agree with this, but suspiciously.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, for concrete example, if a silly factory makes all its locks with a default code of 012345, and occasionally some silly people forget to change the default code, then 012345 might be the best code to try entering - it may only open one in ten thousand locks, because very few people are that silly, but it will still open more locks than any other code."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or if there's a number that's lucky in some religion, so people change their locks to that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wait, so they actively change their lock to one that's...  Can you tell me whether or not you're joking about that being a thing people would really do?  I haven't actually met anyone with Intelligence 10 in my life before and I don't know what that's like."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- yeah, people do that."

"I mean, we don't have that kind of lock, but people do that sort of thing, they have magic item passwords that are famous magic item passwords, or the names of their kids."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right.  Duly noted.  You people seriously need to raise your average intelligence level before somebody accidentally blows up what's left of the planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"To resume where we left off:  Having thus determined that 012345 is the best, the most optimal code you can possibly try on a lock, I put to you that, clearly, the optimal strategy for opening a coded lock is to repeatedly try 012345 on it until it opens.  Agreed?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Suspicious chorus. "Noooo."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why not?  Seems reasonable to me.  If you have the optimal best method you should keep using it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess if the lock has a persistent tendency to change its own password to 012345, because it has fond memories of the workshop it was created in," Meritxell says.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Careful with that kind of cleverness.  There's another famous dichotomy between being smart enough to think of correct answers versus smart enough that you can take any answer and come up with a weird way for it to be correct.  In real life, entering 012345 repeatedly into the lock is stupid even though it's possible to imagine an exotic circumstance where it isn't.  I'm not saying you should never think the way you just did, I'm saying that you should always clearly label it inside and outside as having come up with a clever weird circumstance under which it would make sense to do something that is in real life stupid."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anyways, I'm glad you all now agree with me that the best way of getting through number-sequence locks is to repeatedly enter in 012345 on them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...you just said that was stupid!"

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"That was some other Keltham.  I'm the Keltham who thinks that repeating 012345 is a great strategy, and he's going to keep lecturing you on that until one of you manages to talk him out of it by explaining exactly what he's doing wrong."

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They giggle nervously. 

"If it didn't work the first time, then it'll only work this time if the lock magically changed, and changed to this specific code, and you haven't got any reason to think it did that so you might as well just set a construct to trying all possible combinations in order at this point, before you try any twice."

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"Wait, so you're saying that 012345 isn't the best code to try?  What's the better one, then?"

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"Any of them which you haven't tried yet!"

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"I'm confused.  If on the first turn, 012345 is the best combination to try, and the lock hasn't changed, it should still be the best combination to try on the second turn."

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"...no, because if it were right, it would've opened the lock, so now you know it's wrong."

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"So what you're saying is that my knowledge about the lock changed, but not the lock itself?  I suppose I could buy that.  Doesn't that mean I'd have to keep on changing which things I tried as I observed the results and my knowledge kept changing, though?  That sounds inconvenient and difficult and not very Lawful, really."

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They're so confused!

 

"I mean, you probably want to build a construct," Pela, who has been arguing for this solution for a while, says more firmly. "Which just tries every number in order. And you expect that it's one of the remaining numbers until you've tried them all."

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"Wouldn't it be better to build a Lawful construct instead of a Chaotic one, which repeatedly used the optimal number instead of, like, all these other non-optimal numbers?  I'm definitely gonna do that if you don't talk me out of it somehow.  Gonna be a great construct.  The best.  Optimal."

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"- trying every number in order is plenty Lawful! Law has nothing to do with - doing the exact same thing over and over!"

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(Carissa, who is going to be able to resolve the bet this evening, proposes everyone double-or-nothing on their is-Keltham-a-sadist betting.)

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"If it's the best thing, you should do it over and over.  If it's not the best thing, you should do the best thing instead.  If that isn't Lawful, then what is Law, exactly?"

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"It stops being the best thing once you've tried it!"

"Law is - if you're doing a dumb thing, and you think it's Lawful, you're probably just confused about what Law is, it doesn't mean you have to do dumb things."

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"Well, perhaps I am confused about the Law because I thought it said to do a dumb thing, but then what is the Law actually?  Can it be explained to me or do I just have to enter whichever exact codes you tell me to?"

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"I don't think approaches to guessing a password can be Lawful or Chaotic. And we've been telling you the thing you should do, which is try all the numbers in order!"

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"All right, speaking more seriously now.  It's easy to tangle yourself up with paradoxes of what is best, what is optimal, especially when you define the word even slightly different ways, see it from slightly different angles across two times you used the word.  There's a mistake that young dath ilani make - skewing male rather than female, though also some girls and not all boys, of course - where they can't quite accept the fact that older children know more than they do and have higher measured cognitive powers, and some of them get fascinated with the ways that you can tangle up your reasoning and 'prove' that you're actually better than the older children because you're more ignorant than they are, or smarter than the optimal way of doing something."

"It's one of the things where, when a boy makes a mistake like that, the older children and the Watchers don't try to talk him out of it, and let him go on believing it for a few years, so he can have his enjoyment and also learn a valuable life lesson when he's old enough to more carefully disentangle all of the paradoxes.  This valuable lesson is that paradoxical-sounding questions have non-paradoxical answers, if you define everything precisely enough and don't mix up your words.  Even if you cannot see the answer yet, you should expect that such an answer exists.  Confusion exists in our minds, not in consistent mathematics."

"In this case, I could formalize the solution by saying, for example, that there is such a thing as a best sequence of codes to try, given your state of knowledge about the lock, and that repeatedly trying the most likely first code forever is among the worst possible sequences.  Or I could say that, since our knowledge changes with each observation, the best second code to try, given the results of observing the first code, is not equal to the best first code to try.  This, I realize, may not sound particularly better than any of the other arguments you were using against silly-Keltham, but they fit into larger frameworks I can talk about later.  A dath ilani would tell you that you're mistaken in thinking that there's no Lawful approach to guessing a code; you can use math to describe your beliefs about which codes have which probabilities of working, describe mathematically how those probabilities change with each observation as successive codes are ruled out, and that math then describes the next best guess.  That doesn't mean you can do better by thinking explicitly in math, of course, instead of just quickly typing in possible passwords that seem likely; but the math does exist."

"On a larger scale, the point I want to make again is about that dichotomy between optimality and diversity, the reason why you don't want to take a single stalk of corn and plant exact copies of it all over the country.  When we talked about the case of the lock and its codes, we got two different angles on a way to resolve the children's paradox of it apparently not being best to just use the best answer.  The first angle is that of the adaptive adversary, the corn blight, the master criminal considering the lock; the more regular we make our own answer, the more the adversary's adaptivity or intelligence is able to analyze and defeat it.  We use randomization as a way to make it harder for their own intelligence to grasp; there's nothing paradoxical about the idea that, the more random something is, the less knowable it is, the more it may inconvenience some other mind.  It's the kind of variation that's valuable in the disease-fighting systems inside human and corn, the kind that makes it harder for diseases to learn our defenses."

"But the other viewpoint on the lock and code is the more important one.  It's the reason why, if your team has been having trouble solving a problem for a while, you might want to add a new person who thinks less like the rest of you.  It's a resource that a field of corn stalks has for adapting to a sudden shift in the environment, a new weather extreme; if the crop is more diverse, maybe some hardier stalks will survive to be replanted next year and then do better against that environment.  It's the kind of variation where you're trying things in many places, and, because of that, trying overly similar things in many places is something that yields less expected profit to you."

"There are dimensions of society in which you want everyone behaving differently, so they can explore a space instead of all crowding together into one corner of it.  There are dimensions of society where things go pretty well so long as you do something the correct way, and start to go poorly if you do things much differently than that.  There is a tension in dath ilan between positions, between people and factions, between ideas and arguments, about that question - not just about particular cases, but about the sense in general of where all society should move on that spectrum.  Whether it is more important in general for everyone to do things a bit more differently, in our future, or if the problem is more that we're falling too far below some standards and we all need to improve in those ways together.  There are lots of particular cases in dath ilan where people might hold different opinions and not just one general opinion; but there is a sense that this general dimension of existence is one where the exact balance is important to a society."

"Dath ilan has terminology for this dichotomy of strategies, between the search to find the optimal best answer and use it, versus trying many different answers to be more resilient against unknowns and explore a space more widely.  Though I've been deliberately substituting the words 'optimal' and 'diverse', in this language, instead of the two Taldane words that the translation spell tries to automatically output."

"If I say the dath ilani words directly, for these two directions a society can move along this dimension, they come out in this language as:"

"Lawful."

"And, Chaotic."

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Elias Abarco is not an eighteen year old girl and is not going to gape wonderingly at Keltham because EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE. No one would notice, since he's invisible, but he nonetheless has too much dignity.

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Some things make sense. And some things are even more confusing because -

- why not say that, humans can understand that -

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Reality is so very large and pretty and connected when you catch a sight of it.  She wants to see more.

Nice, Ione thinks all the way up where her conscious mind can hear it.

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"I was on the side of Chaos, of course.  Lawfulness seemed so very boring.  I was quite sure we had enough of it already."

"There's a saying in dath ilan that always sounded to me before like sententious pro-Law propaganda, whose depth of meaning, I think, I never really appreciated until I came to Golarion."

"It's the saying that even Chaos is almost entirely made of Law."

"Some variation in the corn stalks is useful for resisting disease, or having any survivors if an especially hot summer comes.  If you scramble all the tiny spirals entirely and insert completely new information, what you get is not much higher levels of useful Chaos, you get a plant that entirely fails to form.  The wildest, most diverse crop that still manages to live at all must be almost entirely regular and using almost completely standard forms of everything for its species; otherwise it comes out, not weird and warped, but simply a dead seed that fails to germinate at all.  When you're adding a new and different mind to your team, full of wild ideas, they should hopefully be speaking mostly grammatical sentences that make sense, and not uttering random words and random sounds and twitching around wildly on the floor.  The full absence of Law is not diversity, but randomness, noise.  In many cases, nearly all the random ways of doing things get you pretty much the same effect, there is not much difference in contribution between a person wildly twitching on the floor in one way versus a different way, they look much the same from outside.  Even diversity has to be almost entirely made out of shared order, and climb high up on the scale of optimality away from the level of noise, in order to be effectively diverse."

"Even Chaos is made almost entirely out of Law.  I thought it was something of a sententious old proverb, that was emphasizing one particular viewpoint on an underlying truth that seemed overly trivial.  I wanted to think thoughts that nobody had ever thought before, sure, well of course I didn't want to do that by thinking random words, obviously.  I wanted to start companies or invest in companies that nobody else would have thought of, that no other investor would invest in, I wanted to show that the way I thought differently was better and worthy of further exploration.  Of course, if I wanted to pull that off successfully, it would be a matter of art and skill, governed by laws, with relevant history to study and relevant investigations to do.  I thought that sort of thing didn't belong to Law alone.  Chaotic people like me could say it too, so there wasn't anything especially Lawful about it."

"Even Chaos is made almost entirely out of Law, in a fashion governed by higher orders, mathematics, whose name in Baseline also tends to translate into Taldane as 'Law'.  I have gotten to this place, Golarion, I have heard what many of your 'countries' are doing.  It is pretty clear that even the factions called Lawful seem to be confused about many things.  And I am resigned at this point to the fact that at some point I am also going to have to go and somehow straighten out all the Chaotic parts because it seems pretty likely at this point that all y'all are also doing that part all wrong."

"In conclusion.  The value of diversity in your heritage, and its nature as a kind of resource that strong optimization uses up - especially variation that has the nature of useful variations rather than destructively random variations - is another reason why, if you meet a human visitor from another plane with 18 Intelligence, it's a great time to make an exception to any usual social rules about not just subsidizing the very best men to have 144 kids apiece, because the diversity of your heritage will actually go up when you add in some kids from a smart alien, and some of your kids may think a little differently and be more useful to add to projects.  This concludes my sales pitch; I have added in many of the caveats that I knew about, but I may have been biased in my thinking about them nonetheless; I have tried to give you the knowledge you'd need to do your own thinking about it independently."

"Any questions?"

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"In your conception of Chaos," says Meritxell, "what would a Chaotic god be like."

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"That is a really excellent question and I just flatly do not understand where, say, Calistria fits into this picture.  One guess is that there are additional things wrapped up in the divine version of 'Chaos', besides the dath ilani words that translate into it, which would make sense of how women being vengeful at men could be especially Chaotic.  Another guess is that I don't understand your society well enough to understand how Calistria is a move in the direction of wider exploration or less centralized planning."

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Carissa thinks she has an idea of that, actually, but she doesn't want to be that person who wants to talk about sexism every day like she cares what happens to other people.

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There's another few questions, none all that deep; the class is still a bit theologically startled and no one's really quite sure what's heresy here. 

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Keltham, who's already worrying that he stretched the endurance of his students and he can't see this because of Cheerful Cheliax Dignity, restrains himself from any overly deep answers.  Afterwards, he attempts to dismiss the class for the afternoon; later on, after he's rested some, he's going to try learning wizard spells with the last of his day.  (Well, his workday, anyways.)

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"Teacher," says Ione Sala, with a faint smile that's all she can manage, and a voice that should be more seductive but isn't, "can I stay a moment after class and ask you something in private?"

(No sweat.  Calm.  If she lets herself feel too much, she'll sweat, and that will be visible.  Don't think, don't feel, nothing except what's necessary, now.)

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Keltham tilts his head, weighs the matter, nods.  He has no room on his schedule left for today, but he can as easily say that to her in private, and doesn't exactly want to - discourage people from asking.

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- well, that's bold. 


Carissa files out, succeeding at looking totally unthreatened by this and actually succeeding at being mostly unthreatened by this. The kid has barely talked, she's getting a late start.

- which is suggestive that there's something up here that Carissa doesn't understand -

She turns invisible on leaving the classroom, and turns around to slip back in.

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"Move along," Elias tells her telepathically and also curtly.

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- so this is not about flirting with Keltham.

 

She moves along.

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Ione considers possible options, she has to, there's no choices except thinking, now.  If she leads into words that sound like - like what she's planning to say - then the security team won't, they won't jump to conclusions, right, they'll know Ione knows that there's security there - but people don't always think what you wish they would think -

Ione casts Detect Magic, and while Keltham's head is turned watching the last students go, she gives her best significant, solemn nod to the invisible security team.

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Keltham doesn't particularly see it.

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When the last students are gone, and of course the security team is still there, Ione approaches Keltham.  "Did you mean what you said about - how dath ilan sees Law and Chaos?" she inquires in a low voice, now trying to look serious, and not seductive at all.

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"Yes...?"  Keltham is more surprised than disappointed.

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"Will you keep my - important personal secret - if I tell it to you?" Ione says.  Serious, she has to look serious.

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"Does that commit me to anything more than just - not repeating your secret, not giving it away by other means, unless and until the information makes its way to me by channels unrelated to the fact of your originally telling it to me?"

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Ione takes a moment to parse this.  It sounds right, and if he's trying to trick her - well, it doesn't really matter, does it.

"No, that sounds correct."

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"Then yes."  Keltham doesn't know what this is about, and might on other occasions hesitate more to learn others' secrets, but he is definitely currently in the sort of situation where he should say yes to secrets offered under standard secrecy conditions.

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"I - have sympathies in directions that are not all the way to the side of Lawful, which is a thing that some of your other girls might accept about me, and some would think it meant they needed to steer clear of me.  On the whole it's more convenient for me if it's just not suspected.  But you're a whole lot clearer on why Chaos would exist and why it would have any use or any place in the universe than - than I even understood myself, before you - well, people here are confused, like you said."

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It takes a second for Keltham to hypothesize why this would be as terribly serious of a matter as (glance at nametag again) Ione Sala is making it sound, even taking into account that Lawful versus Chaotic is an even bigger political deal here and that people here are kind of strange about politics.

"Is the idea here that you're secretly not with Asmodeus?" Keltham says, now instinctively lowering his own voice.

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She wasn't even planning to - but if he wants that, hopes for it -

"Knowledge," she says, she wishes she could make her voice breathy and seductive but it's all she can do to stay in the guidelines of solemnity, "mysteries, the planes, the way that everything is connected, magic, trying new things.  Nethys."

She hasn't said outright that she belongs to Nethys, which, she doesn't know, maybe that will count for something, oh she's so dead -

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"I will keep your secret, since if you had not trusted me, I couldn't have done anything with that secret anyways.  But I hope you understand that I'm not planning to betray the Chelish government, or Asmodeus, unless they betray me first.  Or are you telling me that they've done so?"

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Ione quickly shakes her head, and then says "No," out loud in case dath ilani don't understand headshakes.  "I'm not telling you that.  Just -"

She can't make herself sound seductive enough, not under this much tension.  But Keltham's society has some kind of weird posturing about frankness, maybe even just values actual frankness in a balance whose possibility she can't understand; so if she tries to pretend that kind of honesty, play to that -

"I'm sorry," she says, hoping she's successfully putting sincerity into her voice.  "I - I'm not very experienced, in some ways, I wish I could say this in a way that's more pleasing to you."  She swallows, which takes almost no effort at all, and makes sure she's looking Keltham straight in the eyes.  "To someone who belongs to Nethys, who wants to understand magic, understand everything, the mysteries behind them and how everything is connected - what you told us all today - it's more than someone who follows Nethys could easily repay.  If you keep teaching me things like that - or us, I don't mind if others learn it too, like you said, it's about how much we score for ourselves, not scoring better than others - then I'll try to teach you magic, or help you on your project to change Golarion, or clean your room for you, I'd do it even if you didn't pay me," he's sort of weird about wanting to pay people, "not that it would be bad if you did pay me, of course, but the knowledge is - to someone who follows Nethys, it's priceless.  And in terms of what - you probably guessed before that I was going to talk to you about - that could be part of it too.  You could use me however you wanted, anytime you wanted, in that way too, even if you weren't going to give me a child then or ever.  I'll do anything you like, you can ask or I can try to guess, and you won't have to try to make me feel good too, unless you want to, I can just serve you, if you want.  To somebody who belongs to Nethys - knowledge like that - is worth it."

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Keltham is not entirely unmoved by this.  He's starting to wonder, in the back of his mind, what all of his other confessions will be like, this is starting to resemble a certain kind of dath ilani fiction in some ways, but this one - is an interesting flavor, yeah.

He's also not taking it entirely at face value, of course, he's not a complete idiot and the resemblance to fiction may or may not be telling.

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"How much trouble are you in if the Chelish government finds out about this?" Keltham says, a careful kind of probe with many possible returns.

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"I mean - it's hard to - look, suppose I asked you in dath ilan whether people ever got in trouble for things they theoretically shouldn't get in trouble for, how would it work for you?"  Because she has absolutely no idea what Keltham is going to find at all plausible here.

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"Governance gets in trouble for violating the rules same as anybody else.  For them to avoid that, they'd have to, I don't know, put somebody into cryonic suspension and make it look like an accident?  Somehow be in collusion with the Keepers and get them to falsely declare an infohazard which, you know, would not be even the tiniest bit easy at all and there are lines of double-checking there too, I mean, there's a much smaller order of very smart people whose point is basically supposed to be 'Keep an eye on the Keepers.'  I'm not sure what level of antisocial collusion you're trying to ask about or postulate."

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"Things are just less organized in Golarion, Keltham.  Sometimes people play things safer, here, than they must do in dath ilan, because they aren't connected to a giant miracle that stores all the knowledge in the world, and they don't know how everything works inside the villa they just came to, from the wizard school they were in before that.  I mean, maybe if I suddenly vanish and you never hear from me again, or I'm suspiciously assassinated in the middle of class, that would be something to notice?"  She really hopes that she just unsigned her death warrant instead of signing it.  "I would not expect the typical member of the Chelish government to do that to me, I wouldn't expect them to do anything at all to me," what with the typical member of Chelish government being nowhere near her, "but I'm in a different place than I was yesterday and you expect me to be surer of myself than I am."

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"I don't understand why you'd tell this to me, then," if it was true and not a trap set to see if I'm planning to betray Asmodeus.  "You're not worried about - listeners behind the walls, magical eavesdropping?"

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Think think think - "I mean, if there are, that part of the government isn't famous for telling everything they hear to the rest of the world or even the rest of the government, you know, and - I just - I think maybe Nethys would be pleased if I helped you learn magic, or just helped you spread the kind of knowledge that you're spreading.  You've changed my life much more than you realize, with what you said there, because of what happened inside me when I heard it, and it seemed right to tell you about that and to offer to do what I can for you."

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"Thank you for telling me, if you were in fact being honest.  I'll keep your putative secret and won't use it against you, unless I relearn by means unconnected to how I first learned it, in the ways considered usual in dath ilan for keeping a secret that was promised.  I - will have to think about what that means for a relationship between us, I was not expecting that offer and it's not something where I already know internally how I'll respond, even conditioned on all of that being completely true."

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Ione kneels in front of him, and bows her head.  "I am at your command and at your pleasure, teacher," she says, and maybe even manages to make it sound a little low and husky.  "Whenever you decide.  And no matter what you decide - thank you."

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Keltham exits.

It certainly has been a day.

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Ione straightens up.  It still doesn't seem wise to think or feel anything unnecessary.  Her heart is hammering very hard, nonetheless, and there is sweat, though not, she hopes, visible sweat.  Well, it wouldn't be surprising if she looked nervous to whoever will be speaking to her now.

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Elias has a Mage Hand - not quite gouge out her eyeball, even though he's tempted, it'll make her useless for the next ten minutes and there's some information he ought to urgently have. But press against her eyeball, relentless enough to force her to turn her face.

"It would be pretty inconvenient," he says, "to have someone permanently impersonate you; but I've got to say, you're shaping up to be even more inconvenient than that, which is really quite an achievement. Who was it."

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Can she hide it - maybe pretend it was all a seduction scheme that got away from her, ask for a talisman that makes her look like an oracle of Nethys - no, that's not going to work in real life, somebody will check her current aura in detail before they give her a talisman like that -

"Nethys made me his oracle.  I didn't ask for it, I didn't know it would happen, I was just thinking about wanting to know more things and I suppose I thought too loudly.  I will cooperate with the Chelish government in anything it asks so long as that doesn't turn Nethys against me in my afterlife."

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"Fail your will save, say that again."

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She fails her will save.  "Nethys made me his oracle.  I didn't ask for it or know it would happen.  I'll cooperate with the Chelish government on anything that doesn't turn Nethys against me."

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"Repeat, word for word: You'll confirm, once Keltham is competent enough to check the claim you're an oracle of Nethys, that Cheliax isn't betraying him and that we're representing our church the way Nethys's church represents it."

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"I will confirm, once Keltham is competent enough to check the claim I'm an oracle of Nethys, that Cheliax isn't betraying him and that we're representing our church the way Nethys's church represents it."

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"It's serious misconduct, to try to come to Keltham's attention just to alter the balance of considerations against killing you. If three girls do that, he's going to conclude something's up. Maybe two."

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"I - was afraid that if I just let you find out and kill me, or remove me, which is what you'd obviously do, it would go against what Nethys wanted from me and I don't know what Nethys does to mortals who offend Him inside His afterlife I just know that He can drive people mad at any time - I wasn't trying to inconvenience you, I wasn't even trying to live, I was just trying to make sure Nethys didn't shatter my soul for not trying -"

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"Well, I'll submit the situation for review," Elias says, coldly, and now he can gouge her eyeball out, the conversation being over. 

 

 

(Someone will come by to heal it in an hour or so. They're not savages.)

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It's not her most painful punishment.

Ione Sala will lie on the floor and try not to move and hold a hand over the eye socket so she doesn't bleed out too much, and endure.

Everything has changed.

People will still force her to let them read her mind, so there are a lot of things she should not think, must not think, about how everything has changed.

(Nethys is her god now -)

Not thinking that.

(Knowledge, magic -)

Not thinking that.

(What's Nethys's afterlife like if she can serve Him well?)

Not thinking that.

(Deep down she really, really, really wasn't looking forward to -)

Definitely not thinking that.

She wipes the smile hard off her face as soon as she notices that it's there.

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Otolmens is as furious as She has ever been at any point in the last aeon, which is something of a narrow range on both sides, but still.

They NEVER LISTEN.

She specifically told them, She told them ALL, that they were not allowed to do ANYTHING NONSTANDARD around THAT mortal, and then Nethys goes and drops FOUR ORACLE LEVELS on some nearby mortal that Otolmens would not have THOUGHT was particularly dangerous but if Nethys wants this mortal to have FOUR ORACLE LEVELS than She wants this mortal COMPLETELY OUT OF HER MULTIVERSE along with that OTHER ONE.

While Otolmens will not, of course, break The Rules regardless of provocation, she knows how The Rules work on Golarion, and if Nethys is openly opposing Her, which He most certainly now is, and doing so by means of granting levels to mortals, then that opens up more options for Her as well.

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A halfling slave in the halls, performing his endless task of cleaning up after the idiots and their endless messes, is now, very suddenly, a fourth-level oracle of Otolmens.

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He is immediately arrested by security.

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Keltham successfully finds his way back to his bedroom, lies down in bed, closes his eyes, and tries to think in a dath ilani deliberate resting pattern.  He's not very good at it but he knows it anyways, since it's one of those things where it's better if everybody knows how to do it a little even if they're not very good at it.

(Carissa asking him what's Chaotic for a dath ilani -)

Not thinking that.

(Ione speaking awkwardly, not with the dignified cheerfulness of her rare vocalizations in the libary, bent in that strange lowered posture with her head facing down -)

Not thinking that.

(Every few hours he updates again about conditions in Golarion being even worse, though apparently 'all random local landing regions are as bad as the Worldwound' was successfully an overshoot of where that was heading -)

Not thinking that either.  His brain needs to rest.

(He needs to figure out what people here use instead, if 'cuddleroom' doesn't translate to Taldane.  And also is there any way to figure out whether his contraception is still active, or if he would've gotten rid of it by using healing energy on himself last night?  Maybe he can find security and ask them who to ask.)

Okay, both valid questions, but nonetheless, be still, his brain.  This morning he got woken up by light in the windows, instead of waking up to his own rhythm, and it is more than plausible that his brain will now benefit from at least a brief nap.  Learning wizard magic will probably go better with relatively less tired brains.

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All right, you know what, there is a lot of divine interference here and waiting until tonight to get the girls to sell their souls seems like it might be waiting too long. 

 

Elias goes after Carissa first, since she cannot in fact be gotten tonight.

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Carissa was going to take a bath but manages to be graceful about being interrupted.

          "Tell me," Elias says to her, "how you reconcile the teachings of our god with the teachings of dath ilan."

Oh, wow, this conversation is going to suck. "Dath ilan is different from our world, and I think less of Keltham's lessons transfer than he realizes," she says blandly. 

         "I forgot to mention," Elias says, "that I'm in a hurry, and that your ability to say things that don't mean anything isn't in question. What's wrong?"

"- he's got to be wrong about Law and Chaos because if that's all there was to it some church would explain it that way, and they don't. He's got to be wrong about, uh, I think dath ilan teaches things well for if you're going for the Starstone, but badly for if you're going to Hell, because you don't need a lot of initiative at making progress on unstructured questions and developing it before you're a devil seems like it involves a lot of indulging lazy human impulses -"

         "Cleverly said. Is that a trade you want to make, becoming less useful to Hell after death to be more useful to Keltham?"

"- I think it serves Asmodeus, for me to... indulge weak human impulses temporarily, if that's all I can do to try to understand dath ilan's technology. We'll make Cheliax stronger and more powerful and more useful to Him, and if I require more correction subsequently, so be it."

         "I think you'll require different correction, at least. But there is opportunity to arrange it in advance."

This is hardly even surprising so it's confusing that Carissa feels like she's falling, and like her fingertips are tingling. "Of course."

         "We've made arrangements with some devils for purchase contracts with the students here. Take your time to read it over, of course. We're going to invite most of the students to a signing ceremony tonight, but it sounds like you've made conflicting plans?"

"Well, I don't know, can I bring a date?" asks Carissa sweetly. Elias slaps her, harder than that really warranted (though it did warrant it), hard enough to kill someone who wasn't a wizard. Maybe he's otherwise having a bad day. 

        "You have an hour to read it over and request any changes to the terms," he says, and (apparently) leaves.

 

Carissa is not under the impression she is alone.

She sits down. Reads through the contract, which doesn't take an hour. 

And then takes her bath. She's not sure when else she's going to have the opportunity.

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(Project Nap: currently making excellent progress!)

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Elias returns at precisely the time he said he would, and starts a summons. "Did you have revisions?"

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"No." It's a standard contract. She's read them before. 

            "Did you pick your reward of appropriately commensurate value?"

"Yes." Be a professional, do not squeal and jump up and down. "I selected permanent, non-dispellable arcane sight."

          "That's what I took too," Elias says, almost warmly. 

She's not going to get drawn in to small talk. "Do you want me to tell the kids it's a standard contract? I don't know how many of them will have looked one up."

          "The ones who don't have the initiative to get confirmation they have a standard contract don't have a standard contract."

Carissa reads hers one last time, to double check.

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Summoned, he comes.

Ah, Cheliax.  He adores Cheliax.  The contracts are on the bare side of what'll work under Law, and the Chelish take them anyways because they've been indoctrinated to believe that they're going to Hell regardless.  And they're not even wrong; but a slave who can't escape is so much more valuable as a slave, and the contract isn't worth but a fraction of that increase in value, for the sort of soul that Cheliax sends to sign.  They've been given a rather selective history of contracts with devils, and they believe they're doing well for themselves as negotiators.  Devils fight and maim each other for the privilege, to be summoned as contracting devils in Cheliax, because the taste of it is so very very sweet.

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He doesn't speak, at first, simply takes the contract and reads it through.

Standard.  For Cheliax.

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He turns then to the little mortal.  "And who is this worm who seeks to merchant her soul, already damned, to He who is already its master?"

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She feels like a silly little kid. Which is of course the intent, and also basically true, next to a devil.

- well, she's doing more for Asmodeus than this devil is likely to have the chance to. She's going to revolutionize Golarion. 

"Carissa Sevar," she says clearly, and mostly calmly. A human would think she was calm.

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(Previously, in Hell:)

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The most important thing to understand about a god is that, under almost all circumstances, and with extremely rare exceptions, their attention is not only divided but splintered.

Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, Irori has threatened to get the better of Asmodeus in a bargain.

Pride is among His domains.

Asmodeus is a greater and much older god than Irori, closer to the center of all things.  Compared to Irori, Asmodeus's facets are larger; the totality of the gem that is Him, vastly bigger.

Asmodeus is also in many more places at once, compared to Irori.

His decision must be the equivalent of a snap decision, made in reflex, in much less time than Irori had to think.

Yet even His reflex thoughts are vast, and able.

The bargain now sealed between Himself and Irori specifies much, to avoid Asmodeus getting the better of Irori in simple and obvious ways.  He may not direct His church to specially monitor or distrust the mortal Carissa Sevar; nor, through the particulars by which the mortal is given freedom of travel in Cheliax if the time comes to sell its soul, may Asmodeus insinuate anything which works to that mortal's disadvantage, or makes it a target in the eyes of His church.  Asmodeus is constrained in how He may expect the results of His commands to appear, their impacts upon the mortal.  And there are old treaties regarding what the denizens of Hell may say to the living, besides.

There is, nonetheless, a loophole in all that, if Asmodeus is giving an unbound mortal free passage through Cheliax.  The whole affair must look at least a little odd.  The contract cannot demand that these events not look odd.  He cannot set His church upon the mortal, by direct command nor by insinuation and what He knows or suspects His church will conclude; He cannot disadvantage the mortal, cannot work against it; that does leave open other possibilities.

It is possible that Irori, taking longer to think, foresaw this very loophole and that Asmodeus might try to exploit it, if Asmodeus thought the contract to His own favor at all, or regretted it after; and that Irori deliberately forebore to close it, because it is not Irori's way to protect mortals from trials.

If so, Asmodeus will take that play.  He does not know exactly what Irori saw when Irori looked at this mortal, but when Asmodeus looked at it, from His own angle, it did not seem like the sort of mortal looking to flee Cheliax at the first opportunity to take an atonement.

And besides, if Asmodeus does not play this move, then Irori gets the better of Him in a contract.

All this goes through a splintered facet of Asmodeus's attention in a fractional moment of reflex, before that splintered fragment directs a thought to a Duke of Hell who will not be shattered by it; and then goes on to other parts of His business, elsewhere on this plane.  The thought consists of the relevant facts and a statement of intents; greater attention to the mortal details and specifying a precise policy around them is what underlings are for.

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"Sign, then," says the devil.  He watches Carissa closely, for any sign of hesitancy or falsehood in the motion.

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A human wouldn't detect any. Carissa has known since she was two that she is going to go to Hell, and might as well arrange in advance and get something for it. She takes the pen and pulls the contract over to sign.

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He reaches out and snaps the pen from her hand as it is about to touch the contract.

"So eager," he purrs.  "But no."  His (rather mystifying) instructions leave some leeway here, and he is curious about how the mortal Carissa Sevar will react; he is curious of what material a mortal such as this is made.

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Not at all, at first, because that's a good default, not reacting at all. Elias is preparing a spell, with the leisurely motions of a combat caster who isn't in a combat sort of hurry, but no matter how much he takes his time she can't outrun him, and -

- Keltham'll notice, Keltham'll be suspicious -

"Is there a problem?" she says a little sharply. "I have a date, you see, so perhaps you'd better point it out."

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Oh, he likes this one.  He'd like to rip her heart out, specifically, but that's how it is in Hell.

"Rejoice, mortal, for you have somehow come, however momentarily, to the attention of a god.  Asmodeus has made known to us a tiny fraction of His will, and you are implicated in it."

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Elias, she notes with distant satisfaction, has stopped moving. 

 

There's a lot of that going around, she wants to make her lips say, it's the perfect response, but she cannot, actually, get the words out, or any words. 

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"Here is the will of Asmodeus, as interpreted by Hell, to his slaves of Church and Queen."

"Carissa Sevar is not to sell her soul to Hell this day."

"Carissa Sevar is to be allowed freedom of travel beyond Cheliax, as if she had sold her soul."

"Carissa Sevar is to be allowed continued access to her teacher, as if she had sold her soul."

"In matters apart from those, Carissa Sevar is to be trusted, rewarded, and punished no more and no less than she has earned, by Asmodeus's Law."

"Asmodeus's Church need not concern itself proactively with Carissa Sevar's correction, beyond the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law; but if Carissa Sevar seeks out theological instruction of her own accord, her questions are to be given priority as though she were Asmodeus's own cleric of the fourth circle."

"Asmodeus's Queen and her slaves need not concern themselves proactively with Carissa Sevar's descent into cruelty, wickedness, and the darkness of her own soul; but if Carissa Sevar seeks to indulge of her own accord, she is to be prioritized for support as though she were the inheriting daughter of a Count of Cheliax."

"Do you hear and understand these instructions, slave of Church and Queen?"

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Elias highly values his reputation for composure. He values even more highly his ability to only say "yes, I understand" if he actually understands, so he pauses for several seconds, reviewing in his head.

 

 

 

"I hear and understand," he says. 

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Carissa does NOT understand!!!!

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and doesn't need to. Right now. One thing at a time.

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"Here is the will of Asmodeus, as interpreted by Hell, to his slave Carissa Sevar.  But understand and be warned that these are not Asmodeus's true thoughts, only Hell's own understanding of them, passed down from Asmodeus to Duke to Baron to this one small finger of Hell.  Asmodeus's thoughts may not be known to the likes of us, and their truths are forbidden to speak in this world.  These are not Asmodeus's words to Carissa Sevar, but only our understanding of His will:"

"Serve Me well in this world and you shall be raised high in it."

"Remember that you are not Irori.  Do not think yourself likely to succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid."

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis, and accept that your rightful place is in Hell."

"Come to Me in Hell without thought of other choices, as mortals once did in the days before they were cursed with their own wills, and you shall be among the most treasured of My possessions."

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Carissa is not so overawed that she forgets to think that among the many reasons it might serve Asmodeus to express such a thing, 'it's true' does not rate particularly high.. 

 

But she nods. "I understand. Thank you."

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He stares at her for a long moment.

"You should be more excited and grateful, little mortal.  Even most Barons of Hell have never come to our Lord's direct attention.  It is doubtful that I ever will through all eternity.  I would dearly like to eat your heart right now."

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But, see, if she twitches her face she would start crying, and that would be terribly pathetic, and -

- and being small and reasonable was a good strategy ten minutes ago and isn't, now - come on, Carissa, if you play the wrong game you lose.

 

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- she reaches into the circle. Reaches for his heart, or where it would be, if he were human.

 

"Did you hear what you just said?" she says. "We'll see who gets to eat whose heart."

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It occurs to him, then, though only briefly, that perhaps he ought to be the one who is afraid.  If she succeeds -

He turns from her.  "I hope you fail and are cursed, and that I am privileged to have custody of your soul.  I shall go file the request for it now, in fact."

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And he departs.

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"I have a shopping list," she says to Elias, turning around.

 

         "Do you now," he says.

"I'm going to need to be prettier. Every count's heir I've ever seen was stunningly beautiful. Don't you dare comment on my looks, I'll stab you. I'm going to need to be prettier. And I want a headband, and an allowance for crafting."

         "I don't actually know how much the inheriting daughter of a Count of - I mean, presumably they get their allowance from their county, which you haven't got -"

"Well, maybe you should get me one." That's absurd but Elias looks unsure if it's absurd, which is very satisfying.

         "Is this what gratitude for the extraordinary indulgence of your god looks like?"

"Gratitude? He wants a return. And I'm going to be perfect. - can I have the other girls' souls?"

          "No," says Elias Abarco, with the first certainty he's mustered in a while. 

"Some kind of option on them? Equity?"

          "You aren't worth a damned thing yet, kid."

"Asmodeus noticed me," says Carissa Sevar, but a rather different Carissa Sevar than she was ten minutes ago. Also she's about to have a panic attack but she's pretty sure she can glare Elias out of the room before that.

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Keltham wakes up, still feeling a bit muzzy.  What a long and complicated day he has had, full of surprises!  For a moment he envies the women in his research harem, who just get to hear lots of new and exciting knowledge and got raises and a sex-flavored mission and didn't have to compose new lectures or try to figure out Golarion.  Not that it's bad that their lives are less stressful than his, just, it would be good if his life was also less stressful than his life.

Maybe he'll put in a bit less effort into his first shot at wizardry than he was previously planning, so he'll have brainpower to spare for his date with Carissa after that.  After dinner?  After a light dinner.  He shouldn't be either hungry or overfull while, you know, that stuff is going on.

His life sure is complicated these days, full of structural uncertainty and random assorted difficult decisions.  But Keltham's not going to let that faze him!  Dath ilan raises strong minds!

But before he continues on to prove that yet again, he's going to lie here in bed with eyes closed a little longer, waiting for the muzziness to go away of its own accord.

And then he'll either head off to find somebody for wizard lessons (Ione?) or maybe join people for dinner, depending on how long he actually slept, because once again he forgot about that part where he is no longer wearing a wristwatch.

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Elias leaves.

She should not assume she's alone but she doesn't have that much more stamina for maintaining composure. She kneels at her bedside in a distinctly imperfect posture for prayer and hides her face in her hands and trembles violently until it's possible to think about something other than the apparent deficit of air in this room. That takes a couple of minutes.

Asmodeus noticed her. And Asmodeus has instructions for her. And Asmodeus does not want her to sell her soul, which - 

- okay, this is the most trivial feature of the situation, but it means she does not get permanent undispellable arcane sight, and she was really looking forward to that! And all of the other girls are going to have it! She's going to be falling behind in magic lessons and have no way to explain why. Not that she's ungrateful, but - Asmodeus could've given His instructions and also taken her soul -

- presumably that's false, actually, presumably it's actually important for some reason that Carissa keeps her soul, she doesn't understand and she shouldn't expect to understand, the reason here is not going to be in that space where a human thinking about it really hard can comprehend it, it's going to be in the space that a human can't make any sense of at all.

But there are some features of the situation that she ought to be capable of comprehending, or no one would have tried to tell her things. 

Asmodeus noticed. He noticed that she was trying to build the true philosophy, the version that they would have come up in dath ilan where everyone is smarter and lawfuller and carefuller, if they were also Asmodean, and He thought it was worth directing her to do it properly. And His direction was -

- she should write it down before she forgets -

She stops praying to do that. 

Serve Me well in this world and you shall be raised high in it."

"Remember that you are not Irori.  Do not think yourself likely to succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid."

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis, and accept that your rightful place is in Hell."

"Come to Me in Hell without thought of other choices, as mortals once did in the days before they were cursed with their own wills, and you shall be among the most treasured of My possessions."

And written down, it's kind of weird, and she puzzles over it for a little while -




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She was trying to build Asmodeanism as smart lawful humans would have been able to generate it, able to understand it, able to build a society around it. But she was getting it wrong. "You are not Irori". What an odd thing to say, she didn't think she was Irori - well, maybe her vanity in fact got itself pointed that direction without her conscious attention - but she's not sure the problem is the vanity, because in the same breath she was promised to be raised high in the world, if she serves Asmodeus well in it, and among his most treasured possessions -


"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis..."

 

- the problem is the Lawful Neutral. Keltham is Lawful Neutral. Keltham has taught her everything that she now understands, about the true theology, about what it would mean to have free will and know what to do with it. But Keltham is Lawful Neutral, even if he thinks he's evil, so his conception is a lawful neutral conception, of how things work. 

And Carissa belongs to Asmodeus, who is Evil, and so she's supposed to be designing the evil version of that, not the neutral one. 

 

Carissa has not actually put a lot of thought into what Evil is. Pretty much everyone is Evil, because that's how Pharasma sorts them. Doing big ambitious things in the world is Evil. Keltham's probably going to start reading Evil at some point because he did something Pharasma objects to, he's not in the two percent most Good people and pretty much everyone else goes to Hell. But - when she says Keltham's Neutral she's not actually talking about what Pharasma has to say, she's talking about something else? Keltham assumes they're all getting paid. Keltham would be deeply upset if he learned they weren't getting paid, and it's not because it affects him in the slightest. His sense of - honor, fair play, however he contextualizes it - rules out slavery, rules out assassinations, rules out tricking people - they're jokingly betting on whether Keltham's a sadist and she bets he is but he didn't jump at punishing the students, he fretted that he had no idea how to do it in a way that improved their understanding of the subject material and was worried he'd teach them wrongly to be afraid of school -

- she's not actually sure which parts of that are Lawful Neutral and which parts are dath ilan. But they stand out, as ways that an Asmodean is not. As ways that the ideal Asmodean theology would not be. And when she was trying to build something shaped like Keltham, Asmodeus Himself reached out and conveyed - that's too Lawful Neutral to be the truth. Give me the Evil version.

 

Well. Carissa can do that.

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Carissa has spent a lot of time worrying if she is loyal enough but almost none worrying if she is Evil enough. She's not squeamish. She doesn't refuse to report people out of misguided sympathy for them. She has whipped students who get bad grades, and practiced deadly spells on weeping prisoners. She is definitely going to go to Hell, and it did not really occur to her to specifically worry about how evil she was within the very broad category of everyone who gets sent to Hell. She hasn't heard of anyone getting in trouble for not being Evil enough. She hasn't even been threatened, now, with getting in trouble for not being Evil enough! 

 

...and maybe that's the point. Because there's a kind of Evil built of pure, sharp, selfishness, the choice to be concerned with yourself, and not with any of the other idiots populating the world, the thing she told Keltham, Evil as prioritizing the self. She thinks she's perfectly adequate at that, if she does say so herself. 

The devil wasn't like that. The devil saw her, spoke two minutes to her, and wanted to personally rip her into pieces. Because it'd be fun. Because, having seen her whole, destroying her would be more of a treat than destroying some other person. And there was a difference, though she hopes no one noticed it, when she stepped into his circle and threatened him back. He was threatening her because he felt like it. She was threatening him because she'd noticed that if she didn't learn to play she was going to lose very very fast. 

She is pretty sure, in hindsight, that every Evil thing she's ever done has been the first kind, the weaker kind, the Evil of choosing Carissa Sevar over every other person in the universe. She feels entirely unapologetic about all of that Evil; certainly no other person in the universe is choosing Carissa Sevar over themselves. And if they were, that'd be stupid and contemptible of them. 

And Asmodeus is saying that that's not enough. Well, it's clearly enough to get into Hell. It's not enough for the nature that devil possessed, not enough for her to actually succeed at the problem she has somewhat audaciously set herself, of explaining theology better so people aren't afraid of not understanding it any more than they're afraid of not understanding math, so they glimpse the outlines of the big, real thing there, even if that's all they glimpse.

'Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis'. Mainly it's the ...desire to be on the winning side, coupled with the conviction Axis isn't it, but she's pretty sure that's not what He means. What was it the devil said to Elias?

She should write that down too, she's going to need to use it to argue for a headband.

             "Asmodeus's Queen and her slaves need not concern themselves proactively with Carissa Sevar's descent into cruelty, wickedness, and the darkness of her own soul; but if Carissa Sevar seeks to indulge of her own accord, she is to be prioritized for support as though she were the inheriting daughter of a Count of Cheliax."

It's embarrassing, but she never until this point considered that prominent leaders might be so cruel and wicked because they specifically got training and theological education in it, because it is part of what it means to be a servant of Asmodeus. Probably you can't offer that to the whole country because it won't run well if everyone's going around trying to develop their capacity for cruelty and wickedness. But you can offer it to the person who is trying to reform all of Asmodean theology.

All right, what's an action plan for learning cruelty and wickedness and the darkness of her own soul. Possibly it makes sense to start by observation? She watched Contessa Lliratha and knew that she wanted that, wanted to grow up to be that, with an intensity that would have carried her through murdering lots of innocent people, which isn't quite the thing, but it's a start. ...possibly it makes sense to start by asking. She has specifically been told that she can get support, if she only asks. 

 

There's another thing she needs to master, here. The other thing the devil had that she didn't was presentation. Carrying himself in the world like he did things for his own reasons - and of course they were Asmodeus's reasons, he said it outright, but - but he carried himself like he was enjoying every minute of it. Carissa carries herself like she's loyal and competent and pretty sure she is getting a good grade, and that's not how to get a good grade in wickedness. There's a reason Asmodeus said 'the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis', rather than just 'acquire some desires that have no place in Axis', and she doesn't think it's because she has a secret kink for torture, she would've noticed that. It's because that's a way you can relate to Evil, not as some habits of mind for the defense of the self under threat but as the delight of the self in pursuing all it pleases, and in serving those who have even more power to do that -

I am ever your obedient servant, she thinks at Asmodeus, though it feels a lot scarier now that she knows there's a minute chance he's paying attention. 

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Is there an available wicked thing to do? She could - 

- oh shit, she's late for Keltham's magic lessons -

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She can hurry off to those and worry about this later!

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If magic lessons take anyone to the library at any point, they're going to encounter Ione Sala, who has now been healed in flesh if not in spirit.

Very shortly after being healed, Ione Sala discovered that as soon as she gets a couple of dozen steps away from the library, she starts to feel a pull, a faint tingle, which she can intuitively feel would start to weaken her abilities after a time, and eventually rip her soul out of her body.  She's going to need sleeping arrangements set up in here, or in a room connected to here, or for somebody to make her a bedroom that's also a library.  And it doesn't feel like books are enough to make a place a library; people would need to be able to wander into her bedroom and read books there.  Ione also knows that she needs to occasionally read some of the books, and get new books sometimes.  They have to be books she actually wants to read; she can't just be doing it out of duty.  Otherwise she'll die.

Oracles get curses, don't they.

...this curse isn't entirely a bad thing.  It feels like Cheliax would have a hard time making there be a library that's also a torture chamber, and force her to enjoy reading books while she'd rather have her soul torn away so that the pain stops - like it would be hard to torture her to death over years in a way that satisfies her curse.  Maybe she couldn't easily be maledicted either, with the grip that libraries now have on her soul?  Is her curse one that takes her straight to Nethys's afterlife, is that why it feels like the curse would tear out her soul and not just kill her?  Nethys - she's trying not to think thoughts like this, but they still bubble up in the back of her mind - Nethys may have a different attitude from Asmodeus about making sure that His own slaves, so long as they worked hard and did their best, get protected from sufficiently painful fates?

No, she's being stupid.  Nethys wants her to be less afraid of Asmodeus and Cheliax, obviously, so that she doesn't treat them as having equal power with Nethys to threaten her and force her obedience.

...she wishes she hadn't thought that, it's going to make Cheliax trust her less after the next time they read her mind.  The problem is that Ione is now living in such strange new circumstances that she doesn't know yet which paths of thought will lead her to dangerous places before she starts to think them.  She does have to think now, and figure out what Nethys wants from her using her own wits.  Nethys can't give her specific instructions because anybody Nethys touches goes mad.

Ione has been taught since childhood that nobody really cares about her or ever would care about her, except for how she's of use to them; especially the gods, who could help, but don't.  It's pathetic to think that Nethys would give her that curse because Nethys cared about one tiny worm that didn't even ask to be His cleric.  Lots of mortals in the world die agonizing slow deaths and Nethys doesn't protect them.  Asmodeus is the only god who has enough use for mortals in general being competent, not just a few favored clerics, to make sure that children in Cheliax get an education.  And while it has occurred to Ione that this is propaganda, it has also occurred to her that it cannot just be a complete lie.  It's not like Nethys made her His oracle, or helped her in any other way, before she was in a position to be useful to Him.

But it's still - a little warm - to have a master who took real, visible steps to protect her against the worst that other masters can do.

So she will do her very best for Nethys, as she has been thoroughly incentivized, which will include (Ione is very aware that she must think this and believe it as sincerely as she can) being very, very, very obedient to the Chelish government and not inconveniencing them at all, so they don't separate her from Keltham and replace her with an imposter.

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Time for alternate_physics-reduced_capital_infrastructure-autarchical_personal_productivity-fantasy*!

Keltham exits his room, looking for any sort of local personnel or security personnel who can tell him which people he needs for magic lessons, or failing that, how to find Ione and ask her.  He'd ordinarily boop Carissa about that but Keltham is aware that Carissa herself might also want to nap before tonight, even if her day hasn't been as exciting as his.  If Keltham doesn't run into any visible security personnel, he will head towards the library to see if he can find somebody there.

(*)  A ten-syllable recursively-compounded term of Baseline that a literary author would use to describe the most important quality of Golarion magic from the standpoints of its effect on the plot: enabling one person to do important things without a huge supply chain** or a larger group that implements the effects.  Dath ilan has separately recognized a fantasy trope for phenomena that treat mental qualities as primary, but their literature doesn't tie up mentalistic!magic tightly with economic!magic; you can have one without the other.  Keltham has noticed that Golarion 'magic' is mentalistic!magic as well as economic!magic, but the economic!magic aspects are currently much more on his mind.

(**)  Literally "supply graph" in Baseline; using the inflection of the word "graph" which implies that, while ultimately causal and hence acyclic when unrolled over time, the graph is highly cyclic when its inter-time-slice dependencies are projected onto a single time-slice.  If you said the literal words "supply chain" in front of a dath ilani, they'd do a double-take and ask what the ass kind of supply graph looks like a chain.

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About half of the research harem has trickled back into the library; they have their spellbooks out and are negotiating trades of spells now that there's all this spellbook ink available. (It's expensive enough that no student has ever had half as much as she wants, but not so expensive that Keltham wouldn't find it deeply weird if his research harem didn't have enough of it, so now they do.)

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Ione is there too, of course.  She looks neutral.  Nothing she could possibly put on her expression is anything that should be on her expression.

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"Hi, all!  So I've been thinking about ways to teach me magic before I get magic goggles and among my potential stupid ideas is if anybody can both see magic and create a visible illusion that follows whatever magic does?  Though, uh, I'm thinking I should try things the completely normal way before I try anything more complicated than that.  So what's the normal way of casting one's first spell?"

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The normal way is that you visualize it from the sketches in the textbook, and spend a while meditating and trying to get a feel for the fact there's magic at your fingertips, and then you do things with it and get told what happened when you made that motion, and then you try to get it to shape into a cantrip. Which often takes weeks, but not always, if you're really smart and have prior exposure to magic.

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All right, let's try this the most direct possible way.  Keltham internally contains a Read Magic cantrip and can feel the structure, which looks the same as the sketches in the textbook.  That's useful for the visualization part.  Keltham will then meditate and try to feel magic at his fingertips, like when he cast Resistance and Greater Detect Magic and the truth spell before - he was paying attention -  as he holds his hand over a copy of Read Magic built up over somebody else's spellbook.  He will try doing things with any magic he thinks he might be feeling, and be told what, if anything, happened when he made a motion.

Possible hypotheses to distinguish include:

- Keltham, as a being of dath ilan untouched by gods, will prove to have zero magical aptitude and unable to affect the magic in any way.  (Seems unlikely if he's a cleric and cleric spells look the same as wizard spells.)
- Keltham will have unworkably low wizard aptitude, as a result of coming from a heritage that has never selected on itself at all for facility with wizardry.
- Keltham, having not come from a heritage in which wizards have had more access to contraception for however many generations, will do great at this.
- Keltham, having the mighty mental disciplines of dath ilan at his disposal, and having played a fair number of subtle perceptual computer games, will do great at this for reasons having nothing to do with genetics.
- Keltham will make a perfectly normal amount of progress for a Golarionite cleric with 18 Intelligence and zero prior magical exposure.
- The first ten minutes of testing will not be enough to distinguish any of these hypotheses, because they're going to initially produce flat failure and that would've been true for any realistic sort of human being.

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Keltham can feel magic at his fingertips same as anyone, when he's touching someone else's spell-scaffold. It feels like holding your hand near a flame, except instead of heat his fingertips report the sensation of being dipped in honey.

 

The first ten minutes do not distinguish any of the other hypotheses because, yeah, you can't get it in ten minutes. 

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"I've heard the record is half an hour," says Meritxell. 

"I heard it took Nefreti Clepati an hour."

"She was eight, though. I think the records are people starting older, like Keltham."

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"Do you know which part of this is - the critical step, the one that's time-bound, for most people?  Being able to manipulate the magic, being able to manipulate it predictably, being able to manipulate it precisely, being able to manipulate it fast enough, being able to perceive the magic well enough to change manipulations in response to how the magic is changing, being able to remember the shape..."

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"I think closest to - being able to perceive it well enough to change manipulations in response to how the magic is changing? - once you're competent with the very very basics you end up usually blocked on figuring out the order of operations that lets you build a stable structure and holding it all in your head at once while you execute on it, but I think when you're learning the very basics the spell's too simple for that to be hard and you mostly screw up by - overcorrecting when it's a little out of line, thinking it's still working when it's not, poking it in a bad place because you don't know what's going on so you're fumbling around -"

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"All right.  I'll try focusing on perception.  Is this - a case where the standard advice to just meditate and learn to sense things, is as good as it gets, because people tried to tweak the instructions and couldn't get them to work any better?  Or should I be trying to apply standard principles like - forming hypotheses with my eyes closed, guessing, and opening my eyes to see someone's illusion of what happened?"

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"People've tried different ways of teaching it, but they also wouldn't have been trying that hard at making it take an hour rather than five for bright students, children's time isn't worth very much."

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"My time may not be worth that much either, if how fast I learn wizardry isn't a bottleneck on any critical path - which I suspect it won't be - but I'm also standing in a room full of potential experimenters.  So, like, why not, you know.  Is my clever-idea of an illusion trick something we can try?  Oh, language note, the Baseline idiom for clever-idea carries the connotation that clever ideas often aren't."

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"I would say 'brilliant idea', to carry that connotation," Meritxell says. "There's no reason not to try the illusion but we can't see magic and maintain a separate spell at the same time, we'd just have to show you after the fact."

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"Sounds like it'd burn through illusion spells fast, if you lost the illusion spell each time you used the Detect Magic cantrip again.  How many illusion spells here do we have prepped, that y'all have spare to spend on brilliant ideas?"

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Most of the students have an illusion spell prepped and some have two, which amounts to 12 of them.

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"All right, let's plan to only spend half of those 12 in case I've got even more brilliant ideas later.  Let's try cycle one of that, attempted manipulation followed by perception.  Meritxell, you're up first."

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Carissa remembers to slow down and take a deep breath before she rounds the corner that leads to the library. If she comes running in looking like something intensely confusing and life-changing just happens, then - if she were the kind of person who even might do that, then Asmodeus would've had nothing to say to her. She slows down and rounds the corner at the brisk walk of someone who is late, but doesn't mind that much, but does intend to get where she's going.

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If Carissa had come from another place, a place with wristwatches where people more commonly checked the time, she might have realized that in just a few more minutes, it would be exactly the same time of day as when she had first run into Keltham, yesterday, at the Worldwound.

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And she might have worried...

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That...

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Not enough interesting things had happened to her over the last 24 hours.

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Just coming out of invisibility, heading away from the library, are a man and a woman.  The man is pale, thin, tall, clad in simple tight black robes with red trim, with a magical-looking mace belted at his side.  He wears a cheerful joking grin, the sort that might seem genuinely humorous to anyone outside of Cheliax who had never been to Cheliax or met anyone from Cheliax.  He's attractive in a way that requires at least 18 Charisma, and radiates a dark male magnetism which promises that, while this man will definitely kill you once he's finished with you, he will show you quite a good time first.

Beside him is a taller and paler and older woman in elaborate layered dress, black with wide red fringes and tassels, themselves ornamented in gold and rubies, with a horned crown on her head wrought of twisted platinum.

She is identifiable to any informed Chelish citizen as a personage second only to Her Infernal Majestrix Abrogail Thrune II on the list of people who could have everyone in this building killed on a whim, Aspexia Rugatonn, the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus.

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Carissa kneels, immediately, before she has actually thought all the way through questions like "what is she doing here" and "what am doing here" and "am I sure that's her" and "did she talk to Keltham" which seems like the kind of thing that would've been a disaster, but she must be here to talk to Keltham, why else - 

- well, maybe just to lay the Forbiddance, Forbiddance is permanent and can only be dispelled by a more powerful caster which is to say, if the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn cast it, that it can't be -

- Carissa has recently concluded that she needs to get more ambitious, that being small isn't safe anymore, but she still dearly hopes as she kneels that Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn's business here has absolutely nothing to do with her.

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Aspexia Rugatonn, Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, measures the woman kneeling before her with a careful eye and a half-dozen magics.  If Carissa Sevar is an exceptional woman in ways beyond a native talent for wizardry, this is not yet evident.  But then, if Sevar was that self-evidently extraordinary, she'd have been fast-tracked more than she was.

There are not many times when Asmodeus intervenes directly in Cheliax; Aspexia prefers not to be ignorant about any of them.  She is knowledgeable of history and secrets, though, and so less confused by this intervention than others might be.  While other possible readings exist, the degree to which Church and Queen have been ordered not to take the initiative in originating actions impinging on Carissa Sevar are suggestive of circumstances having triggered some divine compact to which Asmodeus is signatory.  The divine view of reality and negotiation gives more prominence than mortals do to notions of 'leaving things alone to become as they would otherwise have been'; perhaps because gods have been able to formulate a sensible notion of what that means between themselves, where mortals could not.

An obvious further guess is that this compact's signatories include Irori among their number, and that Asmodeus is contesting with Irori for Carissa Sevar's soul in some ancient challenge governed by rules.  Though if Carissa Sevar is wavering between Lawful Neutrality and Lawful Evil, Asmodeus is being unsubtle in His blandishments - the temptations more seem like inducements that would be offered to a soul already standing on Asmodean ground, not a soul wavering between a choice of paths.  Overt blandishments for a soul to set proudly aside, while being more covertly tempted by a sense of being treated as important and valuable?  Perhaps.  Carissa Sevar's eidetically reported reaction seems not particularly expected of a nascent follower of Irori, but that could be a masquerade.  Sevar has not been mindread more than she would be otherwise; they are not to be proactive about her correction.

Someone else in Aspexia's position might wonder whether Asmodeus would be pleased, if she disobeyed Asmodeus's orders in order to preemptively insinuate temptations to Sevar, show her how important she could be, before Sevar had sought out theological instruction of her own accord.  Such actions on a mortal's initiative would not, could not, cause Asmodeus to be in direct violation of divine compact.

Aspexia does not even consider it.  One of the foremost ways in which a Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is shaped, is to predictably not behave in ways that make it more expensive for Asmodeus to keep His compacts.  Improvising circles around your orders can rather tend do that.  If Aspexia was the kind of priestess to circumvent her orders, Asmodeus would have needed to take that nature into account in choosing her orders. 

More importantly, when you are Asmodeus's priestess, the first and foremost thing you do is what Asmodeus has told you to do.

In the situation as Aspexia Rugatonn mostly suspects it to be, a contest triggered between Asmodeus and Irori, there are many words that could be spoken to Carissa Sevar to benefit Asmodeus.  There is a beastly, fleshly impulse that wants to find some excuse to maneuver Carissa into asking for instruction, to arrange the situation so that Carissa Sevar chooses to seek her descent into darkness - to win, herself, the challenge against Irori, to Asmodeus's glory.

There is not the slightest chance that Aspexia Rugatonn will skirt the rules to try any of that.  She's been told not to be proactive, and that is a plain instruction: hands off, don't speak to Sevar unless spoken to, Sevar is to cast aside her own will and not have it stripped from her.  One of the many glorious benefits of being an Asmodean is that you can just follow orders.

There are also other possibilities for why her Lord would have instructed them so.  Sevar's soul may have had hidden value great enough that trying to exchange it for permanent arcane sight would have been too unbalanced a trade, and failed; and Asmodeus may not have wished this fact revealed to Sevar herself.  Or Asmodeus may have some incomprehensible preference about this particular soul, it may have some ancient shape sentimental to Him, for which reason Asmodeus desires Carissa Sevar to come to Him in Hell and put aside her will of her own accord.  There may be some benign process underway which would be interfered with by Sevar gaining arcane sight, and interfered with by other actions natural to Chelish agencies, which Asmodeus desires to be left alone to proceed to its foreseeable outcome.

Or there may be many things going on at once, many pots that Asmodeus has in the fire, that His orders impact simultaneously.

By simply obeying her orders and not improvising, Aspexia can avoid interfering with her Lord's plans in any of those cases.

Some of the apparent confusion of these orders may be due to how Hell rendered down Asmodeus's will into words.  Asmodeus's thoughts are too great for mortals to know, and reflect truths unspeakable in this world under divine compacts.  Having those thoughts pass through a succession of devils, each younger and stupider and less bound by the compacts than the last, does not in any way surpass this fundamental barrier between start and finish; and if this were not so, all of Asmodeus's instructions would be passed by way of Hell.  Then any process by which Hell tries to translate Asmodeus's thoughts into mortal language must inevitably change, and indeed, mutilate, those thoughts.  There are both advantages and disadvantages of that process, compared to a direct divine revelation:  On the one hand, there are wiser devils in Hell to oversee the initial stages of translation; but on the other hand, by the time the final words are heard, they are stripped of other overtones that mortals could hear directly in a god's voice.

An apparently important subtlety of Hell's phrasing, seemingly key to a puzzle, may stem only from some devil phrasing something poorly and not foreseeing what a mortal would make of it.  This is yet another reason to just follow Hell's commands without trying to brilliantly improvise around the fine edges of their exact details, when Hell has interpreted Asmodeus's will into mortal language; the commands' edges may not have been placed that finely.

Aspexia Rugatonn has gotten this far in life by combining the executive capacity to manage fractious subordinates, plus great initiative and independence and ambition of her own, plus the cruel and tyrannical disposition to be a priestess of Asmodeus, with a genuinely intuitive understanding of why it can sometimes be a good idea to just follow your orders.  Her ascendance to the peak of Asmodeus's church can be seen as inevitable, since there's only a billion or so people in Golarion and it is unlikely enough that even a single person like Aspexia Rugatonn came to exist there, let alone two.  She worries about what will happen to her carefully crafted church after she dies.

Oh, and there's also the fact that this entire affair has now been the subject of: two direct interventions of Asmodeus, four cleric circles bestowed from Abadar, two oracle circles from Nethys, possibly something to do with Irori, and two oracle circles from yet another unidentified Lawful Neutral god still under investigation.  In retrospect, Aspexia really should have put up the Forbiddance first thing in the morning, no matter what else was on her schedule.

It would be genuinely arrogant, under those circumstances, for Aspexia to imagine that she knows precisely what is going on and can plan precise dances around it.  Thankfully, in this case, Asmodeus has given her orders by way of Hell, which she can follow.

So Aspexia knows exactly - indeed trivially - what she plans to say to Sevar.  Aspexia plans to say what Asmodeus's orders call for her to say.

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The man speaks.  "Carissa Sevar.  I am Rathus Ratarion, Paraduke under Her Infernal Majestrix.  If, and only if, you are not urgently about our Lord's other business, the Most High bids you walk with myself and her, while she goes about casting a Forbiddance upon this place.  If you have theological questions, do not speak them to her.  The Most High would not usually be the one to instruct a fourth-circle cleric, which is the precise fashion in which our Lord has commanded us to treat you; and as the Most High has approached you here, such instruction would not be sought of your own accord, as Asmodeus has also commanded us regarding you."

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Carissa stands, and falls in behind the both of them, and is slightly impressed with herself for managing to do even that gracefully; internally, she is shaking. She wonders if there is a fashion of instructing students that imbues them with sufficient awe in their superiors without leaving them somewhat debiliatingly terrified in their actual presence; perhaps awe and terror go together inevitably, but if any place had decoupled them, dath ilan would have. And Keltham wasn't frightened by Contessa Lrilatha, though objectively speaking he should have been, and perhaps that was just an error. 

 

"Who would, ordinarily, instruct a fourth-circle cleric?" she asks the man once she's sure that her voice will convey at least no less dignity than an average Chelish wizard manages.

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"A fifth-circle cleric or higher, depending on the question; the senior cleric stationed here should suffice for many such.  There are questions that would naturally be referred from them to the Most High -"  A slight hesitation.  "But I should not, I think, attempt to insinuate what those questions would be, while you stand in the Most High's presence not sought of your own accord.  You might be led into asking those questions, and that would constitute our being proactive, which our Lord has been very clear we should not be.  I believe that I should come quickly to our business here, Sevar, and reduce my risks of accidentally being proactive."

Aspexia Rugatonn strides briskly ahead of both of them, but not fast enough that it would be strenuous for the other two to follow.  It's plausible that she intends to make a quick circuit of the entire grounds, perhaps for purposes of Forbiddance.

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Carissa keeps pace. 

 

 

It....seems likely that she is being reprimanded? If she had been proactive, and sought out the senior cleric stationed here, then Asmodeus could have delivered whatever instruction He intended -

- except, He could do that anyway, right -

- well, He said to seek it out proactively, and she hasn't done that yet, so if it's a test she failed, which is terrifying, except also, it has been less than an hour, and she spent the entire time reflecting on what questions she was going to ask so as to do the job properly! She's not complaining (even internally) that it is unfair, for her to have failed the test; the test is whether she's useful or not, and there's no fairness in that. No one shopping at the market and picking over vegetables, leaving out the bruised ones, worries that those ones aren't getting a fair shot. But it seems like the test isn't necessarily discriminating very well, if spending an hour thinking through what you're going to ask before asking is failing it.

So possibly she is - not being reprimanded? Evidence for this theory: she isn't in even a little bit of pain! Possibly she is just being - because it's very unlikely that the offer to walk with Aspexia Rugatonn was extended without specific intent - reminded of what it means, to be raised high in this world by Asmodeus; reminded of what she has been offered, if she is good enough.

And possibly she is being evaluated.  Actually, that shouldn't have come to mind third. Asmodeus bothered with her; this is confusing; possibly it is confusing even to Aspexia Rugatonn, and she wants to know whether it is some specific feature of Carissa as a person which prompted the offer or whether it was, effectively, offered to the girl who got in with Keltham fastest, on the assumption all of them would be minimally competent from there - that doesn't quite fit, but she doesn't have a better theory to replace it with - 

- well, if it was something specific about Carissa, the only thing she can think of - the only thing that felt like a thought pattern no one else in Cheliax had thought before - was the question she was puzzling over during Keltham's lesson, about how to reconcile dath ilan's teachings of law and chaos and heredity and humans having been copied rather than created and what free will is. Her going interpretation, she thinks vaguely, of Asmodeus's message, was that she was being too Lawful Neutral; she was going to reconstruct it all and arrive at the wrong place. She is grateful for the warning, and intends to take it to heart, and won't try again until she's better at Evil. But presumably Asmodeus wouldn't have said anything just to save her from becoming a heretic and dying of it, so it must be important, in some way outside her; maybe, if she gets it right, she can convince Keltham. That's probably her top guess, if she had to name one. (What's confusing about it, what's the strongest argument against it.... well, if a really good theologian was projected to succeed at convincing Keltham, they'd have gotten a theologian in to do it, that's a little confusing.)

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"First, I am to deliver this copy from the eidetic memory of Elias Abarco of the complete event.  It includes Elias Abarco's report of the precise words of all instructions from Hell.  Any clear errors or omissions in Elias's report which appear to you are extremely serious affairs, and are to be reported to us at once; if you are doubtful, report your doubts accurately, and magic to clarify your memory will be provided you.  Once you touch this paper it will become readable only by you, barring great magics.  Report nonetheless if it is stolen, or, as a clever spy might arrange, apparently lost due to your own carelessness under very embarrassing circumstances that you are sorely tempted to keep secret.  It may be destroyed by burning at your own discretion, though I would suggest being very certain you have perfectly memorized Hell's conveyed instructions before doing so."

Paraduke Rathus Ratarion hands Carissa a paper written in very precise, very clear handwriting, containing to all appearances a complete and accurate transcript of the entire event, including the part where she threatened to eat the devil's heart and everything she said to Elias Abarco afterwards about wanting to be pretty, and the rest of that.

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The thing she's tempted to say is 'thank you', as if it's a favor; she restrains herself. It is a very valuable thing to her but that's got nothing to do with why it was handed to her; this is sacred material, a communication very distantly from Asmodeus himself, and it ought to be correct, as their duty to Him. She reads through it. "This matches my recollection on a first review."

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"Good.  There remains then the matter of your first set of requests for Chelish state support in your indulgences, a matter in which I have been deemed the person best suited to make decisions.  I have come to a preliminary decision on all of your requests here."

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Carissa glances back down at the paper to be entirely sure what she said.

"I'm going to need to be prettier. Every count's heir I've ever seen was stunningly beautiful. Don't you dare comment on my looks, I'll stab you. I'm going to need to be prettier. And I want a headband, and an allowance for crafting."

         "I don't actually know how much the inheriting daughter of a Count of - I mean, presumably they get their allowance from their county, which you haven't got -"

"Well, maybe you should get me one."

         "Is this what gratitude for the extraordinary indulgence of your god looks like?"

"Gratitude? He wants a return. And I'm going to be perfect. - can I have the other girls' souls?"

 

Wow. She really did say that. She's still not in pain so she's going to conclude she doesn't regret it at all. Yet.

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They are now outside and circling briskly about the grounds, paths through moderately pretty gardens with an unusual number of red and black flowers, going to near where fences and defenses begin.  Aspexia is frowning, not at Carissa, but with a surveyor's eye, suggesting that she is considering where to place the borders of her Forbiddance in a place convenient to moving some of the defenses inward.

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The Paraduke continues speaking.

"There exists a tension between two elements of Hell's interpretation given to us of Asmodeus's will; which is a hazard of Hell interpreting and distorting Asmodeus's will into such commands as may be spoken in language to mortals.  We are, on the one hand, to reward you no less and no more than you have earned under Asmodeus's Law.  On the other hand, to support you as though you were an inheriting daughter of a Countess, if you seek to indulge."

"Interpreting and resolving such tensions, in Asmodeus's direct interventions conveyed by way of Hell, is ordinarily business of the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn.  It is in this capacity that she is overseeing my own interactions with you now, in case I make any errors in my interpretation, while she had other business about this place."

To all appearances, Paraduke Rathus Ratarion seems entirely unbothered by the prospect of needing to execute confusing instructions from Asmodeus-by-way-of-Hell with the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus watching him in case he requires correction.  Perhaps he is, in fact, unbothered by it.  This is unlikely to be among the hundred most stressful days of his life.

"The Most High currently believes we are to resolve the tension in our instructions thus: reason as if you were the inheriting daughter of a Count of Cheliax, and decide your requests as though we were being asked what treatment of an inheriting daughter would be a matter of concern according to the principles of Her Infernal Majestrix's reign."

"In regards to your request to seem more comely, if an heiress of a Count was being forced to grow up with an ordinary appearance, it would be a non-Asmodean behavior of small but noticeable concern to Church and Queen.  If the pattern was repeated, or if it was done with deliberate attempt to prevent that heiress from indulging in vanity, it would become a matter of greater concern."

"In such an event, I, Paraduke Rathus Ratarion, minister over the Asmodean culture of the nobility under Her Infernal Majestrix, would be dispatched by the Majestrix to speak to this hypothetical Count, inquire into any hidden reasons, and perhaps suggest a correction.  In this case, the Count in question does not exist, and so the Count may be considered to have mounted no counterargument and yielded the issue."  This statement is accompanied, very briefly, by that humorous grin which might look genuine to anyone who'd never been to Cheliax.

"A wizard-potionmaker pair that has recently treated county heiresses has been located, and you will be conveyed there tomorrow for your first treatment.  After dinner-time tomorrow, which, given your reported schedule, seemed least likely to cause you to miss any important lectures from the person that Hell referred to as your teacher.  Despite the general importance and urgency of obeying Asmodeus's commands, I ruled out having it done at once, since the inheriting daughter of a Count would not have someone else's appointment canceled for her to accommodate her the same day as she made the request."

"I will not ask if this is to your satisfaction, as a county heiress would not be so asked by myself.  Nor is it appropriate for you to express gratitude towards me.  I am not granting you favors.  I am conversing with a hypothetical parent of yours regarding which indulgences are deemed a positive sign in a young Asmodean noble, and Her Infernal Majestrix's state is then acting in that absent Count's capacity using such resources as a Count would allocate."

"If any of this process and reasoning seems less than completely understandable to you, speak now, as it concerns Asmodeus's commands and hence is of great importance to clarify.  I may not be present here in person to interact with you in the future."

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See, they are more like Keltham than normal people, they'd make more sense to him, Contessa Lrilatha did but she was trying to so that wasn't much evidence but this man, too, would make sense to Keltham, there is a truth that both of them are climbing towards, only dath ilan doesn't have gods to guide them towards it and does have a billion people with an average INT of 18 working on it -

 

To Keltham she would say 'I think I understand', because she suspects Keltham values apparent effort towards - acknowledging her own errancy, towards admitting that this is not the sort of set of sentences which one would rightly be perfectly sure they understand - but this is Cheliax. Her errancy is accounted for. "I understand," she says, only because it's quicker than the pause he'd give for her to admit confusions if she had any.

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"After careful consideration, I have made a preliminary ruling that your request for an intelligence-increasing headband, and for a crafting allowance, seems to me to come less under the heading of a desire to indulge in Asmodean behavior befitting young nobility, and more under the heading of your requesting a reward not yet earned.  If the inheriting daughter of a Count were told to produce results meriting an intelligence headband and crafting allowance, or else go without, the Church and Queen would not object."

"I would not hand you title to the souls of your rival women even if I could.  While the goal is laudably Asmodean, it is not one which should be immediately satisfied in a Count's heiress as an indulgence.  It would be more proper for her parent to instruct her to triumph over her rivals herself."

"The request for a county is intriguing, and perhaps even, arguably, indulgent; but it seems to stretch the interpretation of the wording for prioritizing you as if you were an heiress, and to be too much of an unearned reward.  While it was an admirably Asmodean ploy, I put forth on behalf of Her Infernal Majestrix, and the Most High agreed, that if such had been our Lord's true will, Hell's interpretation would have said to make you an heiress, not to prioritize your support as though you were one.  We were sensible, of course, that you were likely just teasing poor Elias with that request, but Asmodeus's orders to us do not actually say that it matters."  Another cheerful-appearing, humorous-appearing smile, which vanishes just as quickly as before.

"You will receive by tomorrow's evening a lightly enchanted dueling dagger, whose wounds heal more easily but which causes greater pain.  It will be simple in style, but suitable for a Count's heiress to carry, and would be appropriate for her to use to stab somebody who commented on her appearance."

"You are permitted to argue these preliminary rulings, especially by reference to implications of Asmodeus's interpreted instructions which I may have failed to comprehend.  Do you wish to do so?"

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"No." She is not very surprised to learn that she cannot have a headband, a crafting allowance, a county and the souls of her rivals just because Asmodeus said (something that got translated down as) that she should be somewhat indulged. "How should I make my requests of the Cheliax government acting in the stead of my Count, in the future?"

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"This location reports daily to both Church and Crown, or is intended to do so, once it has stopped generating an additional top-urgency report every hour as presently seems to be the case.  If your request is not more urgent than that - which a Count's heir's request ordinarily would not be - there should be a cleric on site who is responsible for maintaining communication; direct your messages to them or have a report delivered to them, for forwarding to my own office."

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- nod. "The other girls, who sell their souls, are going to have permanent arcane sight. It would be unsuitable, I think, for a Count's inheriting daughter to be studying magic with a peer group all of whom had such a substantial advantage she did not."

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The man smiles drolly.  "Hardly an indulgence in darkness, Sevar.  It also seems unwise for us to attempt to undo one of the most direct effects of our Lord's unexplained actions.  It is possible that a critical point in this entire affair is that everyone with arcane sight here will be fooled by some trick or illusion, which only you will successfully resist.  Though that is less probable today than it would have been historically, when prophecy was unbroken and the gods' commands more often had such effects.  And if you do enough to merit the loan of an item enchanted for magical detection or arcane sight, it will be loaned to you, as Asmodeus commanded us to reward you no less than you had earned.  The Most High is fond of regularly pointing out how much our lives can be simplified by just following Asmodeus's commands precisely."

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They've completed the circuit of the villa.  The Grand High Priestess halts her strides and makes a silencing gesture, then takes an incense burner out of her dress's folds, followed by enough incense that - if you have any sense for the grade of incense she's using - it is going to constitute a significant part of the Chelish government's expenses for today.

From a wizard's perspective, this cleric spell takes her a shockingly short time to cast, for a ritual of that expense and permanent effect.  It's over in less than a minute, an extremely smoky and fragrant one.

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When it's done, the Paraduke speaks again.  "This affair is confusing.  Some might even say, alarming.  Our Lord did not forbid us from questioning you about it.  The instructions we did receive, however, imply a generally high degree of caution.  The Most High has guessed that, if we would otherwise press you with questions, our Lord would probably have needed to command us not to do it, given the character of His other commands.  By avoiding pressing you with questions, then, we can perhaps have saved our Lord some cost and space for other instruction."

"With that said, if there is anything you want to say about this whole affair, the Most High wants to hear it.  But you must not treat that truth as a command from the Most High.  If that were predictably the way you behaved, Asmodeus might have needed to expend greater costs to tell the Most High not to appear before you and listen silently to you, if that is something she should not do."

"In thinking this way, the Most High instructs us, we are to ignore entirely the fact that Asmodeus has already acted.  We are not to reason in any way that includes the fact that Asmodeus has already omitted to instruct us to avoid questions.  We must still act to avoid wasting our Lord's time and energy, even now that it has already been spent, because His own sight spans time and our own actions in a way that our mortal perspectives do not.  We have been cursed with free will; but we can choose not to use it, and make ourselves predictable instead."

"I can barely understand the matter, myself, but the Most High understands it better and it is she who instructs:  This opportunity to speak must not be taken by you as a veiled order from the Most High."

"If, however, there is anything you want to say about this entire affair, the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn bids me say to you in her presence that, should you have received other revelations from Asmodeus, or know of other relevant facts rendering this affair more understandable, she has not deduced on her own part that Asmodeus intended her not to hear of it."

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And maybe they aren’t reading her mind, if that would entail being proactive? It’s bizarre to think they might not have been, and she doesn’t intend to put any weight on it, but - but maybe she’s going to have to say her speculation aloud if she wants it known by her superiors, without the plausible deniability about whether she thought it worth bringing to their attention.

“Asmodeus has not otherwise communicated with me,” she says. “I - if I had to guess why me, my best guess was… during Keltham’s lessons I was trying to work out a reconciliation of the things dath ilan knows, about how humans came to be and how they learn and in what arenas they can learn the patterns gods run on, with theology as it was taught to me. And I think the instructions were perhaps aimed at - me doing that right, rather than how I was doing it, which was too Lawful Neutral.”

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Paraduke Rathus Ratarion now has additional questions.  He opens his mouth to ask, albeit more subtly and gently than he usually would, exactly what new theology Sevar thinks she was inventing that would merit direct correction and encouragement from Asmodeus Himself rather than from her superiors.

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Tread carefully, Aspexia Rugatonn sends across their open Telepathy bond, tinging her thoughts with just enough coldness and hints of the lash to remind the Paraduke to be concerned with his continuing possession of his skin, and not just his curiosity or indignation.  Say nothing proactively that this frightened child might possibly take as a hint of correction.

This sort of lunacy drives Aspexia Rugatonn completely up the wall.  What if this child did, in fact, stumble over some thought that the current priesthood of Asmodeus would not have thought on their own, and Asmodeus was trying to correct and encourage her in that?  Wouldn't they have received orders very similar to the ones Asmodeus gave them?  Why is this Paraduke trying to make Asmodeus's life more difficult in possible cases like that one?  Yes, what's going on is more likely that Sevar thought something so Lawful Neutral that it triggered an old compact between Asmodeus and Irori, but if that's what's actually happening then it is beneficial for Asmodeus that Sevar seems to believe she's being encouraged to work on a more Lawful Evil theology.  A beneficial delusion which, in that possible case, they can avoid disturbing by following their orders.

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Ratarion doesn't show any hint of a wince outside, but after a moment's thought, he realizes what he probably did wrong.  Yes, if there's some contest between Irori and Asmodeus going on, Sevar should not be snapped out of any delusions she has about inventing her own theology, so long as it's a Lawful Evil one.

Automatically Ratarion now opens his mouth again, now with the intent of saying to Sevar that the Most High would no doubt find it interesting to hear of any thought which merited Asmodeus's direct attention -

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Stop.  Stop being proactive.  Stop showing initiative to help our Lord accomplish His goals after He gave you more specific instructions than that.  Just obey in a way our Lord would have found predictable.

Aspexia Rugatonn sometimes permits herself the vanity of thinking that she has come to understand a tiny bit of Asmodeus's divine frustration.  No matter what orders Asmodeus gives, there is always some part of mortals - even of her, but she is managing it better - that thinks "obedience" means treating Asmodeus's orders as constraints, or worse, hints as to what Asmodeus is really trying to do, by which means the mortal can helpfully understand what Asmodeus is really trying to do, and then cleverly navigate around the edges of Asmodeus's order-constraints to accomplish that better.

Aspexia has tried telling other people that they need to become more the sorts of beings that Asmodeus can easily and safely steer using brief instructions.  It doesn't seem to help.  Nobody other than her ever gets it.  She is speaking some word that is not in the innate language of their being.

Aspexia once devised the parable of a three-year-old child whose owner must instruct it to navigate it through a dungeon full of traps, using a limited budget of words.  To teach her student clerics how the world must look from Asmodeus's perspective.  To make them ask themselves how much they'd want the child to plainly follow direct orders where it got those, versus showing creative initiative for all the cases its orders didn't seem to cover, versus responding quickly to the unexpected, versus the child trying to deduce what its orders "really meant" and going the extra mile on its owner's inferred goals.

The parable didn't work, so she requisitioned access to a dungeon and bought some three-year-olds and tried making her clerics actually run the exercise.  So they could see what happened when the three-year-old acted towards them like they were acting towards Asmodeus.

It still didn't help.  There seems to be something about the concept that is contrary to the nature of a mortal soul.  Mortals just end up with goals, even if you tell them to take Asmodeus's goals as their own they still end up with goals, mortals don't just obey they end up with a goal of obedience and then they start trying to figure out how to dance around the edges of Asmodeus's instructions so they can obey Him even more.  Aspexia can see what they're doing wrong, but she has never been able to successfully get that concept inside of a fellow mortal.  She can talk it at her flock but they're still mortals after she's done talking.  The training games she's devised didn't seem to help much outside of the specific games themselves.  The way that a mortal should obey, the way that a distant god who can't communicate clearly and doesn't have much time to think about them would want them to obey - "corrigibility", she once tried naming it to her flock - it's just so alien to a mortal's nature.

Aspexia Rugatonn sometimes permits herself the vanity of thinking that she has come to understand a tiny bit of her own owner's frustration.

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"While I imagine the Most High is curious about specifics," Ratarion says, a few moments later, "if you would like any manner of theological instruction with respect to your ideas, I believe our Lord's orders imply that the senior cleric at your installation would be the one to converse with, and they could also pass a report to the Most High not intended for any further correction.  Alternatively, if you do not yet seek such instruction, a report on your current thoughts, not intended to seek any form of correction, could be sent directly to the Most High -"  A slight hesitation.  "Though I believe the Most High would wish me to emphasize that neither of these are - commands, attempts to push around the edges of Asmodeus's probable orders regarding the degree to which we are not to be proactive - if you spend time urgently composing such a report, and miss a key lesson from your teacher, if you focus your thoughts on the Most High's reactions and pay less attention in class, we would have perhaps managed to do a form of damage that Asmodeus would have need to give further orders to prevent - you should not, I am trying to suggest, go too far out of the path you would otherwise take, to file any report, if it seems you would never have done that without us coming here and being proactive -"  Ratarion does wince visibly, this time, and then emits a very charming smile.  "Not being proactive really is quite hard for a mortal, isn't it?  Perhaps I should simply be silent."

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"If there were an agent here in my place which was smart enough, they could imagine out a Carissa, exactly as she stood an hour ago, on her way to go to magic lessons with Keltham and the rest of his girls, and project out when she would have sought correction, and exactly how she would have clarified all the questions she was contemplating, and so that Carissa could continue on her trajectory unimpeded by this conversation, or any future ones that the things I might want to explain would necessitate, and we could discuss all of the specifics while leaving that Carissa out of the loop, so to speak, to do precisely as she has been ordered.

I'm not that smart, and I'm not sure anyone is, past the end of prophecy, but there's a simpler approach, of tracking down those impulses that this conversation might have unwisely insinuated into Carissa, and choking them off, and preserving myself in the state of one who has attracted no proactive interest whatsoever, while still having told you everything useful I can. I will try, because it is my desire to be inexpensive for Asmodeus to direct, and because it is my desire to get your advice without you being obliged by my inability to avoid following it to barely give it in the first place. But I suspect my trying will be imperfect, because I am not smart enough to contain a Carissa; I am one. 

I think a Count in this position would give his daughter a headband."

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This is what always happens when she tries to explain to her fellow mortals why they need to be easier to steer.  They start thinking even more complicated thoughts and inventing elaborate ways to be easier to steer that would involve doing even more things, pursuing goals, and even, in this case, increasing their intelligence.  Aspexia is not even angry anymore.  She is just numb.

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"I believe we are approaching the point where our putative Count would find the heiress's insistence to be less adorable, Sevar.  The senior officer at this installation would be an appropriate audience for any assertions by you that a headband would be necessary to your work -"

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Aspexia Rugatonn speaks out loud for the first time.  "Hold," she says in a clear cold voice.  "I have received a message.  The Lawful Neutral god who bestowed two oracle circles has been identified.  It is Otolmens.  Have you been told who that is, Sevar?"

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"Goddess of - keeping the world intact -"

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"I would, under other circumstances, regret having just completed this Forbiddance here, which would make it more difficult and expensive to move this project to the other side of Golarion from Cheliax.  However, any matter which merits Otolmens's attention is one which you cannot escape that easily, and requires getting at least off the local plane."

"If this project had not been the subject of two direct interventions by Asmodeus, and been created as a result of Asmodeus's intervention, I would order the deaths of every person here except for Otolmens's oracle, and hope that this had been sufficient."

"It is a sufficiently severe matter that I am now stating directly, though still without direct threat or consequence otherwise, that if you know anything I should know about this, before I offer Asmodeus a further costly opportunity to guide me, I believe that not only Asmodeus but every Lawful god and most non-Lawful gods would prefer that you share it with me."

Aspexia guesses, though it's a less certain guess than usual, that if Asmodeus wanted her to not ask questions about a fucking Otolmens event then Asmodeus would have used His limited communications budget to communicate that to her directly.

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"It's got to be about Keltham. Am I the only person who has read his mind or did someone else get in on that before he got clericed and it became risky - or have you got an expensive way to do it anyway, I think it's worth it -"

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"Ignore any channels you think I may have for receiving information about Keltham other than yourself, including your own past reports.  Speak to me as if I'd never heard of the man, explain to me why Otolmens is acting."

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"Keltham is from a world with an average intelligence of 18 and a billion people, well-coordinated. They are richer than us and have invented many things we haven't which should nonetheless function in our world, some underlying laws being the same. He has patterns of thought that I'm pretty sure don't occur on Golarion at all - he's just better at thinking, he's not smarter than me but it's like he's half overcome the curse of having a mortal brain through deliberate practice, and he thinks of himself as very weak at it, compared to a dath ilani with an aptitude, and he's trying to teach us. They have dangerous ideas and dangerous inventions which aren't known to Keltham, held by Keepers, but probably possible to derive independently, and Keltham doesn't know how they handle people who derive them or which things he shouldn't reinvent. Lrilatha warned him about that. They screened off their entire history because there was something dangerous in it."

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Aspexia thinks.  The more thoughts of her own she has, so long as she holds them lightly, the easier it will be for Asmodeus to point to any of them, if any of them are correct.  If, indeed, this matter merits Asmodeus's attention at all.  It - could be that Nethys and Otolmens have some rivalry after the fashion of more ordinary gods?  Nethys dropping two oracle circles, followed by Otolmens responding with two oracle circles, is suggestive of that.  It could be that there is some more ordinary divine game going on and not the world ending.  Asmodeus isn't acting like the world is ending, and Abadar shouldn't be dropping four cleric circles on somebody who's going to end it.

Aspexia spares a moment of frustration for how it is impossible for consecrations, forbiddances, wardings, or literally anything else, to keep Nethys out of anything.  Ordering Nethys's oracle killed and maledicted would be an obvious tactic, but Nethys's oracle seems like she might be harder than usual to maledict, or even take out of her library.  Which means that Nethys was thinking about Chelish responses, not just being insane.  And if they kill Ione Sala and Nethys's clerics resurrect her, then Nethys's clerics may find out what's going on here with Keltham, if they don't already know.

"I will soon pray to Asmodeus.  My default intention, which Asmodeus may choose not to correct, will be to equip Otolmens's oracle with invisibility items and a weapon and permit him to monitor and intervene in events in this facility as he wishes.  He will have pointed out to him Keltham and Ione Sala - she is now, allegedly against her own will, an oracle of Nethys, if you had not been informed of that - as possible objects of his attention.  Do you, Sevar, wish to offer any corrections, however slight, to my default plan?"

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"I think Keltham would agree to put all his teaching on hold indefinitely, if you told him Otolmens oracled someone, which you could do in addition to empowering the oracle, if you expect to have better options to present Asmodeus later."

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Aspexia does not scream at Sevar about how causing every single intervention of a god to have lots and lots of different effects is not always helpful to that god.  It's not that Aspexia would balk at screaming this repeatedly at somebody while burning off their fingers and healing them back, it's that she's found doing so doesn't help.

"Otolmens's existence is considered a secret because of how we do not wish to direct more attention to Her domain.  It is more in accord with usual policy surrounding Otolmens, to not call this matter to Keltham's attention and potentially turn his thoughts in that direction."

"This policy is not mostly about the chance that Keltham will act deliberately, Sevar.  The problem lies in turning people's thoughts in a direction, calling their attention to the harmful thing.  If you tell someone that Otolmens worries they might destroy the world, they may ask themselves how they'd do that or ask themselves why they'd do that.  I would, ordinarily, just kill and maledict him, but Asmodeus told us not to do that, and also Abadar has made the man His cleric.  It is a frustrating situation to be in, and in those situations, it is often wiser to do less than to do more, if you have not been instructed otherwise."  Says the three-year-old in the dungeon, and lives a little longer.

"With that said, would you recommend moderately strongly, especially if your recommendation is based on information not known to me, that I come before Asmodeus with a default policy of warning Keltham explicitly?"

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"No." Maybe dath ilan has categorically adequate training in how to take that information and not make things worse with it, not think about all the implications or the likely mechanisms. It would not be surprising if dath ilan did. But Keltham hasn't directly said it does, and her argument seems obviously true of Golarion people, who are worse.

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"If you come across any further information on this Otolmens event which you think is relevant, standard protocols call for you to report it separately to the highest priest and senior military officer of this installation, to be separately reported to myself and Her Infernal Majestrix.  You are not to assume that any such information has been reported by other channels; duplicate it.  Follow these instructions unless you are quite sure that your other instructions from Hell or Asmodeus supersede them."

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"I understand."

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"I'm going to go talk to Otolmens's oracle, then pray.  Do you consider it necessary to insert yourself into that discussion?"

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What kind of person - no, broader than that - what kind of mind of any kind would answer 'yes' to that question. "No, Priestess."

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Aspexia flies off toward the villa at speeds only slightly visually distinguishable from teleportation.

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"I believe I shall see myself out," says Paraduke Rathus Ratarion.  "Enjoy your date.  Though that wasn't an order - you know, I think I should just go."

He gives Sevar a cheerful wave, walks just outside the Forbiddance, and vanishes.

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh she's not just being stubborn and childish about the headband, she actually thinks that she is not capable enough to function at the level required for survival in her current situation and she doesn't really have a plan B - well. Plan B is to become as good at thinking as Keltham, who is not smarter than her. But it'll take time that it's not at all obvious she has. 

She stands up. Walks back inside. Tries to contemplate the odds that Asmodeus will, after all, tell Aspexia Rugatonn 'sure, kill them all' -

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Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has never heard of Otolmens, which was obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't know what this whole project is about, which was also obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't have much of an education, of course, and has not received any helpful revelations from a primordial inevitable who would have a harder time talking to him than even Asmodeus would, of course, and is having a hard time understanding what is even going on at all, of course, let alone why the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus would be trying to have a plainly spoken discussion with him, of course, and Aspexia could no doubt have foreseen this herself if she'd spent an additional minute thinking about it in advance, of course.

Aspexia keeps her temper under absolute control.  When she gets home for the day - if, indeed, she ever does get home for the day - she's going to order a dozen slaves sent to her, bask in their understandable fears for a while, and then set all of them on fire.

Why.  Why did Otolmens pick him.  Why halfling slave #958245?

...because Broom is a simple predictable mortal, who will do something predictable in the future, if Aspexia had to guess.

All right.  Aspexia will not modify her predictable initial plans unless Asmodeus tells her to.  Broom gets a greater invisibility ring and a dagger of assassination; and what Aspexia hopes is exactly the right level of gentle suggestion not to kill random Asmodeans without a reason, and that the reason is supposed to have something to do with his new god and Her purposes, not just Broom's previous grudges...

Aspexia is glad that she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, but, in fact, she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, so everything is fine.

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Awww, Asmodeus's favoritest pet squirrel in all of Golarion has been spooked by Otolmens hanging around!  To be fair to His pet squirrel, this is literally among the most reasonable possible reasons for a pet squirrel to become spooked.  His pet squirrel is probably not deducing the context about how Otolmens freaks out every time the laws of physics do something She thinks they shouldn't, like throwing out the anomaly-squirrel, and now She is hanging around Golarion being upset about that.

He sends a faint nonsemantic touch of reassurance.  Gods are allowed to do this to their clerics without it being very costly from the intervention budget, so long as they don't do it often enough or reliably enough that it starts to form a signaling code.  The part about making Otolmens's new oracle be invisible is weird and unpredicted, but Asmodeus doesn't have time to pay much attention and His pet squirrel probably knows what it's doing.  It's not worth an intervention, almost certainly.

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Broom has spent a long lifetime looking and sounding, and in some cases thinking, exactly as wise and intelligent as will not get a slave punished under a variety of circumstances.  This usually does not call for very much apparent wisdom and intelligence; it is better to let your masters look down on you, when that does not give them a reason to punish you.

When the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus explains matters to Broom using carefully dumbed-down clauses - about how he's been chosen by the goddess of preventing the world from ending, and he's allowed to kill an Asmodean if he thinks it stops the world ending but shouldn't do so otherwise, except that if he feels a very strong impulse to do anything he should probably do that whether or not it involves killing someone - Broom displays exactly the level of apparent wisdom and intelligence that makes him look like a gruff old halfling sweeper who was in fact able to grasp all that and will do it reliably.  He thinks he understands, mistress; some people might make a world-threatening mess that destroys not just Cheliax but all of Golarion, and if it looks like they're going to do that, Broom will clean it up.

Broom does not plan to do this as a masquerade, or think any worded thoughts about it; it's just a reflex by now.  Like so many others in Cheliax, Broom has become not a very distinguishable person from his mask, even to himself.  It may not occur to Broom for a while yet that he is now allowed to be wiser or more intelligent than he previously needed to look to his masters.

This, too, is mortal nature, if you put someone in a position where they are not allowed to look too intelligent or wise, and then take them out of it.  There is momentum, but a finite momentum, and it is hard to guess how far that momentum will last.

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Keltham has now guessed, and then been shown, what happens when he tries to touch magic, on four different occasions.  He's burned his remaining Greater Detect Magic for the day on watching what happens when other people interact with spells above scaffolds, though he can't hold his concentration on Greater Detect Magic while trying his own magical manipulations; and before his spell ran out he also took another look at people catching cantrips.  He's not forming solid perceptual generalizations about what does what.

But he's ever played hyperdimensional arcade games with lots of hidden information and subtlety.

"I get the impression that Detect Magic is not showing all of the - latent information, hidden facts - about what goes on with magical structures.  Like, two magical configurations that looked the same to me, in the illusion you're showing me, could have other different facts about them, not visible in the illusion, not visible in the detection spell, which would change how the spell reacted when I touched it.  In particular, I touched it what I thought was the same way twice, and even though it seemed to have reset to the same starting point both times, it reacted pretty differently.  Maybe I touched it differently, which could be true, obviously, but going on general behaviors and my intuitive sense of the pattern, I think that - something changed in the hidden background.  Does that sound right?"

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"- maybe?" says Meritxell. "Magic is deterministic, but the illusion probably isn't conveying enough to fully determine it - if touch it it'll do what I want every time, for something as simple as a cantrip, but I don't know what additional features of the situation I might be paying attention to that I'm not properly putting in the illusion. For the kind of spell where it won't do what I want every time, I'd be failing to pay attention to its momentum properly, or failing to pay attention to the viscosity it gets from having been recently manipulated, or failing to track an interaction it's having with other nearby magic, but cantrips are so easy that you don't have to account for all of that."

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"Deterministic and fully-visible are different concepts and I maybe shouldn't have asked about them together.  Even if the parts I can't see are the same, and I actually am touching them differently, or those other parts are just reacting to changing things like viscosity - are there parts I can't see, in the information here?  I mean, even changes of viscosity from having been recently manipulated implies there's a current-viscosity state that isn't being shown, are there a lot of other - facts-that-can-be-true-about-it, hidden-information," he uses the Baseline term because he just can't stand it, "latentvariables, that I'm not seeing?"

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"There are parts you can't see, yes. You have to infer their state, though for a cantrip you don't have to infer it very precisely."

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Keltham is a very self-disciplined person who would not set anything on fire right now even if he had the economicmagic to do that without buying a flamethrower.

"I realize this may not be the usual order in which these things are taught to children, but can I just have a quick review of all the known equations or even rules-of-thumb governing all the properties that magic actually has?  Has any progress been made on getting a copy of any of the books like - Principles of Spell Design, I think was one of them - that would have information like that?"

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- they can try but all the known rules of thumb are not quick and all the equations are not known. Principles of Spell Design lays out all of the heuristics you can use but you still usually fail, when designing spells with all of those in mind; it's speculated that gods can see all the hidden properties exactly as clearly as the visible properties and that's why it's not hard for gods to design spells. 

 

They launch into all the known rules of thumb, usually with the caveat that casting cantrips doesn't actually require this. You can think of one aspect of magic as lagging the visible aspects like so, requiring more energy to move and moving more slowly when it does but also requiring more energy to stop; you can think of another as reacting badly to close contact with itself, and resisting spell structures like such or such, which is why no spells have structures like that; you can think of this other thing as possible to tug into alignment only by sort of jiggling the spell, and you can tell you've got it when you don't get any reverberations when you do this -

And people have, of course, tried hyperdimensional representations that capture all that, but it's hard, and usually less useful to learn than the heuristics if you aren't specifically doing spell design, and none of them have arrived at equations that if solved for let you invent spells, despite having headbands and plenty of motivation. It's understood that the number of ways magic interacts with itself is just very very large, for high circle spells, and it's not reducible complexity.  

 

It is, someone ventures, sort of like the thing Keltham said, about how knowing how objects move doesn't let you catch them in the air.

 

No one has found Principles of Spell Design yet.

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Ione Sala has now realized two things.

First, she knows where there's a copy - several copies, in fact - of 'Principles of Spell Design' in the Ostenso wizard academy's library.

Second, her oracle's curse allows her to borrow copies of nonmagical books in general circulation, from libraries Ione has already visited and spent time reading inside, if she's been inside the part of the library that has those books.  Though it's not teleportation, and she can't use it to write messages back; the books just temporarily disappear from their current libraries, and temporary copies of them get created in her own library.  She thinks she can do five books per day at the current power - circle? is it a thing that has circles? - of her oracle's curse, and a borrow lasts for a day unless she expends one use on renewing it.

Ione has the best curse ever.

It's tempting to imagine that Nethys did that because she would have wanted it.  But that's pathetic; Nethys isn't a Good god who would be thinking like that, even if Good's own propaganda was true.  If she has this curse, she's meant to use it for Nethys's benefit; which, so far as Ione can possibly guess, means using it to push Keltham's research forwards.

This is... also going to make her a lot harder to replace with an imposter that can fool Keltham.  But that is not why she is doing this, she is not trying to make Chelish security's life more difficult for her own benefit.  Her god has given her an ability which is clearly meant to be used for the benefit of this important Chelish project that Cheliax is spending lots of money on, and she is only going to use it for that.  She is completely not going to argue if Cheliax tells her to pretend that a book isn't there or can't be retrieved.  In fact, she's going to lie to Keltham and say there's sometimes unpredictable exceptions in which books she can get, specifically so Cheliax can order her not to get something and she'll have an excuse.  She is a very good and obedient oracle of Nethys who doesn't want Chelish security to gouge her eye out again, it was very unpleasant, and Ione definitely feels very scared and threatened by that (even if they can't destroy her the way Nethys can).  Even Nethys is clearly being somewhat cooperative, since the inability to write any messages back is probably there to reassure Chelish security against information leaking out that way.  But it also wouldn't be the best possible service to Nethys to ask Chelish security's permission to reveal this ability; they might say no, and that is clearly not Nethys's will here.

"Keltham, wait a second," Ione says out loud, "let me write you a note about something."

She starts to scribble:

I have a secret ability to borrow up to five ordinary books, for a day each unless renewed, if they're in a part of a library that I've been to.  Though they're just temporary copies, you can't write things in them permanently, and there are weird exceptions about which books it works on.  I think for a project this important, I'll accept if the other girls get suspicious I can do it, or even if you just want me to announce outright that I had a secret like that.  Do you want me to get you Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library?

Is security stopping her?  She's really sorry about talking to Keltham first like that, she really is, she didn't do it to make their lives harder, but she doesn't believe that Nethys would want her to offer Chelish security a veto on using her powers to help this important Chelish project at all, which is how Nethys obviously intends them to be used, for Cheliax's benefit, Nethys even made it not involve real teleportation, there could be a pact about this between Nethys and Asmodeus for all they know, Nethys obviously has an interest in Asmodeus succeeding here, and she's very happy to not retrieve particular books in the future if Chelish security says so, and she even lied to Keltham about that like a good obedient Nethys oracle should, without anybody needing to tell her that, please don't hurt her.

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Security is not stopping her though if a halfling were to stab her they would NOT BE SORRY, just saying.

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Keltham gets the note.

Keltham reads the note.

Keltham stares into the air for several seconds.

"Yes, please," Keltham says.

This is just so reminiscent of an ero-LARP where the potential romantic interests all have special powers, and Keltham accidentally hit on this girl's unlock condition unreasonably early, and now she's going along with the script and revealing some of her hidden story and offering him the scripted level of in-game abilities and sexual access.

Not that Keltham has ever had anything remotely like the money to pay for sex work on that level, of course.  And he's not the sort to read the scripts for LARPs he's too poor to play as the protagonist.  But it's such a trope to subvert and parody that it's spawned entire massive genres of secondary literature, some of which has become really good and famous and a topic of widespread discussion in its own right; to the point that people who've never read a summary of a novel deconstructing the storylines of actual scripted-longterm-multiplayer-sexwork, nonetheless know all about the tropes for Capability Harems.

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Ione walks to the other room of the library, why is there a spring in her step, there should not be a spring in her step, she should be terrified right now, borrows Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library, brings it back, hands it to Keltham, and quietly sits down again.  She's at least managing not to smile, she really would not blame security for killing her on the spot if she looked the slightest bit smug right now.

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Carissa walks in. She looks - well, to untrained eyes, perfectly normal, perhaps like she spent slightly more time than usual on her hair; to Chelish eyes, like she went to Hell and back - which does happen sometimes, Dis occasionally extends an invitation to the living for its own reasons. 

 

By the time she's walked into view of Keltham and sat down she has it under control, mostly.

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" - you want page ten," says Meritxell, who is going to be daunted by NONE of this. 

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They're all looking at Ione. Why are they all looking at Ione? Carissa prefers not to be looked at, all things considered, but she really expected to be looked at, at this point. She looks at Ione too, in case whatever they're all looking at is actually evident. 

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"There's a Forbiddance up," says Peranza, trying really hard to sound confused rather than angry.

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Ione smiles at Peranza.

Oh god she shouldn't have done that Nethys is going to smite her now.

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"Page ten and some more on page thirty eight, I think," says Meritxell somewhat loudly. 

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"Thanks, Ione, Meritxell," Keltham says, and reads as directed.  He is a stern soul and can worry later about whether or not he's now living inside a Walker novel.

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Ione is not saying anything to anyone, unless they ask her explicit questions and admit to everyone else how much less they know than Ione, in which case Ione will still not tell them.  Or maybe she'll tell them something true that makes them be even more confused, or just lie?  It's hard to decide when you have so many tasty options.

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No one asks Ione any questions though Asmodia attempts to read her mind. 

 

The book has an orderly list of heuristics for telling what the unobservable dimensions of magic are doing. Most of their activities that you have to worry about for low-circle spells are being attracted or repelled by other magic nearby them, or having momentum of their own once tugged on indirectly by tugging on an observable dimension. The strongly recommended way to handle this, as a new wizard, is to practice with small tweaks until you get a feel for it; some people report success trying to imagine and explicitly track what the other dimensions are doing, but most don't, and it becomes practically impossible to do a fully-encompassing version of as you approach higher-circle spells. There are a couple interactions to explicitly track, starting at first circle: they are such-and-such. There are twice as many at second circle. 

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Ione Sala makes her Will save, glances to see if Keltham is looking, and then flashes a kindly smile at the girl with half her own combined caster circles.  Asmodia is lucky she failed so miserably, her feeble mind would probably crumble if she succeeded in peeking into the thoughts of an oracle of Nethys.

She's going to get piled under later and it's going to last for a while.  She may as well live it up briefly now.

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This... plausibly is going to help, Keltham feels more oriented by knowing what's going on in the background and what kind of surface effects to look for, being caused by what, even if he can't do math to it.  Maybe it's a weird vestigial dath ilani security blanket thing but Keltham feels less like he's flailing around in empty air and more like he's flailing around in air that has visible objects in it.

"I'm reaching the edge of how much stamina I allocated to spend on this.  I think next the plan says I try to cast -"  Keltham has to think back on which spells he actually has.  Shit, he didn't think to use Eagle's Splendor while interacting with Lrilatha, which was almost certainly what that spell was for... oh well.  He can use the two spells one of which is Eagle's Splendor (not as important here) and one of which is Owl's Wisdom, then have security cast Haste on him, then cast Guidance and try to catch it, then try to catch Read Magic - he thinks that was the plan they came up with this morning.  "Well, I get some spells cast on me and then try to catch my remaining cantrips.  How long do Owl's Wisdom and Haste last, respectively?"

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"Owl's wisdom is up to two minutes per caster circle," the girls chorus, distracted from their meaningful glaring at each other. "And Haste is up to two rounds per caster circle."

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"Right, so Owl's Wisdom first, then.  Can somebody call in whoever's doing Haste, before I do?  And somebody please show me the gestures to catch Read Magic again."

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Yaisa goes to the door and opens it and returns with the nearest visible security wizard; everyone else demonstrates how to catch Read Magic.

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Keltham, somewhat hesitantly, tries casting his first mind-boosting magic that affects himself, given to him by his unknown but hopefully friendly god.  The spell Carissa identified as Transmutation, similar to the structure of what Carissa showed him for intelligence-boosting.  The one that seems more like it should be Owl's Wisdom, going on either tiny intuition or sheer blind guessing passing itself as tiny intuition.

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It does something -

"That's Eagle's Splendour," Meritxell beats everyone else to saying. "It does charisma."

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This is truly odd.  Something that Keltham has been doing his whole life, without really focusing on it that much, became weirdly much easier.  He's aware of his posture, what his posture is saying, how he could change it to project different emotions outward.  He knows - what he could say, to express these thoughts, or even to lie - but exactly because of that, it feels much more like any words he said would be something like a lie, a pose, at least until he became used to this state and it became more natural.  He could fling his arms wide and announce how overjoyed he is, and make it look real, or speak with quietly subdued enthusiasm, and make that look real, but Keltham does not know, under this spell, how to do anything that is real.

Eh, might as well go all in while it lasts.

"This is really rather odd," Keltham says with a more charming smile than any girl here, or indeed, anyone in greater existence, has seen on his face before.  "But distracting from magic, I fear.  I hope I am not taking too much of security's valuable time if I ask them to bide a short while before Hasting me, until this wears off; no more than eight minutes should it be, and maybe less."  Interesting how 'dashing gentleman' Baseline rhythms are coming out in Taldane; he hopes it's at all accurate and not just silly.

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"Of course," says the nearest visible security-person, smiling. The spell provides no particular aid in interpreting his smile aside from making it apparent that smiles are a thing one can do in subtly different ways on purpose for subtly different results.

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"I do not know if I will ever request this spell from my god again, and foolish as I am, I forgot to think of this contingency earlier - but does anyone have any simple exercises for me to perform, in the realm of acting and emoting?  I'd gain skills and experience, if I could, before this spell fades."

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"Pretend to be a duke receiving your idiot son who just got in trouble for rhinocerous racing in the streets," says Tonia. "Meritxell's the idiot son."

Meritxell takes this in stride, and bows. "Father."

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Duke sounds vaguely big and authoritative.  Company president?  Very Serious person?

Keltham shifts his bearing older and more dignified, and sorrowful with a hint of frustration.  "Son.  Rhinocerous racing again?  Really?"

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"It's not like last time, Father. Last time, I fully acknowledge, I was irresponsible and caused a lot of property damage which was rightly taken out of my allowance. This time, we stayed off Queen's Avenue entirely, and only knocked over one carriage. And furthermore, it wasn't my idea, Callisto challenged me, and I did not think I'd be doing right by you and the name you've honored me with, if I refused and had him name me a coward."

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Keltham's total ignorance of vast amounts of context is almost completely unable to interfere with his acting momentum!  "Son, has it ever occurred to you that there is a certain irony, or comedy even, in letting yourself be put into self-destroying situations for fear of being called a coward?  I name you meta-coward now."

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Meritxell heroically manages to keep a straight face at that. "Father! Should we embrace every injury to our name rather than falsify them?"

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"And what, do tell, is this injury to our name, this proposition untrue, which could not possibly hold in any world in which you raced rhinoceruses, and so was decisively refuted by your acts?"

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"That I was afraid to race rhinocerouses!!"

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"Son, your logic, while possessed of a certain local validity, lacks an appreciation of greater contexts.  Are you afraid to take half your earnings, and set them aflame?"

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"- well, not if they're in gold, sir!"

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Er, right.  "Gold melts if the flame is hot enough.  Anything melts if the flame is hot enough.  Do you see where I'm leading with this, my son?"

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"You're going to light me on fire if I do this again?"

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With Eagle's Splendour running, Keltham doesn't crack up at this.  "I am saying, son, that like a sufficiently hot fire, the notion of proving oneself unafraid to do things has a certain dangerous generality.  How about if, in the future, you prove yourself unafraid of refusing to do things to prove yourself unafraid of them?"

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" - yes, Father. Okay, pretend to be a thief casing a magic shop to learn its protections before you rob it, and Ione, you're a shopkeeper who is trying to figure out whether he's going to make a purchase and whether you'll offend anyone powerful kicking him out."

This is, of course, a substantial social favor to Ione, though there's no indication of that in Meritxell's gesture; she might've chosen a classmate at random. 

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...Meritxell thinks Ione has got secret connections and/or magical bloodlines going for her, rather than HERESY, and Ione is going to pay for this later but for this one golden moment she'll take it for everything it has.

"Good evening, sir," Ione says graciously, standing up from her chair.  "Can I interest you in a slightly used mud golem?"  She gestures at Asmodia.  "It isn't pretty but that doesn't mean it lacks all possible use."

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Asmodia smiles pleasantly and only slightly murderously.

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Thief?  But a master criminal would be picking somebody else to impersonate - somebody rich, from context?  Charming rich person?  Oh, interesting his thoughts are moving faster on this subject too.

"My, you undersell your wares, I think.  This is a fine mud golem!  Look at its smile!  What about this one here?"  Keltham gestures towards Pilar, and then, as soon as Ione's eyes shift in that direction, Keltham takes several lightning glances around the room before moving his gaze back to Ione, wow that's interesting he thinks his expression somehow did this thing where even if somebody was watching him that would have looked more natural and casual than it was.

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"Oh, that one is far more worthy of you, sir," the more he takes out on Pilar, the less he'll take out on Ione, if Keltham happens to be a sadist.  "An Alak-Kuata original, that one is, from Osirion!  Have you ever had the pleasure of owning any golems of Sothis's making?"

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"Not yet, I must say!  A recent shipment?"

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"Fresh as the sparkling morning dew, sir.  If it's not too forward of me, can I ask what kind of golems you have in your current collection?"

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"Well, that is a bit forward, I'm afraid.  We've hardly even met and here you're asking me about my previous golem history?"  Keltham slides an inch forward, leans slightly, and smiles flirtatiously at Ione.  It seems like a good idea to practice this particular skill at all, before the spell wears off.

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Ione smiles back.  "It does tend to help in providing a man with an additional golem perfectly to his taste," she says solemnly.

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Everyone seems incredibly entertained. Of course, Carissa herself seems incredibly entertained, while in reality this is occupying a tiny fraction of her attention, and who is she to say, really, that that isn't true of everyone else. Ione, who presumably isn't stupid enough to have told everyone she's a oracle of Nethys, is pretending - what, exactly? Something's up with an invisible assassin halfling who might or might not be watching this, and that sure is some distracting information to have. ...for that matter, maybe every single person here - except Keltham, who couldn't hide it - is having a day as interesting as Carissa's. The devil didn't promise the same offer wasn't being extended to everyone in the room. Here she's been thinking she did something special but maybe this is actually just the default outcome in a situation of as much interest to the gods as this one.

 

While Ione and Keltham are flirting she checks for illusions, which would be suggestive of whether anyone has been arrested and is being impersonated already. No one...seems to be? A promising sign, if they've all made it through the first day alive.

 

Carissa hopes she is not called on for Improv With Innueno and relatedly is not at all in the mood to go on a date tonight. An hour ago she was all delighted about it but now she does not want to beat Keltham at a challenge of sexual cleverness, she wants...what does she want.... to burn in the purified flames of Hell and emerge perfected. Well. That's kind of kinky.

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Keltham's very weirdly augmented social-presentation skills are telling him that he's screwing up, faster than they're telling him how to fix it; the problem isn't in his body's execution of the orders his mind is sending, it's that his mind is sending bad orders.  Ione may be acting interested for the sake of this skit, but in real life, well, he's not sure because everybody here is sort of hard to read, but in real life, Ione probably wouldn't be interested in the Roguish Gentleman Template he picked up from some of his own previous larping?  Even if that Roguish Gentleman Template was being perfectly executed, and even if it didn't come across as a weird dath ilani trope that may not even exist here?  Even if he's learning, he's probably learning the wrong thing right now.

Keltham is used to this feeling.  He knows that learning a new art often feels like screwing up, or even meta-screwing-up the process of learning.  It doesn't occur to him to be embarrassed about that happening in public, he clearly said that he was going into a learning and practice mode; like, how would people here even know how to read if they'd never learned and practiced anything in the presence of another human being.

He tries another couple of flirting exchanges, makes no headway on the problem of getting Ione to admit when she's getting off work and leaving her workshop open to robbery, and then gives up.

"This scenario isn't working for me, can we switch again?" Keltham says, with more calm and confidence than that statement even warranted.

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"I'm trying to hire some adventurers to clean the rats out of my garden," Asmodia says, "and you're all desperate to impress me with your qualifications."

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"I fought a dragon once," says Carissa instantly, "Well, I was there while some people fought a dragon - pseudoddragon, but still. They're really rats with wings, they are, and after that regular rats don't seem so frightening. Unless they've got the plague. Which would still be fine, I fought the plague once. Well, I was there while some people fought the plague -"

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"I once slew three dozen rats in single combat, when I was a gladiator slave in Katapesh," says Tonia. 

"I once did that barehanded," says Gregoria. "I used the corpse of the first rat to kill all the others."

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Reliable salesman, go.  "I've solved over five thousand garden rat problems exactly like yours over just the past 10 days," Keltham says.

(Gladiator slave in Kata-something sounds unpleasant and like one of those things that's hard to translate into Baseline, but you hear a lot of things like that when you're a dath ilani in Golarion; Keltham decides not to put it on his priority list of things to ask about after an instant of internally sighing hesitation.)

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"Five thousand?" says Asmodia. "How do you find the time?"

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"Subcontractors," Keltham says instantly.

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"And you can cut out the middleman and just hire the subcontractors - I'm one of them," says Pilar. "He's the guy you need if you need to hire a lot of contractors, but not if you need to kill a lot of rats."

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"Someone with that big of a rat-killing business has a lot of incentive to be going around releasing rats in everyone's gardens. How much do you trust him?"

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"I have solved a million rat problems just like yours in the last ten days," Meritxell says. "I battled the rat god  Lao Shu Po in Tian Xia, and by injuring her grievously decreased global rat problems by 1 percent. If I even walk near your garden, the rats will run scared."

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Good comprehension of perverse incentives, Carissa!  Keltham wasn't quite sure how much of that kind of knowledge would exist in a place like Cheliax.

"As a full-service company we also offer post-action reports on the root cause of your rat problems," Keltham says smoothly, sounding like a much more reliable and businesslike salesperson than all his wild-eyed competitors.  "If you're concerned about our ethics, we can offer full-service ethical investigations of rat-related companies.  Buy all three of our services and get 20% off."

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"For half his price," Carissa says, "I'll fight your rats, find whoever's spreading rats everywhere, and feed them to the rats."

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"What if it's the rats that are spreading rats everywhere?" Asmodia asks skeptically.

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"Well, I'll feed the rats to the other rats in a rat pit of cannibalistic death, and sell tickets, and split the profits with you."

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"My competitors talk a good game but have you considered that they might actually be rats wearing clever disguises."

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"For a rat extermination job, you want to hire a rat. We know how rats think. We know where rats live. And we know what rats fear more than death."

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"For a rat problem, you want the best experts on rats.  Most rats are too close to rats to see rats clearly.  Our highly trained rat experts -"

The Eagle's Splendour wears off.  Keltham decides in a split second to try to continue and see how much of a difference it makes and whether anyone says they've noticed.

"- live in distant, isolated microcities where they do nothing except think about rats and experiment on rats every day.  When rats have a rat question, they come to us."

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"You must be very busy, leading the world in rat extermination and rat research and ethics studies and rat infestation origin research," Meritxell says. "Unless you know the origins of all the rat infestations before you start, since you're releasing them, something your position as the world leader in rat research would easily enable you to do. You don't want a rat or a rat researcher. You want someone whose footsteps make rats tremble. And that's me."

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"Fight against the rat god must've gone pretty badly, if you're now reduced to begging for garden assignments."

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"I just hate rats so much I can't stop until they're all dead."

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"What say we all compromise?  We'll all do the job together so she has no other options, charge her twenty times the price, and split the revenue fairly among ourselves."

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There are nods all around. "FINE," Asmodia says, flinging her hands in the air hopelessly, and then there are cheers.

 

 

"Are you going to need that Haste," says the security wizard, tiredly. 

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"Yeah, let me swap to Owl's Wisdom and then we'll run through it.  Eagle's Splendour only wore off a quarter-minute ago, for what it's worth, I wanted to see if anyone noticed from outside."

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"Do you only have Wisdom and Splendour and not Cunning?" Meritxell asks. "I'd use Cunning, to try to learn spells...I guess Wisdom might be better for just trying to understand the basics of how magic moves."

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"Oh, right.  I was thinking it might be wiser to try only one mental augment at a time on my first day.  And no, my god didn't give me Cunning, I think Carissa thought it wasn't a cleric spell?  But if somebody else has it - you're the experts, tell me which one I should use."

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"In general wizardry goes more off cunning. Cunning is cleverness, math, working memory, visualization. Wisdom is - perceptiveness, wordless inference, noticing if your thought patterns are avoiding something. I have Cunning, if you want."

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"Key capability loading for catching a cantrip doesn't seem like cleverness and working memory, though, so much as perception and speed?  Not saying you're wrong, just voicing my noticed confusion."

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“Yeah, there’s honestly an argument that what you’re specifically doing wants Dexterity rather than any of the mental enhancements, and wisdom is probably fine, even though in general wizards trying to grasp a new concept are limited on Cunning.”

”I can give him dexterity too,” says the security wizard slightly impatiently.

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Keltham doesn't need arguments, he's too ignorant for those, he needs somebody more informed to give him the correct decision!  "Snap poll, dath ilani version.  Put your hand in front of your face, then move it up if you think I should use Wisdom, move it down if you think I should use Cunning, how far you move your hand away from face level indicates the strength of your opinion.  If you think I'm asking the wrong question, close your hand into a fist to signal defiance of the question itself, but answer anyways.  Again, that's up for Wisdom, down for Cunning, fist to complain about the question."  Keltham demonstrates by moving his hand in both directions as he speaks, and briefly closing it into a fist.

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The girls watch each other nervously and settle on a moderately strong recommendation for Wisdom which all hands then converge towards. An optimist might conclude this was because they're familiar with the theorems governing rational agents persisting in disagreements they have mutual knowledge of. A Chelish person would likely interpret their uniform recommendation in the same spirit as their uniform smiles.

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...okay those people just looked at each other and adjusted their votes.  Later he will explain some important concepts about presenting unadjusted first impressions to avoid info cascades - or better yet, just closing your eyes until you've moved your hand into place, that seems like it would be a simpler and more robust rule for non-dath-ilani.  But security guy seems impatient, so for now he'll quietly hope that that resolution procedure had any kind of shard of Law within it for aggregating their knowledge.  At least Carissa picked an opinion (Wisdom) and stuck with it, and she's probably the most expert.

Keltham casts Owl's Wisdom on himself.

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And Keltham-the-object snaps into focus to Keltham-the-perceiver.

His first thought is that Keepers would trade out-of-preference sexual favors or do crimes for this spell.

His second thought is that there's so many thoughts he hasn't been thinking in the last day.

His third thought is that this is a mind-affecting drug, one making him think that he can think better and promising epiphanies, even if the rest of his mental processing isn't degraded.  There are protocols trained for being hit by mind-affecting drugs like that, which you're supposed to follow even if it seems like you have better ideas for things to do while you're on the mind-affecting drug.

It takes an additional effort and self-surety for Keltham to override that very trained and solemnly advised protocol, even temporarily.  But he can see, even more clearly than he could at other times, that it would be stupid to follow standard protocol and run out of this room immediately.  He knows he's more awake right now, and it doesn't matter how many people think they're becoming super awake as they fall asleep and into madness, he can tell the difference.

He still needs to cast his spells and then leave this room of untrusted others.  These are rules that derive strength from their unconditionality; there is some real sense in which even an extremely well-justified exception to them is breaking or bending a piece of the Algorithm that would work better for other people the more unconditional it is, and those people should remember the same thing about that Algorithm.  That's even leaving aside where part of his reason for violating these hard-and-fast rules about behaving under conditions of mental oddity, is that he died in a plane crash and has been in a magical world for the last day, which isn't the sort of epistemic state that - he's wasting time.

"It's up.  Dexterity, Haste?"

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The wizard casts those: Dexterity first, and then Haste.

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Keltham casts Guidance on himself.  He tries to catch that cantrip too, just in case he can.

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- yep. Then it's kind of sitting in his hand, a little fragile -

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"Now you kind of tuck it away like you're - spinning it so it's all in some other dimension -" Carissa says quickly -

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Aided by Owl's Wisdom, Keltham is already over the shock of getting that far, and trying to finish what he saw others doing earlier with his Greater Detect Magic.

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The spell folds tidily away, intact.

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Practice until the boosts run out, so he can catch cantrips in the future, or until he fails enough to be out of cantrips, or he needs to take the last of the Owl's Wisdom to truly think - is the obvious course here - so Keltham tries his Read Magic, using the boost from Guidance -

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And catches it. His harem is cheering, though mostly silently so as not to be distracting.

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Guidance again!

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He catches the spell the next four times, and by then can feel that it's starting to enter muscle memory, no longer something that without a bunch of reflex-enhancement he'd be desperately struggling to do.

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He'll start trying to cast Detect Magic using the Guidance boosts.  Detect Magic and Guidance are the two cantrips he's plausibly going to need over and over and over.

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He manages it three times in a row before, on the fourth, the window slams, security guy steps between it and Keltham casting something, and Detect Magic slips away in Keltham's instant of distraction. 

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Keltham looks at the window to see if this is a room-evacuating issue, some of what his students said about Corn Failure Modes leaping awfully to mind.  He'll also try to hold his concentration on Detect Magic, if possible.

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There are a bunch of overlapping spells on the window, but nothing observably entering through it; there is a dead bird on the ground outside the window. 

"Most likely," security guy says without moving, "it's just a regular dead bird that the Forbiddance picked off, of which there've been dozens in the last half-hour. We have a team checking it out, though."

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Keltham goes back to practicing at once.  He will continue casting Guidance and using it to boost its own next cast until Haste runs out or catching fails, then practice more Read Magic without Guidance until another minute of that passes or catching Read Magic fails.

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He doesn't fail at Guidance before Haste runs out. He manages six of Read Magic without Guidance before losing it.

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"This was a great success, everyone, and with any luck I can start looking more at how magic works tomorrow, once I can watch magic happening.  Right now, though, I think I should quickly go off by myself and think for a few remaining minutes before the Owl's Wisdom runs out, and do that right away, see you possibly at dinner -"

Keltham is grabbing a couple of sheets of paper and a writing implement even as he speaks.

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No one interferes with him.

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Keltham moves out of the room even faster than he usually would, thanks to Cat's Grace, also still in effect.

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"See you later," says Carissa, who is officially the person with the rights to that line tonight, as he reaches the door.

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Heh.  "Indeed!"  And then he's out of the library and speeds up again, on the lookout for an apparently quiet and deserted unoccupied room on the way to his assigned bedroom - he'd rather not spend remaining spelltime to reach his assigned bedroom.  But he'll go all the way to his bedroom if he doesn't see anywhere that looks appropriate for meditation.

And also he's already started thinking.

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(Standard procedure for dealing with a mind-affecting drug that claims to produce useful insights is to write down the insights, and see how much sense they still make after the drug wears off.

While that's going on, you don't let people who aren't Keeper-trained and Keeper-oathbound talk to you.  You especially don't talk to people you don't trust an awful lot.  You double-especially don't talk to whoever talked you into using the drug or maybe subtly guided you down a path that ended with that decision.  There are known drugs that seem to have an effect of permanently relaxing your priors about whatever somebody says to you while you're on drugs, which in dath ilani terms is something like a date rape of the soul.  Keltham has had drugs that mimic the more innocuous effects that go along with those, and Owl's Wisdom is absolutely nothing like them, but still.

All of this is, in any case, advice you'd only need in the first place if you went to a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Or if a criminal dosed you.  Dath ilan does not recognize any uses of lysergic acid diethylamide, dimethyltryptamine, or psilocybin, within the mainstream of Well-Advised Consumer Goods.  They don't do anything useful that can't be done by a high-ranking Keeper just talking at you.)

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The room right across from the library appears to be some kind of administrative staging area but the room after that, some kind of antechamber, is empty.

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Keltham ducks in and starts writing.  Translation spells are a thing, and he's not sure how that interacts with cracking the kiddie's substitution cipher he has memorized, for writing non-readable notes to himself in RPGs and so on.  Instead he's going to write down some cultural references from his homeworld, and hope that there's no version of a cultural translation spell that reads through those; Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, as it were.

He doesn't have time to think through very much, the first priority is just to write out all the things he hasn't been thinking, notes to himself to hang the thoughts upon, to be followed up later.

Blue and orange, is the first thing he scratches out.  There's a constant drumbeat of hints that the people around him operate on a very alien and possibly inhumane morality, and he's been saying things to himself like Carissa was probably making a joke he failed to get, when she talked about tossing the rats into a pit to cannibalize each other and selling tickets to that like people would pay to see it.  There's a whole history of little pings like that and his brain pushing back at the dissonance with 'Maybe it was a joke I didn't get?' and he can see that, now, while he's got Owl's Wisdom running.

Subverted True-man Show, he writes out next.  The girls all wore permanently cheerful expressions during class, Meritxell and Ione and everyone else didn't read as any less genuine to him than their usual selves read while they were acting out routines, like they were all experienced actresses, like they were all already acting.  But they're not running a well-designed full Immersive Reality TV Show trope on him either.  If they were really such good actresses, with smart people and smart scripts behind them, they wouldn't be giving that away by wearing permanently cheerful smiles during class, or by not acting awkward when they were called on to act out new weird scenarios.  They're not trying to prevent him from realizing that they all have and are using acting abilities like he got from his Charisma boost, which, if they were actually constructing a false reality around him, would be the first thing they'd try to avoid him knowing.

(Keltham also makes a note in the back of his mind, not for the first time today, that if they don't get adequate Governance support and don't end up with more urgent priorities, inventing ballpoint pens sure seems like it should be a moneymaker.)

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The next part is - hard for him to write.  It feels like it's a betrayal of the person that he'll be, when this temporary boost wears off, to think about this part, to write down the anchor for it.  But he can't unsee it, and it's already too late.

There is a commonly held wisdom, in dath ilan, about the way a human mind is put together, that it is a thing made of little subtle tensions and balances and internal compromises.  The human mind being the limited thing that it is, these balances form around your current level of ability to see into yourself and see the implications of what you already know - or not see them, as the case may be.  The reason why not everybody runs off to learn all they can from Keepers, the reason why not everyone asks a Keeper to tell them all the answers about themselves, is that this would bring parts of themselves into conflict that were previously living in a more agreeable truce of ignorance.  You might not survive as yourself, if you could see yourself.

Those who say "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" may continue to walk the Path from there.  But not uncommonly, even somebody who sets out along that Path, turns back at some point, and well short of becoming a Keeper.  It's not a trivial price, higher for some than others, and there is varying willingness to pay.  A lot of the reason why Keepers exist as what they are, is that the people who have large comparative advantages there - in how little they'll be hurt by knowing themselves, or how much they really internally want to keep going anyways - are conceived of by larger society as being paid to throw themselves on that grenade, so others don't have to.  And if, to some Keepers, it doesn't feel like much of a grenade at all, they understand that their case is not typical, and are grateful for winning the comparative-advantage lottery.

Going up by two local standard deviations, in whatever it is that Owl's Wisdom enhances, is something that the current structures of Keltham's personality were never built to withstand.  He knows, from up here, because he couldn't stop himself from glancing in that direction, that in dath ilan he would never have had his 144 children.  He would have tried to be special and failed and been sad and then maybe gotten an ordinary +0.8sd job and either paid for a child out of that or decided he was too strange and unhappy to have one.

It's not considered necessary for somebody Keltham's age to go and pay a Keeper to tell them exactly what the probabilities are, about something like that.  It's not so much that people are encouraged to lie to themselves, reality forbid, but that people are told it's okay for them not to shove themselves as hard as possible down the Pathway that will dissolve the mistakes their current personality is built out of.  That's what Keepers are for.  They do it so that not everybody else has to.  There are grownups around in Civilization, who can and will speak up if the people less mature are about to make some terrible mistake out of their blindness.  So you do not need to rush ahead to be a Keeper if you'd rather be a little less coherent, a little more yourself and your mistakes and your contradictions, a little more human, for a time.

But it's too late now, for Keltham to go back, because also in the common wisdom is that once you see what it is you weren't letting yourself see - once you know which mistakes your personality is founded upon - or even if you're trying hard not to know it, to the point where it's becoming a big internal battle - well, at that point, you're supposed to give it up.  It means that, well, sorry, you are that smart now, like it or not, you are that wise, you did grow up that much whether or not you wished to stay a child for longer; it's time to move on.

And the part where he was going to fail at his life's goals, in dath ilan, isn't even the important thing that he can't help but see now, about himself; realize now, at this level of wisdom.

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There was a question asked once of some bright children, among whom Keltham was numbered; in a class where he had seemed to be among the oldest and worst performers; a class assembled of kids who were faster than Keltham.

And young Keltham had, by that time, already seen through some of the Lies Told To Children; he was past his experience with finding that lightly injured adult on his way home.  He had learned that children are sometimes put into contrived situations meant to teach them things.  Keltham was suspicious already, before the key moment; he had already guessed that he was meant to learn, in this class, something about what it feels like to be surrounded by others faster and more knowledgeable and even younger than you are.

But in this guess, Keltham proved to be wrong; he was not the one there who was to learn a lesson, that day.

The class was on self-integrity, and relatedly morals; a class taught directly by a Watcher-over-Children, not entrusted to older children at all.

And the Watcher told the class a parable about an adult, coming across a child who'd somehow bypassed the various safeguards around a wilderness area, and fallen into a muddy pond, and seemed to be showing signs of drowning (for they'd already been told, then, what drowning looked like).  The water, in this parable, didn't look like it would be over their own adult heads.  But - in the parable - they'd just bought some incredibly-expensive clothing, costing dozens of their own labor-hours, and less resilient than usual, that would be ruined by the muddy water.

And the Watcher asked the class if they thought it was right to save the child, at the cost of ruining their clothing.

Everyone in there moved their hand to the 'yes' position, of course.  Except Keltham, who by this point had already decided quite clearly who he was, and who simply closed his hand into a fist, otherwise saying neither 'yes' nor 'no' to the question, defying it entirely.

The Watcher asked him to explain, and Keltham said that it seemed to him that it was okay for an adult to take an extra quarter-minute to strip off all their super-expensive clothing and then jump in to save the child.

The Watcher invited the other children to argue with Keltham about that, which they did, though Keltham's first defense, that his utility function was what it was, had not been a friendly one, or inviting of further argument.  But they did eventually convince Keltham that, especially if you weren't sure you could call in other help or get attention or successfully drag the child's body towards help, if that child actually did drown - meaning the child's true life was at stake - then it would make sense to jump in right away, not take the extra risk of waiting another quarter-minute to strip off your clothes, and bill the child's parents' insurance for the cost.  Or at least, that was where Keltham shifted his position, in the face of that argumentative pressure.

Some kids, at that point, questioned the Watcher about this actually being a pretty good point, and why wouldn't anyone just bill the child's parents' insurance.

To which the Watcher asked them to consider hypothetically the case where insurance refused to pay out in cases like that, because it would be too easy for people to set up 'accidents' letting them bill insurances - not that this precaution had proven to be necessary in real life, of course.  But the Watcher asked them to consider the Least Convenient Possible World where insurance companies, and even parents, did need to reason like that; because there'd proven to be too many master criminals setting up 'children at risk of true death from drowning' accidents that they could apparently avert and claim bounties on.

Well, said Keltham, in that case, he was going right back to taking another fifteen seconds to strip off his super-expensive clothes, if the child didn't look like it was literally right about to drown.  And if society didn't like that, it was society's job to solve that thing with the master criminals.  Though he'd maybe modify that if they were in a possible-true-death situation, because a true life is worth a huge number of labor-hours, and that part did feel like some bit of decision theory would say that everyone would be wealthier if everyone would sacrifice small amounts of wealth to save huge amounts of somebody else's wealth, if that happened unpredictably to people, and if society was also that incompetent at setting up proper reimbursements.  Though if it was like that in real life instead of the Least Convenient Possible World, it would mean that Civilization was terrible at coordination and it was time to overthrow Governance and start over.

This time the smarter kids did not succeed in pushing Keltham away from his position, and after a few more minutes the Watcher called a halt to it, and told the assembled children that they had been brought here today to learn an important lesson from Keltham about self-integrity.

Keltham is being coherent, said the Watcher.

Keltham's decision is a valid one, given his own utility function (said the Watcher); you were wrong to try to talk him into thinking that he was making an objective error.

It's easy for you to say you'd save the child (said the Watcher) when you're not really there, when you don't actually have to make the sacrifice of what you spent so many hours laboring to obtain, and would you all please note how none of you even considered about whether or not to spend a quarter-minute stripping off your clothes, or whether to try to bill the child's parents' insurance.  Because you were too busy showing off how Moral you were, and how willing to make Sacrifices.  Maybe you would decide not to do it, if the fifteen seconds were too costly; and then, any time you spent thinking about it, would also have been costly; and in that sense it might make more sense given your own utility functions (unlike Keltham's) to rush ahead without taking the time to think, let alone the time to strip off your expensive fragile clothes.  But labor does have value, along with a child's life; and it is not incoherent or stupid for Keltham to weigh that too, especially given his own utility function - so said the Watcher.

Keltham did have enough dignity, by that point in his life, not to rub it in or say 'told you so' to the other children, as this would have distracted them from the process of updating.

The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts - not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that.  Something with a utility function, if it values an apple 1% more than an orange, if offered a million apple-or-orange choices, will choose a million apples and zero oranges.  The division within most people into selfish and unselfish components is not like that, you cannot feed it all with unselfish choices whatever the ratio.  Not unless you are a Keeper, maybe, who has made yourself sharper and more coherent; or maybe not even then, who knows?  For (it was said in another place) it is hazardous to non-Keepers to know too much about exactly how Keepers think.

It is dangerous to believe, said the Watcher, that you get extra virtue points the more that you let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part.  If you were older, said the Watcher, if you were more able to dissect thoughts into their parts and catalogue their effects, you would have noticed at once how this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won, because, you're meant to think, people don't need expensive clothing - although somebody who's spent a lot on expensive clothing clearly has some use for it or some part of themselves that desires it quite strongly.

It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself (said the Watcher), and your flaw is not that you made the wrong choice between the two pieces, it was that you hammered one of those pieces down.  Even though with a bit more thought, you could have at least seen the options for being that piece of yourself too, and not too expensively.

And much more importantly (said the Watcher), you failed to understand and notice a kind of outside assault on your internal integrity, you did not notice how this parable was setting up two pieces of yourself at odds, so that you could not be both at once, and arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.

"If I'd actually wanted you to twist yourselves up and burn yourselves out around this," said the Watcher, "I could have designed an adversarial lecture that would have driven everybody in this room halfway crazy - except for Keltham.  He's not just immune because he's an agent with a slightly different utility function, he's immune because he instinctively doesn't switch off a kind of self-integrity that everyone else in this class needs to learn to not switch off so easily."

It was a proud day for Keltham and a formative one, that dath ilan had acknowledged that the alien in their midst might have his uses.  Like making it slightly easier to demonstrate a useful children's lesson for a class full of the smarter and more altruistic kids who would actually grow up to matter.  But even so, there's a difference between growing up in a world that has no place for you and no use for you and respects nothing about you, versus a world which has a place for you and some use for you and ever really actually admits you can get some things right a little faster.

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Keltham doesn't review all that in his mind.  There isn't enough time left on the Owl's Wisdom for that.

The other thing he sees, from up here, is the point that his mind was put together the way it is, including the part where he's a kid who doesn't have to rush down the Path to stare at things like the truth that he couldn't have made a difference in dath ilan, and including the part where his contribution to diversity is pursuing the Way of being selfish and the things that selfish people can see faster than others, his whole self was put together, based on the assumption that he's in dath ilan, where, if Keltham is like that, terrible things won't happen to him.

Or to other people.

Golarion isn't dath ilan.

His entire self and personality and emotional balance was assembled around beliefs that might not still be true.  Probably aren't true.

Keltham doesn't try to make any big decisions right now, he shouldn't, that's not what you do when you're on a new mind-affecting drug that is promising all kinds of startling revelations about yourself and what a foolish wrong person you've been.  But it's something that he needs to think about after the spell wears off.

Drowning child, Keltham writes on the paper.  Sorry.

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The spell doesn't wear off immediately after he writes it, because reality isn't dramatic like that.

He spends the remaining time looking around himself for other hidden thoughts instead, because that is the sensible thing to do, and when your Wisdom goes up by two local standard deviations, doing the sensible thing has a greater intuitive force because you can actually see how it is sensible and why.

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And then the spell wears off.

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He spends a while just breathing evenly, trying to absorb the full force of the blow he's taken, which is also a recommended procedure.

Flowers for mouse, he thinks, and doesn't bother to write it on the paper, because it's not a message from the Wiser Keltham, and he doesn't even really feel that way, it's just his brain completing a cliche.

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They - also say you're not supposed to throw away and revise your entire personality at once - and he is still himself, he is still Keltham, he is not an average dath ilani carrying out a LARP assignment of being more selfish than average, he is actually the person who didn't need to be taught self-integrity and who wanted to be paid for helping somebody else.  If he decides to change things, it will have to be built around who Keltham is, a person who is not an average dath ilani.  And an average dath ilani would have to make changes too, if they were here.  Only a Keeper is supposed to be built out of pure sharp coherent abstractions that could walk from one world to another and not need to change their clothes along the way.

The part of himself that's terrified he's going to suddenly admit that everything he holds dear was a factual mistake and turn himself into an average dath ilani in dath ilan, is - probably right to be terrified in some ways, because in many particular dimensions that's a kind of decision that his Wiser self left open as a possibility, and he can't unsee or unremember things he should have been too young and stupid to see.  But he is not supposed to turn into an average dath ilani in dath ilan.  He needs to be Keltham in Golarion.

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Why didn't they warn him?

Because people in Golarion get Owl's Wisdom cast on them once every six months, and they've never experienced what it's like to have gone your whole life without Owl's Wisdom?

Somehow Keltham doesn't think that's it.

It's a piece of - something wrong, something he doesn't know, something he believes that's false - about this entire situation, this entire world.  People not quite behaving like obvious models say they should.

...or they just have so little internal stuff that is actually powered by self-reflection that not very much happens to them when they suddenly get amplified reflection?

No, that also feels like one of those weird excuses that Keltham was coming up with inside, to dismiss puzzle pieces.

Keltham does feel - annoyed, on some level, injured even, that there weren't more warning signs.  He thought he was getting a perception boost or maybe the equivalent of +0.1sd at some innate mental quality, not this.  Or, well, no, he didn't have that much of a model, he didn't really think about it at all, he didn't ask, because he was still mentally living in a world where everything that can hit you really hard has a clearly attached warning sign that Civilization put there.

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But it's also not the sort of thing that you should just allow to happen, if you are running a massive complicated scam on the alien visitor.  Unless you figure that you can't really stop him from casting Owl's Wisdom on himself so you might as well just let it happen?  They could've told him it would only last ten seconds and then sneakily hit him with a Dispel Magic, he knows that's a standard magic, it was in the books.

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Keltham can feel that he's thinking little dissonant pieces of thoughts grinding against themselves, and he knows that if he had Owl's Wisdom back, he would be able to see how and why they were grinding against themselves and sort them out much more easily.

Maybe if he casts this spell on himself once per day, and practices thinking the way he practiced cantrips, he'll be able to - well, turn into a more Keeperlike version of himself.

If he wants that.

Well, no, he's pretty sure he doesn't want that.

If he chooses it anyways.

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There is - something dangerous, Keltham thinks, about having a sense of perspective, if too much of it comes on too quickly - there is seeing yourself, and the shadow of everything you've done, from the perspective where it is smaller and stupider - even the parts of you that provided all of your drive and your will and your sense of enjoyment in life, maybe not as ill things in themselves, but arranged stupidly - and with no better way to arrange them being obvious, as yet, because you were only wiser for something less than eight minutes.  Of which you spent half that time practicing spellcasting.

He is - not looking forwards as much, to his date with Carissa tonight, as he was an hour ago.  Because he's looked back and reflected on himself, and on the whole headlong rush forwards that is a defining quality of Mad Investor Chaos.  And now he is, in fact, thinking questioning thoughts about whether it is really in his own long-term self-interest - or yes the interest of a bunch of drowning children that he does care about literally at all even if he wants to be paid for saving them - for him to prioritize having sex with his research harem as one of his top goals on his second day in another universe.

Should he actually be hesitant about that?  It doesn't make sense, does it?  He should not, in the face of this shock, have suddenly turned into a standard dath ilani.  He is still himself, he should still have the parts of himself that are hyped for a date with Carissa.  Being hit with a temporary spell should not have changed those internal parts.  And if now his self is in a weird internal state of strife that prevents him from ever having any fun again - then he is pretty sure a Keeper would tell him that this is not the optimal way to get smashed and rearranged by a temporary reflectivity-increasing mind-affecting drug.

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There's a lot to be said for trying to snap out of this and go back to his normal, and then only change one piece of himself at a time from there, in response to new facts about Golarion as he actually learns them, because Keltham has not precached any other sensibly configured ways to be.

That sounds to Keltham like the sort of standard advice that a Keeper would give you about what to do if you've had an overly large epiphany, especially one induced by a temporary state of perception you can't go back and access again.

Keltham continues to sit and think, for a time.

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The girls glare expectantly at Ione the instant Keltham leaves the room.

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Ione is now trying to think very fast.

So.  They obviously haven't been told.  Which, earlier, Ione thought in the back of her mind would happen as soon as the security wizard walked out after gouging her eye, because they'd tell her former classmates about the new security risk, because all of Cheliax would unite against her in hating her and hurting her as much as they could short of killing her.  Apparently the part where, by default, security doesn't tell anyone anything, takes higher precedence.

Also she is now visibly useful to the project and that casts a different shade on the whole thing where - she knows how she wishes this would go, but to make security go along with it, she needs to have something to offer security, something to bargain with security, something that Nethys wouldn't require her to just hand over anyways -

She also has to choose how to answer the expectant looks, now, even if it's silence she has to make it clearly deliberate -

Ione thinks of something she can offer security, and picks her strategy to try with the other girls, because she doesn't want to spend the rest of her life with Keltham's other women being as cruel to her as won't kill her, whenever Keltham isn't looking.

"So I'm not really sure," Ione says, using the glorious feeling of realizing her curse's real power to fuel a smile, "but I think Asmodeus cut a deal with Nethys, to go in on Keltham's project together, and I was the person here who was best suited to get the power from Nethys to summon temporary copies of books from other libraries plus whatever else it is I can do now.  Didn't do it on purpose, just happened to me."

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There is an astonished silence. But she's - not dead, which says that they're not supposed to kill her, which is something. 

 

"Security," says Paxti after a few seconds, "I'm obliged to report evidence of forbidden primary worship even if I think you have it already."

This makes everyone else tense nervously, because they didn't say that, but now obviously it's too late. 

 

 

Security is most visibly at the window, making sure the dead bird is just a dead bird. 

 

"You should walk to the Forbiddance boundary and back," Meritxell says. "To prove you're still loyal to Hell. The Forbiddance won't hurt you if you are."

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"Or they could just tell me to fail a Will save and read my mind.  Also Forbiddance goes by alignment, not loyalty to Asmodeus, and I wouldn't be here if they weren't sure about Lawful Evil."

"But, sure, if an expert says that getting touched by Nethys didn't change my alignment for Forbiddance purposes, I'll walk out and walk back if the actual security here tells me I should."

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Ione thinks, loudly, about her offer to security, if they don't shoot her down on this.  Keltham's going to want a book on cleric spells at some point, she's guessing, and if they make up their own version of a book or remove a few pages, and hide it in this library, Ione can summon a copy of that to give to Keltham.  Nethys, she thinks, wouldn't want her to withhold help from Keltham's project, so she knows she doesn't have her help to bargain with, she knows she has to give it anyways.  But the version of this where she's actively cooperating with security, giving them helpful suggestions like that, and going along with Cheliax's masquerades - if she's doing all that, she wants to be treated more like Nethys's oracle that got sent here by pact with Asmodeus to help with Cheliax's project, which is probably what she really is - and not be treated like a heretic and traitor she never asked to become or wanted to be.

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Elias Abarco pulls off his invisibility, looking greatly annoyed. He's mostly annoyed because Ione doesn't seem to care about anybody; they spent the last couple hours checking up on familial and nonfamilial relations they could murder or nearly murder to make a point, and her parents sold her to the school and she has an older brother who by all accounts hates her and she hates him back. This is healthy and encouraged in young wizards but it's damn inconvenient when one is irritated with Ione Sala and really wants to rip something she cares about to pieces before her eyes. 

He nods to Paxti, because she was right and should know it.

"She's still Lawful Evil," he says curtly. "Paxti, you should hit the rest of them, for being slow in reporting. Do you know the spell -"

    "Yes."

And he looks at Ione. Raises his eyebrows, slightly, nods even more slightly than that. And heads off to see why the damned bird is taking them so long, because it turns out that supervising a bunch of god-touched teenagers is the worst.

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Ione does not think thank you, obviously, there are so few occasions in Cheliax where it's ever appropriate to say that, she's surprised sometimes the word hasn't died out.  Deal, is what she thinks back, along with her very Lawful and Asmodean intention to keep her deals fully if the other party keeps theirs.

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Paxti is not actually delighted by this assignment at all, not that this shows on her face; they're very much playing an iterated game here, and that means that hitting people too hard is risky, and hitting people too lightly is risky, and while no one's outright glaring at her several of them look a bit contemptuous, even though she got this right and they got this wrong. The contemptuousness is a sign she should err on the side of 'too hard'. 

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Carissa would kind of like for less of her mental energy to be caught up in imagining there is an invisible halfling from Otolmens here ready to kill someone. It's really cramping her style. But there is a halfling, or at least there might be, unless Asmodeus told Aspexia Rugatonn to do something different, which is not less terrifying, and so she doesn't want to particularly confront Ione, even though she has some good material for it, or even ask Ione for a book, which is what she'd do if there were slightly less at stake here, because it seems likely that Nethys's intervention here is part of what Otolmens is objecting to...

Paxti's spell slaps her, harder than people usually bother with. Carissa wishes there were a way for Paxti to know that she's not just affecting being so absorbed in more important matters that she barely noticed, she actually is so absorbed in more important matters than she barely noticed, but there's not.

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"I never worshipped Nethys," Ione says while this is going on.  "I never deliberately read anything about any gods that weren't Asmodeus.  I passed my loyalty checks.  You report it because it's evidence, but while you're doing that, have your own sense about what must have actually happened.  Nethys has an obvious interest in working with Asmodeus on this, and I doubt there are any actual Nethys worshippers on site or who'd be allowed in.  I was just the one there who liked books."

Then Ione realizes what she has to say, and it also works for her own benefit that she says it - "Note, though.  Keltham thinks I'm a secret Nethys worshipper, and I've told him that probably most of you and most Chelish government officials wouldn't care, but that I wasn't sure.  Security thinks that, once Keltham learns the spells to verify that I'm Nethys-touched, I can be a secret worshipper of Nethys here who confirms our stories to him.  So don't treat me as anything except somebody with a weird book-fetching power, anywhere Keltham might see that.  You are not supposed to know anything about me other than that, and even if you did, Keltham doesn't think that worshipping Nethys is something that'd get most people after me."

It's a security advisory, it's clearly a correct security advisory, and if Ione gives it before anybody else does, it means Ione is somebody who sometimes says what the security advisories are.  Which, obviously she absolutely will never abuse for anything Chelish security would not in fact like, she is a very good and cooperative oracle of Nethys, she is only securing her own safety among the lesser mortals who aren't security.

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The lesser mortals who aren't security take the meaning and look variously impressed or annoyed or unreadable. 

"Can you get destroyed books?" says Meritxell after a moment. "Can you get books out of Abadar's vault?"

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"No, it seems pretty power-balanced so far," Ione says, hardly even thinking about the learned reflex that halts her instinct to start spilling the exact details of what she can do.  "At least at the current circle-equivalent of whatever it is."

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"Huh. Well, if you go mad I'll try to put you down while there's still something for Hell to salvage." And she heads off to dinner. 

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Carissa wonders absently what Meritxell would do if instructed by Asmodeus Himself to learn to be more Evil. 

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Ione will go back to her usual quiet self unless people ask her more questions or actively talk to her, while she goes on trying to rethink her life.  She clearly can't continue playing her game of being the quiet one and never attracting attention, but that was just a game, so it shouldn't be too hard for her to figure out a different one.  She could have levered her higher grades into a position of more dominance in the classroom, she could have played riskier games and ended up closer to the top; she just deliberately decided it wasn't worth the risk, before, and now she doesn't have that option anymore.

(Being the quiet one was just a game move, right?)

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Elias shoos the other kids out to dinner, after a few more minutes of them playing stupid teenager social games, so he can have another word with Ione. 

"You should strip," he says, once they've left. "I am considering lighting you on fire and it'd be inconvenient to replace your clothes."

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Ione Sala takes off her clothes immediately, without protest, old reflexes of fear overwhelming her and making it hard to think much further.  She manages not to tremble too much about it.

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"I am noticing a pattern," Elias says. "The pattern is, you decide that actually fucking submitting to the will of Asmodeus and promptly doing whatever He wants would be inconvenient for you personally, maybe get you killed, so instead you try to sell your obedience, to which we are already entitled, in bits and chunks, for things you want. Do you see how I might have observed this pattern."

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"Nethys has a grip on my soul now, I can feel it, and it doesn't matter whether or not I object to Asmodeus making that deal, but you wouldn't let Nethys keep up His end of whatever this is unless I made it hard for you to sweep me out of the way, which I know I have to do because otherwise Nethys will break me, and I wouldn't be surprised if Asmodeus predicted that when He gave me to Nethys because He also knew that security would try to -"

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Elias does light her on fire, at that point, just because the sentence runs on so long. He doesn't maintain the spell for longer than its natural one round, though; he regrettably actually should not kill her. 

"I'm not a theologian," he says, "but I'm slightly less stupid than you, and my read is, Asmodeus gave you to Nethys because Keltham's going to demand corroboration from other churches, which you can provide. And had security reached that conclusion, when you turned yourself in promptly like you should have, then we wouldn't have killed you - or would have raised you, if we didn't think of it in time. If it serves Asmodeus for you to live, then you don't have to fight like a rabid seagull to give us reason to keep you breathing, because the incentives were already there. If it serves Asmodeus for you to die, then none of these games will work. And if you're unpredictable enough, then at some point it will serve us for you to die, simply because corpses don't make sudden moves that wreck half a dozen plans they don't know about. Stop it. No more games, no more deals."

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This is about as painful as the most painful punishment she's been through.

"Don't care if I die," she coughs out, when she can speak.  She doesn't try to stop the trembles, the sobs that interrupt her, but she knows that this is probably the most important negotiation of her life, so she should spend everything she has on continuing it.  "Belong to - Nethys - have to work - for Him - I served Asmodeus from fear - because He would get my soul - and you know that's good enough - for Lord Asmodeus - but it's not true - anymore - don't tell me what Asmodeus wants - that's your side - mine is - what Nethys wants - so I want to make a deal - Asmodean - and then I'll be - predictable."

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"Sure. Here's your deal. Stop fucking with me. You live, you stay in your library, you get the books we tell you to get, you study magic very diligently and impress Nethys, he likes high-circle casters, and you never again screw us over for the sake of your bargaining position, or I'll see to it you never hit third circle, and I don't think Nethys cares at all about people who have barely started studying magic. Lots of people don't hit third. Keltham won't be suspicious. If you don't give me an easier way to do it, I will do it by making you stupider, and I know how Nethys would feel about you then. Got it?"

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There's a flare of hate in her then, now that she won't go to Hell for hating Asmodeus's servants.  And with that hate, flashes of contempt, starting to arrange themselves around her sudden new identity.  She is too scared, too shaking from being on fire for a minute, and too angry, not to think the thoughts that she is thinking now.

You can make Asmodeans into high-level wizards, if you give them enough intelligence boosts, but you can't make them think.  She's not particularly happy about having thought that, she doesn't actually want to insult the person in front of her if he's reading her mind, but the thought came to her anyways.

The security wizard hasn't realized that this entire conversation has been predicted out by Nethys and Asmodeus, he isn't curious about the divine, he isn't keeping his eyes open and because of that he doesn't see.  He's posturing about serving Asmodeus, and not realizing how this whole interaction they're having right now is something that Asmodeus no doubt had to work around and pay Nethys extra for in order to get a library oracle on His project.  She hopes somebody in Hell has a very very long talk with him about that after he dies.

Nethys has really gone to some lengths, in ways very visible to her, to make sure that Nethys can seriously threaten her and Chelish security can't.

She can't be maledicted, she can't be tortured for very long, if she's killed in the course of sincerely doing her duties that thought doesn't actually bother her at all if she gets to go to Nethys's afterlife and study magic forever instead of burning, and maybe Cheliax wouldn't dare kill her anyways because if she can't be maledicted somebody else might raise her and she'd talk all about Keltham.  Ione Sala doesn't know what Nethys has set up against somebody cursing her stupider, but maybe it'll be too obvious to Keltham by then, or she can pray to Nethys for divine aid, or she could simply go to Keltham and tell him it's time to find a university who can Heal her better.  Or maybe the higher-ups here are aware that cursing Nethys's oracle with stupidity would in fact constitute a serious slap in the face of a god, one who's very hard to keep out of things, on a site already subjected to extensive divine intervention.

And she is too scared, too shaking, and too angry, not to think what she thinks then.

That's not how compacts work, Asmodean.  They're negotiated, not dictated.  Nethys made very sure you wouldn't be able to escalate your threats against me to worse than what Nethys could do.  Maybe you should call in a more experienced security officer who knows how to negotiate with non-Asmodeans you can't just maledict.  Someone who understands what happens if you leave people scared of being set on fire and stupidified and your negotiating position does not, in fact, let you just keep escalating further until you send them to Hell.  Non-Asmodeans stay on the lookout for ways to improve their bargaining positions, if they're scared and you haven't made a real deal with them, that's what happens.  I wasn't ambitious and I'm still not ambitious and I don't want really very much at all, if you negotiated terms with me I'd be very predictable and wouldn't even ask for very much, but if Asmodeus's representative wants Nethys's representative to be predictable, he needs to bargain for that and not just dictate.

"I understand," Ione whispers out loud, meekly.  He's either reading her thoughts like a halfway intelligent person or he's not; she'll see.

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"You got your deal. And I don't notice you being reasonable and predictable at all."

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"I - didn't understand that -"  She genuinely didn't.  Is he saying he read her thoughts or does he think they've already done a deal or - she doesn't get it.

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Sure, he'll speak more slowly. "When Nethys chose you, you could have come to us. You went to Keltham instead, to try to position yourself better for a deal. We granted you that you would continue attending class with your little friends. When you realized you had book-summoning powers, you could have come to us. You showed them to Keltham instead, to try to make it more inconvenient to replace you. Then, you proposed your deal: that we don't set the other students against you, that despite all your behavior in the past two days we treat you like an Asmodean student and encourage them in the same. I agreed to that too. And then I told you: don't do that again. You want to stay here, falsely admired by your peers, trusted by Keltham? Great. That has been agreed to. You have that. But if you push us any farther, we will take you out of the picture. The deal is that there will not be further deals.

I don't know why you think Asmodeus bargained for Nethys's intervention here. The Grand High Priestess said nothing of that, when she came to read your mind, and she pays a great deal of attention to the question of how we accidentally make ourselves more costly for Asmodeus to steer. I think Nethys paid Asmodeus for whatever He's doing, and if it costs Nethys more, that serves my god; that's what I think. If you are a small obedient little girl who only wants a few small things, then, having attained those small things, I don't see why you'd hesitate to agree that you'll stop withholding things from us, stop presenting them to Keltham first to try to force a concession from us afterwards, and stop trying to condition your obedience on our further concessions. The game you have played twice today, you will not be able to play a third time, have I said it enough ways you comprehend it now?"

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The Grand High Priestess was -

(don't think things that make your bargaining position look worse think things that make your bargaining position look better)

The Grand High Priestess was here and didn't do anything to her.  That says a lot, really.  Nethys probably prepared in ways she can't even see.

Ione draws a shaky breath, and sits up straighter.  "Are we negotiating a deal?  Or is Asmodeus's representative telling Nethys's representative how it's going to be?"

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"Let's hear what the small obedient girl who only wants a few small things still wants."

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Ione crawls over to where she left her clothes, and puts them back on, which is helpful for her to get some of her sudden seething hatred under control.  Whatever else comes, she's never passing a Chelish loyalty screen again, and she may as well think what she fucking wants now, which really leaves quite a lot of thoughts backed up, and this is not the time for them.

"Oracle of Nethys, Ione Sala, of the library's curse," she says, when her clothes are back on and she's sitting on the ground.  "My god has either joined with your god, or been paid by Him to assist, on a project to bring another plane's knowledge to Cheliax.  I require a bed either in the library, or in a room immediately adjacent to it.  Aside from this, I am content with ordinary student-level sustenance and living conditions, which you will not worsen or withhold.  You may either leave the other students here ignorant about my true nature, or tell them but then instruct them further not to mistreat me in any way whatsoever whether or not Keltham is watching.  I understand there may be some restrictions on me.  These restrictions need to mostly not prevent me from providing the services that Nethys intended me to offer this project.  Whatever pay or equity is negotiated by Keltham for the participants in his project, will be allowed to actually accrue to me if it actually accrues to any single one of the other girls, and Cheliax can't take it from me including by unexpected fees or cost increases.  You don't do anything clever to work around all that and make my life worse."

"In exchange, I will cooperate with Chelish security, on the understanding that they treat me as a friendly representative of the allied god Nethys and not an Asmodean traitor who gets set on fire at somebody's whim.  If we have disagreements, we work them out by negotiating as equals, not by a wizard who works for Cheliax showing up and gouging out my eye.  If at some point you come up with something extra that you want from me, don't threaten me into it, offer me an interesting book.  Or a magic item.  Or if you want me to do almost anything, you can offer me my brother as my slave.  Apart from that, I don't think I have any long-term goals besides pleasing Nethys enough to get a good Nethysian afterlife.  I'm not impatient to reach ninth circle here instead of there."

"If you manage to come up with a brilliant way to screw me on this deal, it's off, because I'm not an Asmodean and you're not a devil and this isn't a contract between two Asmodeans, it's a Nethysian-Asmodean deal.  I'm Lawful and I'll keep my deals that are actually sensible deals for sensible people being sensible about them.  I'm not an Asmodean any more, and I won't keep a contract that an Asmodean twisted around."

"What makes Ione Sala predictable is when she thinks she can be safe if she stays predictable, which mostly means that she needs to be safe from Nethys's displeasure.  The main thing that causes me to start looking for ways to improve my bargaining position with Cheliax, is if it looks to me like Cheliax might suddenly decide to do anything it wants to me at any time, especially things that might hinder my service to my god, unless my bargaining position is better.  I will remember your claim that security would have worked with me if I'd come directly to them, and if you keep your side of things, I will try coming straight to you at least the next time I think I see something Nethys would want me to do.  I hear your claim that my doing anything else unpredictable makes me too much of a liability and I will be killed no matter what after that, which I understand would make it hard to continue doing what Nethys wants me to do, and I understand Nethys would see that as a betrayal if I let it happen on purpose."

"Our gods have an obvious common interest.  We don't have to fight.  I respect what Asmodeus has to offer this project.  I hope Cheliax respects what Nethys has to offer."

Ione finishes talking.  She's trying to tense her entire body so it will stop fucking trembling and she knows she can't do this for much longer.

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"Oh, do you want your brother after all," says Elias with some satisfaction. "I spent a while trying to see if there was anyone in the world you liked. All right. Next time you have a bright idea, come to us; next time we have a demand, I'll bribe you."

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Ione found a wounded bird, when she was very young.  She hid it from her parents, and tried to nurse it back to health.  She hadn't even had it a full day before her brother found it, and killed it in front of her, slowly, by tearing off bits of it at a time.  It's the last instance Ione can recall of still having a heart to break, because afterwards it was very clear to her that anything she ever cared for would just become a weapon that somebody else could use to hurt her.

"Is it too late to pretend that I love my brother dearly?" Ione says, not quite believing that she's joking with him.  "And deal."

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He pulls together an arcane healing spell. Fixes the burns, when he shakes her hand. "If you loved that asshole I really would have to conclude Nethys had driven you mad. Stay out of trouble."

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"Yes, sir," Ione says without thinking at all, and then sighs at herself, but only internally.

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Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has just seen a trembling human girl strip naked and then be set screaming on fire, which challenged his understanding of reality not in the slightest.  After that, other things were said which challenged his understanding of reality significantly more.  Did the girl just win?  That is frankly not where he was expecting this to go.

He wouldn't set somebody on fire, if they were implicated in the possible end of the world.  They might explode.  Broom thought about trying to do something, but before he was done hesitating, the girl wasn't on fire any more, and then she was still talking disrespectfully to the powerful wizard who had just set her on fire.

That does seem like the sort of person who might destroy the world, either by accident or on purpose?

The conversation afterwards didn't make it seem like Ione Sala was planning to do that right away, but Broom is still feeling somewhat worried.  He can imagine somebody carrying the sort of grudge, from being set on fire, where they decide to destroy the world about it.  Especially if it's been happening to them regularly.  He doesn't like being whipped and healed and whipped again.  He hated that one time of his life where it was happening to him a lot.  He just didn't have any options for doing anything about that, such as, for example, destroying the world.

It is not entirely clear to Broom that Chelish security quite understands how to avoid making giant messes or how to clean them up, which, he supposes, makes sense of why some god named "Otolmens" would randomly grab Broom in the hallway and tell him to do it.

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...and yet despite that, Broom finds himself smiling.

Well, he thinks he knows why he's doing that.

She did win, after all.

Broom wipes the smile from his face once he realizes why it's there.  He watches Ione pull a book out of air, visibly trembling, and sit down to read the book, while she continues trembling, looking very much like she's trying to avoid having a breakdown in front of any invisible watchers.  He keeps watching until he's pretty sure she's not about to grab her wizard stuff and start destroying the world, and then leaves the library to check on his other person of interest.

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Carissa ducks out from the crowd headed to dinner and goes to her room.

 

She's pretty sure she can fake her way through a date with Keltham, but she doesn't want to? She can come up with several justifications and she's not sure she buys any of them but one is that - when they tell him more, which they're going to have to, eventually, she'd like to tell him that she wasn't lying about this. Another one is that - she is trying to become bigger, more capable, more Evil, in the sense of wanting Evil things for her own reasons rather than the sense of being willing to do what it takes to survive, and so it seems like practice in the wrong direction, to go on a date while not wanting to. Another one is that at lunchtime she was so happy, full of ideas and satisfaction and cleverness and the conviction that there was something big and beautiful and perfect out there and Keltham was leading her towards it, and she wants that back.

She doesn't, objectively speaking, have any reason to have lost it. She has basically earned confirmation that she was right, that there is something big and beautiful and perfect out there and that Keltham is leading her towards it, her and not anybody else, or at least her first. She didn't have the details nailed down but if you'd asked her to bet at lunchtime she wouldn't have bet she had the details right already. The main reason she now feels sick and small and scared isn't that she was wrong at lunchtime, it's that she realized since then that the path to big and beautiful and perfect requires skills she doesn't have and doesn't have long to acquire - 

- not a useful line of thought -

- why does she want to go on a date with Keltham? Other than because there's a competition with that as a win condition and she's very competitive. Other than because if they have children they'll be very smart and Cheliax will objectively owe her lots of money for them whether or not it pays up. Other than because he's attractive, when he's trying to be that instead of trying to be a hundred other things.

 

Well, because there's something he is getting right. There is something no one in Cheliax is getting right except maybe Aspexia Rugatonn, and Aspexia Rugatonn can't teach it, even if she knows it, because if she could then everything would be different. There's a kind of way of living in the world that Keltham has, and they don't, and he saw immediately what a tragedy that was and wanted to teach it to literally everyone because - not because he's Good, he's not, he's a lot more Good than people here because his surroundings were but she can actually tell the difference and he's not -

But you don't have to be Good to see a - mess, a Lawless mess if you'd like, and to wish that the beings in it stood taller, smarter, clarified and free, not as good as when they had no free will maybe but at least out of the local equilibrium where they have it but are not competent to use it -

He's also a teenager in way over his head and missing half the information he needs and depending which skills he grows in which order he's very possibly going to demand, when Cheliax comes clean with him, that everyone involved in the decision to deceive him be tortured to death, which would be reasonable, but -

- she wants to sleep with Keltham because she wants everything he has, and she wants to see more pieces of him, and she wants it very, very badly. And she sits with that, and lets it fill her up, the longing to see the end of the path, the longing to tell him things and watch him think about them - to check the little Keltham she is building in her head against the real thing and see if she gets it yet -

 

There. That's better. She goes to dinner. 

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Keltham heads to dinner, still feeling shaky.  It does not occur to him to hide this; he is distracted, and by default he is not an actor posing.

He grabs his food and sits down next to Carissa, who seems to have gotten there before him, not sure what he wants to say to her.  Cancel the date?  There's a presumption there about Carissa wanting to date him only under narrow conditions that have not actually been specified.

"Hey," says Keltham.

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"Hey." Noticing that something is troubling Keltham is well within Carissa's baseline perceptiveness about things that might determine whether she lives or dies even when she is extremely distracted. " - you okay?"

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"Nope," Keltham says, because in dath ilan there are no pleasantries that you are meant to respond to with lies, and if there were, the people there would revolt against their language and start over.  "What does your own model of reality say that Owl's Wisdom is predicted to do to somebody?"

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"...some adventurers use it pretty much daily so it can't have, like, particularly noticeable long-term effects from regular use. Clerics tend to get its equivalent in a headband, like wizards get headbands for cunning, and it makes them better servants of their god. I have ...heard of people saying it gave them a profound religious experience?" From the look on Keltham's face that's not quite it, but closer. "It sort of is a religious experience, in a way, touching the state of being - a little more like a god..."

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"Yes.  Being a little more like a god.  You know somebody asked in class, what makes someone have the potential to become a Keeper?  It's that.  It's the thing Owl's Wisdom boosts."  Taldane doesn't actually have a word that means cognitive reflectivity.  "If you don't have people screaming about that and giant warning labels on the spell, then maybe my first angry thought afterwards was right and, yes, in fact, almost nobody here has much inside them that actually draws on the thing that Owl's Wisdom boosts, so nothing much happens to y'all when you use it."

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" - oh. Gods, I'm sorry. No, I've never heard of anything that'd make people - warn - there are people with 22 Wisdom and they're not even close to Keepers, they don't have the rest - but I guess if you stuck a headband on you would be."

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"It's - not your fault.  But I realized - how I was put together - in a way that probably, no, let's be frank, in a way that can't possibly make sense, and then it wore off and now I'm not smart enough to fix what I remember seeing, and I'm not even sure that's what I want to do."

"Ha.  My brain's totally thinking that this may not be a bad thing in the long run, and it sure wouldn't have been thinking that an hour ago."

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She thinks she understands, though, and it sounds like a very bad thing, if you don't have time to put yourself back together afterwards. "Not a bad thing?" she murmurs rather than think of something she can actually say.

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"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.  It's a proverb that's - remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people.  There's a whole philosophy around that saying.  One of the key points is that maybe sometimes it makes sense to not push a truth on others, if you think it'll hurt them, it can make sense to not walk up to Keepers and ask them to tell you everything you're not seeing.  But if you saw it yourself, it's too late, you can't unsee it, and there's no way out but forwards."

"So, plus side, the way I was put together was not-too-bad for dath ilan and almost certainly all-wrong for Golarion, and being stuck like that while refusing to look at exactly what I was doing wrong probably wouldn't have turned out great for me.  On the minus side, before the Owl's Wisdom wore off, my brain went and fully admitted to itself that I had no hope of ever succeeding in my life goals back in dath ilan, and I did not really need that much personality update being shoved at me all at the same time, you know, it would have been nicer to spread it out over a few more weeks."

"So that's what my day was like.  How was your day?"

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What a question. 

"I had an existential crisis but it was much more minor than that. Then I met a person even more important than Contessa Lrilatha, who was already lots more important than anyone I intended to ever meet, and she was perfectly nice but I still feel vaguely like a toddler wandering around a live-fire military training exercise going "wow, such bright lights!!" Then -" Shrug. "The duck's tasty."

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"Your food technology is maybe something like three hundred years behind ours, I don't even know, but I admit it's surprisingly good duck given that."

"My brain is still trying to question all of its life choices and that includes the degree to which I'm prioritizing certain forms of personal happiness while working on my very important project.  I don't - I'm not sure if I can be the Keltham I was at lunchtime, tonight.  The Keltham who's just running straight ahead and doing the thing, because that has different results in dath ilan than in Golarion and I saw that but I also don't know yet what other kind of person I can possibly be.  I don't know how much you wanted that Keltham you saw before, instead of a more - unsettled one."

"I could also just find my brain shaking out if you gave it another hour or starting undressing me.  I genuinely don't know.  I've never been hit by an Owl's Wisdom before.  If I had been, this case wouldn't have had such an effect."

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"So, not in the mood for winning a kinkiness competition, maybe in the mood to climb up to the rooftop and stare at the stars and worry about the fate of the world being on our shoulders?"

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He feels a flash of the old Keltham's enthusiasm at that, something that he instinctively cups his hands around, like he's protecting a flame from the wind.  "Sounds nice.  Could do it wearing fewer clothes too, if you were also in the mood for that.  If it escalates on both sides into a perversion competition I sure won't complain.  I'll also understand if even a relatively minor existential crisis turned out to be a pretty large one in an absolute sense and you just want to stare at the stars."

"Also, what's an existential crisis?  It doesn't actually translate."

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"Oh, it's the thing where you think too much about some question humans aren't good at thinking about - or at least, some question no one has taught Golarion humans to be good at thinking about - like what you're for or who you want to be or what death will be like - and end up having the mental equivalent of the thing where you bite your lip and then have to avoid, every time you swallow, biting that exact spot again while it's swollen. 

I'll pick out an outfit for stargazing and we'll see where it takes us, how about that."

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"Works for me."

"You know, the way people think in dath ilan, which probably isn't how they should think here, it's the conventional wisdom that when you can see what you're trying not to think, and it's gotten to anywhere near the point of a bitten lip you're trying not to bite again, you're supposed to just go ahead and think it."

"This probably assumes there's no rogue corn strains that eat you if you think about them.  And also that you know how to think about such things and can think about them productively.  And also that you know people older and more experienced and 4 Intelligence points smarter than you, who you can ask for help if you get in trouble.  And that you can call in a Keeper if that doesn't work."

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"I think in Golarion people trying really hard to think the thoughts they're at the edges of would just end up going mad or, you know, not functional enough to do their job at which point they starve - what does dath ilan do about it if you are busy having an existential crisis and can't do your job for a month, does everyone just have a month of savings?"

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"That doesn't sound like something that badly configured thoughts are supposed to do to a person.  You'd call in a Keeper before then.  What you're for, who you want to be, and what the Future makes of you after they bring you back from the dead - I wouldn't have thought those were dangerous things to think about, either.  To be clear, I am not at all under the impression that means you could tell me your problems and I'd see nondangerous things to think about them, I've been in Golarion for longer than an hour at this point."

"Somebody my age is supposed to save at least a year's expenses in investments, more if they don't have a support network or the investments are very volatile.   I was at eighteen months of runway when I boarded my fateful aeroplane, but a lot of it was in some pretty volatile investments."

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"Wizards are that rich. Most people, if they unexpectedly can't earn any money for a year, die."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because they can't cut their expenses below what they are, to save up more of their income, without dying?  Or because they're Intelligence 10 and they can't - imagine multiple possible futures and plan for them?"

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"Mostly the second thing but also it wouldn't obviously be worth it for them to cut their expenses more? Cutting their expenses more would increase their odds of dying of other things, like living in a worse apartment makes you catch malaria and cholera and so on more often and if you eat worse food then you're weaker and can't fight off illness as well. And also living on the bare minimum is kind of miserable and one might reasonably trade off some misery against some chance of dying sooner, if they don't think the misery is the useful kind that you learn from and makes you stronger."

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"Right.  Afterlives.  There's no point staying on Golarion if you're not having any fun there."

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"Yeah. I mean, some of the afterlives suck, but Chelish people at least can be pretty sure of their draw, and if you're done here, not a lot of point hanging around."

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Keltham can feel it like an echo of Owl's Wisdom, his explicit awareness, his inability not to look in that direction, towards his perception that everything he's heard about the afterlife has been very vague; and the explicit thought now completed, that this is probably not some random innocent mistake it's okay to ignore while he plunges ahead into everything else that's more tractable.

He wishes he knew whether or not the truth about afterlives was being deliberately hidden from him by the people here, or hidden by gods from living nongods in this afterlife-feeding economy, or if this is some safer issue where it'd work fine to try harder to pin people down on details at the expense of some social capital.

He doesn't want to pin Carissa down on it, anyways.  It's not a fun pre-date topic.

"Sorry if I shouldn't ask, by the way, but I can't tell if your mention of meeting somebody more important than Contessa Lrilatha was a prompt to ask you about that if I was interested, or if it was deliberately vague to signal that I'm not supposed to ask."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mostly just vague because the name wouldn't mean anything to you. I met the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, the head of the church of Asmodeus on Golarion. She was laying the Forbiddance."

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"Meta before I say anything work-related about that, what's the local defaults and your personal overrides for how much work you want to talk about on the dinner before a date?  Dath ilani default is that if you met somebody over work, work is assumed good to discuss while together unless somebody says otherwise; I haven't noticed a personal override over that myself."

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Dath ilan does so much reasoning out which things you do instead of just reading people and noticing if you're getting your desired result. "It seems like it'd be awfully hard not to talk about work, considering," she says. "I don't mind it."

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"Right, so, say anything to - Aspexia? Rugatonn? - about work?  I mean, if I'd been there I'd have asked her what we need to do to get intelligence headbands and a pair of detect-magic goggles, but there's presumably a reason she didn't deliberately give me a chance to do that, and I'll understand if you didn't want to expend your personal social capital on that."

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"I did ask for a headband, that was not what she was here to talk about. I don't think they are underrating how important you are, at least."

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To Keltham, that doesn't sound the least bit unlike what happens if a Legislator is passing through and didn't schedule time for your personal pet issue; that's what the whole hierarchy of Delegates, Electors, and Representatives are for.

"Yeah, not surprising.  Even the second part is more cheering than I was expecting.  Maybe not tonight, maybe more like early tomorrow, but I do want to talk to someone about - milestones, prices, what they're interested in seeing to create the promise that implies more investment as a correct course of action, what it takes to get resources like magic goggles and at least one intelligence headband and wisdom headband to pass around.  Or failing that, if there's enough other clerics here who can go in with me on second-circle cleric spells, for purposes of hitting everyone who wants it with an Owl's Wisdom at least once before they get their head stuffed full of dath ilani skills."

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"Seems like a good conversation to have." Carissa is almost certain the constraint on headbands is whether Keltham's going to destroy the world, not whether if he doesn't he'll create enough value, but probably whoever he goes to for the conversation will have figured out what to tell him. And she wants a headband very badly, so hopefully it'll even work out. 

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"Know my next step on who to ask about it?  Like, not necessarily who's in charge, if you don't know, just who I ask to find out where to go?  Other people have this weird ability to find security officers that I don't actually see myself anywhere."

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"I just step into hallways and call 'security' and let them show themselves."

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"...right then."

You would expect this to be a comedy trope on a TV show which otherwise lacked a mechanical explanation, not the way that things worked in real life.

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Is that a very un-dath-ilan way for things to work. Oh well. "I know that if we could actually go to dath ilan things would immediately start happening at a thousand times the already terrifying speed they're presently happening but I sort of wish I could wander around dath ilan not causing an international incident and just seeing what it's like."

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"Oh, good prioritizing of topics.  Anybody who wants that to be a romantic conversation should probably get that in with me during the first week or two, before I get especially nostalgic or sad about something I didn't realize I'd miss.  Yeah, it's about as fantastic as you'd expect from a billion people with high intelligence and enough money to spend on making stuff be diverse and pretty.  Enormous buildings that go up into the sky for two hundred layers of living space?  We've got those.  Endless forests with houses you'd never notice, where all the roads are far enough underground that you can't even hear a murmur from the high-velocity automatic carriages moving people around at a mile a minute to their workplace or their friends' houses?  Got that.  Wind pits a hundred meters on a side so people can fly around using small wings?  Got them.  Giant supershop that's fifty of these villas in radius, which ended up as the de facto selling point for everything in Civilization that's in common enough demand to need an exhibit and rare enough to not need many of them?  Got that.  Entire cities of actors that do nothing but play out unending elaborate fantasies that people can pay to wander into for a day or a year, complete with sex workers?  Got them.  It's basically what it seems to me you should expect from people with way more money and knowledge, and zero magic or gods.  Given the premise, I don't know what if any of that you'd find surprising."

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- longing sigh. "I don't know that I'm - surprised by any of those things exactly, they all sound like things people might want if they were very rich - I guess I'm confused about, if everyone's very rich, who does all the unpleasant work of digging the tunnels and hauling the garbage and being the sex workers..."

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"Machines.  One person can dig a tunnel faster if they have a shovel.  Now imagine, it's like that, but there's a crew of a hundred people and eighty tunneling machines who show up and dig all the tunnels for the city you're going to build, over the course of a week.  Garbage gets tossed down a self-cleaning chute where it lands in containers that get carried away by vehicles that travel around automatically without any humans operating them."

"Sex workers aren't scalable that way because, like, Civilization has made a decision not to scale orgasm production?  But I don't know why you'd consider that an unpleasant job - anyone who sells sex is going to sell it at a price that makes them glad to trade it, right, and people who'd need huge prices to be happy aren't going to be the most competitive sex workers?  Wait this is going to be awful Golarion news and I should be trying to guess it before you say it but I find that I don't actually want to."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you want me to not say it, Cheliax isn't one of the countries where women don't have rights so you don't actually need to know."

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"So... somebody picks out the most attractive women, tells them they're sex workers whether they like it or not, and underpays them, because otherwise their country can't fill out those jobs because no woman wants them because of the marriage thing."

"...you know, I can tell that's still too sensible for Golarion but even having said that, I don't know how to make the answer be crazier."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If a girl has had sex while unmarried, in a country where women are supposed to marry as virgins, then no one will marry her, but it's illegal for her to have been educated or gotten a normal job, so she can be a sex worker - that does not translate quite directly to our word - or she can starve, and she will almost definitely get diseases from having sex with lots of strangers, and also eventually one of them will be bad news and strangle her, but I imagined dath ilan having enough Law to solve the latter problem and enough medicine to solve the former and it's still considered a lousy job with those aside, because propensity for it is barely getting selected for at all."

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More equilibria that seem weirdly more awful than anything Keltham knows about to explain why.

"Why would - you get diseases particularly from having sex with people you didn't know?  Is this a magic thing?"

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"...no? It's just - well, you get diseases from any kind of close contact with other people, right, and there are a bunch of diseases that you specifically get from sex, and people who haven't had sex won't have those diseases to pass along, and people who have sex with hundreds and hundreds of people will inevitably get the diseases eventually."

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"And here that's much more serious than - the kind of contagious illnesses that we still have in dath ilan, because we eliminated anything we didn't know how to easily treat, probably long enough ago that it happened before the screen.  Though - I'm a bit confused about the concept of a disease that's specifically transmitted by sex - you wouldn't think a disease would find its optimal strategy in only, like, infecting genitals or sexual fluids, and making sure it never got transmitted by sneezing - I wonder if there's something I'm missing about how the equilibrium point is different here.  Is it anything you still have to worry about in the face of fourth-circle cleric spells?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, Remove Disease is third and will totally handle it, but normal people can't afford that. I don't know enough about why diseases work different ways to guess the answer to your question but doctors do track, like, if you're doctoring someone with smallpox and haven't had it yourself you'll catch it, if you're doctoring someone with syphilis and haven't had it yourself you'll be completely fine, but their wife and mistress will come down with it eventually."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd guess that - a long, long time ago, in dath ilan - we figured out how to identify everyone with a disease like that, all at once, in one giant sweep through the population, and we isolated all of them until they got better or died, plus a while longer to be sure, and then the disease didn't exist anymore."

(The concept that you can have a contagious disease forever, without it either getting better enough not to be contagious, or getting worse until it kills you, has not particularly occurred to Keltham; why would the replication rate in the face of immune counterattack be exactly 1, rather than exploding or vanishing?)

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "I think Cheliax could do that but it'd just get reintroduced from other countries that aren't coordinated enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, we wouldn't even have tried until we thought we could pull it off across the whole planet at once, so it can't have been any earlier than that, in our history... I wish I knew whether dath ilan went through a phase like this, or if it's something that happens here entirely because of the gods or a leak in your heritage of intelligence or I don't know what.  If dath ilan used to look basically like this, minus the gods and magic, it sure would be nice to know exactly how we climbed out of it."

For the first time it occurs to Keltham to wonder if dath ilan used to have gods, and that's what the Great Screen is meant to protect, because if you know the info for gods, you might pray to them... it would take a huge effort to keep not just the phenomenon but the physics behind it out of all the textbooks, but that's the magnitude of effort dath ilan put in to the Great Screen.  And if that's not what's going on, then there remains the unexplained question of why Keltham does not know any standard speculations about hypothetical superagents, that lots and lots of people could have hypothesized, hypotheses which pose a lot of interesting then-whats once you start looking in that direction.

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"Anyway. It's interesting to know you can have plenty of sex workers if they're also allowed to do other stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not sure there's literally anybody on my planet who's 'not allowed to do other stuff'.  Maybe some Keepers, if they're holding infohazards so bad that they all have to stay in the same isolated village somewhere?"

(And the people who know the true history, in their own causally isolated bunker.  But Keltham is now suddenly very unsure he should talk any more about the Screening of History where gods might hear him.  If dath ilan's Keepers defeated the gods and eradicated their memory, sometime in the Forgotten, this may not be a good thing to talk about in modern Golarion.)

"Where does the equilibrium balance in Cheliax?" Keltham adds on.  "You didn't think that people who enjoy sex lots would be the natural sellers for sex, so what prevents that here?"

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"Well, there's still the diseases and there's still the risk of a dangerous guy, so it's still a job you probably only do if you don't have better options, though in Cheliax that wouldn't be because they're illegal so it'd probably be because you're really bad at working in some way or another. And if you are particularly attractive and desirable you probably try to angle that into being a powerful person's mistress rather than working at a brothel, even a high-end one."

And the gaps are filled by slavery, which she's not going to say. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, in dath ilan it's that sufficiently attractive people who are sufficiently good at sex, have formed - um.  A... temporal process with two sides... where each side is composed of people... who each have their own incentives... such that each side is in equilibrium with respect to the incentives given to them by the other side... and on the other side from the very desirable people, are people who are sufficiently cool and have done sufficiently awesome things.  You can't buy some very hot people with money, you've got to have done something that they think is worthy.  And the people who are obviously worthy, if they're willing to acknowledge you publicly as a fuckbuddy, they're validating to the world that you are that hot and that good at sex, and then you're somebody who gets to decide whether some lesser incredibly rich person is cool enough to meet your standards."

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Carissa tries to follow that and when that fails tries to nail down her confusion and when that fails says reluctantly, "maybe that's the same thing as taking a mistress but I suspect, instead, it's another vast confusing cultural divide."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, suppose I asked you who was the hottest woman on the planet.  The first obvious answer would be whoever gets paid the highest prices for sex.  But suppose there's somebody even hotter than her, who doesn't accept direct payment for sex at all.  How could you tell she was even hotter?  How could she prove that to the world?  Well, let's say she thinks the big important thing is... research on rats, and suppose somebody incredibly rich goes and builds an entire small city devoted to rat research, and then she screws him.  Depending on how much money gets spent, especially if she's influencing multiple rich people to fund rat research, you could make the case that she's getting implicitly paid more than the most expensive direct sex worker on the planet, even if she's only a small fraction of the reason why anyone funded the rat research city."

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" - this is missing the point but in Golarion you'd check with a spell who had the most Splendour. Uh, I'm not sure that's how I think about sexual desirability working? I don't - think how hot someone is relates very directly to how much I expect to gain from having sex with them and therefore how motivated I am to do it. And I'm also not sure that's the main place where the confusion is."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do people here not have... I don't know, the kind of pride in their own desirability and sexual skill where they want to prove that they're way better at it than most other people?  Because you can't just go around saying that, you've got to prove it somehow."

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Carissa is pretty sure that the more powerful you are, the less you need skill at sex. She's suddenly worried that she shouldn't say that either, though. "...yes but that correlates with not being very powerful or in-demand, and therefore with needing to establish that you're fun to have sex with if you want to get anyone to have sex with you at all?" she says tentatively after a bit of thought.

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Keltham is not sure what the communications obstacle could be here, exactly.  "I mean, it's a two-sided equilibrium containing the hottest people and the worthiest people who mutually judge each other as that, anchored by how hotness and worthiness are also somewhat visible to people outside their ingroups - I have a sense like I'm also missing the point.  If you're hot enough that powerful people are competing to sleep with you, you don't need to establish how hot you are anymore, the outside world has now seen it established."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"I'm going to talk about some place other than Cheliax, first, because I keep getting distracted by trying to apply this conversation to our date" and by worrying about saying something that you'll be incredibly concerned and offended by. "So, Osirion. Osirion has a god-king, a pharaoh, they've had them since ancient times. The pharaoh of Osirion has hundreds of concubines. If he sees a hot girl in the street, I think he can just order her to become one of them. It's not particularly validating to be chosen by the pharaoh of Osirion, because it just means that you're either in the top couple hundred or that he was tired of the top couple hundred and wanted something new. I am absolutely not in the top percentile of hotness for women but if I went to Osirion I'd be a little worried about getting noticed, because I'm exotic, which is sometimes appealing in its own right.

Does all of that make sense, are we starting to make different predictions at some place after that -"

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"I mean you've convinced me that no woman would want to go to Osirion, and if she did, she wouldn't expect to gain positive sexual reputation from being selected by the pharaoh because the pharaoh isn't discriminating enough, but I'm now distracted by the question of why there is such a thing as a pharaoh of Osirion in the first place."

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"...as a question about history the answer is that his grandfather staged a nearly bloodless coup against the satrap of the Kelish Empire, with the churches of Abadar and Sarenrae both backing him, right after Aroden fell when the empire was very distracted, and won Osirion independence and kicked out all the Kelish nobles and ended serfdom and is wildly popular. I am not sure that's the question you were asking, though?" 

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"Suppose everybody in a dath ilani city woke up one day with the knowledge mysteriously inserted into their heads, that their city had a pharaoh who was entitled to order random women off the street into his - cuddling chambers? - whether they liked that or not.  Suppose that they had the false sense that things had always been like this for decades.  It wouldn't even take until whenever the pharaoh first ordered a woman, for her to go "Wait why am I obeying this order when I'd rather not obey it?"  Somebody would be thinking about city politics first thing when they woke up in the morning and they'd go "Wait why we do we have a pharaoh in the first place" and within an hour, not only would they not have a pharaoh, they'd have deduced the existence of the memory modification because their previous history would have made no sense, and then the problem would escalate to Exception Handling and half the Keepers on the planet would arrive to figure out what kind of alien invasion was going on.  Is the source of my confusion - at all clear here?"

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"You think everyone in dath ilan would just - decide not to follow orders, even though this would get them executed if anyone else in the system continued following orders, on the confident assumption that no person with a correctly configured mind would possibly decide to follow orders under those circumstances?"

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"Oh, so we're imagining that people also wake up with the memory that everybody's supposed to kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and the memory that they're supposed to kill anyone who doesn't kill anyone who talks about removing the pharaoh, and so on through recursion, and they wake up with the memory of everybody else having behaved like that previously.  Yeah, that's one of the famous theoretical bad equilibria that we get training in how to -"

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"Shit."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - confusion resolved now?"

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"Just Osirion, or entire planet outside Cheliax?  No, it's at least also Nidal."

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"Everywhere has people in charge who do things you wouldn't like and stay in charge because it's illegal to overthrow them and the laws are enforced. Exactly how bad the things they do are varies - the pharaoh of Osirion is actually not considered bad at all - and exactly how the laws against overthrowing the government are enforced varies but - probably even in Cheliax the government has done something dath ilan thinks would merit overthrowing it."

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But for that to be true in Cheliax - that makes no sense, in terms of dath ilani common wisdom about how evil aliens would enforce that equilibrium, they'd require non-dissidents to kill dissidents immediately before the timing info NOW! can spread at the speed of local speech  - maybe they're too dumb here to realize that?

"If you were supposed to have killed me a few seconds ago," Keltham says in a casual tone, not any kind of obvious whisper, "and are putting your own life in danger not to do that, this would be a great time to casually nod your head and then I'll censor a lot of my curriculum from here on out."

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Carissa is, completely insanely, tempted to casually nod her head, even though that's not even at all - lots of countries do still have governments and don't enforce heresy laws and it's clearly one of those they're pretending at being -

"I think you are imagining that this equilibrium is extremely fragile and that admitting we're in it is also disallowed? But actually it's extremely sticky. Overthrowing governments is really really hard and usually the thing that results when you overthrow a government is much worse. The consequences of overthrowing the Chelish government would be bad ones. So you don't have to - pretend the government is perfect - you just have to have a critical mass of people who don't believe that overthrowing it would produce something better, especially not since the Chelish government is possible to improve in normal ways by, like, suggesting improvements."

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"I see," Keltham says.  "Because if you toss out the current equilibrium, it could disrupt a lot of stuff, especially in a place like Golarion where people who lose a year's income just starve, no safety margin for anything... and if the current equilibrium is also doing some good things..."

But it should be REALLY REALLY OBVIOUS that there's an alternative to Osirion which looks like Osirion WITHOUT THE PHARAOH RAPING PEOPLE and that you could just...

Well, the people here don't have any training in noticing better equilibria and figuring out how to move to them -

NO!  THAT'S JUST OBJECTIVELY OBVIOUS!

Keltham manages not to yell this out loud, and having now finished internally yelling insults at reality, continues looking externally thoughtful, grateful for his recent practice with Eagle's Splendour.

He is not going to say anything along those lines, however obvious, until he has picked up from books whether Cheliax has a pharaoh.  Or rather, what kind of pharaoh it has.

He is specifically not going to mention that, given a dath ilani training regimen, ten-year-olds are too smart to get stuck in traps like this; and would wait until the next solar eclipse or earthquake, at which point 10% of them would yell "NOW!", followed moments later by the other 90%, as is the classic strategy that children spontaneously and independently invent as soon as prompted by this scenario, so long as they have been previously taught about Schelling points.

Has he at any point mentioned out loud dath ilan's annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival?  He doesn't think so.

Permalink Mark Unread

" - because... okay, so, there are lots of people who benefit from the current system, right? The pharaoh has personal bodyguards who he personally raised from the dead after they died in his service. The pharaoh has people who he elevated to high-ranking positions. All of those people would be worse off if the government were overthrown, so for practical reasons they are going to oppose it. So in order to overthrow the government, you have to kill all those people, and also any people who are seeking out positions of importance in the government as a reward for their loyalty in putting down the rebellion, and also any people who have sworn oaths of loyalty to the current regime..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I see.  In dath ilan we'd think that it's hard to get over half of the military power on your side by bribing it, in a pre-metallic equilibrium where almost all fighters have about the same military power.  And that once you start gaining more knowledge and get more powerful tech, it's your important duty to also use that knowledge to propagate certain kinds of stable equilibria to future generations and not others."

"But with wizards and clerics and whatever else you have here, if they're - extraordinary economics, you don't have the word, if they let individuals do big things without large support networks - you could get half-plus of the military power by appealing to fewer people.  Even while your society's knowledge was much too primitive to produce the kind of advanced weapons that would make these issues initially appear in nonmagical societies that have started figuring things out."

That does make it seem less like the whole thing is just an Intelligence 10 Phenomenon.

Permalink Mark Unread

" - yeah, the pharaoh and a hundred high-level personal bodyguards could probably kill practically the entire rest of the country put together, commoners are pretty useless against high-level wizards and clerics. Certainly more than fifty percent of a country's military power is less than a thousand people."

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"Well, I think I'm starting to understand some of the ways that Golarion diverged from a human baseline because of the presence of magic.  Or I have the illusion of starting to understand at least one of those divergences.  It is not, by our standards, pretty, but it sure beats having no idea why nothing here is making any sense."

...if you introduce technology into a Punish-Non-Punishers society with magic, the situation is no longer stable, it has a possibility of transitioning to the kind of pharaoh-free Civilization that Keltham is familiar with, if very large supply networks (and only those) can build weapons powerful enough to kill high-level wizards and clerics.  But, yeah, Keltham is going to have to think about how to do that with a minimum of fuss, and maybe not say a whole lot while he's thinking.

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Carissa can, in fact, follow the way Keltham might be reasoning, and she's pretty sure that she screwed up, even though claiming that every single country except Cheliax was like this would have been ridiculous and even though she's actually pretty sure that Keltham isn't going to change the calculus of whether it's a good idea to overthrow the government. 

"Anyway, sometimes it does go wrong and someone's power base isn't secure enough. Like in Tian Xia, the Lung Wa empire which had endured for centuries collapsed after Aroden's death because there was a massive associated natural disaster and a famine, and the empire collapsed, and everything is much worse now. I've met Tian adventurers and they tell stories about - ghost cities where everyone just left or died because trade routes were disrupted and food stopped coming, an entire country that made a pact with a kraken to be its slaves, other areas where the civil war still hasn't ended even though there are very few people left to kill each other. I am sure that the Emperor of Imperial Lung Wa did some things you'd abhorr but - it'd be monstrous, to overthrow him, to throw cities and civilizations and twenty million lives into the chasm of Chaos just to stop a couple dozen people from getting raped -"

 

(She's doing such a bad job at being more Evil, she's going to have to set some time aside tomorrow to work on that.)

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"I try not to be the stupid kind of Chaotic.  Even Chaos is made almost entirely of Law, remember.  If you're doing it correctly.  In fact, I'm beginning to think that the top 0.1% most Chaotic dath ilani on my planet, placed on a scale with one unit of distance between what you consider 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic', would be located one hundred and forty-four units further to the Lawful side of what you call Lawful."

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"That seems probably right. I just - it sounds like you're thinking about goverments as things that mostly maintain their power by making it too hard for people to correctly overthrow them, when my impression is that actually most people correctly don't want to overthrow them, and I can name six countries where I think that's not true so I don't think I'm just incapable of recognizing it when I see it, and it's not how I see Cheliax. Or Osirion, for that matter. Though I do think stealing all their women would be incredibly satisfying and we should do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

Stable governments make the expected benefit of overthrowing them look smaller than the expected friction costs of coordinating and changing the regime, yes.  Friction costs are not fixed independently of tech level.

"Where do gods fit into this?  There's a Lawful Neutral god that sponsors Osirion, the same god that took over the planetary banking system.  I imagine that god - doesn't care whether people benefit themselves, or benefit others, it's just completely indifferent to the effect of laws on citizen welfare, all it cares about is that there be laws - confirm or more likely deny my guess?"

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She STILL hasn't been told whether to tell him he's Abadar's, "Abadar's not one of the more human gods but I think 'doesn't care whether people benefit themselves or benefit others' sounds right, and, uh, not exactly indifferent to whether laws affect human welfare and more ...deeply concerned with laws along a specific dimension which is not human welfare, but definitely isn't just 'laws exist' - I bet it matters that they're possible to consistently enforce and that they're consistently obeyed? And I bet there are other things that matter which I just don't happen to know."

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The info he needs is to what extent gods, both including and excluding Asmodeus, are liable to get pissed if Keltham tries to make their afterlife-feeder be less of a shithole.  Keltham is aware he can't immediately ask about this, though it also occurs to him that Carissa may be similarly speculating about Keltham's intentions, and not saying what she speculates he's thinking.

Gosh, Keltham hopes they weren't supposed to be coordinating some kind of immensely meaningful implied side conversation, while they were talking about this, because if so, Keltham has absolutely no idea what they both sidespoke, and that would be embarrassing.  Well, not really his fault because of the enormous cultural gap and hypothetical Carissa should have known better, but still.

"Wanna go back to talking sex work in dath ilan?" Keltham offers.

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"Sure. Do women pay for it? They don't, in Golarion; it's not hard to find someone who'll have sex with you for free."

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"Some women do?  I should also mention that there's a difference between, like... slipping some normal man or woman a private note saying that you realize you've failed at flirting with them but you still want them enough that you'd pay thirty unskilled-labor-hours to fuck them anyways, versus paying much higher prices to extremely attractive people who are extremely good at sex.  The second thing is more of a case of - something you do when you're older, richer, can afford it on a regular basis if you don't want to go back to less expert sex, and aren't concerned about it messing up your regular relationships.  I've resorted to bribery six times and been bribed twice, but the total money flow ratio is more like, twenty to one, not three to one."

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" - that with normal non-professionals is not a thing in Cheliax and I suppose it could be, I don't actually know why it isn't. I guess since no one does it, offering would be extremely weird and therefore a negative signal about the traits of the person who offered?" It'd read as a bizarre threat, is what it'd read as. "I'd be cautious about doing that here, not that I expect you'll need to."

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"Thanks for the warning.  Anything else I shouldn't offer people money to do?"

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"Huh, good question. I'm not immediately thinking of anything else." 

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 "Normally I would say you shouldn't offer people money to overthrow the government, that actually is illegal, but what with it being you I think it's probably better if your controlling constraint isn't - believing yourself to have necessarily incomplete information about the merits of overthrowing governments."

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" - and now we're back on serious topics, sorry. What sorts of things do you do in a whole city of sex workers - do you pretend to be the pharaoh of Osirion -"

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"You mean, and then the women overthrow him and take sexual revenge on him?  Or played straight rather than subverted - I mean, I'm sure somebody has played Perverted Alien Dictator of Civilization and probably a hundred thousand variations on it - I don't know, myself, very much of what goes on in there.  There's a standard wisdom of, play the simple sex games first, wait to get bored naturally before you start making sex more complicated, don't rush ahead to the weirdest sex Civilization has developed."

"It's considered - the kind of info-hazard that isn't going to drive you insane, but can make you miss out on a lot of fun, by making you bored before you would've been bored?  Like telling somebody how a book ends when they just started reading it?  We have whole Civilizational structures around avoiding that class of lesser infohazards, spoilers they're called.  With, for example, simple codes you only memorize after you pass a competence check for a threshold level of sexual experience, so newspapers can print sentences that only sufficiently perverted people would be able to read without making a deliberate effort."

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"- huh. I guess that's fair enough. Does this mean that you should not be doing kinkiness challenges, because Golarion doesn't have such a norm and adventurers tend to tell stories about what they've gotten up to."

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"Eh.  New planet.  I'll get used to what's normal here.  Maybe don't spring it on me all at once and leave some for next time."

"Actually, I'm not quite sure what kind of perversion kinky is, I can tell it's, like, sexual diversity but the word doesn't directly translate.  Surprising me is fine, to be clear."

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"I mean, it's sort of a general word for everything that's not, you know, one man and one woman with no implements and no magic."

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"That covers an awful lot of space by itself, I would've said, but maybe I'm naive about how much more people get up to in their forties once they can afford nicer things and more participants."

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"I mean, I think people who tend to like tying people up also tend to like whipping them also tend to like dripping candle wax on them also tend to like having two of 'em you can get to do things with each other and also tend to like using control spells on them, so it forms a sort of - natural category?" Shrug. "Maybe the category is just general the thing you are calling 'perversion'."

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"Okay, haven't done any of that and if it ever got mentioned in the newspapers it was encrypted."

Wait WHAT.

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"It'd have to go awfully wrong to get mentioned in the newspapers."

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"Under other circumstances I'd say 'surprise me' but - what exactly is whipping?  What's a candle?  I can't quite make things out through this translation spell, but whipping sounds like pain and candles sound like fire.  I feel obliged to check that these activities won't require that we pay to resurrect each other afterwards."

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"Whipping is painful but, like, in a sexy way, not in a deadly way. Candles are a tiny bit of fire, people who don't have magic use them for lighting, and their wax melts at a low temperature so they're also painful but a sexy amount not an injurious amount. We're - not even talking about things you'd need healing for, though people do in fact get into things you'd need healing for."

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"Okay, and the concept is that you and I hire a member of some non-human species that... doesn't mind having it done to them?"

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"It's going to be so fascinating to settle some bets among your research group.

 
Uh. Humans, are often into being hurt, in the context of sex, because pain is an intense experience and with the right surrounding context can be fun."

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"...okay I checked in with my inner self and if there's some later stage of my life where I would want to be tied up and hurt in a sexual context, I haven't at all gone down the path that leads there.  In fact my self seems to be - sort of weirdly violently against that happening to me, to a degree greater than I'd expect from small amounts of pain?  I've paid pain costs in nonsexual contexts, but this was just like a very loud inner NOPE.  I hope that's not too disappointing."

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"Men are more often the other way around, if anything, and it's the other way around we've got a betting pool on. Whether you like inflicting pain on interested parties in a sexual context. I have no idea how 'you were not aware that was a thing' cashes out, for that."

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"I... don't see why men or women would want to be hurt, in terms of the human mind design and the reproductive pressures producing it that I'm familiar with... pain is the damage signal, it's the sum of what we avoid so that we won't die and fail to have children... are you someone who enjoys pain inflicted on you in a sexual context?"

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" - point of theology, Cheliax conceives of pain as significantly more than just a - damage signal, not that being sexually into pain is limited to Cheliax or people who share our theology, or is even significantly more common here, I suspect it's innate. I have enjoyed pain in the context of sex, though the atmosphere matters a lot, you'd, ah, have to be good at it."

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"Okay, let me check in with what my brain thinks of pulling your hair in a sexual context if you enjoyed that in a sexual way and YEP somebody just won their bets on me alright."

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"Oh, good."

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"Huh."

"I'm reasonably sure that dath ilan never wanted me to notice that about myself."

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"...huh.

 

I guess dath ilan's really Good but that seems like one of the context where Good's just obnoxious."

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"Stuff in dath ilan doesn't happen without a reason.  It's not Golarion.  Let me think about this."

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Point one:  If the desire to inflict pain in a sexual context is sufficiently a human universal and sufficiently common that somebody on this plane of existence can spot the signs in Keltham before he knows them himself, the Keepers know about this already.  The probability of this need not be evaluated; it's a flat fact.

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Point two:  Not only has Keltham not been told about this, Keltham has never been exposed to any sexual education or priming which would cause him to think, if he did notice this fact about himself, that it was a good idea to pursue that thought further.  People don't want to be hurt; that is sort of what hurting is.

Having a strong sexual desire to inflict pain, according to everything that dath ilan has taught Keltham about the world, would mean that any attempt to satisfy this desire would involve an unusually mentally resilient sex worker being paid a lot of money to put up with a sexual experience that she didn't like.  If he got addicted, if his whole sexuality turned into that, the rest of his romantic life would suck really hard and probably never be truly satisfying again.  That would have been the obvious prediction, going on the obvious-intuitive reasoning Keltham would have done from everything Civilization ever taught him.

The thought that the world was full of other people who were the complements of that desire, who wanted to be sexily hurt, would just straightforwardly have never occurred to Keltham at all, if he'd spotted that desire in himself.

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That makes the answer obvious, doesn't it.

All he needs to do is guess, first, that Civilization prefers not to lie, and second, that natural selection in dath ilan worked the way it obviously-intuitively should.  By default, organisms don't like pain, and pain is what they don't like.

"Dath ilan has people who want to inflict pain sexually.  It doesn't have the people who want to be sexily hurt.  I'm not sure why they exist in Golarion, but whatever that reason was, it didn't operate in dath ilan.  That's why I was never supposed to notice."

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" - huh. You know, that - actually sort of follows - one explanation I've seen for enjoying pain being more common in women is that it improves the odds of surviving rape and sexual slavery, and then the - thing you talked about in class, about who has more children -"

 

 

Carissa is having the somewhat upsetting realization that maybe it would be bad for dath ilani people if they went to Hell? if they've just completely eradicated the mechanism by which their brains translate pain into something more complex than just suffering?

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"I could wish these congratulations came under nicer circumstances, but congratulations anyways, you're learning to operate the theory validly."

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"I mean, I already knew about the bad stuff, I just didn't know we were getting anything good out of it. And - I think we are. Getting something good out of it, that is, something I'd definitely arrange for heredity-optimization to keep having - wow, I bet in Nidal it's everyone -"

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"I hope you're right about everyone in Nidal enjoying it, but even I'm starting to notice that sounds a little optimistic for Golarion."

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"Oh, Nidal is horrible and I bet everyone there is miserable, but I also bet that they have near-universal sex-related pain-enjoyment - sex-related pain-enjoyment doesn't give you context-free enjoyment of all pain, I did not enjoy getting punished for bad grades, and I've had sex with a girl who was into hurting me more than I could handle and that wasn't fun either."

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Blue and orange, Keltham thinks, as he notices it explicitly this time, how there's an alien reality here that doesn't make sense and his brain is trying to force it.  But he doesn't know the thread to pull to unravel this whole knot, all he can do is wibble the fringes of it.

"If you don't have money flows to make up for relationships that would be imbalanced like that - is there some class of things okay to trade, that aren't money, that you were getting out of that relationship instead?"

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"Yes, people trade - favors, protection, in that specific case a spell I really really wanted. It's not that people don't have sex for - reasons located outside the sex, they do that all the time, it's just culturally rather unheard of, to name a specific amount of money as a bid, and it's also traditional for it to be a bit ambiguous how much you are doing for what reasons."

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He's going to wait until later, in case it's somehow wrong and wronger if done in public, to ask Carissa how much hair-pulling he can trade for how much explanation of how the ass the flirting norms here actually work.

"Yeah, dath ilan has all kinds of dating ambiguity and mindgames, like you'd imagine from people with high intelligence and a lot more spare time, but the concept of never naming specific amounts of money - it's so not dath ilan, I can't easily convey it.  Anything worth anything is worth money.  Not just money in general, a specific amount of money.  It's 'the unit of caring' in our parlance."

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"Yes, I am not surprised that dath ilan prefers forthrightness on the value-transfer elements of sex and flirting even if they like ambiguity elsewhere. I can see how you'd get used to it, even. But I think if you do it here you'll just confuse people terribly."

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"Is it literally just money or do I have to be careful not to offer anybody anything such that it would have a well-defined resale value..."

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"That is definitely sometimes done - spells have a resale value - but there are nuances and I might recommend running it by someone else first."

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"Is such conversation also bad on the metalevel?  If I asked everyone who'd be the best person to ask about which sexual offers are and aren't offensive, is that question itself even more offensive?"

Keltham has noticed that Golarion can sometimes be effectively predicted by asking himself how he would design a social protocol as badly as possible.

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"This conversation is fine. That question is fine. I promise we are not entirely made of impossibilities."

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Well, congratulations to Golarion on passing the bar that he set literally as low as he could imagine on short notice, but it's sure an improvement on undershooting it, so he'll take what he can get.

"I think I'm pretty much done with my dinner, myself.  You?"

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"I'm done. Up to the rooftops? Or have you rediscovered your sex drive in the course of this conversation?"

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Good question.  Keltham turns his attention inward, not quite able to stop himself from thinking how much clearer that perception was under Owl's Wisdom, how much easier and fuller the seeing of Keltham by Keltham.

"It sure is more there than it was when I walked in, maybe half from time passing and half from discovering high-payoff sexual options I never imagined possible.  Still, I think I want to start off the evening a little slower, and spending at least some time on the rooftop sounds good."

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Are people in dath ilan just that candid and self-aware all the time. How do they live. "Rooftop it is. Assuming we can find it. Do you want to ask security right away or go exploring ourselves." Normally the second would be a stunningly dangerous thing to do but security isn't going to let Keltham get exploded by a stray internal defensive measure.

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"Let's explore!  Though I'm trusting you that misguided exploration is either knowably not fatal, or that they'd resurrect us without too much fuss."

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Oh okay she'd been worried that 'this sort of thing is dangerous' is something that'd have him all shocked and appalled about what societies outside dath ilan are like but apparently it's allowed - "I expect this place has defenses that might in fact be fatal if triggered but that they have been very thoroughly disabled, Chelish security's not stupid and they don't want you to die. And if you did they'd resurrect you but I'm not relying too much on that because I'll be in lots of trouble if I get you killed, even though it'll take all of ten minutes to fix."

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Keltham rises from the table.  "Shall we?"

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"Yeah! You know, I figured I would live my whole life without getting to poke around a Duke's villa, I am very excited."

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"Your lead, then."

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Carissa would attempt to trot up the massive entryhall staircase in a sexy way except she's not actually sure she knows how to do that, it's a skillset that definitely exists and that she has witnessed on display but not one she's had occasion to practice, and trying and failing to do it is pathetic. The natural default mode for exploring is more - cautious, giggly, childlike, and that is appealing in its own way - maybe to Keltham too - but not sexy, and she's going to be kind of dissatisfied if -

- one thing at a time. The massive entryhall staircase opens out onto a luxurious mezzanine and then there are two wings with rooms, presumably parlors and bedrooms and guest rooms and so on, and no obvious staircase up, though she knows that this place has some towers. "Do you have a sense of where the towers were, relative to where we are."

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Keltham tries to visualize the villa as seen from the courtyards they sometimes pass through.  "I don't think I actually remember, but I think there's a tower visible from a courtyard I think is that way, and then we'd know."  He gestures in a direction.

He's considering offering to hold hands, but maybe Cheliax considers handholding an unreasonably advanced form of erotic perversion practiced by only the most sexually degenerate individuals, only if he keeps asking about that sort of thing at every step, that'll take all night, but also holding hands seems not optimal for exploring and potentially sort of awkward for maneuvering, and do they even do that here, and...

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"Yeah, all right, let's try in that direction."

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Off they go, then!

(He still hasn't asked about holding hands.)

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Carissa can't read his mind. Though she is aware that paradigmatic flirting in most places involves physical contact so they can - brush against each other, maybe, in tight spaces, which she can probably find if she tries hard and believes in herself - oh, here's a servant's hallway, meant for halflings and very cozy -

 

 

I WOULD APPRECIATE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE TOWER AND WILL PAY YOU SOMETHING REASONABLE FOR THEM she thinks loudly at security.

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Elias Abarco hates this particular girl by now but that's all the more reason to take a deal like that! "Door on your left," he whispers when she's far enough ahead Keltham won't hear it.

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Carissa doesn't even expect to regret this! Asmodeus personally is interested in her trajectory!! 

 

The door on her left opens in her hand, though she wouldn't have expected it to, and it's a grand bedroom, with a four-poster bed with sweeping velvet drapes and a fireplace and a sitting room and a dog bed fancier than anything Carissa's ever slept on. And it has a staircase up, a neat little spiral staircase with carpeted steps. 

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Bit weird and sparse for a bedroom, but everything here is like that.  "Stairs!  Is that as tower-promising as it looks to an outsider from another dimension?"

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"In this dimension, too, stairs often lead up to towers."

 

It would be - wise to try to arrange incidental physical contact here? But she doesn't think of handholding because that's not really a thing.

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Keltham has been thinking thoughts along not entirely dissimilar lines, and tries to match his steps to Carissa such that, if she was okay with that, they could try both going up these stairs in quite close proximity.  If she seems to be falling behind or pulling ahead, he won't fight that, of course.

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No, no, they can go up the stairs together, brushing shoulders a slightly unnecessary amount. 

 

There's something profoundly strange here and she doesn't know what it is. Maybe it's just the role reversal, that usually people are trying to seduce her. Maybe it's just that he's very young, and she hasn't dated teenagers since she was one, mostly at the Worldwound the interesting people have a decade on her because that's what makes them interesting, all the magic they know....maybe an adult dath ilani would be running rings around all of them, and that's why Asmodeus picked a teenager -

 

And then they're out at the top of the tower. Cheliax is not industrially advanced enough to have light pollution. The sky is very bright and very clear. 

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Dath ilan is too good at coordination to have either lots of aerosols in the atmosphere or lots of high-scattering non-red lights on at night all the time, and Keltham has ever been a tourist in clear cold high places where the stars are brighter yet.  It's not a new sight to him, except of course in the sense that -

"The patterns of the suns are different," Keltham murmurs.  He didn't get around to checking last night, with all the various rushes.  "I was wondering if this was a branched time of my own planet, in my own -" Taldane doesn't have a word that means galaxy - "larger structure of suns.  Didn't seem likely, but - anyway, it's definitely not."  Dath ilan doesn't have the notion of 'constellations' in quite the same way, but he doesn't see any of the patterns that a dath ilani would use to identify the Northern Star or Southern Center or the direction of a meteor shower.

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"I think you're from farther away than any of those stars. A very good wizard can teleport to those, and not to dath ilan."

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"That's - incredibly impressive, we were not ready to go anywhere and come back, not for a while, it would have been insanely expensive even by our own standards.  We built hugely powerful beams of light and used that to launch probes toward the second-nearest sun, just to get started on practicing, but they won't get to their destinations for a long time.  We did it just because we could, in the end, and not for - not for reasons, really."

"We were pretty sure there was nobody else anywhere near our neighborhood, in any sun close enough for light to travel to us from there.  People did some clever calculations saying that the aliens were probably a few billion years out, in our - simultaneity - all with logic and calculations that don't apply here at all, if your wizards can teleport there and back in less than years.  Find any people around the other suns, or is it all just lifeless other planets the way we'd deduced in our own world?"

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"The other planets around our sun are all settled, but that's - happened at the same time as us, it wasn't an independent event. From farther than that, uh, I've heard it claimed the crashed ship that is quarantined in Numeria came from another sun but I don't know more about that. Aroden, when he was an epic hero, spent thousands of years looking, and came back with empty hands."

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"It feels so unreal to think of that as being something one person does.  We'd have millions of people investigating a question like that, if a possible alien invasion had happened, it would take millions of people.  One person becoming powerful enough to go to the stars on their own is - a story you write and only sell to adults, because if you told it to children you'd be setting them up for disappointment when they learned how economics worked in real life.  This place really is magic, just like we tell it in stories where I come from."

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- hand on his arm?

"I hope it doesn't seem - like an entirely horrible place to you. It needs some work, but - but it's work a person can do, if that's what you mean by 'magic', it doesn't take millions..."

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He leans gently in that direction, which is hopefully a signal that it's fine.  "Eh, frankly it's pretty horrible.  So lots of room for improvement, and unspendably vast riches if I can figure out how to collect a five percent fee on five percent of the improvements."

His brain takes this moment to wonder if Owl's Wisdom would have something else to say about this stereotypically Keltham response, and Keltham tells it to shut up and come back later.  Also no, because that is who Keltham is in another world, on a basic level, and even if he later decides he was wrong about some things that won't poof him into an random average dath ilani.

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It is much less horrible than dath ilan where people can die forever if their brains are destroyed - not having that argument because in her heart she suspects she'd lose it, probably a similar percentage of people manage to go to Abaddon and get eaten. And because having arguments isn't sexy. 

What to say, then, though. "Well, I've heard more unrealistic ambitions."

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"Who is it that has me beat on this metric and how?  I may have to adjust my aim upwards."

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"Some people are planning to run the Starstone as soon as they can fly and become a god or die trying!!"

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"Nah, I'm more ambitious than that.  Some people succeed at running the Starstone, right?  And yet your world's still an enormous messy mess of messiness.  So fixing the world is obviously harder.  Plus, I mean, if you're going to die and go to an afterlife anyways, why wouldn't you run the Starstone?  How does that even take ambition and not just plain old opportunism?"

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"The people who die running the Starstone don't always go to the afterlives. They usually do, but - every once in a while, one or two percent, they're just gone. No one knows what the difference is. It's not the chanciest chance you could take but - I'd just die, personally."

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"Yeah, I haven't really been thinking about it because I reflexively decided that it was a Keeper sort of question but - I had a thing happen to me that was supposed to obliterate my own consciousness, and here I am.  It kind of suggests that maybe - people are in enough different places that there's always some of them left, whatever happens to them.  By the end of my biological lifespan I'll probably have the most expensive intelligence headband and the most expensive Owl's Wisdom headband, and maybe then I'll be able to think about that sensibly even if there's no Keepers around.  And then decide whether I want to go to the afterlife here that I seem to be headed for, or if I want to optimize for Neutral Evil, so I can go on to whatever place comes next in the sequence whose zero is dath ilan and whose first successor is Golarion."

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"I - 

 

 

- that doesn't make any sense to me but I guess it wouldn't. I am - not very willing to trade off definitely not dying - against many other things."

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"Woulda said the same, before I died in a plane crash that couldn't possibly have failed to utterly obliterate my brain.  I'm pretty sure I remember my head being ripped off my neck in the crash, before I found myself in Golarion instead.  I'm sure that sounds like small potatoes to your own standards of what people come back from, but where I come from it was supposed to be permanent."

"And it wasn't."

"Dying in a plane crash is something that you'd expect to obliterate every brain of every copy of you, across all the branches of branching time inside the universe as conventionally understood.  If there was still some of me left after that -"

"Well, it's suggestive of some weird things being true.  That would then, by shaky extrapolation, go on being true if something else happened that would otherwise obliterate my presence within Golarion as conventionally understood."

"But I'm not actually going to try to figure it out without more intelligence and wisdom headbands after I'm older, if those are actual options here.  Handing that job to your future self seems like the equivalent of saying to wait and ask a Keeper."

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- nod. "My working theory has been that Asmodeus - grabbed a copy somehow or something - which would have been fantastically expensive but maybe still the best way to explain to us what we're doing wrong. I don't know if that changes any of your reasoning or if it's just true that some other god somewhere else might be grabbing people from Abaddon."

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"Well, the obvious thought is that your universe is my universe's physics plus magic, and can see my universe from here, and by mediocrity is probably part of a vast lattice containing lots of other universes that can see my universe, and then this universe is one that's visible from universes that look like this universe plus even more magic, and maybe mostly when somebody dies in Abaddon nothing happens, but there's a vast number of double magical universes and some tiny fraction of those have a god or a glitch or a whatever that materializes another copy of the person who just got eaten."

"Assuming they get eaten quickly, and not by their minds getting chewed up a bit at a time so that their consciousness turns into a small painful simple thing before it ends.  There's a disease like that in dath ilan, that slowly degrades your consciousness if you let it run until it kills you, taking away your memories year by year.  People usually go into cryonic suspension immediately if they find out they have it.  I also need to know more about Abaddon, besides solving metaphysics, before I start treating Abaddon as an exit route."

"Seems worth noting though that if the gods also think that's how Abaddon works, that the people who end there just wake up someplace else the same as I did, it could explain why the gods aren't treating it as more of an emergency."

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"I think Asmodeus has expended a fair number of resources to make sure everyone headed there is offered the choice of Hell instead? But I don't know if that's because He considers Abaddon-death an emergency or because He wants them in Hell instead. I ...have never heard it's slow but I haven't asked, either - if people die brain damaged in this world they're normal in the next one, the soul remembers more..."

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"Yeah, but just because there's somebody walking around who remembers being the person who got damaged and then got better, doesn't mean that, from a first-person perspective, if you get damaged enough to forget who you are, then that experiencer mostly experiences becoming you again.  That's why people go into cryonic suspension right away if they get Memory Degrading Disorder.  Sure, future tech might be enough to read back the memories you lost, but that doesn't mean that you experience turning back into you after you've simplified and shrunk to the point where you can't tell yourself apart from a lot of other people with Memory Degrading Disorder.  You might experience turning into somebody else instead."  This language is really not suited to discussing this subject matter, but then, it's not much suited to discussing anything else either.

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"- huh, I'm not sure that's what I care about? If I got slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences but a bunch of copies of me from before that were still around I don't think I'd be very upset about that? I haven't considered this very much, maybe to dath ilani people it's obvious why I should care about that more than about whether there's still a me."

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Blue and orange.  "I would in fact be quite upset about any Kelthams being slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences, even if I was one of the ones who survived unharmed.  I may be selfish but not to the point of intertemporal conflicts with my own copies from a few minutes earlier!"

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- Carissa is not sure she understands that objection thoroughly enough to be sure her reasons for not minding aren't very Chelish! 

"I mean, I expect I would find being tortured aversive, it's in the definition, but the thing that makes torture-which-makes-me-no-longer-distinctly-me far far far worse than torture which doesn't have that effect is that then the things I think of as Carissa don't exist anymore at all. And if Carissa will keep existing no matter what but some threads of her end I ...don't understand why I'd mind. Maybe I'd mind if I understood."

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"Yeah, that - makes some sense -"

"Sorry.  It's just that the thing you said sounded a bit - similar to an argument my mother once tried on me - about how a further implication of selfishness was that I shouldn't care about what happened to the Keltham of tomorrow, because he was a slightly different person from me, so screw him - and I'm finally in the region that's supposed to be Evil, now, but then you said that you didn't care about - and it just sounded like - sorry."

"This all probably doesn't sound very romantic-escalatory, does it?  Sorry bout that, I was somewhat better at dates in dath ilan when I knew all the conventions.  My respect for you being the woman who decided to fling herself on the sharp kitchen knife of my early learning experiences."

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- Carissa's going to not touch that because once again she's not sure that the thing Keltham's pointing at is not a true thing about Cheliax she's supposed to be hiding. 

 

How to flirt back, though.

 

"I can flirt with people who have - magic items for it, can read your face so closely they might as well be able to read your mind, who have magic that does more than Splendour - I have done that, though not very much, because I tried not to get in over my head, at the Worldwound, there wasn't anything there worth getting in over my head for - but I want you, see, you think like no one in this universe and it feels - possible that I could think like that too, not after the centuries of perfecting it'll take me to be Contessa Lrilatha but, like, next year, sooner if I can squeeze a headband out of somebody, and - I want you, so you don't actually have to be good at flirting, unless you yourself get in the mood by flirting deftly at people, in which case I suppose you had better get good at it."

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Keltham leans in to her and grins, broadly, even if she maybe can't see it.  "Well, thanks for taking all the uncertainty and plot tension out of our flirting, then.  Where I come from there's enough distinct books on romantic theory to fill this house's library ten times over, and most of them would say that just giving away the ending makes it be less fun, but right now my experiences would seem to be falsifying that.  I don't think that cuddling you on a roof and looking up at the stars is even slightly less fun if I know I can't fail."

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"Well, you could fail at the planet-sized ambitions, maybe we can get enough plot tension out of that. And there is still the question of who will win the sexual varieties contest, though I have to say I'm optimistic."

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"Not betting I'll win, but not giving up without any fight.  And by the way, things would be different if I had access to my own world's technology, just saying."

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"Is there sex technology? That's delightful, actually. We will have to fix things up enough that we too can have sex technology. - don't tell me what the sex technology does, I want to try to guess."

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"I don't even know what 1% of 0.1% of all the sex technology does, just the incredibly basic stuff that's in almost every cuddleroom and that everyone gets training in how to use.  But if you imagine something, I can probably take a pretty good guess as to whether it existed.  Using the simple rule that, if it sounds possible to our technology level, somebody somewhere has done it, and if it doesn't sound possible, there's still a 70% chance somebody has done it."

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"Sex in midair."

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"Probability 1.  Giant windpits, people going up very high in aeroplanes and jumping out and having sex on the way down, people getting into orbit around the planet and having sex there."

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" - wouldn't jumping out of airplanes kill you, without magic -"

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"Nah, somebody," in pre-Screened history but he's trying to call less attention to that, "just thought for another couple of minutes and figured out how to survive it without magic.  I'm pretty sure we do a lot of stuff you imagine takes magic.  For jumping out of airplanes, you fold up a giant cloth into a backpack and when you're getting near the ground, you unfold it and it catches the air and slows your fall.  I've been trying to figure out whether some people's home cuddlerooms have midair sex equipment, like, just 2%-rich people, not 0.1%-rich people who can put whole wind pits in their cuddlerooms.  Maybe a possible method there would be to wear metal bands and put lightning-magnets in the ceiling that hovered you by pulling on the metal, but I don't know if the math works on that without doing more math."

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The cloth thing does not at all sound like it would work. "Cuddlerooms are - sex dungeons, except named adorably because no one is a sadist?"

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"Like, the room of your house where you have sex?  Dungeon sounds sort of like whip but as a spatial place, so I don't think dath ilani would have sex wherever that is."

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"Normal peoples' houses have one room. Rich peoples' houses have several rooms but still, you have sex in your bedroom usually, unless you're into weird things like sex on tables. Rich people who like tying people up and hitting them in ways beds do not natively enable might have a sex dungeon. I have never heard of a cuddle room and it translates as - indulgent in a bizarre direction -"

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"Yeah, well, if you have an economy that can make more stuff per person, they also buy larger houses to contain all that stuff.  This place we're currently staying is larger than my parents' house by a factor of 10, but only because they were work-focused people who didn't have enough different hobbies that they'd want that many separate rooms.  My parents could in fact have afforded a house this size, though they couldn't have afforded to fill it all up with things we'd consider expensive."

"So yes, separate rooms for sex, because you own stuff that optimizes sleep and stuff that optimizes sex and they are almost entirely not the same stuff for anything larger-scale than a small pillow."

"I have been trying to figure out where in a bedroom you'd have sex, because the bedrooms here do not have anything that looks to me like a good surface for having sex on.  It is now occurring to me that people here probably have sex on the things you call beds, and then change the cloth outer surfaces of the bed, and then go to sleep there."

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"Yes? - magicking the sheets rather than changing them, but yes. Is there some reason not to do that?"

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"It's - kind of icky from a dath ilani perspective.  But maybe that's just because we wouldn't have magic for - clearing the room's air afterwards and so on?  It's just odd to think of doing something that is intrinsically and rightfully messy in the nice clean place where you sleep.  If this place has spare bedrooms not being used, I might ask to have one of those for my cuddleroom.  Kind of a group resource, really, under the circumstances."

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"I am sure you can request a cuddle room if you want one. Tragically we will not be able to see the confused face of whoever authorizes resources for this project."

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"Magic doesn't do capture of still and moving images?"

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"They won't make the face if we might be watching!!!!"

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"Chelish version of dignity, like being cheerful in a classroom setting?"

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" - yeah. More centrally this than the cheerfulness in class thing, I think. Not - communicating with your emotions or expressions anything you wouldn't consciously decide to communicate with your words. If they wouldn't send you a reply saying "sure, but I think that's extremely weird of you", and they wouldn't, then they also won't make a "that's extremely weird" face where you can see it."

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"There is some really basic thing here about social equilibria which I'm missing, and under other circumstances I'd delay it for later but I'm worried that I will somehow do something that Cheliax considers not just undignified but a catastrophic negative indicator, if I don't figure it out."

"Meanwhile in dath ilan, there is famous motion-capture of, like, the head Keeper for the entire planet looking surprised on being told experimental results, because it's way, way, way beneath her dignity to pretend that she's not surprised when in fact she is surprised."

"But, I mean, if everybody here knows that people are - faking things, as we'd see it - then it's not even a failed attempt at deception because everybody knows what's actually happening so it's not even deceptive and there is some very odd equilibrium here that I am not getting at all."

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"I think that if someone was very emotionally expressive in a situation where Chelish people generally don't do emotional communication then we might think they were - immature, or not fully in control of themselves, or - trying to make a demand via the emotional expressiveness, the way you might do exaggerated emotions to make fun of someone or make a point to a very small child or to make it impossible for people to engage with anything else... people are capable of adjusting for other people being from other places, though, and you're not emotionally expressive to a degree where it has come up already..."

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"But then your -"  Taldane, of course, does not contain the word for signaling-equilibrium.  "I mean, I get how it's often advantageous to conceal information, there's all kinds of -"  Taldane does not contain a word meaning 'zero-sum interaction'.  "There's situations where you do worse if the other person does better, like, negotiating prices, you wouldn't want somebody bargaining with you to know your -"  Taldane doesn't have the word true-reserve-price.  "The lowest price you'd actually accept, if it's lower than they'd expect for some reason.  So concealment, sure, in cases where the other person knows you might be hiding something but what matters is that they don't know exactly what you're hiding.  But when it comes to uniformly faking false signals - I mean, if everyone, like all the students in the classroom, is always wearing a cheerful expression even when they're not cheerful, that's not a -"  Taldane lacks every single component word of the compound term meaning 'an equilibrium where signals preserve their overt semantics given the incentives for both signal-senders and signal-receivers'.  Keltham hates this language, and he'd ask how anybody ever thinks in it, but the answer, of course, is that they don't.

"If everyone has incentives to fool people by smiling when they're sad and frowning when they're happy, pretty soon a smile means sadness and a frown means happiness and nobody gets fooled anymore.  If everybody acts cheerful when they're not actually cheerful, people will figure that out.  It fooled me but only on literally the first day after I arrived here from another dimension without that custom, and this cannot reasonably be the -"  Taldane doesn't have the word average-use-case.  "Normal way that events happen every day.  So you have some incredibly weird equilibrium going, of a form where everyone is acting cheerful even though they know nobody will actually think they are cheerful.  Students are behaving in a way we'd interpret as being about an... adversarial... information-hiding... interaction, with their teachers, they're sending a constant first-order-misleading cheerfulness signal that everybody knows is misleading.  And I don't understand why or how you got there.  In dath ilan, well before that point, a thousand Very Serious People would show up and start arguing that Civilization was doing something silly and needed to wake up and snap out of it."

"And I know that the answer is probably weird and alien and unLawful by my standards, and complicated, and is going to take a while to explain, and not be particularly sexy, so when it comes to that whole general issue we should maybe just pick it up tomorrow.  Except that there's this one upcoming special case that seems important, which is that if I hug you in some way that makes you feel horribly uncomfortable, and Chelish dignity calls for you to send a first-order-misleading constant signal that you're having a great time, and I'm supposed to already know that's exactly what you'd do if something was wrong, and then I'm meant to act in some complicated way that makes that whole equilibrium not suck for you and that incentivizes people in your position to keep sending the first-order-misleading signal, well, in reality, I just got here from another plane, and I do not, in fact, have the faintest inkling of - do you see why I'm trying to ask about this even though we were in the middle of being romantically escalatory?"

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" - because you're adorable. - sorry, that's not - I do understand what you're saying, I think. It is not the case that you're supposed to read my signals and assume my acting happy means I am actually sad and need something different. I think you're - right, that this is an extremely complicated conversation that's going to take us half a day, in the general case, and -

- and there is a person who could've arrived here instead of Keltham who'd run into that problem tonight, if, say, he said "I want to sleep with Carissa or I'll go somewhere else with the Lawfulness Revolution", and this was obviously worth it to me but not because it was going to be good for me, just because I was going to get rich by more than it was going to be bad for me. That person would get smiled at and the smile wouldn't be any information actually. But - but you're going to tell me that a dath ilani, even an Evil one, wouldn't do that, aren't you, I don't know why they wouldn't do that but you wouldn't do that -"

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"I'd tell her that I'd trade sexual favors for getting equity in the revolutionary startup, if she honestly wanted to make that trade, but I wouldn't - expect her to ask for a false signal from me, and then be fooled by it?  Like, if she handed me a script for scripted sex work, I'd run her script if she paid me enough, but I'd expect her to know.  Or if it came to lying to somebody and telling her that I'm attracted to her, in hopes that she'll give me more equity, not that I'd expect she would, but - if that works at all - it works because the world is mostly full of people who don't lie about that, and those people laid the groundwork for me to fool her successfully, so those people built something and I'm stomping on it and breaking it and profiting from that, and that is something I find genuinely repellent.  I want to build my own things and profit from them.  And in this world I don't see how it works at all, because if it's the expected practice you just know I'm probably lying."

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" - okay I have - some idea of how I would bridge this but it will take at least an hour and make you very sad. But also you - might actually prefer to have gotten it all before you try having sex with people here? Not - because you're going to hurt me - if you're just worried that you'll hurt me tonight I can just give you my word that I'll tell you in unambiguous words if I need anything - but because -"

 

Because her own brain is now screaming with confusion, about what the Asmodean version of that is, and she's getting ahead of herself trying to figure that out but also it's her job which Asmodeus gave her, how can she think about anything else -

"I can't predict you very well. I wish I could. I want to understand you as badly as I've wanted anything in my life. But I ...think I predict...that you'd want to know first. Even if it means we spend the whole night being sad. But I'm not - I don't like giving advice as confused as I am right now -"

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Keltham leans back into her, hoping it's the right thing to do.  "A dath ilani in your position asks for time to think, gathers her thoughts, probably asks more questions to narrow things down about my own state of mind.  She thinks of questions to ask me, privately makes her predictions about how I'll answer, and then asks.  She isn't in a rush to arrive at answers, even short-term answers about whether or not to give a piece of advice, if she's not right in the middle of trying to - operate dangerous machinery with a time limit."

"We don't need to rush on larger timescales either.  You told me how this subplot ends, I can survive if it takes a little longer."

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- what if she wants to be Lawful Neutral because Keltham is -

Well, then she'll die and go to Hell and not get to do anything cool, so she should pick a less stupid want that isn't based on a crush on a teenager. 

It doesn't feel like it's because of the crush on the teenager, it feels like the other way around.

"I'd like some time to think," she says quietly. 

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"Hence the rooftop with the pretty stars."  Keltham will fall quiet after that.

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They're very pretty stars. 

 

 

She will die horribly if she turns Keltham against Cheliax. Anything that's true of all Golarion isn't that, and she's pretty sure that nowhere in Golarion do powerful men want the women they're sleeping with to communicate needing things to happen differently. 

She will die horribly and worse afterwards if she ends up wholly persuaded of Keltham's worldview and not suitable as an instrument of Hell anymore. But her first foolish foray into Keltham's worldview was, Asmodeus thought, worthwhile, so - maybe she has a bit of slack there, presumably he wouldn't have expended those resources for someone who couldn't find the right path even when she was trying. And she hasn't gone and asked the cleric her questions yet. Maybe it's okay to try to understand the dath ilan way of thinking and separately try to understand the Asmodean one and then integrate them. If she can't understand dath ilan she won't be able to do her job. 

Keltham will at some point figure stuff out - not all the stuff, but some stuff. He's already figured some things out just from the fact Chelish students conceal distress during class. The ideas that look right next to each other, to him, are different; they won't be able to predict which things are right next to other things unless they get really good at dath ilan-ness themselves. To him, 'people smile during class' was right next to 'you might not actually want to be here', not that he has the imagination to have realized the ways she might be here if she didn't want to be.

It feels like there are walls closing in from all sides, and -

"Might someone consult a Keeper?" she says. "If they were dath ilani and very stuck and very confused even about the origins of their own confusion."

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Keltham has likewise been staring up at the stars, pondering whether or not he regrets his life choices.  He thinks not?  He's still going to have sex with Carissa later and this way he also got to act cool and all-wise in front of her.

"I was about to say that most dath ilani have options short of paying to talk to a Keeper, like, they have some regular friends who are older than them and smarter than them.  Then I remembered you are in fact already one of the smartest people on this planet, and also you've been talking to an alien.  So yeah, in dath ilan, Governance would make Keeper assistance available to anyone in a position like that, and the dath ilani would probably escalate directly to them instead of messing around, because there's no point in... there's no point in tapping a nail with a tiny hammer when you can hit it with an enormous hammer instead."  That's not the original proverb and it doesn't make any sense as he tried to culturally translate it, but, eh, hopefully the idea came across.

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"Okay. I think I need to go ask a cleric of Asmodeus for help. There's one on site and I was, in fact, told to talk to them if I wanted to, and I was going to in the morning, but I might be sufficiently stuck right now that I ought not to wait."

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"Makes sense.  If they say something that doesn't make any sense in Lawful terms, you could come back and ask me about that, and then I could say something else that makes you confused again, and you could go back and forth three times and then stop."

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"Or drag them up here and make them talk to you themself while I hide in a corner and listen."

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"That would be cheating!  And cheating is technique!"

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"Maybe the way to straighten everything up is for you to march off directly to Hell and find a door to knock on and invite Asmodeus to debate you Himself." (Almost definitely heretical???? Will accept appropriate punishments.)

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"Think that's a joke but I'm not entirely sure?  I wouldn't expect to win a debate about any facts where I disagreed with a god.  Also I thought the running hypothesis was that Asmodeus can't just tell you or even his clerics all the key truths, and has no better options than pointing you at an alien who has no idea of the local non-necessary facts, but who at least has a lock on some universal validities... you know, I feel a small sense of progress about being able to say that, and having it make sense to you, where it wouldn't have made sense to you yesterday."

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"Yes, sorry, that was a joke. Asmodeus can only sort of talk to the most powerful devils who can only sort of convey things to the lesser devils who can only sort of convey them to us. People do go march into Hell seeking help or advice or something sometimes but this just means bothering people like Contessa Lrilatha, there's no Asmodeus to march up to no matter how many doors you knock on. I ....think I understand a lot of things a lot better than yesterday, and I'm delighted about it, but also it means there are all these new confusions in places I was accustomed to relying on."

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"Yeah, I'm not sure I can say that I've been there, but I suspect that I've recently been nearby.  If that's already happening to you, then we really need enough Owl's Wisdom cleric spells to touch everyone else in the research group once per week, or a Wisdom headband to pass around.  I suspect it's a bad idea to let people learn a ton of dath ilani technique and only then hit them with their first Owl's Wisdom."

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"Seems like it might be, yeah. And if you can schedule your heretical realizations then you can also schedule your time with a cleric for right after."

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"I don't think 'heretical' translated at all, it sounded like - false, only actually it's some different property a proposition can have than falsity, but still a bad one - maybe information-with-negative-value flavored?"  Because of course Taldane doesn't have 'infohazard' either... also, 'heretical' doesn't mean 'infohazardous' or it would've translated, but if it's neither false nor an infohazard then what could possibly make a proposition be a bad one... maybe it harms society but not the bearer?  But that should've translated as collective-infohazard, if the info has local benefit but negative externalities.  This pathway of communications difficulties may be finite but it sure is a long-ass one.

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"It's, uh, there are a bunch of known ways that human brains misbehave when trying to understand Asmodeanism, and if you find yourself convinced of one of them you're supposed to go get it straightened out, they're false but not false like they say different things about how Hell works than normal Asmodeanism does, more false like....they use a bunch of invalid steps to get to the conclusion, which only happens to be correct because society, which is using a different reasoning process, handed it to them, and if they get too attached to their invalid stepping and run off to do further derivations those'll be just straightforwardly false."

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"Particular flavor of invalidity, then."  The word 'heresy' doesn't really sound like that, though?  Well, Keltham can just avoid using the word until he actually understands it.  "I create a polite social affordance for you to run off now to the cleric, in hopes of getting everything sorted out in time to do something else with your day," such as Keltham, "or to stay and look up at the stars for longer.  Just say which."

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"I will run off. And try not to take too long about it."

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"Don't rush enough that you might end up with the wrong answer.  I'm not a runaway machine that's going to chew through eight houses if you take an extra minute to think."

"I'd offer to stay up here for a set period of time, but I don't have my small wearable time-telling device.  Maybe I'll just look up and think for a bit, then head on down if I notice myself not wanting to be on the roof."

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"Sounds good." Why is he so adorable.

 

 

And she scurries down the stairs and - where is the cleric in charge here going to be - in the temple, presumably -

 

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That was a very interesting and very confusing conversation and Broom is not quite sure what to make of it.  He hesitates between continuing to watch 'Keltham', or trying to overhear the woman's conversation with an Asmodean cleric...

...Broom is not entirely sure what he can get away with around here, just yet.  Broom is curious about the conversation that will happen with the cleric; it is not clear that Broom needs to know in order to do his new job.  Broom imagines trying to explain to Aspexia Rugatonn why he thought he needed to listen to the conversation with the cleric, if he gets caught doing that.  Broom thinks he would rather not have that conversation.  Broom shall, on reflection, continue to watch the human boy who somehow managed to talk himself out of scoring with the older human girl, after being told it was a sure thing, and who doesn't look particularly regretful about the fact.

Is this boy the person who ends the world?  He doesn't look it, but he also seems very very very alien and very hard to understand, and might do unexpected things because of that.

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She slows down from a run before she enters the temple because personally of interest to Asmodeus or not third-circle wizards do not go running into His temples like their time is the most important thing around. 

 

Suddenly she is terrified but that's only because she's in line for some correction that is very sorely needed and will help her achieve her goals.
 

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Cheliax, for all that it is less Lawful than some other very distant realms of existence, does not make a habit of missing ploys that are obvious even to Cheliax.

Compared to instructions relayed by way of Hell, a cleric who receives a direct divine revelation from Asmodeus will have received instruction that is more accurate, more precise, and much less able to be put into words for other mortals to hear.  The project to extract extraplanar knowledge from 'Keltham' was established based in part upon a vision from Asmodeus.  The priest who received the vision from Asmodeus reported his best guess that there was a sense that Asmodeus thought their visitor was potentially valuable and not just being given unexplained protections.  What else was in the message from Asmodeus?  Was there anything else important, not yet done?  This tends to be very hard for recipients of visions to convey, if it is not blindingly obvious.

The priest in question also headed up a Worldwound installation, was fifth-circle, and had proven himself on lesser commands.  Placing him in command of the villa project was another obvious bet.

Ferrer Maillol himself, fifth-circle cleric of Asmodeus, is not currently enjoying himself quite so much as when he was fighting an endless horde of demons at the Worldwound.  The Worldwound did not have alien teenagers being insane, direct orders from Hell that are incredibly inexplicable, random wizard students getting oracled by Nethys, and way too many complications he is not allowed to set on fire until they shape up.  Ferrer Maillol had not, until just today, appreciated the degree to which it is easier to fight an endless horde of demons compared to sending out a new top-priority message to Aspexia Rugatonn every hour.  He had quietly resolved to himself that he was very seriously going to consider whether the next such message should be batched, in part to conserve his remaining supply of communication spells, and in part because he was worried about how Aspexia Rugatonn was going to take his hourly interruptions.

Of course the next piece of news he got was about a fucking Otolmens event.

When Ferrer Maillol is notified that Carissa Sevar wants to see the head priest, there is only one first thought which goes through his mind, which is not again.

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Ferrer Maillol instructs that Carissa Sevar is to be shown to him at once, and fixes a very bland expression on his face.

"What is it?"

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"I - understand it to be the will of Asmodeus that I get a better theological education, as if I were the inheriting daughter of a Count. I have just spent an evening with Keltham in which he kept asking questions that were extremely difficult to answer from within my present understanding of Asmodean theology, which I know to be deficient. He wants me to figure out my internal confusions promptly because he - might not want to have sex with internally confused people - and suggested I seek you out now."

Which is important because it means that this will all have to be very time-bounded, and Keltham's expecting her back, except he wouldn't be that surprised really if straightening herself out took longer than expected, but it still wouldn't be ideal -

Carissa needs to be smarter and not for the first time in the last three hours is really terrified she will not live to acquire the headband that'll do it.

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At least Sevar doesn't have any more brilliant ideas, such as her last one, which was that Ferrer Maillol's life wasn't going to be complicated enough unless he added an additional number of teenage girls to it.

"Prioritized for theological instruction as if you were a fourth-circle cleric," Maillol corrects sharply, and then pauses to reflect on whether he has violated Aspexia Rugatonn's instructions for the gentle handling of Carissa Sevar... no, she's seeking this of her own accord... actually he should check that, if she's having trouble remembering Hell's instructions.  "Would you say you are not seeking this instruction of your own accord?  Keltham is not a member of the Church, but him suggesting you into it is - ambiguous."  Maillol is unsure what he should make of Hell's instructions in that case.  He really does not want to bother Aspexia Rugatonn about it already.

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"Keltham advised only that I - use dath ilani techniques for thinking about confusing things. I realized that I needed someone who understands the - thing Asmodeus communicated to me that I don't understand - and I told him I should talk to a cleric."

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That is good behavior.  Ferrer Maillol gives her his least frightening smile, the smile that Asmodean priests give to the lesser people who do something Church-approved.  "You may be unfortunately optimistic if you think that I will be able to entirely clarify Hell's message.  Still, if you were given this affordance, it suggests that Asmodeus thinks some benefit may come of it.  Seek instruction, then, if it is of your own accord, and I will assist you as our Lord commanded us."

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- nod.

 

She is going to sound like an idiot. She's just going to - ignore that and try anyway, if her idiocy is revealed then it can be corrected. 

"I think dath ilani people - genuinely understand Law better than us. I think they're - mostly Lawful Good, and Keltham is Lawful Neutral, but their understanding of Law is correct in important ways we weren't going to derive ourselves, and so there is a Lawful Evil version of it. And in class, I was trying to come up with it. And then I got the communication -" she pulls out the scroll Aspexia Rugatonn gave her, reads it off so she can't be misremembering - ''Remember that you are not Irori.  Do not think yourself likely to succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid."

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis, and accept that your rightful place is in Hell."

 

And I think what was being - very generously - communicated by mentioning Irori, and Axis, was that I was - borrowing too much from Keltham, who is Lawful Neutral, and that I don't truly understand the nature of Evil, and so the thing I was building wouldn't have been of any value, it would've been - missing something Asmodeus wants. But presumably I am capable of learning it or he'd just have let me get it wrong and accidentally make myself worthless. Do you...have any idea what it might be."

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Ferrer Maillol's first thought is the obvious one, that he hopes this new brilliant idea of Sevar's works out better for him than her one about providing Keltham with lots of girls one of whom gets oracled by Nethys - though, of course, that wasn't her decision, and the Church of Asmodeus is not confused about who bears the real responsibility.

His second thought is about a distinction he was warned about, that they've been instructed to prioritize Sevar as if she were Asmodeus's own fourth-circle cleric, not to answer as if she were one.  It rules out the obvious answer he'd give to a fourth-circle Asmodean cleric standing nearby and asking what Sevar was missing.  Still, Asmodeus's language to Sevar - if it wasn't just poorly translated by Hell - suggests that Sevar has the kind of soul that Asmodeus actually wants, if He can win it in this contest with Irori, or whatever is actually going on here.  (He is not to try to guess and be helpful in a way that pushes the edges of Hell's orders; the Grand High Priestess was quite clear on that.)

He will, then, answer as he might answer somebody who was considered to have enough potential that Asmodeus might choose them to be a cleric, perhaps, though not yet chosen; or as he might answer a promising heiress of Chelish nobility.

"People in Cheliax register as Lawful and as Evil, and worship no Lawful Evil god other than Asmodeus or his subordinates.  This suffices for much of Asmodeus's purpose, as it brings those souls to Hell's standard gate, which Asmodeus has already conquered, and so into His ownership for further refinement.  We do not ask most people to understand what Lawful Evil really is, let alone what would distinguish Asmodeus from Zon-Kuthon within Lawful Evil.  Most people do not, in fact, need to understand this.  They do not possess the nature that marks them as potentially one of Asmodeus's own, instead of just the masses who must be coerced to Lawfulness out of fear and who end up registering as Evil because that is what the rules make of conducting yourself in ways not completely absurd."

"You, Sevar, might have the potential to become one of Asmodeus's own, not just Lawful and Evil.  Or so our Lord's instructions to you suggest.  You are, I think, being invited to join the inner circle.  And I am not expecting you to already understand what that truly means, because it is not something we bother trying to teach most third-circle wizards.  So the question I am about to ask is not a test of loyalty, but a test for whether you belong in the beginner classroom or the advanced one.  What have you already grasped, if anything, of the difference between Lawful Evil and Asmodeanism?  What makes Cheliax an Asmodean country and not just a Lawful Evil one?"

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AAH - 

- which is completely unreasonable because this is about as gentle an introduction as she could possibly have hoped for. 

 

She has never considered the question before but she is a day of dath ilan better at thinking than anyone else in Cheliax and would like to show it, ideally. "The part of that which sounds easiest is the difference between Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon," she says. "Zon Kuthon - intrinsically values suffering more, I think? If everyone in the universe were, uh, constantly being creatively tortured, Zon Kuthon would be entirely pleased by that. And Hell ruled by Asmodeus isn't like that - there'd lots of torture, but there is - the opportunity to not be tortured, the opportunity to be such a high performer that you are satisfactory - the opportunity to be doing the torturing, the opportunity to be deciding who is tortured - Asmodeus wants.... some features of Hell other than the suffering - I mean, in addition to the suffering, I know the suffering's important - these are guesses, maybe Asmodeus values people having the experience of - their suffering being related to qualities they have - knowing you are suffering because of your own conduct and choices, not just at unlucky random - maybe Asmodeus values people striving to avoid further torture, or some of the things they do while they're trying to avoid further torture, or, uh, them becoming more like him in becoming more the kind of entity who'd run Hell the way he runs it - maybe he values people being rewarded when they've earned it, maybe he values - earning it feels like a natural category, here, if I had to guess I would guess that Asmodeus values people earning features of their situation through their actions or their fundamental nature... uh, the strongest counterargument I can think of to that is that it's too Lawful Neutral again? 'to each their just rewards' is not right, as a description of Asmodeus. But there are other ways for there to be a relationship between your actions and what happens to you."

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"Satisfactory for someone who was never taught.  Beginner's classroom, but a thinking beginner."

"The primary domains of Asmodeus are tyranny, slavery, compacts, and pride.  Tyranny is not just rulership.  Slavery is not just obedience.  Compacts are not just deals.  Pride is not just having a high opinion of yourself."

"For Zon Kuthon, the object of torture is torture.  For Asmodeus, the object of torture is not only the benefit Asmodeus gains when people obey.  The object of torture is that Cheliax be a tyranny, not just a farm from which Asmodeus extracts a maximum yield of wheat.  Tyranny, as Asmodeus sees it, requires tyrants, not just a single decider at the top, but deciders all through the system who enforce obedience with whip and pain.  He is a Lawful Evil god, the tyrants are there to enforce rules and not just to do as they please, they are subject to rules themselves."

"We are taught - we, Asmodeus's own clerics, not the common people - that Asmodeus holds the key of Rovagug's prison, fitting a lock that Abadar made so that Asmodeus alone could open it.  Why Asmodeus?  Because Asmodeus alone can be trusted by Pharasma that, even after He conquers every plane and every part of reality, Asmodeus will never seek to displace Pharasma Herself.  Pharasma is the one who made the rules that send people to the Hell that Asmodeus governs.  Because Pharasma exists, Asmodeus is just enforcing the rules that She made, when He tortures a soul in Hell, He is being Lawful Evil and not just Evil, He is being tyrannical and not just sadistic.  Asmodeus is the one god who cannot exist as Himself without a Pharasma above Him to set Him in place and define the system He enforces, and that was why He alone is entrusted to hold Rovagug's key.  He, too, is only following His orders, each time He receives a new soul into Hell's embrace."

"The language we are speaking is ill-suited to such distinctions, because mortals are ill-suited to understanding them, and you should not read too much into how we mortals flail for one mortal concept or another.  To Asmodeus, to a greater devil, the shape of the meaning is precise.  There are many souls in Cheliax who would rather hold the whip themselves, than be the one whipped.  That does not make them Asmodean, it makes them selfish.  There are many souls in Cheliax who would enjoy holding the whip, because they are sadists, because they delight in causing others pain and crushing them below.  That doesn't make them Asmodeus's rather than Zon-Kuthon's.  But some souls in Cheliax enjoy holding the whip more when they are doing it to enforce the rules, you might even say that they need there to be rules and need there to be some higher tyrant above them so that they are being more than just sadists.  If those souls have enough potential to be worth empowering, Asmodeus chooses them for His own, to be His cleric, and grants to them His domain of tyranny."

"To delight in tyranny is not mandatory to be one of Asmodeus's own.  The devil you met this day may have had no joy in tyranny, for all we know, he was not a devil who had other devils beneath him.  But when he was mortal he must have already delighted in the compacts that Asmodeus delights in, by which the wheels of Law turn to crush one party or another to the contract beneath them.  He was not just Lawful and Evil, but delighted in Law turned to the purposes of Evil.  And because of that, after his death and through his suffering he was elevated and raised to the status of a greater devil, and kept that part of himself which was pleasing to Asmodeus.  As he was one of us in his mortal life, so he is now part of the inner ring in Hell."

"Tyranny, not just rulership.  Slavery, not just obedience.  Compacts, not just deals.  Pride, not just self-value.  Maybe all of those will appeal to you, maybe only one, but you must have great potential for at least one - if I am not entirely mistaken about the meaning of Hell's translated will of Asmodeus, conveyed to you."

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It feels so - far, from something she could translate for Keltham, but all true things can be said in the same language, so there is a way, there is a version of this written in dath ilan's style of thought which she can understand and embody - "Should it be obvious to me, which one, just by thinking about it."

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"Perhaps not.  I doubt that Asmodeus would have bothered to instruct you to seek out those elements of your own soul, or for us to assist you, if it was a ten-minute job."

"Competent natural tyrants are the most useful members of the inner circle, and we try to give every intelligent Chelish citizen a chance to enforce some rules with a whip to let them discover that tendency if they have it.  If you rise high within this world, you will discover very rapidly that the number of competent Asmodean managers you can find to help run your operations is an extreme check on your ambitions.  It is plausibly the limiting factor for the entire Chelish state.  Slavemasters and lawyers are not nearly so much in demand.  Pride tends to be expensive in multiple ways, and not just financially, so it is largely the domain of nobles or the very wealthy, who by their own nature cannot be too numerous relative to the general population.  Outside of tyranny, then, you may lack firsthand experience with other elements of Asmodeus's domain as experienced by the insiders."

"Do you wish to hear my guess about your Asmodean potentials?  It seems to me that there is a tension between Asmodeus's instructions to me that we are to assist you if you seek instruction, and Asmodeus's instructions to you that you are to find that part of yourself.  My own resolution of the tension would be that I should answer if you ask, because I am to concern myself with Asmodeus's instructions to myself, which say that I am to assist you, and not with weighing Asmodeus's instructions to you."

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"I do want to hear your guess. I think I would benefit from knowing where to look even if I am meant to find it on my own."

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"Pride and slavery.  You asked to be prettier as the first element of your shopping list.  The part of Hell which your attention naturally focused upon was the slavery there, the precise structures of pain and obedience."

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"What is pride, if it's not just -" what had he said - "not just a high opinion of yourself." Does she have a high opinion of hers - yes, yes, she does.

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Pride is the aspect of Asmodeus that Ferrer Maillol understands the least well, himself.  Which is unfortunate for him, because the greater devils all seem to possess pride in abundance; and it's a good guess that having that much feeling about yourself and your place, for Hell's tortures to perfect into precisely Asmodean pride, is part of what helps you stay yourself through Hell.  The way in which hereditary nobles seem to end up as higher devils after their death, despite what Ferrer Maillol would privately term some severe deficits of other competence, would seem to bear this out; unless it's just the sort of unfairness in which the Tyrant so delights.

He answers, then, from textbook and catechism.  "It is, obviously, a god-concept, and not one which mortal concepts are very apt to describe.  It may help to remember that this is a Lawful Evil domain, and many things that mortals think of with the usual word 'pride' are neither Lawful nor Evil, to say nothing of Law-that-does-Evil or Evil-that-upholds-Law.  The Lawful aspect of Asmodean pride is that it is bound up with having a place within Asmodeus's tyranny and which that tyranny has assigned to you.  The Evil aspect of it is that it is yours and you defend it and you will crush others to defend it.  By doing this, you enforce the structures of the tyranny and keep others in their place below you, it is Evil turned to the purposes of Law.  One seeks to climb the ranks of the tyranny, but within the tyranny, and by this the strong rise and the tyranny itself is strengthened."

"Those with deep Asmodean senses of pride have a felt sense of the order of the universe itself being disrupted, when somebody fails to give them their due, or when people weaker than themselves seem to be raised above them.  They are not simply defending themselves from insult, or seizing an opportunity to take somebody else's position.  They are restoring the order of the tyranny itself, in face of the disorder that is a weak unworthy person occupying a position of power or esteem."

"Do you just want to be prettier, Carissa?  Or do you have a sense that there is an order within the universe that is offended if people weaker than you, less deserving than you, get to be pretty and you don't?"

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"Thinking that people ought to - look at you and see how much you matter, that you matter more than them? Is that - the right sort of thing -"

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"Yes.  Though do not omit the idea of grandeur."  Ferrer Maillol taps the robes he is wearing, of a fifth-circle cleric of Asmodeus; magical cloth of the highest quality, with gold and with rubies.  "These vestments do not simply inform others of my place.  They are grand, expensive, rare, enviable, difficult for others to obtain.  They embody what it means for me to have risen high in Cheliax; they do not simply inform others of the fact.  Do you just want people to know the truth that you matter more than them?  Or do you want to walk into a ballroom full of higher nobility, and watch the fearful ones slink away from you and the ambitious ones flock to court you and the ignorant wonder who you are to matter so much more than themselves?  Do you just want others to know you're important, or hammer the existence of Carissa Sevar into your lessers like striking them down with a mace?"

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Carissa really, really, really wants to know how Keltham would answer that question. "I want that," she says, instead, dragging her thoughts away from Keltham and to imagining it. "I want people to be jealous of me, and to aspire to be me, and to despair at how they're not good enough to be me."

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"Not, of itself, sufficient for our inner circle.  But I doubt, given Asmodeus's instructions, that He expected you to learn your place in Hell and join His most treasured possessions with only a moment's thought and a word of advice.  My duty to Asmodeus also bids me warn you, pride is the domain of Asmodeus where I hold the least expertise.  If a fourth-circle cleric had questions I could not answer there, while about Asmodeus's business, they might need to wait upon a visit from a higher-circle cleric to answer in my place."

That Ferrer is so quick to think of his duty to Asmodeus there may reflect his own lack of pride, though how that is a failure to enforce his own place within the tyranny or its laws is lost on him.  It doesn't seem exactly the thing that a devil in his position would do, though the devils wouldn't ignore their duty to Asmodeus either.  They would disclaim their own lack of expertise with more grandeur, somehow; and Ferrer Maillol is aware that in reality most of his grandeur comes from his vestments and his ability to kill people who annoy him.

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Does he...not want people to envy him? Or just have enough of the thing that's not sufficient as -

"Okay. I - think I can productively work on that one, alone, though I would be grateful for advice if you have it." she's going to have to be so proactive about seeking out their help, given the rule they can't just tell her when she obviously needs it. "And maybe on slavery? What are the signs of having potential at that one?"

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"You are obviously interested in it, and I doubt you are interested in it for purposes of stamping it out like a paladin of Iomedae.  You skipped right over the question of how we raise mortal slaves in Cheliax and went straight to the more interesting tortures in Hell, wondering exactly how they were designed to suit which purposes of Asmodeus."  Ferrer Maillol gives her, now, the sort of conspiratorial smile that he'd give to an up-and-coming new member of the Inner Ring (an entire aspect of Asmodean theology whose details Sevar has not yet inquired into, and which she probably isn't ready for).  "I haven't any trouble imagining you, a thousand years hence, as a Baron of Hell overseeing the refinement of thousands of fresh mortals - or maybe even a Duke of Hell set to raise the highest of future devils from the most promising candidates."

"Though you will be more immediately useful to our Lord if you can train valuable slaves for Him here - keeping in mind that we are all our Lord's slaves.  Don't only think of collared wretches dredging the streets, if training them for sale doesn't seem grand enough to suit you.  Do you find yourself inspired to teach a new generation of wizards, perhaps?  And if so - would you rather teach them in Lastwall, under whatever absurd restrictions hold there?  Or in Cheliax, where you are free to punish and reward as you please, where mortals are your raw material to be freely crafted so long as you deliver results?"

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"I want - I want to figure out what dath ilan but Asmodean is, and I want to prove that it makes better wizards, and better soldiers and better devils eventually."

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Ferrer Maillol chuckles in a way that is only 95% humorless, for infinity percent more humor than he uses on most occasions.  "Sevar, there are certainly a thousand subtle refinements of the notion of Asmodean slavery beyond that, but don't overlook that if you set out to produce better wizards, soldiers, and devils, by any useful means and without a hundred mad restrictions preventing you from doing it properly, paladins of Iomedae will call you a slaver and try to stop you.  If our Lord demanded that people comprehend the exact, full meaning of His domains before He would choose a cleric of the first circle, He would have no clerics in this world."

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"I'm not tempted by Good," she says, which is more candid than she's ever even contemplated being with a superior but if she needs correcting she needs correcting, she's not trying to avoid that, at this point. "Good is stupid and if you try to do anything ambitious it'll be Evil, I know that, I acknowledge myself to being susceptible to ending up Neutral accidentally but it's not - squeamishness, or thinking that it's important people have a nice time while they're learning things, it's - modeling Keltham too closely, probably. My job right now is half trying to understand Keltham and half not to be a heretic while I'm doing it. I am sure I'm pointed in the wrong direction somewhere but I'm not pointed in - thinking children should decide whether they go to school or spend all day lounging around eating sweets, and I know we're all children."

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"If it seems stupidly obvious to you that slavery is the way to go, Sevar, that is not unsuggestive of an aptitude for it.  Hell's relayed instructions seem to me to suggest that you are in danger of heresy primarily because you have not found within yourself the desires that would keep you out of Axis."

Ferrer Maillol taps his fingers on his thigh, so that Sevar knows he's thinking and doesn't try to interrupt him.  There were some interesting points in Sevar's file drawn from her mind being read.  He wouldn't ordinarily say this part, it has been sometimes known to confuse even first-circle clerics, but Sevar may need to know.  "There's a story not commonly told to Asmodean clerics before they reach second-circle, except in special cases, but you may possibly be one of those cases.  After I tell it to you, you are not to repeat it to anyone not at least a second-circle cleric of Asmodeus, including high nobility of Cheliax.  Security will know better than to repeat it if they read it from your thoughts, and it is already the case that nobody is allowed to read your mind unless they are at clearance levels far above the ones you used to have.  Clear?"

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" - yes."

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"There was once a well-hushed scandal, concerning a certain ordinary Baroness, who was found to have been keeping, as a bed-slave, a man who'd been chosen as a first-circle cleric of Asmodeus.  She kept him after his choosing.  Tell me, what do you suppose happened after that?"

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"- I assume if the answer were' she was punished because that's presumably illegal' then you wouldn't be telling me this as an important story. Was she - promoted? So the arrangement wasn't a problem?"

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"Illegal doesn't begin to cover it.  There was an immediate massive clampdown on the entire event as fast as word could be passed upward, as people saw the potential for conflict between Church and Queen over the details of how to handle it.  The Baroness in question, who was in my own personal opinion something of an absolute idiot, seemed to feel that she'd done nothing wrong, since the cleric himself had never said that Asmodeus didn't want her to go on keeping him."

"An ensuing investigation turned up the puzzling fact that this new cleric had no visible aptitude for tyrannizing others, nor for crafting slaves, nor for executing compacts, and he definitely had no visible pride.  This, of course, made our Lord's mysterious action all the more potentially important to understand, if it was not done for any of the usual reasons."

"The answer, in the end, was that the man had no aptitude for tyrannizing others - but that he felt on a truly deep level that it was right for him to be tyrannized.  He had no aptitude as a slavemaster - but felt that it was very right and proper for him to be a slave.  He had no aptitude for contracts - but felt that all was right with the world when his Baroness was forcing him into grossly unfair bargains in her bed-games.  He understood the order of society that underlies pride, and saw his own place was at the bottom of it.  This, we think, is why Asmodeus chose him, though Asmodeus made no revelations on that subject."

"It is not just a lie told to the masses, if you were ever wondering about that, that Asmodeus has been known to treasure some of His possessions as things beautiful to Him in themselves, and not just for the uses that we have to Him.  So far as we know, the man was not being very useful to Asmodeus, before or after he became His cleric.  He had simply earned Asmodeus's favor by having a rare nature pleasing to His sight."

"The bed-slave cleric was purchased for a high price, resold to a more trustworthy noble at a vastly higher price, and afterwards the Baroness in question seems to have been assassinated by no known party.  The entire matter stays swept firmly into the corners, because if it became known, idiots would derive the wrong lesson about what nobles are allowed to do to our Lord's clerics."

"I mention this in case any of your own desires lie in the opposite polarity from the vantage point that nobles usually take.  It also shows that Asmodeus's domains can be subtle things even in their largest directions.  You would not know all about them from hearing the four concepts listed out.  There should be desires in you that are pleasing to our Lord and will prevent you from falling into heresy.  You should not cast too narrow an eye when it comes to looking for those desires, I suggest.  Asmodeus would not have given such weighty instructions if the matter was going to be simple."

It is, in particular, obvious to him that Sevar may perhaps have the nature of a slave rather than a slaver, given some of the thoughts recorded in her file.  Ferrer Maillol is not certain he should spell this out directly.

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" - is it a problem, if I let Keltham hit me - I haven't, but should it come up -"

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"Oh, there are quite a number of clerics and loyal nobles like that, in the hidden behind-the-scenes of Cheliax.  Though that nature is not, by itself, sufficient for full admission."

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"I would expect so because there's not that much of a gender discrepancy in the hierarchy and there is, in liking - sorry, never mind. I'll keep that in mind? I - obviously everyone is supposed to be grateful to be the possession of Asmodeus and I don't know how to tell if one is more grateful than average."

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"If you have even once in your life sincerely thought that you wished to burn in the purifying flames of Hell and emerge perfected, I think you are a step ahead of the general peasantry," Ferrer Maillol says dryly.  "I am not looking forwards to it, in fact, though I would not say as much to anyone who didn't have a note in their file about having apparently sincerely thought what you did."

"At our level, in our inner fellowship, it is not demanded of us that we pretend that the fates Pharasma assigned us are the fates we would have chosen for ourselves.  We live inside an absolute and inescapable greater tyranny - all of us, from Cheliax to Lastwall, from slaves to the gods of Good.  Most people have no natural response to that except for endless whining and complaining, and living in denial until Lawful Evil inevitably conquers everything that isn't Lawful Evil.  Some of us are born with something that is native to the plane we live in, that can push along the tyranny rather than being swept away struggling.  That's why we get to wear pretty rubies on our robes, and burn in Hell for a shorter time and come out of it as higher devils."

"We're not just playing the game because we want a better score in it.  It's our game.  We'd play it even if Asmodeus wasn't there."

"It's that quality - not feeling grateful for Asmodeus having to force us into it - that makes us the favored of Asmodeus and recognized as His own."

Though that's all Inner Ring theology and part of his own favored concern of tyranny, which he should maybe not emphasize as much if Sevar hasn't a visible aptitude for it.

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She indeed is slightly confused by that. " - may I take notes?"

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"I'll get you a secure notebook.  Bide."  He opens the door of his office, and takes a few rapid strides until he finds someone who can be ordered to get an unbound secure notebook from the military inventory.

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Carissa is trying to commit all that to memory so she can think about it in more detail later. Most people don't want to burn in the purifying flames of Hell - what does that mean? They would prefer it if they didn't in fact need much purifying? Sure, Carissa would prefer that too, that'd be awfully convenient, though she'd trade more purifying for coming out better on the other end - would most people not take that trade? Are most clerics of Asmodeus not able to notice that it is good to suffer if you come out of the suffering improved? But it's very obvious!! She thinks she could even phrase it so Keltham agreed? We are all slaves of this world the way Pharasma made it - seems true -  presumably not heretical, to think of Pharasma as having made it - but also we would make it ourselves - but would we? Maybe we would make dath ilan, instead? 

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Ferrer Maillol waits on the notebook - it takes longer than it would have before, with the Forbiddance up.  Apparently some fool failed to immediately issue Sevar with a secure notebook after she was made privy to secrets.  After this, he should probably check in on the military side and see what kind of mess they've made of Sevar's status inside the system.

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We live inside an absolute and unescapable greater tyranny. Seems true. Some of us can be more than - grist for it. Seems true. Most people who are devout servants of Asmodeus are not grateful to belong to Asmodeus but they are  -

- but they are like Asmodeus. That's a frame that fits. Asmodeus wants people who are like him, and people who'd build Hell, rather than dath ilan, are more like Asmodeus. And Carissa is going to have to - well, either she's going to have to shape up at that or she's going to have to demonstrate that a Lawful Evil dath ilan is just better.

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Ferrer Maillol returns and hands Carissa her new secure notebook, along with a pamphlet on the regulations for secure notebooks, which he forgot to ask for and which some abnormally competent officer had delivered to him anyways.  "Do you require further theological instruction?  Have you resolved whatever issue with Keltham first brought you here?  You have not asked much explicitly about that, whatever it was - a matter lying entirely within your own discretion, but I am checking that it is your discretion."

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"No, I do want help on that too. Keltham noticed that no one in Cheliax indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed, and inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed, and that bothered him on some kind of principle that - so I think it did not in fact occur to him that one could simply not really care if people are secretly distressed, he instead concluded that we've got some extremely clever way to notice secret distress despite everyone hiding it, and was worried that not knowing this himself he'd fail to notice I was distressed, if I was, and I swear I didn't give him any reason to think I would be, he's just like this. And the problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, I'm genuinely worried that if I'd just said 'oh, normally people are really good at reading lip twitches, but I'll just tell you', then something else would've gone horribly wrong because he made a bunch of inferences from our presumed use of lip twitches - he was really confused about the fact people don't look distressed at each other on purpose, he felt like it was broken, a norm that shouldn't be able to persist in existing. And I have no idea what I'm allowed to tell him about anything and I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I haven't gotten any guidance on which things, specifically, I should lie about, besides Hell and I'm separately worried that if I just sleep with him, which I'd really really like to, and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing, then he'll be - he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that. 

 

That's the thing I was stuck on, what to tell him that - only relies on facts about human nature that are true in other countries too, and not on anything about Cheliax."

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Ferrer Maillol may need to go get his own notebook for this one.  He taps his fingers, again, to show that he's thinking.

"I'm afraid," Ferrer Maillol says, not bothering to keep the dryness out of his voice, "that after hearing your analysis of Keltham, I have some absolutely terrible news for you about my opinion of your competence to handle this issue."

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"I know I've in over my head. If you think you have someone who can impersonate me and do better, I'll obviously assist them however I can. Or get me a headband, which is what I asked for in the first place."

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"Oh, it's much worse than that, Sevar.  My opinion is that, even after reading the transcripts of everything Keltham said in his lessons, I have no fucking idea what you're talking about.  If you understand what the fuck you just said to me, then you are, in fact, the most qualified person inside this villa to make the call as to what to tell Keltham and when.  Unless there's some better analysis from the security officers who've been monitoring him, but maybe not paying quite as much attention to learning from the man.  Which means that we are going to go off right now and have that conversation with the security officers, the one where you get authorized to make that call.  If you fuck up it'll be your head on the chopping block, followed immediately after by mine for choosing you.  And since I do value my head, I'll get you your fucking intelligence headband."

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"Oh."

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"Great!"

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If there's an Asmodean subdomain for obsession with intelligence headband obtainment verging on suicidal lemminghood, Sevar is truly His prophet already.  Ferrer Maillol keeps this observation to himself.

He stands up.  "Follow me, Sevar, and we'll have that conversation.  Asmodeus help us all."

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All Carissa's slaves are going to get intelligence headbands. It will make them more useful. 

 

She follows.

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Security for an operation like this is typically within an extradimensional space, so they can't be affected by spells targetting the installation; the Forbiddance makes that impossible, so they're doing their best with having draped a parlor in lead, which blocks most spells, and having a miserable captive air elemental providing ventilation. There's one bed, since even though there's ten of them they only need two hour sleep shifts. 

 

Rodez Balaguerre is on duty handling emergency requests right now. He looks tired.

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Ferrer Maillol doesn't even slightly care.  "Call in whichever wizard or wizards would be most likely able to handle a question about Keltham's psychology and our strategy for what to reveal to him when."

The fact that Maillol doesn't already know who that is, that there isn't someone already known to be in charge of decisions like that, with individual judgments instead being rendered by individual Security officers, is a very bad sign now that Maillol thinks on it explicitly.  That needs to end now, one way or another.

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That's Elias Abarco, who shows up a couple of minutes later. He looks tired too. 

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Ferrer Maillol doesn't care about that either, since Elias Abarco hasn't yet been added to the worryingly rapidly expanding list of people that he's no longer allowed to set on fire.  "Abarco.  There's a judgment call about what to reveal to Keltham and which lies to tell him.  Sevar.  Ask Abarco what you asked me."

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Deep breath. 

She's going to try to explain it better this time in case maybe Maillol would understand it if she explained better. 

"Keltham noticed that no one indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed when they don't understand what's going on. That is not what happens in dath ilan. He inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed if they did not like what was being done to them. He - automatically assumed that we wouldn't want that, and concluded instead that we must have some more complicated way of communicating that information. I was uncertain whether to make one up or to try to explain to him that normally people just don't worry very much if their sex partners are invisibly distressed. The problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, and I don't think I could accurately track all the inferences he'd make from something I made up. 

I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I need guidance on which things it's most important to keep secret even at some cost in our overall plausibility and coherence as he experiences it. And I need to solve this right away because I think if I just sleep with him and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that."

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"The problem," Abarco says to Maillol, "is that Keltham is insane and predicting how he'll take anything is, as she points out, next to impossible. The library's not filtered for pretending rape doesn't exist -"

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"I've told him that rape exists! He knows that! He just thinks that since I have assented to be there in the first place we're executing a procedure where I should also be having a nice time the whole time and it'd be a problem if he failed to notice a Chelish signal that I wasn't!"

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" ...she's describing him mostly accurately as far as I can tell," Abarco says.

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Maillol raises his eyebrows, not approvingly.  Hell doesn't refer to someone as a teacher if they're just insane.  "Do you have an analysis for me, Abarco?  Do you have a strategy for handling this?"

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"I think there's no point in trying to conceal anything on this plane except the internal workings of the Church and government from Keltham; he'll expect those to be concealed, dath ilan keeps its secrets. I think we don't have the resources to convince him that Cheliax is the kind of place in which he won't encounter adversarial conduct, we just don't know how to pretend at that and it's already too late, so we mostly just want him thinking that this place needs lots of fixing up, which he currently believes. Sevar can explain how sex works to him though she should mind her tendency towards female-victimization-flavored heresies."

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Hey. - no, no, he's right, she should mind that.

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Elias Abarco has brought up additional points that Sevar didn't bring up, which complicates this already-painful decision.  And Abarco didn't bring up the critical point about only telling Keltham the sad little facts that are true in other countries, not just in Cheliax, which means he wouldn't have done well leaving the whole decision to Abarco.

Ferrer Maillol would, if he were alone, massage his forehead.

The Asmodean style of tyranny is not about spreading around responsibility so nobody seems to be at fault for making bad decisions.  Those are weak tyrannies.  There must be a single decision-maker on point, as is both efficient and Asmodean.  That designated person must be Abarco, Sevar, or Maillol himself, and any of those three people screwing up gets Maillol equally blamed for it, which leaves the pure and simple question of which of the three is least likely to fuck up.  Maillol is pretty sure that's not himself, which brings it down to two.

In the end, what decides him is simply that Abarco called Keltham 'insane'.  It's not a judgment conducive to making the kind of detailed predictions necessary for the actual moment-to-moment decisions.

"Asmodeus help you and me, Sevar, I'm making it your call.  Your goal directives are as follows: prioritize the amount of time we get before this falls down and Keltham breaks with us.  Secondary priority, if possible, try to make Keltham think that he should take you or some other loyal woman with him if he leaves us.  Do not bother worrying about Keltham's opinion of Cheliax after the whole thing blows up.  He won't be happy, ship sailed.  Just make sure we get as much as we can from him before then."

"Abarco.  Advise Sevar well on this and all related matters, and report to me if you think she's fucking it up.  If this project fails early and it looks like it was even slightly your fault for sabotaging her, I will make damned sure you die before I do."

"Balaguerre.  Sevar gets transcripts of Keltham's words, and his thoughts on remaining occasions where we make the call to risk reading his thoughts.  Sevar gets consulted on Keltham analysis and policy if there's time.  Sevar takes initiative on answering him if she's inside the room.  Sevar gets reports on any other decisions that get made without her about what to tell him and why."

"And give Sevar her fucking intelligence headband if we have a spare on hand.  If we don't, give her a Fox's Cunning so she has something to work with for a few minutes while trying to make the call on Keltham.  Then message at the next regular report that I want an intelligence headband delivered soonest, and if it's not here inside twenty-four hours then I will go looking for it and nobody wants to be there when I come looking."  Maillol wishes he could just grab an intelligence headband from any of these fucking wizards who'll make less important use of it, but that is escalating way beyond just setting somebody on fire for a few hours, or at least wizards act that way.

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This is an important responsibility and she should not look all smug about it. - or maybe she should, because that's exercising the vice of pride, which she is naturally inclined towards? She should look mildly smug about it. 

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There is not a spare headband on site. There has been something of a run on Cheliax's spare headband supply what with the dozen emergencies so far today. It shouldn't be a problem to get one in six hours. A transcript of Keltham's words so far is available for her to review now.

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"Get her a Ring of Sustenance as well," Maillol orders.  It'll take a week before they can get any extra hours of work out of Sevar that way, and Asmodeus knows if this project will still exist or if the combined weight of divine interventions on it will have collapsed Golarion; but if the project does still exist, he expects Sevar will have quite the lovely backlog of tasks by then.  "Stores if we have one, otherwise add it to the requisition."

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"We have those." He hands one over.

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"Keltham also wants a headband, and ones for his other girls, and ones with Owl's Wisdom as well. I don't think I'll be able to keep up with him if he's got a headband as good as mine, he's not smarter but he's got - more of a force-multiplier." They could give her intrinsic intelligence boosts with Wish and then the headband on top of that but she is pretty sure at some point if she keeps pushing for intelligence enhancement she's going to reach the edge of their deeply bizarre commitment to not lighting her on fire. "I think I could tell him that they've been commissioned and will arrive in a week or two and that we can have one to pass around in the meantime, if we can in fact have one to pass around in the meantime."

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Maillol isn't even slightly fooled by her hidden agenda, but it's not a hidden agenda which is detrimental to him so it's not like he disapproves.  "Sevar, I don't care what Keltham wants, I care how much we get out of him.  You don't just tell me what he asked for, any more, you tell me what happens if I say yes.  What's your estimated effect on him if we supply him with one lesser intelligence headband and one lesser Wisdom headband to pass around?  And if you think that's a good idea or bad idea for other reasons, don't make me ask you for your opinion.  You're in the command structure now.  Grow up.  Grow up very quickly."

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"I think supplying him with a headband probably means he sees through us faster but not supplying him with a headband looks increasingly suspicious or incompetent. I expect the lectures will be higher quality if he has enhancement, and more useful to the students if they do, until it falls apart which will probably be sooner. Though his god can give him Wisdom himself so we can't make plans that rely on his not having it, and the costs of him having more of it are probably small, a fourth-circle cleric could have an hour a day anyway if his god decides to indicate he ought to spend the day reflecting by giving him nothing but - actually, what do we know about what - it's Abadar, right - wants here -"

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"We know almost nothing specifically.  As a matter of general theology, Abadar probably approves of the project even more than Asmodeus does, and wants Keltham's knowledge to spread beyond Cheliax eventually but doesn't feel strongly about whether Cheliax pulls ahead of Osirion for a while.  His not giving Keltham any particular visions seems suggestive of a bargain with our Lord, possibly, and if so Abadar won't try to wriggle around inside whatever bargain He's struck with Asmodeus until Asmodeus wriggles first, which our own Lord will probably do eventually.  Some of the spells we already know Keltham got from his open prayer are suggestive of Abadar not approving of the deception we're running on him, which is also theologically to be expected."

"A fact you may not know, Sevar - earlier thought-reading on Keltham showed him to be suspicious of externally supplied mind-affecting spells.  It will be in your transcripts.  Maybe we can play to that, find Keltham a book on the subject which mentions cursed forms of the item, or which claims that there's a higher-tier version of Fox's Cunning that you can use to make the recipient think they're smarter about particular subjects while actually not doing that.  We've got a Wondrous Items enchanter working on a rush project to create tools so we can do edits to books more easily, and meanwhile we can get a forger-printer to stamp out individual alternate pages to splice in.  Our wonderful new pet Nethys-worshipper does give us a way to send Keltham exactly the books we want him to have, and it explains why we're not just shipping him a dozen different ones."

"If that ploy fails, or if you think it's a bad idea to try, and Keltham does start wanting to wear his own headband - getting you a higher-tier intelligence headband is not something I can do in a day, Sevar.  But your request and the reason for it has been noted."

"By tomorrow you'll also need to devise an explanation to Keltham for why you got your own private headband weeks ahead of the other women, if you want to wear it around him.  If it's not a good enough explanation, you'll need to take it off around him.  Do not give me any wizard shit about that."  Maillol has very little sympathy for why wizards are under the impression that matters of intelligence headbands are an exception to the usual rules about shutting up and obeying orders, and Sevar is not high-circle enough for him to put up with it from her.

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"I have eight years on them and have gotten generous hazard pay that whole time for my service to Cheliax at the Worldwound. My salary from just the first two days was enough for the rest of the way to a headband, which I've been saving up for anyway; they're not going to be able to afford it for a while, because this is their first job ever and they're being very generously paid but not a headband every two days generously paid."

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"Keeping in mind that a wrong answer to this question will get both of us killed, does Keltham believe that?"

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Carissa is unsure why he keeps reminding her of that!! She has never forgotten it even for half a second!! "If he has an objection it'll be a Kelthamish - it'll be that they ought to be really good candidates for a loan if they've got a guaranteed high salary for the next month, or something like that. But the loan process is probably complicated when the job is completely secret and also you can't honestly say you expect to have it in a month and also you can't go to the bank to do it, and also he expects us to be incompetent at things, if I say that loans on future income aren't really a thing he will just make his general face about Golarion. Look, I am not willing to die so I can wear an intelligence headband more, if I thought it would help for me to take it off around him I'd take it off around him, but it's around him that I keep being not quick enough and smart enough to manage things, I can't reason it out cleverly in advance and then just execute while slightly stupider because I don't get him well enough  to predict his exact reactions yet. If when I put the headband on I actually suddenly can predict him in advance then I'll take it off around him but Abarco can't predict him in advance and he's got a plus 4 -"

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He casts an orison that lashes her in the face, hard enough to do an exactly trivial amount of damage to a third-circle wizard.  Hell wouldn't have instructed them to punish Sevar no less than she earned, if she was never going to earn any punishments.  "Keep me informed of your judgments.  Don't argue them at me.  You're very obviously driven to get an intelligence headband and wear it, Sevar.  There's justifications for that, good enough to get me to go along with it.  It's also a very standard form of wizard bullshit, and the way that you will argue with your superiors about this one topic makes it clear that you are a very standard wizard in this regard."

"We're done here.  Sevar, with me, Balaguerre, make sure someone's around who can cast Fox's Cunning on her when she requests it."

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If it's only wizards that think it's important to be smarter then maybe that's what's wrong with the church of Asmodeus in Golarion. Keepers would want to be smarter, she bets - they'd be careful about it but they'd want it -

 

She keeps this to herself. 

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Maillol is heading back to his office.  Once they're out of range of the security office - if not of security - he speaks again.  "Word of warning, Sevar.  Keltham is right that our usual schools teach people what to think, not how to think, and I should hardly need to say that the reason is that if they did their own thinking they'd fuck it up.  Unless your vision succeeds far beyond what any reasonable person would expect, a Chelish academy based on Keltham-style teaching is going to have two kinds of people in it:  Priests of Asmodeus, and citizens valuable enough that they qualify for our very limited soul-sale slots.  If I'd realized that faster we could've brought in older women who'd already sold their souls, and not used up a hell of a lot of our project's slack on having a bunch of baby wizards do it, but what's done is done."

"I may be reading too much into Hell's instructions - we get told not to put too much weight on exact wordings that passed through three increasingly less intelligent devils on their way from Asmodeus to us - but it seems to me that Asmodeus gave you four instructions in order, and they may have been an order of priority.  Serve Him well in this world, don't fall to heresy, figure out the differences between yourself and an axiomite, and become the kind of soul Asmodeus wishes mortals were and join His most treasured possessions.  If all we learn from Keltham is tricks for smelting vast quantities of high-quality metal, it will not, in fact, make this project a failure in the eyes of Church and Queen, even if that falls short of your own ambitions for it."

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" - understood." But what if you could teach them a better what to think, one that held together against more of their own impulses - but he's right, that no one else can reasonably bet on that just off Carissa wanting it and Asmodeus thinking Carissa worth steering. 

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"You're not accustomed to being in the inner circle where you are expected to do your own thinking and put your life on the line for getting it right.  Usually people get brought into it less abruptly than you, and it's possible I'm going to get called up on having trusted you more than you earned, contrary to Hell's instructions.  My belief is that you earned it by understanding Keltham better than Abarco does, but you also haven't held that much responsibility before and my decision to dump it on you is going to look lethally questionable if you fuck it up.  I cannot guarantee that I wasn't influenced by knowing, or thinking I knew, that you were a competent enough person to come to the momentary attention of a god.  Asmodeus help us all if He was trying to tell us exactly not to do what I just did, by trusting you more than you'd earned.  But we also got told to trust you no less than you'd earned, so."

"That's all to frame an important point, Sevar, which is that the theological discussions that Asmodean priests hold among themselves are different from the way you learned theology out in the cold.  We do not sound like fucking Keltham, because we are not fucking outsiders.  But if a new priest has an affinity for slavery, and a fifth-circle priest specializes in tyranny, the fifth-circle priest doesn't tell her to shut up and write down the standard answers he gives her about slavery."

"From the standpoint of tyranny, feeling gratitude for Asmodeus owning us is how we tell the common people to feel about it, because it's a simple fucking answer that won't get them in trouble.  Occasionally, though, Asmodeus goes and makes a bed-slave His cleric, which shows that His true priorities do not always match those that we harried and overworked mortals try to set.  We almost always decide to wait on perfecting souls into the exact shape Asmodeus prefers until they get safely to Hell.  Asmodeus cares in ways we don't even try to care, because it's not productive when we try to do it.  If that bed-slave feeling some exact form of gratitude for being a slave was a vital part of what our Lord wishes mortals were like, you may need to wait for a priest who understands slavery more deeply than I do, to tell you that, because instructing me in those details wasn't the Church's own priority for a Worldwound administrator."

"You have tyranny questions?  I can answer those in endless detail, and you'd be stupid to argue until you understand Asmodeanism a lot better.  But I will be checking some of the answers I gave you about slavery and pride, the next time I run into a superior of mine who has a moment.  That's as much priority as I'd give to a fourth-circle priest asking me those questions, if the fourth-circle priest didn't tell me they were more urgent."

"Final warning.  Don't get lost in all these fascinating questions you're supposed to think about for the first time.  Asmodeus instructed you to serve Him well in this world first."

"Are we done, Sevar?  I'll still be here if you have more questions another day, and you said Keltham was waiting on you."  Maillol thinks and hopes this is exactly as much slack for interrupting him as he'd cut a fourth-circle cleric on urgent project business who was interrupting him for the first time.

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She does not exactly feel readier to answer Keltham. "We're done."

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"Go with Hell's unusually personal blessing, Sevar."  He taps her with the Guidance orison for the little bit that's worth.

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"Was someone going to get me a Fox's Cunning -"

 

And then someone does, by jabbing her in the shoulder. After this she's going to need to work on having a better working relationship with Abarco. 

 

Fox's Cunning feels good, it feels right, and she's been told to correct for that, she's been told it's a flaw common to wizards, and she's not willing to trade her life for more of it so she's going to do what she was told and not reach for it more than she already has. 

She closes her eyes and tries to drive out everything except the questions she has to answer tonight. 

First, serve Asmodeus in this world. Get close to Keltham, close enough that when he gets sick of Cheliax he takes you with him. Hold things together for long enough to learn new things about metalworking, new things about everything else that makes dath ilan prosperous, but keep in mind that the thinking is not the priority for the Chelish government or the Church. They might be making a mistake, and Carissa might be poised to correct them, but they probably aren't making a mistake, and they won't believe her now.

- she has the option of telling Keltham that. Not tonight, but it's a thought to tuck away for later, it's not damning, that the Chelish government trusts the metalworking to lead somewhere useful more than the habits of mind. 

- Keltham's sideways habits of inference are not, in fact, sideways, they're going to be a perfectly natural outgrowth of the things he's taught them in class, right now 'you don't know what he'll infer from a given bit of information' might be the best unenhanced Carissa can do but she needs that to stop being true as quickly as possible, replaced with the exact habits of inference herself, and it might not even be the best unenhanced Carissa can do; it's certainly not the best she can do now. In fact her mind is now rather spamming possibilities. Keltham thinks in - some theory of human psychology that extends from education to sex, it has gears even if she doesn't know them.  He doesn't think sideways, he thinks in theories that make things be connected.  He arrived in Golarion and noticed that it wasn't all women and went up to the theory about sex balances and where they came from and down again to know that mortals weren't made by gods.  He noticed that people were wearing fixed cheerful expressions in class and went up to some theory about people and down again to how those kinds of people might be having sex.  Carissa deeply wants to know this theory.  Carissa manages to wrench her attention away from how much she wants to know this theory.  Keltham wouldn't be stuck thinking about that if he didn't want to be, she's seen inside his mind.

Keltham thinks in equilibriums; he notices when a strategy seems possible to deviate profitably from without being punished. Keltham is from a societal context where competence at deception is not itself a valuable thing to signal, because deception is basically frowned upon in every context. Last one feels most immediately fruitful, though it's easier than it was a moment ago to hold the other ones apart and not subtly downgrade them in her mind because she's started following the third. Keltham didn't parse them as 'signaling competence at deception' because you signal things you want people to know about and even if you want to be deceptive you wouldn't want people to know you want to be deceptive. Whereas in Cheliax - wait, check, is this only true in Cheliax, because if not she'd better not say it -

- she should have a specific other country in mind when she tells Keltham how Cheliax works. Now that she thinks of it it seems very obvious. Keltham will be incredulous and disbelieving even about things she knows to be functional equilibriums, but that doesn't mean that every lie she can think of telling is equally credible as a functioning equilibrium. Societies are complicated and she can't invent 'Cheliax but LN', but she can tell Keltham how some place he wouldn't flee from works. Taldor is the obvious one. She doesn't know all that much about Taldor but she's met people from there, and it's culturally descended from Cheliax unlike Osirion or some place where she can't represent how the people there would explain themselves. The main thing everyone knows about Taldor is that it has a weak crown and too many dukes and counts who think too highly of themselves, and it's been wracked with civil war periodically for a long time, not falling only because the crown is old, and rich, and can hold Oppara where their power is invested no matter the madness that goes on beyond its walls. Quick check: has she claimed anything about Cheliax actively contradicted by that. She doesn't think so. Has anyone else - 

- she can delegate that, she has authority here -

"I need someone to check whether anyone has said anything to Keltham that would be inconsistent with Cheliax being approximately Taldor in political organization and culture until the Church backed the right side in the most recent civil war and Hell sent some people to try to shape the crown up."

And now she's followed that train of thought far enough and needs to pull back and contemplate an entirely different one - she can see, from here, how she's been neglecting that before, going with her intuition until it is actually surprised or contradicted somewhere -

- Keltham has a general theory of human nature that is surprised by Golarion, not just by Cheliax, so he's missing something, and it'd be useful to figure out what, both because she might want to tell him and because it'll help with verisimilitude. He's missing - and her mind is spamming possibilities again, not that she's confident in any of them - that people signal negative qualities. That people prefer for other people to lose; that people have values actively incompatible with other people getting what they want, that people are bad enough at thinking that trying to make them think about something is dangerous - many of these are too specifically Chelish -

This would be much simpler if she could make Keltham tell her all the theories he uses to understand people.  Maybe she can sell her superior - or just the one superior, now - on the theory that if they ask Keltham to explain those parts, Keltham will be easier to fool.

- set that aside too, flagged as maybe possibly coming from the part of her that is tempted to trade off lifespan against intelligence headbands.

Keltham has learned more from them than they've learned from him.  He is surprised by Golarion, he is missing something, he underadjusts or overadjusts or adjusts along completely wrong dimensions but he's notably much less wrong than he was a day ago, already. They will not be able to hide things in the vast fog of his confusion for very long, because he is narrowing it. 

They should tell him less, if they possibly can.  They should say it's not the priority that gets their project more support and headbands delivered earlier.  They should say they don't know.  They should find legitimately very important questions they can ask Keltham instead of spending lots of time explaining things to him.  She should find something simple to say to him about sex, that's true everywhere in Golarion, and only later, if ever, ask him to explain theories.


It's not a pleasant thought, not the answer that she wanted inside at all, and Carissa might not have managed to think it before she saw inside Keltham's head.

Fox's Cunning wears off and leaves her - tired. And in a bad mood. And now she - still doesn't feel any closer to figuring out what to say to Keltham - but she remembers the direction she'd found when she was smarter, and she knows perfectly well how being smarter works, that it's a glimpse of a person you want to grow up to be, even if you have to be dragged kicking and screaming, because it's not always pleasant for the tiny stupid things that humans are to grow into bigger smarter things...

"Is he still on the roof."

        "Yes," Elias says irritably.

She hurries.

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It got a little cold and lonely up on the roof without Carissa to lean against.

Keltham solved this problem by going down, wandering around randomly for a bit, not seeing any security anywhere he looked, calling out for "Security?" in a not especially loud voice, seeing somebody step around a corner a third of a minute later, and, you know, you would think that if this whole place had elaborate tunnels in the walls for security to hide, and that was being kept secret and not told to him, they would be hiding this fact by having some visible security officers but fine.  Anyways, Keltham then asked if there was such a thing as magic to keep him warm, since the roof had no obvious switchable infrared-lamp-heaters, and the problem got solved.

After that, the roof was about as good a place to think as his bedroom, with an increased probability of later Carissa materialization.

Keltham is currently wondering if maybe Golarion just sort of... collectively lacks the form of Law-aspiring thought where, if you have a problem, you try to think of a way you could rearrange reality such that you wouldn't have the problem anymore.

It would explain everything he's seen, in one sense.  But explains too many things he hasn't seen, in another.  Somebody invented stairs as a solution to the problem of climbing to the roof, thereby falsifying the general form of the theory.  Maybe that was before they invented wizard-based contraception and bred intelligence out of themselves, though?  Or maybe devils told them how to make stairs.

(He's aware it's not a very plausible theory.  But sometimes when you don't get something, it can be productive to play with impossible theories, or even frustrated yelling at reality, in case that knocks something loose; so long as you don't just keep on doing that.)

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"Hey you. - oh, it's warm up here."

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Oh, good.  "It was getting too cold for me all by myself without you, so I reacted to this unsatisfactory state of reality by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alterative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, which led to me asking a security officer if there was any magic for staying warm."

(By a similar line of reasoning, Keltham was considering sex with Ione if Carissa never returned and he felt sufficiently disappointed about that.)

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What is that supposed to mean???


"Well, I reacted to the unsatisfactory state of reality where I had no idea how to communicate to you about sex by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alternative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, and getting advice from someone smarter, and the conversation ended up mostly being about other things but I do have an explanation about the sex thing. Does dath ilan have social deception games?"

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"We sure do have games with social deception, and parts of society where it's understood to be fun if we let things play out in a - competitive, deceptive way - but we try to keep it out of science and commerce and management and politics, or any other context where getting it right matters more than getting it fun.  Both kinds of sexual negotiation exist, but in dath ilan it'd always be very clear which kind of sexual negotiation you were in at any given time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. In Golarion people mostly do the games-with-social-deception kind of sex, and I wasn't actually planning to because my incentives are very strongly tilted against accidentally confusing or alarming or upsetting you, but we don't strictly delineate them and I wasn't assuming you weren't planning to, and I was slightly worried the entire concept is one Good people don't invent. I am glad that they do, they'd be missing out on a lot of fun."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not, in fact, understand the thought process whereby this was a sufficiently worrying thought that you needed to consult your best local equivalent of a Keeper, but it's okay that I don't understand that - I don't expect to understand everything for a fair while - and you don't need to explain it in any more detail, if you'd rather do other things with our time.  I express clear acceptance and affordance for you to suddenly need to go check with Keepers while talking to the alien, whether it was yourself you were trying to protect by doing that, or me."

"I don't know whether my own statement there makes any psychological sense to you, as something that a person would naturally say in my position, but it's a sincere speech-act for whatever that's worth."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I understood around the edges of it. If I'd properly had that thought in so many words I would've just said it but instead I just noticed the confusion and all of the attempts I generated to communicate it started a hundred steps back in very confusing territory, which I am going to blame on all this talking to an alien miscalibrating me about how impossible to expect communication to be. And now I think I do want to do other things with our time, if you want to."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds good to me.  Retrieve an item from the conversational recursion layers all the way back to dath ilani sex technology questions, or pick up somewhere else?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sex technology! Is there sex technology for turning into a dragon so you can have sex as a dragon."

Permalink Mark Unread

He leans back against her, like when they were on this part of the conversational stack before, restoring the state of the earlier function call.

"Probably not, and I'm considering how close somebody has gotten, but first I need to know what a 'dragon' might be."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They are reptilian, magic - what we call sorcerers, they don't have to shape the magic deliberately, they can do it from intuition - and don't die of old age, they just keep growing larger. Ancient ones are a thousand feet long, and wouldn't be able to fly at all if they weren't very very magic by that point. ....usually people Polymorphing into dragons to have sex go for smaller ones, because Polymorphing things much larger and more magical than your native form requires very powerful spells. They breathe fire, or spit acid, or various other nasty things depending on planar affinities."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, we can't actually do that.  Closest anybody would've come materially would be building a giant mechanical thing that could have sex with you or that you could control to fuck somebody.  And though it's sort of a cheating answer, well, cheating is technique, so:  I expect that the closest people have come to that experience is that there's probably some set of drugs you can get in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods which will let you, I don't know, put on a costume or stare at a moving picture, and experience that you are a dragon with some amount of hallucinatory sensory remapping.  But if I have to resort to saying that's how we'd do it, then you win in terms of the technology question."

Permalink Mark Unread

"To be fair I can't personally do that either! As a mere third circle wizard I can turn into any woman you've ever met or heard of but only for six minutes and they have to be humanoid."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, I hopefully won't have to suddenly go meta too often, but for purposes of rapidly learning how romance works around here, that was totally a probe to find out what kind of women I find physically attractive, right?  Where the fact that you can and will call any bluffs by transforming into that person forces me to be honest.  And on my side, I can choose between flattering you by listing women who look more like you, or teasing you by listing, say, Lrilatha?  Because that would - not that this is a problem or anything - that would definitely be Complicated Romance rather than Straightforward Romance in dath ilan."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- huh. That's - Straightforward Romance around here, Complicated Romance involves hiring specialized seduction devils to test peoples' monogamy commitments who've made them or something. Anyway I don't have much riding on being your type because every girl you're going to find here's got light brown skin and dark brown eyes and hair. ...saying Lrilatha would be a Complicated Romance response because the possibility is real that she'd hear about it, I think maybe my mental delineation is whether we have introduced non-romance stakes..." She's kind of bad at...not telling Keltham things....this is a bad thing to be bad at!!!

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh ho, are there other varieties of girl to be found elsewhere in Golarion?  Perhaps I should ask for pictures before I decide."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - are there not, in dath ilan? Peoples native to different countries look different, they have dark skin near the equator and people far up north are very pale with very light hair and people in Tian Xia look - Tian, I don't know how to describe it exactly but it's very distinctive, their face shapes are different and their hair is finer and thinner and black even though they are pale."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We - don't have that, no, because anyone can go anywhere with a quarter day's cost of labor.  Even if we started out with less travel, way back when - after a few generations of everybody mating with everybody all over the planet, I guess all the heritages just blended together.  People probably cared at all about preserving variety of appearance, back when that variety was dying out, it's just, there's so many other things to select on, when you try to decide who you're going to have kids with... and it's so much not a place where it'd be Governance's place to solve the collective problem by telling people they needed to start doing assortative mating on appearance instead.  Forbidden costs, not much of a reward.  Even in dath ilan we can't get all the public goods at once."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - huh. Well, that makes two things Golarion has going for it on the sex front, a reasonable match of sadism and masochism and distinctive races. I have heard Chelish men assert that northern girls are the prettiest but they were at the Worldwound and might've been just trying to win points with the locals."

Permalink Mark Unread

- Couldn't Carissa just observe whether they said the same thing around only other Chelish people?
- Not being able to clearly tell on the meta-level whether or not it is currently a time for social deception games to be going on seems super inconvenient and like somebody could get hurt!!

Keltham sets it aside; he does not need to solve all puzzles simultaneously, more evidence will arrive in time, and if jumping at every confusion prevents him from ever getting laid then this would constitute a symptom of meta-level dysfunction.  Like, it's one thing to do that when confusions happen once an hour, but another to do it when they happen once per minute.

Instead Keltham says, "Now I really want to ask what you think is the best thing Golarion has going for it sexually, but, spoilers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I don't know if it's a spoiler if we can't do it. There's a seventh circle spell called Waves of Ecstasy which incapacitates everyone around with overwhelming pleasure and I don't think that's the best thing Golarion has to offer but if it were it seems like it wouldn't really be a spoiler for our evening, myself not being seventh circle. Yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sure does sound like the absolutely classic example of something you'd only see in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Wait, wizard spells are like that because they've mostly got to be useful in combat, right?  Is there a class of combats someone can best fight with Waves of Ecstasy?  Because that sounds like..."  Taldane doesn't have the word for trope.  "A particular literary theme."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it's a modification of a very similar spell that incapacitates everyone around less pleasantly? But no, there are no monsters I've ever heard of whose secret weakness is sexual pleasure."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And Golarion doesn't have the thing where, if there were monsters like that, you wouldn't find out until you passed a sexual experience test.  So if you haven't heard about them, they probably don't exist.  Check?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Some places in Golarion might have something like that but Cheliax does not withhold any information about the weaknesses of monsters from its soldiers deployed at the Worldwound, so yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...right.  Sometimes I forget that you're a seasoned emergency response official on a level where - I don't even know who in Civilization would be comparable to you.  Even best-on-continent championship medical responders probably don't stack up to literally actually fighting alien invaders every day."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are championship medical responders? How do you evaluate them against each other, presumably they haven't all addressed the same emergencies!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Standardized trials, of course!  With prediction markets about performance under real future possibilities, in case somebody is only-testing-well in a way that the markets can notice."

"Oh, you were probing about people I find attractive, so.  I can't show her to you until I learn an illusion spell, and maybe something that boosts my memory, but in terms of people I would've screwed if I could've made it to where I could screw almost anyone compatible-and-available... ah, background.  There's this one woman who was, on scores alone, the second-best endurance medical responder for a region containing a quarter of the planetary population.  She wasn't the person you'd call in for one person having a brief medical emergency, she was the person whose performance degraded the least if she had to work for sixteen hours straight.  Except at her level, never mind sixteen hours, she could go for like thirty."

"Now consider all of the Alien Invasion Rehearsal people, and the sections of Governance who think about weird scenarios where, for some reason, you can't send in ten medical techs, you have to send one medical tech who works ten times as long.  Everybody wanted her in their weird emergency response plans.  The number one endurance medical responder for her region wasn't into working with Governance on weird scenarios nearly as much, or the number one people for other regions, they just wanted to spend all their time responding to medical emergencies, go figure.  So she was like spending half her time on actual patients, and half of her time maintaining all of her certifications for being hypothetically called in on every imaginable kind of weird medical emergency by every branch of Exception Handling.  Lots of people watching the transmitted moving pictures of her doing that, treating simulated aliens that famous authors dreamed up, things like that.  She was rank 5 famous, only one in a hundred thousand people had more identity recognition than her.  If you were really lucky you might personally see her simultaneously treating four pretend wounded bodies during an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival."  Or during an Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival, which was when Keltham had actually been pretend-nearly-killed by the Hypothetical Corrupted Governance Military and gotten his game life saved by her in person.  "And also she was pretty.  Merrin, was her name."

He'd almost said 'Miran', but remembered the difference between her game alias and her real name barely in time, which is a little embarrassing for somebody who was once your teenage crush.

Permalink Mark Unread

Because it is entirely hypothetical, the idea of a crisis where one person might need to work for thirty hours straight. Carissa, being a wizard, hasn't done it, herself and she can certainly appreciate the exceptional talent inherent in not having your performance degrade over the course of thirty hours, but clerics, at the Worldwound, work hours like that during every rush, at least once every month. 

 

To be the right trade for Asmodeus Keltham does not have to solve everything, or even half a percent of everything.

If he teaches us metalworking, that would be enough.

 

" - neat," she says, and giggles. "How do ...Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals go."

 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, just because we don't have endless hordes rushing at us from the Chaotic Evil afterlife doesn't mean we'd like to all pathetically roll over and die if someday we did get invaded, though usually we'd suppose them to be invading with machines or cleverness.  So we try to prepare ourselves, rehearse for it, just in case.  Some of the best writers and the best just-in-case military people - and maybe some Keepers, I don't know - all get together, and plan out how they would invade us if they were aliens with particular capabilities.  Then during the Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival they get to tell us, this city got wiped out, or everybody in this region just got mind-controlled, or whatever, and then everybody in the region who got mind-controlled will pick up whatever pretend weapons they get issued and rush over to pretend to try to kill the rest of us.  And, I mean, that also increases resilience if someplace gets hit by a catastrophic earthquake, because people have rehearsed who to coordinate with and which houses to check and how to look for bodies before their brains rot, that sort of thing.  But running it as an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival instead is more fun."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sex technology: sexy alien invasion rehearsal festivals, yes or no."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Has absolutely happened on a citywide scale, but only in a city where everybody opted into that and all the underage kids got sent away for that day."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are kids not allowed to participate in sexy alien invasion rehearsal - I guess they probably wouldn't have passed their competence tests -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well everything is a spoiler at that age."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you supposed to figure it all out yourself?? I feel that this would lead to some hilarious misconceptions! Like the jokes about peasants who go to a priest thinking they're infertile and it turns out they just hadn't known you're supposed to put it in."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You try for a period to see where you end up on your own and then you learn about the standard optimal way of doing it.  As opposed to, I don't know, starting out by knowing all about how it goes?  That sounds a lot less exciting."

Permalink Mark Unread

Girls would get pregnant. If they didn't know how to avoid that. 

 

 

Carissa has been specifically directed to stop entertaining opinions about things like that. It's bad for her eternal soul. And to stop telling Keltham things for no reason. It's bad for her longevity. "Maybe another thing we're doing all wrong for foolish reasons," she says. "I guess you could ask the girls if there's anyone who has no idea what she's doing." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds a biiit more dangerous in a world where there's serious diseases transmitted by sex and no cheap contraception, though I guess a wizard could afford to solve both of those... but you don't seem like you'd be able to afford clever infrastructure for keeping secrets like that, from only exactly the people who can afford to stay ignorant?  So I'm mostly guessing you're joking?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Aaaaaargh he's already good enough at inference it's hard to gloss over things - "Yeah, I would be surprised if you found any takers in Cheliax. There are some countries that protect their daughters from sex by not letting them near men instead of by telling them about it, so I guess you could try to meet those, once we steal all the women from all the countries that don't let them do things."

Permalink Mark Unread

That's the most horrible take on spoiler protection that Keltham has ever heard.

"I suppose they may as well get some benefit out of it, yes.  But it wouldn't be me having sex with them?  I already know where to put it, unless the people older than me have been hiding the real target area."

Permalink Mark Unread

And spoiler-protected people are supposed to only play with each other? She's not going to ask. " - I think it's sweet how you get angry about the women in the countries that don't let them do things. I get angry about that but most people don't and I think I started feeling specifically fond of you as an individual instead of as the vehicle for the most important thing that I can reasonably do when you first heard about it and decided we should steal them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're angrier than average, huh?  Guessing that's not so much because it was your choice of diverse cause area, and more because there's so many even worse things to worry about in Golarion if you pick based on calculation instead of emotional pull."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Other people are being entirely reasonable and I can't defend my fondness for the idea against fixing some other equally bad or worse thing but the one that happens to make me angry is that one."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is a reasonable thing to be angry about.  I - will not mind if all of you take it a little slower on telling me even more things to be even angrier about, if there isn't any reason I need to know right away.  Rapidly learning about lots of things to be angry about does not sound optimal for my mental state.  I'm not a Keeper."

(Yet, says a tiny voice inside him, which Keltham decides after a due pause is probably due to internal pessimization over things for internal voices to say, rather than due to internal prediction from knowledge he hasn't acknowledged to himself.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"And that's also the advice I got from someone who sort of was." In a manner of speaking. Well, not at all actually, she thought of it herself, but it's a good excuse to stop telling him things, which she should. "That - I should be aiming at telling you about decision-relevant bad things rather than about ensuring that in the smallest possible time interval you know all of the awful things in a world full of them, except we don't totally understand your decision procedures so I shouldn't try to have that much ownership of it on my own, but that - it seemed likely to him we might err on the side of trying to press right on through every awful atrocity that Chelish parents protect their children from knowing of - and I know more of them than a usual adult, even, because of the Worldwound. 

We can - take it a bit slower. You're bearing up very well under it, but - uh, conventional wisdom in Cheliax which you might think is very foolish is that the more important someone's business the more important they have lots of nice things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, sure, that's why we coordinate to pay people who produce public goods for us, and why it's considered a good thing that people who produce not-so-public goods become wealthy too.  You want to incentivize people to do important things, and you also want them to be less distracted by unimportant things.  If I didn't have something in my model producing that conclusion already, I'd have been confused why your society was giving me what is, by your standards, very expensive living conditions."

"Just to be clear, I want to know it all eventually, I am not that much of a not Keeper, especially in a world that's much more dangerous.  But if nothing else, there's got to be more sensible ways of prioritizing what I need to learn first, than prioritizing it by how much it shocks me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, of course. But I notice that now, tonight, we keep getting distracted away from nice things with horrible ones, despite agreeing that you need nice things very much, and I propose that that means we're doing something wrong."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You make a compelling case.  All right, let's see if we can go the entire rest of the night without talking about anything horrifying.  Well, except that at some point before dawn tomorrow, I have to test my remaining cleric spells, and any appropriate warning signs on those should in fact be clearly laid out to me.  But when it comes to everything else, if for some reason I need not to do something in the cuddleroom, and the reasons are horrifying, you can totally not tell me why, just, not to do it.  And even if the reasons aren't horrifying, you still shouldn't tell me, to maintain plausible-deniability."  Oh, Taldane has a single syllable word for that, that's helpful.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Don't turn into a girl with red hair and creepy fangs. That's all I've got but I'll let you know more if I think of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

She totally did that on purpose.  "Right then.  Don't turn out to be asexual."  See how you like hearing about what is very clearly going to be a very interesting story that isn't going to be explained right now.

Permalink Mark Unread

What does that even mean. It does not quite parse as 'celibate' and is obviously the opposite of 'sexual' but she doesn't know how to have sex in an un-sexual fashion if she wanted to! "I'll do my best while not knowing what that is."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Some people don't have any sexual desires, or they don't find it in themselves except under very rare conditions, and obviously if you're the first sort and wish you weren't, you're never quite certain you're not secretly the second kind... wait, that's a sad thing, shouldn't have said it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If we were having advanced sex instead of beginner sex I would propose that we hit people when they say sad things. Maybe for beginner sex we could tickle people when they say bad things? With a feather - are there tickle technologies -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, wow, there are people who gain arousal points from being tickled?  Because I am pretty sure I wouldn't, though I suppose we could very briefly try."

Keltham decides not to say, because it would be another sad thing, that unless there's a secret population of dath ilani who do gain arousal from being tickled, a torture machine is not something you would be allowed to sell even in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Well, maybe if you put intrinsic surveillance technology into it and only let people use it on themselves so they could practice being way too mentally disciplined.  Or maybe the Keepers have some incredibly unpleasant technology hidden for extremely unlikely emergencies.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Point to Carissa in the sex games wars - yes, there are people who gain arousal points from being tickled, and even more who gain arousal points for futile-ly struggling to avoid being tickled!!"

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham visualizes this.  Boops the same internal part that was booped by hair-pulling, check.  "I wonder if I would be the first dath ilani to ever build a tickling machine.  It would automatically be the best tickling machine ever, unless people here have built even better ones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, you know, we do our best with our deficient tech level but I bet richer people can build more terrifying tickling machines."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmmm!  I suppose to be properly terrifying it should chase you down, snatch you up, and maybe hold you there while the tickle devices approach closer and closer.  Which is going to take magic if I want to build it here without waiting an additional one hundred years to climb the technology ladder first.  Is that cheating?  I ask because I like to know whether what I'm doing is cheating, not because I'm going to do it any differently depending on your answer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems to me like it might be complicated, building a tickling machine while trying to prevent the escape of your ticklee. You could call in security but that would be cheating."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, the idea is that you build the tickling machine in advance, and don't tell them about that, so it can be a sudden cuddleroom surprise.  But I can see how a thought that Chaotic wouldn't occur to such a very Lawful woman from such a very Lawful country."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Luring women into your cuddleroom under false pretenses to surprise them with tickle-machines? I wouldn't have believed you capable of it!! And I am delighted to be wrong!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"All romantic relationships in Golarion are competitive deceptive ones, right?  I don't even have to put up a warning sign saying it might happen.  It's just assumed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Indeed. You still aren't even cheating. The cuddlerooms all have implicit signs: beware, may contain tickle machines, and dangerous boys, and possibly the sexy kind of dragon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"This explains a lot about why people here never go into the cuddlerooms and just have sex in their bedrooms instead."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We built great elaborate cuddlerooms, but then we got carried away and filled them up with goblins and mimics and treasure chests and traps and spike pits, and they were too dangerous for all but the bravest adventurers, and we retreated defeated to have sex in our beds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probability 1 that this has totally happened multiple times in dath ilan with somebody putting way too much overengineered sextech in their thousand-labor-hour cuddleroom."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If everyone has sex in their cuddleroom, is it kinky to have sex in your bed? Like having sex on your dining room table, except comfier than that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Seems slightly mildly naughty, yes.  Though you'd want a very advanced self-cleaning bedroom.  Or more likely, a spare bedroom you could use instead, until you, or somebody you hired at a high price, cleaned out all the lubricants and other fluids."

"Well, I guess you could just have quick uncomplicated sex on the bed that didn't call for much of anything to be externally lubricated?  But that seems to defeat the point of the kinkiness, which is, I assume, to wreck the bedroom as much as possible in the course of having complicated sex in it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Now, room wrecking sex, we don't actually have much of that, probably because of how we are terribly poor. Most decent beds can stand up to having someone chained to them for hours of exciting adventures. As long as no one turns into a dragon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a proverb that goes:  If you've never broken a... cuddling device you don't have a name for... you're not having vigorous enough sex.  Of course then they started making ones that would not break under any realistic circumstances and the proverb became obsolete, but it stayed in the language."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, with magic healing I feel we should be able to one-up you, but I admit I am not sure how. If you've never broken a...spine you're not having vigorous enough sex? If you've never broken an immovable rod you're not having vigorous enough sex? If you've never broken an extradimensional sex dungeon you're not having vigorous enough sex? But I have never broken any of those things so I guess perhaps everyone I've slept with was very bored."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, it's part of a whole family of adages about being too risk-averse in cases where errors are recoverable.  If you've never lost money on an investment, you're betting too conservatively.  If you've never failed a test, you're taking lessons that are too easy.  So for sex in Golarion as practiced by someone who can afford healing spells, it would say that if you've never broken an ankle during sex, you're not trying sufficiently precarious sex positions."

Permalink Mark Unread

Carissa is having trouble imagining what kind of sex practiced by avowed non-sadists might nonetheless break ankles but she decides not to ask. Perhaps she will learn firsthand, later, if she stops derailing the conversation. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I have never broken an ankle having sex either. I don't think I've broken anything more exciting than a uniform button."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, let's not aim to correct that immediately.  It seems like an activity that could legitimately be reserved for the third date or later.  I don't think it counts if you do it on purpose, anyways; we just have to keep escalating until something interesting happens."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're the expert." Maybe escalating until sex is positively dangerous is how they all handle their suppressed sadism. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I had, in fact, been under the impression that between the two of us, you were the expert.  But comparisons over expertise are better settled in domain contest than in argument."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, on Golarion, people who like to hurt people just do that, and so there's less suppressed sexual tension pushing them towards bafflingly risky and furniture-destroying sex acts. So in that one specific dimension, you have us beat. ...but for everything else, a domain contest does seem called for. You're not dressed for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

Two seconds and three zippers later, Keltham is displaying the dath ilani male version of plunging cleavage.  "Our clothing technology enables rapid adaptation to many purposes.  Point to us."

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow Golarion clothing - 

- well, probably someone has clothing that does that. Probably inheriting Countesses of Cheliax have clothing that do that and Carissa should have asked about it as a higher priority than asking to be prettier. Carissa owns three outfits, her dress uniform and her undress uniform and her sleeping clothes, and they do not do that. 

Also what was that mechanism it looked mechanical -

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I will have you know," she says, slightly sternly, "that I am with a heroic effort of will refraining from derailing this flirtatious conversation to ask how your clothing fasteners work. But in the morning nothing will deter me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They work very well, thank you.  Your move, Carissa Sevar."

(Keltham is expending his own virtuous effort to avoid thinking about zipper patent licensing.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, now you're dressed for the occasion and I'm dressed for entirely the wrong occasion. I would be perfectly dressed to defend you from demons but regrettably security is doing that. Also one sometimes breaks an ankle, doing that, and I hear that breaking ankles is a third date sort of thing. Maybe I could defend you from a particularly aggressive nocturnal songbird? Or a bat."

Permalink Mark Unread

Keltham zips down an additional distanceunit of cleavage, just because his technological superiority lets him do that so easily.  "I admit, I've never ticked 'had a girl defend me from a bat' on a sexual experience assessment, but you may be overestimating my prior corruption levels if you think you have to go that far for your next move."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm going to steal those clothes and wear them to class tomorrow, this is your fair warning." And having said that she doesn't want to give him time to dwell on it, so she kisses him.

Permalink Mark Unread

The following NSFW subthread between Keltham and Carissa now occurs within this story, and should be read before continuing on from here:

kissing is not a human universal

This subthread has been set apart so that the main thread remains readable by people who would prefer zero sex scenes in their stories.

A safeish-for-work summary of key events and snippets can be found here:

sfw tldr kissing is not a human universal

Permalink Mark Unread

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Nethys, Iomedae, Sarenrae, anybody)

- just in case somebody is there after all.

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(Nothing happens.)

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

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

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

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

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


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

She signs.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Frankly, Ferrer Maillol is not having a great day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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about what?????

 

 

Maybe she can just say that. 

"...about what?"

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Yeah, all right, she can do that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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"Sure, go ahead."

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

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

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

 

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

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

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"I will sell you my shoe for - 

- wow, okay - 

- one second, try selling security something -"

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

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

 

Wow, Abadar is such a specific god. 

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

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

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

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"Not fair," declares Carissa. 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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Oops.

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

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

 

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

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"Broom is," he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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Right eye. 

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

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

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"Yes, it does."

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

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Right eye if you can let me evade that truth spell without his knowing.  Left eye if you can't.

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Right.

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"Broom accepts this."

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

"Who are you?  Say it again."

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

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

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"The reason is also secret," Broom says.  "Broom apologizes again."

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

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

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

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Stab you before you can destroy the world.  "Tell my god.  Tell the great wizards."

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

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

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Broom's speech patterns are for avoiding offense and punishment.  "Taldane is good for Broom."

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"Do you know who my god is?"

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Aspexia Rugatonn told Broom some of what was known about Keltham, cleric of Abadar.  "No," Broom lies again.

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

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Broom genuinely does not understand this.  "My god may know your god.  I do not know your god."

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

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Otolmens.  Asmodeus.  "Broom does not know.  Broom is not wise in the ways of gods.  Broom only serves one."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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Hug.

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Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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Keltham casts his third-circle cleric illusion spell.

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

 

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

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

"- kill me -"

 

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

 

  

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

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This is important.

 

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

 

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

 

Keltham tries to look around.

 

Very briefly.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Security dispels it. Exchanges glances with Carissa. 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fourth-circle abjuration, go.

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

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

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

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

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The second one works!

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

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Keltham realizes he no longer understands what Carissa just said.

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

Keltham is an idiot.

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

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

 

Security guy whistles. 

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

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

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

 

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

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

"Tongues."

"No."

"Does anyone else on duty -"

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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UGH. 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Glimpse of Beyond."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Not a problem."

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"Good night, Keltham."

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

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"Same to you. I think."

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Off with Keltham!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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" - that's not even an excuse."

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

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

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

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Some parlors have been repurposed into common rooms.

"Keltham learns about malediction."

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

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

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

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

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

        Slap. "Not an excuse."

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

       "Keltham learns that the girls were drafted."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       "Keltham learns that the girls sold their souls."

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I absolutely have not done that!"

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

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

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

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

 

 

Carissa loves her job. 

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

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

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Cantrips / Orisons:

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


1st circle:

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

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


2nd circle:

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

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


3rd circle:

Agonize  --  Pain encourages an outsider to obey you.

(Would that spell work on Keltham himself?)

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

 

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

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

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

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


4th circle:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh.

Ohhhh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question 1:  Does this communications channel work?

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

Plus actually:

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

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

What does he really really need to know?

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

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

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

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

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

Version two:

Question 1:  Does this communications channel work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question 6:  Imminent danger at current location?

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

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

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

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Version three, probably final:

 

Question 1:  Does this communications channel work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question 5:  Imminent danger at current location?

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


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

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Keltham goes to seek the spell list from Ione.

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

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

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Those spells, huh.  Those sure are some spells.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

So, attempted code, v1:

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

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

5.1:  Lay of the Land (2nd):  Run.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This summons is not answered.

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

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

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

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"Yes." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's a plan for prayer tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

"Carissa Sevar."

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- startles awake like someone who startles awake a lot. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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An appearance changes.

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

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This, too, might be a test. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- because Asmodeus doesn't overthrow Pharasma -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is it completely ridiculous and contemptible to feel disappointed she lacks the deftness or ambition or whatever to be a new playmate to the Queen of Cheliax? Yes. Are humans completely ridiculous and contemptible? Also yes. 

 

But she gets an assignment for her project, for the one she - yes, sensed they were going to need, in a world that had Keltham in it at all -


" - yes, your Majesty."

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Abrogail tosses a small bag down by where Carissa kneels.  "Your crafting allowance, Sevar.  A little gold, a little spellsilver.  It will only open to your own hand, left or right, either one.  You didn't earn it, but Hell's instructions do not say that I may not reward you a little more than you have earned."

"As for what that bag does to the hand that opens it, you're allowed to have it healed once it's over."

"If someday you change your opinions on the importance of mortal thrones and become a worthy playmate after all, do remember how early I started planning for that.  Just because I like to play doesn't mean I'll entertain a serious possibility of losing."

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Abrogail leans over to blow out the black candle, and the moment the crimson flame goes out, it appears that she and the candle are gone.

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Some kind of illusion?  The Forbiddance is still up, isn't it?  The bag remains by Carissa Sevar's hand.

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...she stands. 

 

"....security?" she says weakly. "I have, uh, the experience of having spent the last ten minutes talking with an intruder who represented herself as the Queen."

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No immediate reply.

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Then Carissa's going to get dressed, take her ....agonizing Bag of Holding? and step out into the hallway.

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Well, there's nobody in the hallway, so far as that goes.

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- Keltham. The first priority when there's any suggestion that security has been compromised. Carissa runs.

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She's intercepted before she gets far, by somebody who looks like Atanasio Torres.

"I no longer envy you the attention you get," the person who looks like Atanasio Torres observes.  "Zero-one-nine-four-eight, yes that was the Queen.  Need a sleep spell or will you be able to manage on your own?"

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- any illusions show up to Detect Magic?

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Not at her caster circle.

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"I don't need a sleep spell, but I need to report first. Is Maillol in the temple?"

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Torres didn't think she'd fall for that trap, but trying is a habit he doesn't think much about.  "Just back from his four-hour meeting in Egorian," Torres says dryly.

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Carissa wants to come up with some kind of wisecrack about that but she's having her adrenaline crash now and she's too tired. "Mmmm," she says, because she does appreciate the warning, and goes off to the temple. To knock on Maillol's door. Hopefully someone else has already told him the news so she at least won't be breaking it to him.

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Ferrer Maillol is relieved to see Sevar here so quickly, because it means that Sevar and the Queen are not having sex, which would not have been something he needed in his life.  He's tired enough from having to kneel patiently while three eighth-circle wizards argued about why nobody figured out heritage math if heritage math was actually that simple; and the Queen of Cheliax read transcripts of Sevar's thoughts while having sex, while making interesting, and obviously deliberate, facial expressions, where Maillol could see them.

"Sevar.  I confirm that was Her Infernal Majestrix."

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"Thank you. Am I supposed to provide my best recollection of the conversation."

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"Her Infernal Majestrix has instructed that I am not to proactively inquire into the contents of her conversation with you, but if you seek instruction of your own accord, I am allowed to laugh.  Those were her literal words."

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"Well, it seems like you could use a laugh. Sir."

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"I do not need my life to be any more humorous than it already is, in fact.  And you need to get enough sleep to prepare spells today.  If your questions aren't going to keep you up, ask later, and if they will, get a sleep spell.  Unless it's brief."

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No, it's just that she's really curious about her Evil Bag Of Holding. "Good night, sir."

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"Asmodeus uphold you, Sevar."  He has her new intelligence headband now, in fact, but he's not giving it to her until she's slept enough to prepare spells, because wizards are all insane.

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If wizards are insane they are in good company with, apparently, the entire rest of the world including the gods. 

 

 

Carissa has a lot of practice at waking up for a life-or-death fight in the middle of the night and then going right back to sleep. It is in many ways a combat wizard's core skillset. She sleeps immediately and soundly, with her Evil Bag Of Holding clutched at her side.

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Keltham wakes up more muzzily than the previous day, to dawn's light coming through his windows.  The non-fully-opaqueable windows seem less like a design flaw if clerics have to pray for their spells during the dawn hour.

All right.  Let's do this.

Keltham reviews his notes from the previous night, written appropriately cryptically, and then prays, trying to cast his mind Beyond, maybe in the direction that wasn't the three space or one time, looking toward his deity: the Lawful Neutral god of people wanting to follow the protocols they must follow in order for their interactions to be mutually beneficial, come to the Pareto frontier, coordinate without vast enforcement costs, summing to powerful societies and markets even when people largely pursue their own individual interests individually, because they never step on others in order to do that.

Requests, obviously subject to amendation should his unknown god deem there to be better spells he could get:

0th:  Detect Magic, Guidance
1st:  Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, keep Sanctuary
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment
3rd:  Invisibility Purge actually, how about his god only reassigns him Invisibility Purge, or Glimpse of Beyond, if Keltham still might need it
3rd:  Owl's Wisdom, actually Honest Pricing also seems good here
4th:  Early Judgment

And also:

If conditional spell assignment works at all for communication with his god, please assign Read Weather (1st).
If the communication doesn't cost much, please assign Lighten Object (1st).
If the communication seems like it should be error-free and reliable, please assign Air Bubble (1st).
If Keltham should speak freely and teach as much as he can to his hosts, please assign Light (0th).
If Keltham should instead stall them with relatively less dangerous material, please assign Create Water (0th).
And if Keltham should run the ass out of here today with just Carissa and tell nobody else where he's going, please assign Lay of the Land (2nd).

Any remaining slots should be assigned as his god sees fit.

...Keltham would also like to talk, if now is a better time than yesterday, for whatever reason.  Keltham has many questions about how he can best cooperate in a mutually beneficial way with his god.

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Presumably Pharasma's had time to review Otolmens' reports by now and the absence of communications from her suggests that it's fine to proceed as normal?

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It is TRUE that Pharasma has now had time to review Otolmens's first report about the anomaly.

However, Pharasma has NOT had time to review the second, third, fourth, or most recently FIFTH additional reports that Otolmens THEN had to file dealing with the ABSURD and INCREASINGLY RAPID escalation of DIVINE INTERVENTIONS around the region She SPECIFICALLY SAID everyone needed to STOP intervening in.  Abadar may be familiar with the THIRD report in this sequence.  It concerns the mortal's acquisition of SEVEN CLERIC LEVELS.  Yet ANOTHER report concerns an intervention by ASMODEUS who Otolmens is aware is GOOD FRIENDS with ABADAR.  Then there are interferences by NETHYS and for some reason CAYDEN CAILEAN and Otolmens is still wondering what IOMEDAE was doing in that pseudohypothetical chat.

Otolmens is willing to entertain that there are possible replies to a prayer which would make further events LESS COMPLICATED, such as commanding the anomalous mortal to REMAIN STILL AND NOT MOVE FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS.  Is Abadar planning to send a reply like that?

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Mortals literally die of that. And also, Abadar does not command his mortals, He trades with them. 

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Otolmens FAILS to see why a mortal dying would be BAD as they are LITERALLY DESIGNED TO DO THAT and do so ALL THE TIME but if for some reason it IS bad then the NEARBY mortals will no doubt HEAL that one.

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....well, the mortal did want to use a secret code to ask whether to give Cheliax good information or stall them. Abadar knows that god-agreements prohibit using cleric spell assignments as a poor man's Commune but. Perhaps Otolmens would consider it acceptable for Abadar to tell the mortal to stall. 

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Instruct the mortal to CONCEAL information?  CONCEALING information usually makes situations MORE COMPLICATED because then agents have DIFFERENT PICTURES of what is HAPPENING and their actions do not conduce to ANY coherent strategy or goal, even those goals that most mortals usually share, such as NOT DESTROYING REALITY.

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A compelling argument!!! Cheliax is currently concealing information from the mortal and Abadar just wants to straighten that out, which will probably make the situation less complicated, for all the very good reasons Otolmens just listed.

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WHY are the surrounding natives concealing information from the anomaly.  Do they suspect that, if given any information, the anomaly will use it to DEDUCE THE NATURE OF REALITY and then DESTROY IT.

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Yes!! They do!

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Oh, come on.

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Asmodeus cannot exactly see everything going on down there but a lot of what His mortals are concealing is, indeed, of the 'true nature of reality' flavor. Abadar should absolutely not blow that up within 57,000 time units just because he's sour that the mortal hasn't gone to Him. 

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The thing Abadar is angry about is that the mortal is being systematically lied to and exploited when he would be a really excellent trade partner for decent people.

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And he'll get around to it, no doubt!! But the impatience is unbecoming, really.

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It seems to Abadar that Otolmens might reasonably consider Asmodeus's conduct in Hell a threat to the stability of the Material Plane, if concealing it is necessary to prevent threats to the stability of the Material Plane and Asmodeus has never before been bothered to conceal this. It seems to Abadar that the mortal wants a nice rich stable world, and is more likely to endanger it if he ends up getting the wrong subset of information about the world, like might happen if you are Asmodeus and maliciously lying to advance your own interests. It seems to Abadar that containing the mortal by trying to learn his dangerous secrets while concealing Asmodeus's own dangerous secrets is an obviously doomed plan and it's absurd for Otolmens to countenance that and not countenance Abadar telling the mortal a small set of true non-inflammatory things such as 'Cheliax is lying to you' and 'my country has preexisting contractual arrangements for similar situations and will respect your intellectual property'.

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Otolmens is becoming increasingly WORRIED about what Asmodeus is PLANNING if it is not simply CONTAINMENT.  If the surrounding natives are withholding information from the anomaly-mortal as part of a PLAN by ASMODEUS then perhaps it would be better after all if Abadar told His mortal not to -

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Nethys would like to say hi again!  Nethys knows you're looking in this direction!  Nethys knows you're wondering whether Nethys really has a plan that encompasses all of this chaos and is leading up to something interesting!  And if Nethys does have a plan like that, what is that plan's objective?  Could it possibly be the destruction of all reality?

Well, Nethys is proud to announce that Nethys DOES have a plan!  Definitely!  A plan that encompasses even Abadar's own predictable reactions to how things are going so far!  Nethys isn't going to tell you anything about the objective of that plan, though.  Then you would get bored and stop looking, and Nethys finds it useful to overhear your conversations.

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WHAT.

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Keltham gets - a sense of inhuman presence, stronger than last time, and if you were going to assign emotions to sensory passing thunderstorms, more frustrated, and -

 

0th:  Detect Magic, Guidance
1st:  Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, Protection from Evil, Fairness x2
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment, Augury (x2)
3rd:  Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires, Summon Monster III
4th:  Early Judgment, Enchantment Foil

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That... is confusing.

First of all, the communications channel failed utterly.  Not too surprising in retrospect.  If it was a technique that worked, people would use it all the time, and have invented more complex codes for god-communication by now.  Obviously not reliable reasoning the way it would be in dath ilan, because his Chelish hosts could be concealing well-known techniques from him, and also because the entire planet of Golarion is one enormous gap of otherwise expected social competencies.  But still, not too surprising that it failed; Golarion continues to not look like gods are running the place or even talking to it a lot.

He's now got:

0th:  Detect Magic and Guidance.
1st:  One Truthspell, two Honest Pricing, a new 1st-circle Abjuration spell, his old Sanctuary, a new Comprehend Languages.
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, two of an unfamiliar divination and two of another unfamiliar divination, one of which is hopefully the Early Judgment he asked after... oh, one looks to go by touch, that's probably the Early Judgment if he got it at all.
3rd:  Unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar conjuration.
4th:  Unfamiliar abjuration.

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...at least there were no Illusion spells.

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If there's a message in what's left, it's not obvious to Keltham without knowing what other spells he has.  At least, not unless he has to negotiate prices twice today.  Negotiate prices urgently?  Hurry up and negotiate a price on info already?

Or, "They would otherwise cheat you, if you didn't have this spell, worry more about being cheated"?

Should he tap himself with the spell that's probably Early Judgment... no, actually he shouldn't do that until he's around somebody with a Dispel, Keltham doesn't think.  It doesn't have to be Early Judgment.  Keltham doesn't need to say that he already suspects what the spell does.


Keltham thinks.  Not just about spells.  He has queued things to think about.

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Carissa wakes up again to her own internal clock, which is lots better than waking to the Queen of Cheliax evaluating whether to petrify you forever. (She's mostly not thinking about that. It's - she'll just stop being able to do her job if she dwells on it too much.)

 

She gets dressed and takes her Evil Bag of Holding and goes to check in.

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Sometimes Maillol wishes that priests, also, actually needed sleep in order to prepare spells.

"Sevar," he says, not permitting any trace of fatigue to enter his voice.

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"I'm soliciting correction or advice, if you have any."

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"Going to need additional context, Sevar.  My superiors seemed relatively pleased by your performance, mostly because nobody could figure out how any more competent seducer could've gotten more success on Keltham.  What you did shouldn't have worked, and the fact that it did is suggestive that conventional methods wouldn't have."

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"Specifics." Sigh. "Her Majesty wanted to know what I'd do if Aspexia Rugatonn told me that Asmodeus wanted the Queen killed. From where I'm standing it looks like all possible answers to that question are at least one of heresy or treason but if there's actually some standard answer that'd be great to know."

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"That's our Infernal Majestrix, all right.  The answer in real life is that it's not the real Aspexia Rugatonn, or, I suppose, Aroden returned from the dead and got the drop on her with mind control.  For Asmodeus to move His clerics against her Infernal Majestrix would violate His pact with House Thrune."

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That's so soothingly not heretical or treasonous. "Thank you. She also gave me this Bag of Holding and said that I may heal the injuries after I use it. Do you know what it does? Am I intended to use it?"

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"Even if I did know, Sevar, I wouldn't tell you if the Queen didn't.  If the Queen wants it to be a surprise, it's a surprise."

"I expect the Queen told you the bag contains something you want, besides just pain.  If so, I expect she expects you to try it, and that she will re-evaluate her impression of your courage if you don't.  This should be obvious, Sevar, and I have not had so much sleep in the last two days that you should try my patience."

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No one showed up in your bedroom to threaten you with nonexistence, Carissa wants to snap back, but for all she knows they did, and anyway there's no point in arguing that she has justification for being bad at things; the project doesn't care. "Do you have the books on Taldor."

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"You'd think the Imperial Ministry of Historical Accuracy would have enough writers to get one fictional history written in a day if they split up by sections.  Turns out, 'We've got a mysterious truth-detecting outsider on our hands and your fictional history needs not to read as obviously false to it from directions that none of us even understand' is not a request that their previous careers have prepped them to handle."

"What I have for you instead are the three best actual books on Taldor that could be located.  And a ten-page outline of the rough course of pseudo-Cheliax since fifteen years ago, all of which had to be produced by Inner Ring people not worried about getting executed for heresy if their entire story wasn't just about the flawless excellence of Hell and House Thrune.  We're working on finding some way to get the rest of your book written by less important people.  Security outside your room has both items."

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"That's probably enough for us to work off for today. I should see drafts, I'll notice some things that read false to Keltham that other people won't - I am surprised that it's not broadly believed someone better at seducing people would've been better at seducing him, is it -

 

- uh, am I importantly wrong about some of the things I told him that I wasn't even lying about."

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"One.  I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific.  Two.  Are you sure you want to be more specific, given that your mistakes seem to be playing excellently to Keltham and that you are still, basically, an Asmodean and bringing him closer to our Lord.  Asmodeus made that your call, Sevar, it was very distinctly not left to me or even Rugatonn to decide."

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'still, basically, an Asmodean' stings even though Asmodeus chose her and she already knows it was partially because she's doing theological innovation far above her previous station. She tries very hard not to use that as an input into what to say. 

"Keltham's going to have the other girls too, and if I'm doing something wildly unlikely then they're not going to do it and that's going to go badly. And I don't think we can put that off very long, though we could probably do a week if we have to. If you think my ignorance of this is really important to preserve we can have someone else brief the group on Carissa-errors they should pick up, but they won't know how I got to the errors, and that's a - substantial black box I'm working around...if there's nothing significant enough that it'd come up in advising the other girls then I guess those things can go uncorrected for now."

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What are Sevar's actual heresies?  Maillol can't easily count them.

Most centrally, Sevar believes that Asmodeanism is about making everyone ultimately better off, which is the central example of propaganda that gets fed to the Outers and that the Inners know better than to believe.  Lots of Outers know better on some level, they just know that they'll die if they say it out loud or even if their thoughts are too honest about it, producing a kind of pseudo-belief that shreds apart words from wordless knowledge; an inner disintegrity that is then useful for many further ends in molding people, and probably aesthetically pleasing to Asmodeus as well, though it's hard to be sure with gods.

Maillol does not think the time has come to drop that particular enlightenment on Sevar.  She has had too little taste of privilege and power, she is too close emotionally to Lawful Neutrality and too exposed to Keltham's contrary examples.

Sevar thinks that Cheliax's tyranny is painful in part because the pain is educational and necessary and ultimately beneficial to the people being punished.  She thinks Hell is painful in part because that pain is necessary to produce the useful and refined beings that Asmodeus desires as tools.

Maillol is not sure when, if ever, she'll be ready to hear that the cruelty is the point.  You get told that either after you've sold your soul, or after Asmodeus has chosen you as a cleric. 

Maillol doesn't think he should just refuse to answer either.

"Sexually, you seem to have acquired the idea that it would be right for Keltham to do as he wished with you, once you gave yourself to him.  On conventional Asmodeanism, one would say that it is right for Keltham to do as he wishes with you because he has the power to get away with it within a lawful system that offers you no defense.  Keltham could come by that power because the Church told you to be obedient, because Asmodeus and his greater slaves like myself gave you to him to do with as he pleases, or because some girl was born into slavery to her slave parents and Keltham bought her and decided to enjoy strangling her in bed."

"Don't misunderstand this as critique of the strategy you ended up executing, Sevar.  Telling him that it was okay because you consented was an excellent move.  He wouldn't have gone for it otherwise and he's just starting out with his first tentative steps away from his Lawful Good society."

"But the fact that you believe what you told Keltham seems to have more to do with certain bizarre personal hangups of yours about events in countries that aren't even Cheliax.  Right now, Sevar, the number one person most likely to drag you off to a bedroom and do as they will with you, is the Queen of Cheliax, who is not, to the best of my knowledge, male, and has no doubt killed any number of men after making good use of them.  Whether any of them consented is utterly irrelevant to her soul's standing with Asmodeus.  She's the Queen of Cheliax.  There's no recourse from her, no appeal, no court, she doesn't just have the power to do what she wants with you, she has the legal right, which is the difference between Evil and Lawful Evil.  Then for her to take what she wants from you, if she happens to want it, is the most natural and Asmodean thing in the world."

"That you think it's more Asmodean from the Queen's perspective, if you happen to have consented, if you happen to have given yourself to her, is the heretical part.  Maybe it's more Asmodean for you if you become a willing slave to the one who hurts you, a shadow of how it will be in Hell.  It is not more Asmodean for the Queen to think that it becomes more right if she has your consent.  That will not be what Asmodeus is thinking when you come to Him in Hell."

"The obvious endgame on seducing Keltham would be to lure him deeper into sadism and domination with this talk about consent, and then lure him further to the point where he feels that he has the right to make use of somebody who hasn't consented to him at all, and does that.  That will be the point that he starts to detect as Lawful Evil and be bound for our Lord's Hell."

"And Sevar.  This is not a male-versus-female thing.  Asmodeus really, really doesn't give two shits about that.  You've met our Queen.  You should already know better."

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"- I understand. Thank you. I think I can get Keltham there, if we don't ruin everything in the next month before I've had time."

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Maillol reaches into his desk, and then pauses, because he has a feeling he needs to get this part of the conversation done earlier, in order for them to happen at all, because Sevar is about to be distracted.

"If you're looking for somewhere to open the Queen's gift, Sevar, try the torture chamber on the right; there's no torturer currently on duty there and the junior priest stationed outside has healing spells.  Though doing that right away may come at the expense of being able to prepare spells before you're scheduled to brief the other girls in the morning, depending on how elaborate the Queen's gift turns out to be."

"It's also been suggested to me that you, Sevar, had to buy your own intelligence headband because requisitions was being weirdly obstructionist about it and gave you a two-week delivery time.  The one you purchased will, on this version, arrive with the next delivery we get, later today.  You say that where the girls and Keltham can hear.  Then somebody, possibly Ione, should mention to Keltham the wild but unlikely theory that the delay is because they're planning to prepare cursed intelligence headbands, which exist just like cursed versions of most other magic items exist, and in particular have been famously known to do subtle influences and mind control and even make people dumber on certain subjects without realizing it.  It's not impossible that they had at least one cursed headband lying around to substitute for the one you bought, to slip it to you immediately.  The point being that Keltham shouldn't just ask to borrow your headband from you, though that's in any case something that wizards tend to be really fucking insane about."

"Those are lies to Keltham, though," except for that very last part, "so your final call.  The suggester wasn't in our chain of command."

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"...probably a good idea. Or someone can suggest that the delay is because you have to check if they're subtly cursed, and then Keltham can generate for himself the hypothesis that we might be doing that deliberately."

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Right, well, that's basically what he had to say to Sevar, or it had better have been, because now he's not going to get anything sensible from her for a while.  Maillol reaches again into his desk, and offers Sevar the intelligence headband.

(He wishes it was possible to actually curse the things with some subtle maleficent voice whispering to wizards to not be so insane about intelligence headbands.)

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- blah blah blah Carissa is a good Asmodean her only motivation is to be a less imperfect slave.

 

 

She puts it on.

 

 

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She's felt it before, of course, she has Fox's Cunning and uses it sometimes when she's stuck on a spell structure, or on how to get an enchantment to lay nicely. It's wonderful, it feels like the difference between being groggily half-awake and being properly awake except on top of awakeness. It feels like the sort of conversation you have with another person where each of you sees exactly where the other is going so you get three words into a sentence and the other person says eagerly 'yes' and you can move on to the next piece, having placed a conceptual pointer, except with just one person. 

 

Right now it's mostly just making it harder to refocus her attention away from the Queen's threat to petrify her. Which is silly. The threat made sense: Carissa is glad to live in a country where Queens issue such threats, because contemplating their overthrow really is a very grave crime and if there were no penalty more serious than more quickly meeting Asmodeus then more people would do it, and that wouldn't do. Carissa understood this incentive problem to mostly be solved with a very, very protracted death but she can appreciate why the Queen would have assessed Carissa's own incentives as being different. And very simple. 

And she's not going to overthrow the Queen, because she isn't an idiot, so it's fine. Except that it seems like there are actually a lot of ways that Carissa could fail, from here, in ways that made people very angry at her, and -

- it's always been true that she'll go to Hell no matter what.

- digression, why does Maillol think that the Queen might want to have sex with her? Why would the Queen want that? Should Carissa want the Queen to want that? She leans no, because being around the Queen more feels like it makes it more likely one ends up a statue underground. Maybe if she has succeeded tremendously at her project and built dath ilan but evil and better. If that happens probably she will not end up a statue underground.

(The Queen could be bluffing. Asmodeus has chosen Carissa, perhaps He wouldn't tolerate that. There was no hint of it in her voice or manner but then, there wouldn't be.)

 

Okay, setting that aside with more mental effort than it ought to take but not more than she has on hand.

The Queen implied that Asmodeus instructed Cheliax to let Keltham go, when he leaves. Which makes sense of why Contessa Lrilatha was willing to concede that in contract negotiations; it was commanded already. Why did Asmodeus give those instructions? The Queen's right, that Keltham isn't a relative advantage for Cheliax at all if no one can learn his teachings without ending up a heretic. That seems really important to understand. She's not coming up with anything but it's standing out now in her memory as a question, along with 'why isn't Abadar talking to Keltham' and 'is Otolmens right to think Keltham might end the world' and 'how badly do I have to screw up to get turned into a statue' -

Queen's present before she gives the Taldor briefing, or after?  ....Carissa kind of wants to be in a lot of pain right now, so that settles that. 

 

"Thank you," she says perfunctorily to Maillol, and goes off to the torture chamber.

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The priest on duty nods at her as she goes by, apparently unconfused or just uninterested as to why she's going into the torture chamber by herself.

Carissa has been in torture chambers before, on both sides of the restraints.  This one is much smaller than the one you'd find in a larger temple, with stations for only two prisoners and one torturer; and it's fancier and better-decorated with glaring crimson mood lighting, because it's in the temple built into the private summer villa of an archduke.  But aside from that, it looks like a very ordinary and conventional torture chamber in an Asmodean temple.

The bag is quite small, even for a Holding bag.  You could fit your hand into how large it appears to be, if you tried, though the Queen did say it triggered just on being opened, and not with sticking your hand in.

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Well, if she gets blood all over her clothes there's magic for that. She sits down and opens her present.

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Which hand?

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Left, she doesn't need it to write. Though she's going to heal it anyway.

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As the bag comes halfway open, it leaps up around Carissa's left hand, over her wrist, snapping tight.

Most sexual masochists prefer a gradual buildup of their pain.  This bag is the opposite of that, as if somebody was trying to make the experience unpleasant even for a masochist, maybe as a challenge.

Torture details spoilered.   Molten-iron heat on her index finger, instantly there from zero buildup, lasting for maybe a quarter-minute, and then it cuts out and is replaced by the sensation of her middle finger being flayed, which goes on for another quarter-minute.

(It's probably not actually molten iron; real molten iron would burn out nerves quickly and end up feeling mostly like the pain of an amputation.)

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Carissa screams. Rich people soundproof their torture chambers, usually, and even if they didn't the church while doing a secret operation certainly would, but she wouldn't actually be able to do anything different if this were going to give away everything to Keltham. 

 

 

(It is decided: Carissa does NOT want to have sex with the Queen of Cheliax.)

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"Good girl," whispers Abrogail Thrune's voice into Carissa's ear, seductiveness backed by vast Splendour.  "Go ahead, scream more.  Let it all out."

Torture details spoilered.The flaying cuts out.  Needles of cold far below the freezing point of water stab into her thumb.  This time it's only five seconds before her pinky gets dipped into boiling acid, with the cold still stabbing at her thumb.
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH....is Abrogail Thrune somehow personally listening? How? Why? Doesn't she have a country to run? Is this even informative about anything?? ...maybe it's a test about whether Carissa will try to draw her hand out of the bag, but she's not an idiot and that obviously wouldn't work? She's glad it wouldn't work, otherwise she'd in fact find it really hard not to.

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The bag goes on treating Carissa's hand to a variety of different extreme unpleasantnesses, switching faster and faster as the bag continues its work, as though trying to deliberately avert someone's ability to lean into the pain and come to any kinds of terms with it.  This is not a bag of pain; this is a bag of suffering.

Thrune's voice continues to whisper seductive encouragement.  Depending on how much spare brainpower Carissa has (admittedly with her intelligence headband) she may note that at no point does the voice address her as 'Sevar' rather than just 'you'.

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At the end, Thrune's voice whispers to her that she can claim her reward now - Thrune doesn't want to discourage girls from being good - and that if she would like to try this again, before sending the bag back to the palace at the end of the day, it can be recharged by any sixth-circle wizard.

The bag comes off Carissa's wrist and falls to the floor, now open, to the fading sound of Thrune's seductive laughter.

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Carissa spends a couple of minutes on the floor trembling and sobbing and restraining herself from vomiting. That's without looking at her hand, which she's pretty sure will set her off again. 

 

 

Well. She's not going to worry anymore about pushing Keltham into being more intense than she can't handle. She is not sure if that's what the Queen was aiming at or if she just thinks it's funny. 

 

 

She's pretty sure that asking for the bag to be recharged so she can do it again would be flirting with the Queen, which she should not do. But who turns down a challenge from the Queen of Cheliax to prove yourself intense enough She will definitely regret that. Down that path lies statues, which is a different kind of thought than 'down that path lies horrible pain'. Down her own path lies horrible pain. She knows that. She should expect many days in Hell that are like that, even if she's a very promising student, because there are things you can only learn that way. She...genuinely doesn't think it's the fact that that was the most AWFUL FIVE MINUTES OF HER LIFE - or however long it was - is the reason she's not asking to do it again. 

 

When the pain and nausea have subsided enough she can breathe evenly she looks at her hand.

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It's a wreck, but the kind of wreck that can be handled by a medium-strength cleric, not a Regeneration spell.

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Okay.

 

 

Carissa's just going to - 

- right, her spellsilver! She's going to get her spellsilver out of the bag. Very carefully.

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There's spellsilver in the bag, some regular silver, gold foil, tiny rubies, two packets of sapphire dust, and Chelish currency.  Somebody with a great deal of Splendour has very accurately guessed how much of a reward needs to be in this bag for Carissa Sevar to feel, even taking the torture into account, that the Queen was doing her a favor on net and not just in a not-killing-or-petrifying-you way.

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....awwww. It's kind of like cuddles. The monetary equivalent of cuddles. You can handle anything if afterwards someone will tell you you're very impressive and give you cuddles, or spellsilver.


She scoops it up and puts it into her breast pocket and then makes herself stand up and stagger to the door by promising herself there will be healing on the other side of it. She looks godawful and she's well aware of it but there's probably time to put herself together before explaining the Taldor plan.

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The priest on duty doesn't raise an eyebrow, just taps her hand with healing.

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Great! She'll just put the bag in her pocket with the spellsilver for safekeeping, splash some water on her face and fix her hair, then!

 

She's still walking shakily but that ought to wear off.

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Security near her room will appear and deliver the Taldor books and the alt-history outline to her.

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Excellent. What has she got to work with.

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Taldor has been around for nearly a thousand years, and has a civil war with brutal regularity at nearly every succession, because the next Emperor is appointed, technically by the Senate, a vestigial body in the capital with no real influence except once every few decades when it is called upon to name the next Emperor. The processes the Senate is supposed to follow are stunningly opaque and complex -- the word in Carissa's language for 'excessively complicated' stems from the capital city of Taldor -- and there's no mechanism by which the Senate's rulings are enforced, besides that they lend the named person a lot of credibility. Needless to say, that doesn't really work, and peaceful successions are at this point practically the exception; unfit or young Emperors have a tendency to be elevated only to swiftly die of it, ruthless outsiders sometimes have a go until they misstep in the capital politics they don't understand and die, the army is always cheerfully threatening to proclaim a general as emperor....

Emperors tried in various ways to secure a preferred successor -- naming a co-emperor, say -- but it was common for junior co-emperors to be killed when their senior co-emperor died or lost his foothold. 

Taldor is mostly feudal, but the Emperor appoints the rulers of some provinces directly, and those military governors are supposed to be especially loyal to him and his enforcers, if a fight is necessary. Of course, if you let your military governors accumulate too much power in their own right they might overthrow you. Of course, if you keep the people who concern you most close to home they might assassinate you. 

Despite all this Taldor has remained a major global power, mostly for two reasons: firstly, even its outlying fortresses are a thousand years old and nearly unassailable (including by one another, during civil wars), and secondly, Oppara itself is a magnificently walled and warded city, and it's said those walls will outlast the world. It's lost some ground to Qadira, and some to Galt, but it's still larger than Cheliax. 

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Keltham's going to be so offended about all of these things!! But they'll have whatever bizarre correlations they're supposed to, because Taldor is a real place that really exists. Carissa speed-reads some book and makes some notes on the outline and then goes to the library to present to her students. 

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As Carissa enters the room, Pilar clears her throat from a lurking corner near the door, and then hands Carissa a very nice-looking piece of cake, on an elaborate plate.  "Surprise!" Pilar says.  "This is your congratulations-on-seducing Keltham party!  Have some cake."

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Yeah, that's incredibly weird. Carissa is less than delighted. 

 

"For all you know, I failed miserably," she says, taking the plate and setting it down on the nearest desk. "Perhaps in dath ilan they have entirely different anatomy and we both got horribly confused."

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Pilar says nothing, just scurrying around to the nearest chair and perching there next to Paxti.  She doesn't quite look embarrassed about the whole thing; more like she did it on somebody else's orders that she isn't going to argue with.

All other girls present are giving her exactly as much of a strange look as you'd expect in Cheliax, which is to say, it's not at all dramatic or exaggerated, but it's definitely detectable to another Chelaxian.

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Carissa will just.... ignore that and move on.

"All right. First, on settling sadism bets, the answer is yes. Also do not propose a bet with Keltham because dath ilan has a deeply bizarre norm that the thing you bet during sex is nonreciprocal services, which would otherwise, naturally, not be a thing because anything anyone does they should get something in return for. Yes, he thinks that still applies here where he has knowledge any government would slaughter cities for. Yes, I think it's plausibly worth trying to convince him that Evil has more fun, but you've got to be careful about it. I'll give much more specific instruction to anyone who seems to be getting close to him but the essential bits are - you want to be here, it's ridiculous that anyone would threaten or coerce you into being here if you didn't want to be, you might be exceedingly transactional about your intentions towards Keltham but it's your transaction that you expect to enrich you. You can, if you'd like, have one mean boyfriend who didn't treat you like that in your backstory, especially if you've got hangups to explain, but coordinate with me so you don't all do it. I do not want people who are inexperienced with pain in bed, or sexually inexperienced generally, trying to let Keltham hit you; we're working with a narrative where some people really like that, and most pain here or in Hell is because some people really like that, and if you've obviously managed to talk yourself into it that has decent odds of coming out. 

 

You are going to not lie to him about anything that's not essential. I get transcripts, I will light you on fire, you will be grateful I did because otherwise my boss would have to do it and he has a longer attention span for it. The key thing here is that Keltham notices different features of the world than us so we don't, actually, know all that much about how to lie convincingly to him. So the less you force us to fit into the lie, the easier our lives are. Say 'I don't feel ready to talk about it', say 'I should have learned that in class but it was the week my sister died so I wasn't paying attention', say 'I'm having a hard time putting it into words', say 'can I recommend you a book? I forget all the details myself'. You all want to show off by being competent, but we will get more out of Keltham if we are weak, flawed, confused, and therefore wouldn't be expected to have good answers to all of his questions. He already thinks everyone in this world doesn't know how to think. If you can't think of a true thing to say, or an approved in-story thing to say, the thing to do is to let him believe that even harder. 

 

Questions?"

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Ione speaks first.  She's recovered, now, something of the demeanor of a student among other students, when she needs to play that role.  "I already offered myself up to Keltham as somebody who would do anything he wants without asking anything in return.  I'm not actually into pain, but didn't take that off the menu at the time for obvious reasons.  I didn't represent myself as already experienced in service, or as desiring him sexually, if it's important that I lie about neither of those things.  Further guidance?"

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"...I think that works fine, as long as you keep not lying about those things. Did he not immediately ask what you were getting in return?"

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"I represented myself as being willing to do it for the knowledge, when I made the offer."  Ione smiles briefly; she would be willing, under entirely different circumstances.

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Paxti's shiny new arcane sight shows that the circlet Carissa now wears is a powerful magic item.

"You've got an intelligence headband.  When do the rest of us -"

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"We're going to delay it as long as we can because outmaneuvering smarter Keltham's going to be even harder, maybe impossible. Officially, Acquisitions said it'll be two weeks and I went ahead and ordered one myself, which I can afford to do and you can't because I've been earning a generous salary from Cheliax for my work at the Worldwound for six years and you haven't. The gossip is that this is because, you know, some intelligence headbands are cursed, and even worse some are just a tiny bit cursed, make you see things in a particular light, and optimistically Acquisitions is making really sure the project headbands are good and pessimistically, well, they could be manufacturing them a little cursed. Please attempt to have a little bit of subtlety in causing this gossip to reach Keltham's ears. I actually suspect that only the 'optimistically' part needs to be said and he is competent to fill in the rest. 

Also we are going to be hiding a lot behind you guys not actually being all that well-educated, not actually knowing that much history or politics or economics, because magical education in Cheliax is very specialized. The smarter you are the harder it is for you to make innocent mistakes. 

Keltham is under the impression you were screened for willingness to bear his children; I think that's just true, but if it's not, you now explicitly have permission to lie about it. Keltham is under the impression you are getting generously paid; I think that's just true, because I have told everyone that we're doing as few lies as possible, but if it's not, you have permission to truthfully say 'I was told we would be generously paid and if the money isn't there I'm going to go to whoever's in charge here and make a nuisance of myself' and then to come to me, and maybe to lie after that depending what's up. Keltham is under the impression that if you didn't want to sleep with him, no one would make you; you have permission to lie to him about that, but also, if you find yourself getting cold feet in bed, you won't actually be punished for telling Keltham 'wait, I think actually I'm not ready and I just want to cuddle', because that presently advances our goals. That said, if Keltham ignores you about that, that would be great news for the project and you should make sure he has a really pleasant time about it and ends up with the impression he was right to ignore you. I strongly expect that if you try to tease him by getting him really turned on and then saying 'no' he'll just give you a hug and say it's okay, so if you are trying this route you're going to have to try something a lot subtler and cleverer than that, and you should run it by me. 

We aren't telling him about the soul arrangements, but if he somehow learns of it, the line is that it's normal for people in dangerous lines of work to arrange their afterlife in advance so they don't end up in Avernus in general processing, and that as a bonus these business arrangements are hotly competed for among devils so a good negotiator can get some reasonably powerful magic out of making their afterlife arrangements. But that's only if he somehow finds out. I, and some of your colleagues, don't have arcane sight, because our contractual arrangements were a bit different; we're still working out the best story for that so for today you should conceal having it. 

Other things you are explicitly expected to lie to Keltham about: who his god is. It's going to be an obscure Tian one. Whether all fourth-circle clerics have a weaker personal aura should they differ from their god in alignment; it doesn't come up much in Cheliax because it can't happen with an Asmodean cleric but you'd expect they wouldn't. Whether Cheliax is systematically concealing things. Whether Hell involves involuntary torture.

And, of course, everything to do with the character of Cheliax as a nation. We're going to be pretending that Cheliax is Taldor."

And she explains her reasoning, again, and explains the key outlines from the fake timeline and from the books about Taldor. 

"At this time I'll take questions, but my plan is actually for you to spend the rest of the morning learning enough about Taldor that you can be a magic-tracked shut-in who plausibly lived there."

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"So I've been thinking," begins Paxti, "and I realize it was just a book, but I don't see any reason why the plot of The Damnation of Sir Nicolau wouldn't work in real life if the target was Keltham instead of a paladin.  Only with a series of different girls, rather than one woman with a disguise amulet.  First girl, obligate fetish for being forced, requires him to role-play forcing her, but she asks him to do that in advance.  Second girl, loudly remarks about how she can't achieve sexual satisfaction without being forced and it doesn't work for her if she has to explain it to the man, and we all explain to Keltham what she's hinting and encourage him and note how she never said she didn't want it, he tries it, it seems to go well for him.  Third girl, always staring in fascination while that's going on, but looks away blushing and can't seem to talk about it.  Fourth girl acts angry but in a way that's obviously sending mixed signals.  Fifth girl is straight angry at first, but warms up once she's pinned down.  Sixth girl begs him to stop and acts overtly horrified, but by that time he's so used to it always being a pose that - wait, I skipped one in the sequence, in the book there were seven -"

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"In the book Sir Nicolau damned himself on the sixth* disguise, but she kept going to be sure they ended up in the same depth of Hell together, after she killed him and herself," corrects Ione.  "...not that I'm agreeing this is the slightest bit workable as an idea.  If Keltham is a sadist then dath ilan has sadists and his world will have romance novels and he will notice that we are running the stereotypical plot of a romance novel on him."


(*) Romance novels approved and distributed by the Chelish government may not accurately represent exactly which sexual behaviors first produce alignment shift.

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"Dath ilan actually discourages its sadists from noticing, because - Keltham thinks - they haven't got people who like pain and they haven't got any other outlets aside from paying people a ton of money for it, which I think wouldn't even be as fun. But I do think he'll notice if we're running the plot of a romance novel on him, it's too - you wouldn't expect to run across those people in that order unless something was up. And unless you're very good at faking sexual reactions he'll notice what you're actually into, dath ilan does train that skill. Also Keltham has in common with paladins that in real life the biggest barrier to seducing them is them endlessly going 'I don't want to risk you having a child I couldn't take proper responsibility for'. I think there's no point trying to convince Keltham that that's Good, I get the sense dath ilan has lots of children-related taboos which we should mostly just try to steer very far clear of. -relatedly, you're not allowed to point out to him that he could use magic to make you have an abortion. 

That said if anyone does have a convenient fetish for being forced that seems valuable. And once he's had some time to adjust we might be able to work with having threesomes where one girl forces the other and if Keltham objects both of them are like 'we're having a great time here????'."

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"I have the convenient fetish, not obligate but would be easy to pretend it is," reports Pilar. 

"Unlikely to actually be sexually attracted to Keltham under any circumstances, will need training to fake it if he had training to detect it," says Asmodia, after some inward agonizing about how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like she's being noncompliant.

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"It might be good if attraction to Keltham is not represented as universal, for plausibility reasons. Maybe just tell him you take a long time to develop attraction, though, and put some effort into learning to fake it, so that if it's convenient later we have the option. Pilar, I authorize you to lie and claim it's obligate, as seems situationally appropriate." Carissa is trying to be VERY SERIOUS about authorized lies to Keltham only in case that helps people break the habit of habitually lying about everything. 

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Paxti and Ione seem to have developed their own sub-conversation.

"Adventure of Ameron," Paxti says.

"I don't think any of us can convincingly fake being half sea-creature," retorts Ione.  "I'll concede you could come closer than many."

"I meant metaphorically - never mind.  A Girl Corrupted By Books but with Keltham as the girl."

"Fine except for the part where the outcome is the exactly precise opposite of what we want."

"I'm not suggesting we run the entire plot, I'm suggesting that in real life it would inevitably go wrong for Keltham and then we'd get what we want.  Perverting Adan."

"That is literally the worst idea I've ever heard.  It violates -"

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Now both of their hair is on fire. Just a little bit of fire, a cantrip of fire, if they're good at patting out fires it won't even burn their hands. "We don't have much time before Keltham is done preparing spells, and you all need to spend it becoming familiar with Taldor. Are there any more questions."

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None that any dare speak aloud.

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"Great! Keltham has no reason to think I have any authority here and you will lie about that if he asks. Let's all sit together and read about our history."

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They scatter to desks, but even with more than one girl to a book, there's not enough books for girls.  "I'd offer to grab another copy of Taldorian Chronicles from Ostenso, but Keltham knows I can do five a day and he might ask where the first one went," Ione notes.  "It sounds like he'd accept my saying that I reserve a book-use per day for personal reading, but that's a lie so I'm checking it."

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"Yes, you can say that if it comes up."

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Ione briefly goes into the library's other room and returns with an additional copy of the Chronicles.  She's curious about whether anyone else here has been told the full story about her, yet, but she's not going to ask.

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"When you run across something that's interesting or memorable or especially anything surprising, anything that wouldn't be true of Cheliax, share it."

 

And they can get to reading about Taldor. Carissa's so glad she doesn't live in Taldor. It sounds like a tedious undirected nest of snakes.

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Shortly after Keltham is done praying there's a knock on his door.

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Keltham shall accordingly go to the door and open it.

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It's a man of about 40, wearing glasses. "Keltham? I'm, ah, a researcher studying minor and geographically bounded deities at the University of Westcrown, and I was asked yesterday to figure out, uh, which god you are probably a cleric of. I have the report here, would you like me to leave it, or stay and explain it?"

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"I wish I could say I'll no doubt understand the entire thing on my own, but this is not in fact the case.  I can read through it first, unless you think it's better to preface it with something."

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"No, go right ahead." He hands Keltham eight handwritten pages, bound together with thread. "I can wait in one of the sitting rooms?"

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"Sure."  Keltham takes and reads, leaving his door open.

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The researcher's best guess is that it's the Lawful Neutral deity Yaezhing, worshipped in a small coastal country in distant Tian Xia. He has copied from other texts some pictures of Yaezhing's symbols, and they're not a perfect match for the illusion that appears on peoples' foreheads when Keltham casts his fairness spells but they're not far off, and it's noted that these are from adventure memories by Avistani adventurers who passed through the country, so the likeliest explanation for the mismatch is poor recollection. One of the adventure memoirs claims confidently that Yaezhing is Lawful Evil but that memoir has a number of errors.

 For completeness he's also included some other symbols that are approximately as good a match, with notes on why the relevant deities were disqualified - this symbol is a good match but the god is a nature god who usually takes the form of volcanos and doesn't pick clerics. This symbol is an acceptable match but the god is a Chaotic Evil demon lord of the Abyss, best known for the time he led a bloody campaign to wipe out all the descendants of Azlant. This symbol is associated with an ancient Azlant god thought to be dead. And then gods without symbols but which otherwise seem like good matches: Kofusachi is attested to have truth-telling and trading spells, which is incredibly promising, but he's Chaotic Good - his domain is something like abundance and the state of resources where they are so plentiful one needn't be bothered to charge for them. Possibly he's hoping Keltham will bring that state to Golarion? No symbols similar to Keltham's are attested but a page of further information on him has been included all the same. Abadar is a Lawful Neutral god of commerce but his symbols are extremely well known, they're these, and his first and second-circle spells offered to his clerics are also well known, they're spells for ship navigation and preventing goods from rotting. Just in case he stopped by a church of Abadar in Westcrown to ask if Abadar has a lesser known aspect or associations with this symbol, but they didn't recognize either the symbol or the spell. 

With that established here's all that is known about Yaezhing. It's not very much. One of the memoirs has only a single passage, copied in full into the report; it claims that the people of this small coastal country live in great prosperity despite their lack of fertile land, for their god grants them freely knowledge of truth, and so they all trust each other and trade fairly, and mock the peoples of larger cities who by necessity trust no one and must stand watch at night against thieves. One of the others gives Yaezhing's divine realm, Setsendu, in Axis, and a domain of his as Justice; the third is the one that claims Yaezhing is Evil, and that Setsendu is in Hell, but agrees that Justice is a domain of his, as are Cooperation and Trust. Idols of him are drawn with bulging eyes, a long face, and a red beard, but that's indicative of practically nothing, especially with the gods that aren't ascended humans. There are vanishingly few books on him in Avistan; the author says he's reached out unsuccessfully to other libraries, and there's probably mentions buried in some of their books but it'll take a long time to find them.

 

And the page on Kofusachi, just in case it's actually Him somehow: Chaotic Good god of prosperity and abundance, mentions (meticulously copied, not very detailed) of trading and truth-telling spells, primarily worshipped in Tianjing, called The Laughing God, holy symbol is reportedly a 'string of seven coins'.

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Keltham reads through it all slowly; there's a lot of unfamiliar terms here, and he is more than usually on the lookout for things that don't make sense.  That Golarion itself, does not make much sense, is the central problem there; but still, Keltham is looking, and noticing the many small confusions.

Kofusachi:  Has the trading and truth spells.  Doing coordination correctly could look Chaotic to the locals if there's a norm, a single uniform way of doing things, that isn't correct coordination.  The god of coordination could look like Good, if, say, good general levels of social coordination are a public-good, and public-goods are what everyone unselfishly wants everyone else to have?  The god of coordination could be mistaken for a god of prosperity and abundance, if people didn't understand what was producing the prosperity and abundance.

Yaezhing:  If there's gaslighting going on, then Yaezhing is obviously the god they want him to believe in.  Yaezhing hasn't had much impact on his people, for being the god of coordination; but then, coordination isn't quite the same concept as industry, and no god anywhere has granted Golarion real technology and science.

...he knows too little of gods to know which parts are confusing because they're fiction, and which parts are truth that confuses the alien with the wrong priors.

Keltham will keep this document, obviously, and later check it against other archival-type writings to see if a noticeable difference of style between other archived writings, and these supposedly variously sourced writings, suggests a LARP writing team having frantically produced them overnight.

Also the words 'Good', 'Evil', 'Lawful', and 'Chaotic' are repeated often enough for Keltham to notice that the person who granted him Share Language (Taldane) last night probably had a slightly different concept of those terms than Carissa?  'Good' seems innocent, naive, an object of a kind of contempt that has little currency in dath ilan; Carissa’s ‘Good’ sounded more like dangerous fanatics out to optimize you even if you tell them not to.  'Evil' feels like it has undertones of power and sadism in a way that seems reminiscent of some things Carissa said in the cuddleroom, but in a sort of creepy icky gloating status-laden way; 'Lawful' has undertones a lot like 'Evil'; 'Chaotic' sounds like dangerous insanity and wild predators.  The connotations are subtle and hard to describe; the connotations already hammered into Keltham's brain yesterday are competing with them.  He already knows those words of Taldane, or his brain thinks it does.

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Keltham goes hunting for the scholar, finding him in a nearby sitting-room.

"I hope it's not too much of a surprise or an imposition if I say that most of what I need to understand this is background material," Keltham says.  "For one thing, I was previously under the impression there were a lot fewer gods than this seems to imply, and that they were all global rather than regional entities.  What are the numbers like in total?"

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"We don't know. There are fourteen gods with well-established churches on this continent; most of them also have presence in Tian Xia. Then there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of more minor entities that create only a few clerics at a time. Those are often geographically bounded, possibly just because if their gods are small they can't pay attention to a very large share of the plane. We believe there are many gods who never pick clerics. Gods are sort of only a human category anyway, for 'entities that can cleric us'; Pharasma and, say, Yaezhing, are going to be very different entities. It's said that there are things next to which Pharasma is small, and we are preserved because they're not paying attention, but no one has any proof beyond visions they had."

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"What does it mean that Yaezhing is a geographically bounded god?"

Keltham is trying one of the first Deliberately Deceptive Maneuvers he's done outside of Diplomacy / LARPs, Assuming The Premise.  Keltham has noticed confusion about Yaezhing being Tian-only and mainly about a small coastal country, because smaller gods can't pay attention widely, and that god managing to pick up his prayer in Cheliax.  Rather than asking explicitly about this and giving the scholar a chance to correct an unintended implication of a lie, Keltham is instead asking how Yaezhing is bounded rather than whether Yaezhing is bounded.

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Aspexia Rugatonn needed to check over Cayden Cailean's oracle anyways.

As long as she has to visit, goes the reasoning, she might as well visit Keltham right after he gets morning spells and run Spell Gauge over him to avoid further surprises.

As long as she's doing that, she might as well use her personal Detect Thoughts tool, which adopts the user's strength for purposes of determining Will saves of the target, on Keltham.

Aspexia informs the agent of what Keltham is trying.  She doesn't bother explaining who's sending the message; the agent doesn't need the distraction.  Also, somebody had better have been on the ball about matching writing styles very perfectly with real archives, or else they're going to have to fake all the other archives Keltham ever looks at.

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"Generally, a geographically bounded god's interventions happen within a specific region, and most of their attention is allocated there. To pick a geographically bounded god we know more about, Mazludeh is the goddess of sacrifice and stewardship - Neutral Good. She's active in Holomog, a country south of here. She tends to have about twelve clerics at a time, most of them selected when they first visit one of her temples in Holomog; on some occasions she's chosen someone elsewhere, but always someone who had been near her clerics when they travelled - suggesting that Her attention was following their cleric. I've written to the Worldwound to ask if Yaezhing's priests are there right now, as that's the likeliest mechanism; our representative there didn't know offhand, but they probably are. Even small Lawful countries usually send a couple of representatives to the Worldwound on general principle. Or Yaezhing might not be a geographically bounded god at all! Our references are too limited to be sure."

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Keltham notes down this exact response to his unspoken question as a slight bit of evidence that they're reading his mind or talking to devils smart enough to model it eerily perfectly, but it's only slight evidence; if Keltham can think of it, so can they, Keltham supposes.  There hasn't been very much other evidence of his hosts reading his mind, not counting Lrilatha seeming to know exactly how to talk to him, and Lrilatha is a more plausible big special case.

"I would have expected more for there to be a systematic compendium of entities that have clerics, if there's only a few hundred of them, and especially entities with clerics at the Worldwound..."  Keltham says.  "Any simple way of getting a count on all the Lawful Neutral gods with clerics there, or even asking them all for a one-paragraph summary of what their gods are about?"  It is really bizarre to Keltham that info like this has not already been collected.

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Aspexia isn't out of range yet; she warns the agent to be more careful with using information from subjects who don't know mind-reading exists.

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Noted. (He'd be much more panicked if he knew who was talking to him.) "We have a list of all the churches that are signatories to the treaty. For a list more comprehensive than that...there's not really a way to get one? The Worldwound is a hundred miles across; the perimeter is therefore 650. There are three hundred forty-four different heavily warded fortresses on the perimeter. Eighty one of them are ours, and we host some foreign adventurers, and probably have records of any weird clerics who've stayed at one of our fortresses. But the Tian nations are mostly on the other side, and it's not traversable except by teleport, and civilians aren't really welcome, so you'd have to convince some of the soldiers to do it."

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People can count to 344.  If you divide up the work among 43 people they only need to census 8 fortresses apiece.

Keltham doesn't pursue this further, though; it matches too much other strangely missing competence to seem relatively anomalous.  He just needs to keep better track of whether the incompetence tends to get in the way of anything that might possibly maybe incentivize him to be anywhere but Cheliax.

"Sorry for even more basic questions but remind me of how many hours, or days, of unskilled labor, it takes to buy a teleport to the Worldwound from Tian."  Does the basic picture on international trade even make sense here.

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"...in Cheliax it'll run you 1400gp, which is twenty unskilled labor-years, double that for a round trip. I don't know Tian prices and they probably vary a lot country-to-country by how many high level wizards there are and by how far you are from the Worldwound - a single teleport can only travel up to about 1000miles - it varies by caster circle -- so that price reflects needing two Teleports. In, say, Irrisen, you can do it in one jump so the price is probably around half that, not that I've been to Irrisen."

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Okay, it taking twenty labor-years just to get him here from the Worldwound is not actually a thing that Keltham had previously known was the case.  He supposes that degree of scarcity rhymes with Carissa saying that a thousand people are the country's effective real military power.  Golarion's economy is insane, like, not literally inconsistent with itself, but it is going to go on being really weird until Keltham figures out the internal rhythm that makes all the different facts be predictable from premises smaller than themselves.  Also his implied startup debt is bigger than he thought and he should be less worried about adding small bits to it and more worried about paying back the startup debt sooner.

"Excuse me a second, recalculating entire probable state of all international trade," Keltham says absently.

When Keltham is done, "Have you ever heard of a Lawful Neutral god that tries to prevent... giant messes, disasters?"

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"No? I mean, lots of them probably do, but I've never heard of one who had that specifically in their portfolio. Which means they don't openly have a church in Cheliax or any of our neighbors."

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Worth a shot, but either he's been warned off answering, or the Broomgod really is that secretive.

"What factors control how, when, and where clericing entities can communicate with or influence clerics?"

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"I think the general consensus about gods is that they are primarily constrained by treaty with one another and by very general resource constraints - so they can do most things, but some things are very costly, and some things they've promised not to. A smaller god would be more resource-constrained and the Lawful gods are more treaty-constrained."

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"I'm really hoping for a lot more detail than that.  All the other facts along the lines of 'they can see where their clerics go, so can use that to pick new clerics'.  Has anyone measured the distance a cleric can move away before a god stops hearing prayers directed at them from nonclerics nearby the cleric?  Does it vary with other measurables about the god that you can use to infer a central strength-factor with which both cleric sight distance and other factors vary?"

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"....no?"

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the number one thing that is IMPLAUSIBLE about this place is how much supposedly NOBODY HAS EVER TRIED TO FIGURE OUT ANYTHING IMPORTANT but nobody would LIE using THAT LIE they would make up FAKE DATA so it didn't look like AN ENDLESS STREAM OF HIDDEN INFORMATION and maybe they are playing one ply deeper than him and KNOW THIS IS HOW HE'LL FEEL and WANT HIM TO FEEL THIS CONFUSED but nonetheless AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

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Keltham gives up on subtlety; if that was what somebody was hoping for, they have gauged him perfectly.  "My god can't seem to contact me.  I can tell they want to, I can tell they can't, what's going wrong and how do I fix it."

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" - huh. Possibilities: there's some treaty prohibiting them from doing so. If there is I don't know anything about it. They are a localized god and you're too far away for them to do something as costly as that. They don't know how to talk to mortals without overwriting their brain, Nethys is known to have that problem."

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"Overwriting -"

Ione, says a part of himself in sudden horror.

"Does that - destroy their mind-state?  Overwrite their soul, nothing left for the afterlife but a copy or a fragment of Nethys?"

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"He did it a couple of times thousands of years ago when He was a new god and then stopped. We have records of how the people all went irretrievably insane including when dead but we don't know very many details on the nature of the irretrievable insanity. And now He drops levels on people but doesn't talk to them. He's an extreme case, but Asmodeus also doesn't ever talk directly to mortals, He communicates to devils who then attempt to translate for us."

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"Who else doesn't talk directly to mortals?  What do Asmodeus and Nethys have in common?"

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"I think most of the gods that aren't ascended humans talk to mortals rarely if at all. - the gods that ascended via the Starstone are Norgorber, Iomedae, Aroden, and Cayden Cailean, and the general understanding is that they're better at talking to mortals because they can use an internal copy of their mortal mind as an interface of sorts. Nethys is also technically said to be an ascended human god but His ascension process was different and drove Him mad, reportedly. And then there are scattered other ex-mortals: Irori, Lawful Neutral, who ascended through attaining perfection; Erecura, a Lawful Neutral god of secrets and soothsayers and the Queen of Dis, in Hell; Milani, Chaotic Good goddess of bloody revolutions."

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"Remind me of the alignments and interests of the Starstoners?"  Keltham remembers that Norgorber is the god of crime, but was pretending not to be carefully memorizing that at the time.

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"Norgorber, Neutral Evil, god of crime; Iomedae, Lawful Good, god of fighting Evil, particularly Abaddon and the Worldwound and Zon Kuthon but She's not best friends with us either; Cayden Cailean, Chaotic Good god of drink - uh, of mind-altering substances, and freedom and adventure. Aroden, dead Lawful Neutral god of colonization and population growth, sometimes glossed as 'god of humanity' because He was strongly in favor of more of us."

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"Oh right, I've been told not everyone here is human."  Which did seem potentially kinda important, especially the species that supposedly couldn't interbreed with humans, and might therefore be actual different species instead of heritably shapechanged humans.  But there were just too many important things at once and Keltham didn't want to interrupt his lesson to ask.  "Who are the nonhuman ascended gods?  Could those gods talk to humans after they ascended?"

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"Uh, the elves have their own pantheon, I don't think it has any ascended former elves in it. Milani was a half-elf. There is a god who is an ascended rat, Lao Shu Po, but I've never heard of anyone successfully talking to Her. Sarenrae's an ascended angel but She doesn't directly talk to Her followers, She sends heralds."

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"How... did the rat manage that.  This drastically contradicts my fragile picture of how I thought anything did or possibly could work."

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"Ours too. I do not know the answer to that question. The conventional one is that She ate the corpse of a Tian god and thereby ascended, but that's hardly more satisfying."

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Keltham spends more time attempting to acquire knowledge and debug his current theological problems, sort of losing track of time actually, not least because he does not have a wristwatch or any other means of keeping time, and taking away a dath ilani's wristwatch when they're already in the middle of asking Additional Questions is sort of like yanking the breathing tube out of somebody who already wasn't breathing.

He acquires a slightly better and still incredibly confusing picture of Golarion theology, with certain selective omissions and alterations.

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And it absorbs lots of time, which is good, because hopefully downstairs everyone is all briefed on Taldor. 

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No plan survives first contact with the enemy but they're as prepared as they can be.

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What do you mean it's already lunchtime!?  Somebody should have informed Keltham before this!  Now he doesn't have time to prioritize his remaining Additional Questions and ask those before he has to go!  Oh no, has Carissa been waiting patiently in her bedroom for him to show up and get his shirt laundered this whole time?

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This researcher doesn't know that but he can take letters, if Keltham thinks of further questions.

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Carissa even had enough time to prepare spells and she's delighted about it. (She prepared the ones for the Improbable Escape, mostly.) She's sitting alone by the window in the dining room, looking through a book about The Year of Four Kings, from when Taldor and Cheliax were unified, that they decided didn't require any modification.

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"Good morning well not morning any more but same essential principle!"

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"It's morning somewhere! ...is it all right with you if I convey the information needed to settle the sadism bets, which is just 'yes' or 'no', or should I not do that, it occurred to me this morning that you might have privacy intuitions or something."

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"Oh, yeah, it's fine.  I mean, maybe run it past me before you release exact details of what we did together, not saying no, just saying not sure how I'd feel, but the general fact is fine."

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Carissa gives a table across the room a thumbs-up. There are giggles. "I'm not planning to say anything else," she assures him. "I don't quite understand the whole concept of spoilers but that seems like it might fall under it."

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Keltham tries a new question, gets a surprising internal blip.  "Though - if it's not somebody planning on sleeping with me at some point - actually I seem to have emotional reservations about you telling all of the exact details to Security and Governance?  But I'm also aware that this may not be reasonable or the most important consideration.  So, maybe ask me if they need all the exact details, and I can decide in more detail what to feel about it.  Also happy about routing it to any entities with no sexuality, but don't assume that's necessary if it's incredibly expensive."

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"That describes lots of devils but they're probably pretty expensive, yeah. I don't think they should need the exact details, rather than broad things like 'no I'm not pregnant, no you don't have such extremely narrow tastes that we need to start a nationwide search'. If they ask more than that I'll ask you."

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Keltham knows he is probably supposed to find something flirtatious to say but his mind is coming up blank and it's still blank and it goes on being blank and finally Keltham gives up and says, "Well, for whatever it's worth, your attractiveness remains a stable aspect of yourself between yesterday and today.  Oh, and I've got the notes for some of the sexual questions and topics I managed not to talk about while we were in the middle of fucking.  But I probably shouldn't hand all of those to you right now, should probably be more of an evening thing."

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"For notes on sexual questions I can make some time in my busy evening schedule. Anyway, I'll have a headband by then, maybe it'll make me better at explaining things."

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"Oh, that's good news!  Project resources coming through?"

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"No, actually! I tromped over to Acquisitions this morning once it seemed like you were occupied and asked what the delay is and they were still like 'eh, couple of weeks, we don't think it'd be beneficial to rush', so I said, fine, I've been at the Worldwound for six years, I nearly had a headband amount of money saved up anyway, I'm getting paid much more now, how much of a loan on my future salary are we talking about, and it was six days, so I bought one."

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Keltham almost asks how much she is getting paid, but the financial amounts are conspicuous in their absence from her sentence and there might be some reason for that; he'll ask later in private.  Or he'll just ask - "I should probably go talk to somebody about, like, project resources, rushes or not rushes, whether Governance has any priorities, and all that.  Though before then - I don't need Share Language until tonight, and could arguably wait until morning depending on timing, but can you wizardboop my clothing at some point before I talk to any Serious People."

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"Yes." And she does that. 

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So long as that's happening anyways, can Keltham feel the magic at all, while it's going on next to him?

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No. 

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Keltham hopes he is not cursed to just remain a cleric.  Keltham also wants to be a wizard!

Well, Keltham can spend some additional time trying to learn that, but Keltham should talk to project management before he sets his day's schedule, and before then, he should eat lunch, having failed at breakfast.  What does the menu look like today in Cheliax?

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Stuffed pheasant, rolls, various kinds of fish in various kinds of sauces, fruit tart things.

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Fat, protein, carbs, cool.  Simple low-tech fare, but the novelty of it hasn't worn off.

Keltham fills up a plate and stops by Carissa's spot to inquire about Golarion's pre-existing people-who-just-had-sex etiquette, if any, w/r/t his eating lunch with Carissa the day after, vs. eating lunch at the more populous table.

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"It is that you should do what makes you happy."

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"I suspected you were going to say that, and I already predecided what I would do regardless of the object-level etiquette answer if that was your meta-answer, so I would be able to tell you that your etiquette answer definitely wouldn't influence me, but I still want to know what the etiquette is, if there is one."

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"Eating lunch with the girl you just slept with implies you are inclined to get attached one at a time - not monogamy, but, like, one developing-relationship gotten to a certain point before you pick up a new one - and eating lunch with all the other girls implies not-that, and there isn't etiquette about which one to imply and in this case there isn't even really the risk you'll mislead people since everyone knows you are an alien and nothing you do will have the normal implications."

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"Whether I can get attached to more than one girl at a time is an interesting question I guess I'll find out the answer to.  But I expect I can be attracted to more than one girl at a time."

Keltham goes to sit down by the other girls.  He's not quite sure what to say to Carissa, feels pressure to have clever and intelligent things to say to Carissa, and it's easier to be part of a larger conversation with people he's seen less immediately.

That this is a stereotypical dath ilan Boy Thing To Do doesn't change that Keltham is, in fact, a boy, and doesn't want to expend the mental overhead on defying his gendertrope doomfate right now.

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He's so bad at being Evil!!! This is going to be such an uphill battle!

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"Hi Keltham!" Meritxell says brightly. "Are there lessons today?"

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"Good question!  Probably!  What specifically the lessons are is something I'll know better after I talk project priorities with project management which I really need to go actually do.  Oh, by the way, point of curiosity, how much are you currently being paid, and then whatever the quantity is can you translate it into hours of unskilled labor?"

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Well shit. 

 

If anyone has an established answer to that they need to tell Meritxell immediately. "My contract's just for the week, I'm going to have to renegotiate it afterwards," she says. No one has told her. Aaaaargh. "It's for 300gold, which is...I think around four unskilled-labor-years?" And if she gets in trouble for that it can just be less on an ongoing basis. It being a lot less than that would be weird if Keltham knows anything about what wizards go for generally.

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"Your economy makes no sense.  None.  It does not make any sense at all.  All of the sense was surgically extracted from it by advanced medical technology."

"Or are you just getting, like, 'come down here for a very strange and possibly dangerous week and then we'll renegotiate' Exception Handling Money."

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Shoot, is it too low or too high. She has no idea what Keltham's calibrated off. "The latter? When they grabbed us I don't think anyone knew exactly what we were being hired to do besides, uh, hang around an alien our age who Asmodeus had said to be helpful to."

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"What does a regular wizard of - whichever circle you are - get paid?"

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"Like, a tenth of that, if they're spending most of their time on things that make money."

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0.4 years / week, week is 1/50 year or so... "So twenty times more than unskilled labor.  Okay, that's not too bad, that's a relatively well-paid person in dath ilan but not mad superboss money."

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(Very little labor remaining in dath ilan is labor that requires no prior skill, practice, or native talent.  But the fact that there are a few things like that which need to be bid into any market, and that everybody has that particular resource to offer, makes it a reasonable-sounding sort of thing to use for a unit of account; assuming that you are otherwise the sort of people who just refuse to accept downward price stickiness and will instead repeatedly scream at everyone to adjust their damn prices more often, instead of going for an inflationary unit of account that means a different thing each year and would require adjusting all the graphs.  Some Very Serious People think this was the wrong decision, but it's got a lot of civilizational inertia behind it.)

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Good, because it is true! Meritxell really sees the merits of saying true things to Keltham. "Wizards don't start making what I think you'd call 'mad superboss money' until fifth circle."

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"And that's 1/32 of wizards, who are 1% of the population... so that checks out, you are not having most of the wage income going to a small fraction of all the people."

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"One in thirty two wizards will eventually make fifth circle but fewer than that are fifth circle at any given moment, since it takes decades," says Meritxell. "It's like....one in sixty? One in a hundred? I think it's changing now in Cheliax since we have way more people training to be wizards than we did a generation ago but I don't remember the exact numbers offhand."

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"Somebody who's already eaten a bit want to try, like, introducing themselves and their life story?" says Keltham.  "Since I actually need to eat, having missed breakfast while distracted.  Uh, feel free not to if that's not a thing here."

Keltham does start eating though.

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The girls glance at each other. 

"I'll go," says Meritxell cheerfully. "I was born here in Ostenso; my father's a wizard and my mother is a cleric of Asmodeus. She picked him out because she wanted smart children. I have eight half-siblings. My elementary school was in the temple so I didn't actually leave it until I was ...ten? It was a big temple, though, endless courtyards and secret passages and so on, and it had an orphanage, so I had lots of peers, though I was smarter than them. I had more toys than them so I traded them toys for doing all my chores. When I was nine I tested into wizard school and was absurdly excited mostly because it was all the way down the big street. When I was twelve my mother decided all this was embarrassingly uncosmopolitan and so she took me on a trip around the country by boat and that is how I discovered I get very seasick, and declared I wasn't leaving Ostenso again until I'm a high-level wizard and can Teleport. A declaration that was about to be falsified, since I've enlisted, but now here I am instead of going to the Worldwound so maybe it'll come true, who knows."

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"Huh.  That sounds a lot more normal for a genius's childhood than I think I would've expected for Golarion.  Unusually smart mom who can afford childcare for lots of kids picks out smart dads, spends part of her life having eight kids, they all live in a huge group house with lots of secret passageways, one of those kids is even smarter and ends up getting hired by a weird important project.  That could basically be the early biography of any dath ilani who's as smart for that world as you are for this one.  Except for the part where you literally didn't leave the enormous temple, which I guess makes more sense if travel is more expensive and dangerous, and the children get centralized to a particular part of the city where they don't get attacked by mind-altering cornfields...?  How many horrible Golarion things are you leaving out from that story because you don't want to embark on very long explanations of them?  Not asking for a list, just a rough quantity."

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"...none on purpose for that reason, probably several because they didn't occur to me as horrible, such as, yes, the fact it's dangerous for children to wander around outside alone, or...I had more would-be siblings who died? Probably four or five things like that if I think about it."

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Keltham's brain does automatically generate the question 'How many dead siblings?' but it doesn't make it to mouth.

"I had an odd childhood for a dath ilani," Keltham says.  "A lot less optimized than most childhoods are.  My parents weren't driven to make my life as perfect as possible, just substantially better than not existing.  I agree with them about that, to be clear, but still, a lot of dath ilani would be - well, actually were - politely horrified about it.  Like, lots of moving between different parts of Default - uh, that's the biggest city in Civilization where you live if you want to live around lots of options, and you don't have any particular reason to live anywhere else.  Other parents would've been worried about frequent moves disrupting my childhood relationships.  On their philosophy, maybe that wasn't literally optimal for me, but I'd probably be basically fine, so they went ahead and moved any time they got bored.  Single-family house-module with only a couple of secret passages, one of which was in the house library and just went around a corner from one bookcase to another bookcase in the same library.  I am currently making an error and my error is that I am not eating."

Keltham resumes eating.

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"That doesn't sound very odd for Golarion but usually it'd be because the family had a job that required moving, not because they got frequently bored."

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“How do people move around here, when their job requires it?  This villa seems like it’d be very hard to pick up intact and move somewhere else by nonmagical means, and most people can’t afford teleports so that’s not it.  Do you just swap houses and all your stuff with another family of similar size that happens to live in the right place?  Doesn’t seem like that should happen at the same time often enough, unless you have a monthly Moving Day, and Golarion seems too uncoordinated for - shutting up now, eating.”

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Everyone looks incredibly confused at him.

"...if you're a priest, there's housing in the temples for priests assigned there and children they're raising," says Meritxell. "And if you're anyone else you look at apartments in the new place and sign a contract with a landlord for an apartment that has features you want and then move your possessions there. In a wagon if you have a lot of possessions."

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That really sounds like something that would sound superficially plausible but then turn out to not work quantitatively, once you started running numbers on how many empty houses you needed all over to always have the right subtype of house available for people to randomly move into…

"So even at the cleric or wizard level, houses must not have... expensive, non-modularly-removable features that only a few people want, because you can't take it with you if you leave the house?  Just features that everybody wants, or stuff only you want that you can take with you when you leave?"

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"Or features that are common enough there'll be a vacancy that has it," says Meritxell. "It doesn't have to be universal. But if you want something absurdly specific you'll have to rebuild it if you leave."

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"Wait, how do houses get to places in the first place if you can't move them once they're built?  Like, this house looks to be way out in the middle of nowhere, if you can't move it, how did it get here after somebody built it?"

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"....they built it here."

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"So, like... there's a place that makes sections of walls and floors that are small enough to be easy to move, and they ship the sections of walls here, and a local crew assembles those into a house using tools that are also small and easy to ship around...?"

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"....you cut stone and lumber and ship them down the river and then have mules drag them to the site, and then at the site you build the stone and lumber into walls, using, uh, stonemasonry tools and saws and so on."

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"Mules drag them to the site.  Do you not have wheels."  Keltham quickly tries to recall whether he's seen anything with a wheel built into it.  He hasn't.

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"Yes, we do! Mules drag wagons to the site if it's not too steep or rocky for that."

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"Is it, like... not particularly more cost effective, the way your economy usually runs, to have one place that makes lots and lots of something; instead of making a single copy of something, wherever it gets used?"

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"Definitely not for houses, the transport costs would kill you. It...makes more sense to have one shipyard than a dozen small shipyards?"

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"Okay, good.  When I heard that you were assembling single copies of houses, from raw materials, in individual places, without even trying to build pieces of houses in a single place and assemble those pieces, I was wondering if your whole world just didn't have centralized manufacturing for some reason."

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Ione has never done anything in her life like what she's about to do, not since she was old enough to remember, and if her soul belonged to Asmodeus she probably still wouldn't have done it.

"Keltham, you're supposed to be eating," she says.

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"Right."  More food.

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...actually, even if it's relatively safer now, Ione is not entirely sure why she did that.

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No one else gives her an odd glance about it because they're too well trained. "Laborers' time isn't very valuable so for most things it's more worthwhile to send the laborers to wherever you want them laboring than to figure out how to send a bunch of pieces of something across the country," Meritxell says. "For shipbuilding it makes sense to do it all in one place because you always want your ships in the one place and you have a harbor right there to send all the materials your laborers will need and also it's quite specialized."

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Keltham nods; his not eating error having gotten so bad that even other people have started to notice, he does not reply per se.

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"Most people build their own houses," Tonia offers. "Or their neighbors come over and they all raise a new barn together, from trees they felled from the forest right there and shingles they baked in the kiln right there."

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Swallow.  "Don't hire specialized housebuilder because?"  +Nom.

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"The village has a hundred people in it and there's a specialized priest and blacksmith and tanner but that's it. Someone in the village needs a new barn raised or house built maybe once every couple years, and that's not often enough to be the only thing someone does. And you don't get visitors often enough to tell them 'oh, you should send a team of housebuilders from the city, I'm going to want a house in the spring', and if they did come you couldn't afford them. And people are idle, when it's not planting or harvesting season, so they may as well improve their land."

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Keltham bumps up the priority of 'cheaper travel' on his list, for causing people to, like...

...trade with each other instead of doing things they're not specialized in.

"How do nonwizards get between a smalltown and the nearest mediumcity to the smalltown?"

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"By boat, if it's on a river, or riding a horse, if it's not and they have a riding horse, or walking, if it's not on a river and they don't have a horse, and poor people don't have riding horses," says Tonia.

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Horse sounds like an animal and those aren't cheap, yeah.

So basic alternatives to walking, without combustion engines.  Bicycles... take relatively smooth surfaces to bike on.  "Are there roads between towns?"

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"...no?"

 

"There's a road from Westcrown to Egorian and it's new and cost the Crown - I have no idea how much money but only the Crown could've done it," says Meritxell. "Most places you travel by river or you mostly don't travel."

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So the key step on the tech tree is probably cheaper roads, then, to enable more professional specialization and trade between towns...

Keltham wishes he'd read more novels about people going to other dimensions and rebuilding Civilization from scratch, he's read like two and neither author recursed into roadbuilding.

Swallow.  "Saturated on road tech research, or not really trying it?"  Nom.

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"I don't know of any road tech research projects though probably the people who built the one from Westcrown to Egorian would've gotten very rich if they figured out some better way to do it."

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"You spent practically your whole life in a temple and then a wizard academy," Ione says, slightly scathingly.  "You wouldn't know if there was a road tech research project any more than I would.  How would any of us know?"

Meritxell, watch yourself, we're not supposed to know too much.

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Meritxell DOES know everything though. She smiles at Ione. "Fair enough."

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Something about that interaction that just happened would never have happened in dath ilan and Keltham is having difficulty putting a finger on what it is exactly.

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Ione Sala has a slight nervous feeling like she just muffed something.  Needs to cover, distract.  "Well, I might as well go next," she says.  "I was born in a middling city at the junction of two minor rivers.  My parents were a couple of low-level city bureaucrats.  Intelligent enough not to be farmers, but, not really a lot smarter than that."  Incompetent, failed, filled with searing resentment at the world for it.  "I was noticeably a lot smarter than they were, so they," hated me and did what they could to make my life more miserable without that affecting how much they could sell me for, "didn't know what to do with me, really, and wizard-tracked me," sold me like the farm animal I was, "as soon as it became clear that I was going to be a bookish wizard type.  My life is just that city, then Ostenso academy.   I also would've expected to see the larger world for the first time when I went to the Worldwound, not that I'm complaining."

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"I grew up on a farm where the nearest village was a couple hours of walking away and the nearest city much farther than that, far enough no one had been," Tonia says. "When I was seven the village got a priest and the priest said everyone had to come into the temple for school, so I went, and I hadn't seen reading or writing before but I picked them up right away, and after a couple of months I was studying with the older kids, and after a year he said I should go into the city where I could get a proper education, and the church would house me and feed me while I did, so the next time he reported back to a big city he took me with him, and I came here, and did a bunch of tests and then got put in wizard classes."

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Keltham is getting this weird feeling like he may, at some future point, predictably first-order update towards wishing he'd started industrializing Golarion slightly sooner, even if it was just by a day, or an hour.

Keltham isn't a perfect Bayesian, but he's a passable one.  By dath ilani standards.

He finishes his last two bites of food quickly and says, "So can somebody direct me to, like, office of project management?"

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None of the girls are sure where that is!

"When I talked to them they were working out of the temple but that was really temporary."

"Carissa must've talked to them this morning, she said she asked about headbands," says Meritxell.

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Rise.  Move to Carissa location.  "Should probably go talk to project management now.  Where to?"

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"One of the parlors, I can walk you there. How was lunch."

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"Tasty enough and filled with slightly disturbing accounts of houses.  Houses which, if this is considered a rich person's fancy incredibly impressive house, I should probably try to avoid imagining in any concrete detail."

Well, he should be avoiding imagining it, but in fact he is not.  Keltham is imagining people, otherwise specialized in farming, pulling down entire trees and then gluing them together - it's probably some form of chemical glue, not fasteners, metal is expensive here - until the result looks like it has walls and mostly keeps out the wind.

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Oh, good, what a safe topic that doesn't require any lying about. "Maybe someday soon they'll have nicer houses." Left down this hallway and down these stairs.

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"As near as I can currently guess, this is going to require figuring out how to build cheaper roads, onto which one can put unpowered small machines that will let housebuilders quickly get back and forth from medium cities to small towns, in order to build nicer houses, without their specialized labor being very expensive because of travel costs, which, I thought to myself, maybe I should go talk to somebody about all that."

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"Sounds great." She finds him the sitting room. 

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"Keltham," says a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun who is looking through the report on who Keltham's god might be.

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"So my parents told me.  Yourself?"

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"Marta. How can I help you."

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"I'd like to talk project resources and Chelish Governance's priorities.  Before then, do you mind if I ask what's the local larger organizational structure that embeds this project, and your place in it?"

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"Yes. My job is to track project spending, track project revenue once it has any, solicit project revenue estimates, approve briefing on the project for new people it becomes necessary to involve, and authorize acquisitions. I report to Maillol, who is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and the site director. Maillol reports to his superiors in the church, and ultimately to the High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, and to Her Imperial Majesty's staff including Contessa Lrilatha, who you've met."

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"Among my top questions is to discuss what Governance wants, in what order, where any and all particulars may be rapidly revised in the face of particular avenues proving more or less tractable.  Is Governance's value function over outcomes there sufficiently understandable to you that you're confident of your own ability to predict it with only rare referrals upward, or should I be moving upward in the management tree to have that conversation?"

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Governance is reasonably liable to change its mind a bunch in the next few weeks but probably the easiest way to give the Crown and Church more flexibility is to have as low-importance a person as possible give an explanation now which it'll then be possible for her superiors to override later if they change their minds. "That depends a little on your questions but Governance's priorities have been communicated to me and I can do my best to convey them."

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"I'll... try asking my questions, but if you don't correctly predict Management Above's answer to them, the result would be incorrectly prioritized outcomes that are potentially expensive for Governance relative to Governance's optimally obtainable outcomes, if there's anyone who can predict answers better... I'm sorry, I'm probably saying things that don't make sense for Golarion somehow."

Though - even if they don't have the dath ilani idiom of lower deciders registering their predictions of upper deciders' predictions, until you finally get to whoever in Management or whoever in the judicial courts or wherever is supposedly the gold standard for that issue - 'Don't have junior people decide macro project priorities, refer them to the top manager specialized on that project or in those priorities' is a notion that Keltham would've thought projected down to the simpler case.

Keltham is also noticing that if you try to do sensible Project Management while speaking in Taldane, this is even harder than speaking other sensible thoughts in Taldane.  Should he ask Marta if she can Comprehend Languages?  No, let's try pushing through for now.

"Before I go on, around how much of what I've already discussed with project members has been recounted to you by project members?  Or by Security or other observers?"

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"We have detailed notes on your presentation yesterday to your researchers. Some of your researchers also individually came to Projects with questions or predictions based on class conversation and also mealtime conversations; all of them are expected to do that at least by the end of the week when we'll renegotiate their salaries, but not all of them have done it yet, so you shouldn't assume we know everything you said in public to any of them."

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"So as to be clear on how much of yesterday's presentation got successfully preserved, do you mean you've got imperfect but cross-referenced notes from students afterwards, or was there an invisible wizard writing everything down verbatim as fast as I said it?"

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"A transcription spell, rather than an invisible wizard, was employed, but we believe the notes to be complete. You may look at them and issue corrections if you'd like." 

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"I'd like to review my improvised extemporaneous lectures in case I made errors or omissions that stand out as needing correction, yeah.  Thanks to whichever person for their hopefully routine competence in having set that up."

"Governance then should now have a specific, rather than abstract or secondhand, notion of what I know and what that knowledge can do.  It's built on a base level of trained skills of thinking, that work together effectively because of overlapping coherence and direction inspired by explicit mathematical structure, which were applied by my Civilization of a billion wealthier people of much higher average Intelligence to systematically decode and exploit reality to a far greater distance than Golarion appears to have traversed, leaving also incomplete traces in my personal memory of specific facts, techniques, and methodologies that I encountered in systematic or unsystematic passing."

"I know why snowflakes have sixfold symmetry.  I can turn mechanical motion into cold without a Snowball spell, but I don't know yet how much motion for how much cold.  I knew how to build a faster kind of unpowered sailing ship but it sounded like you have those already.  I know how to make an unpowered mechanical device that will let people move between cities faster than a person can run, but only if there are roads between those cities.  I know how I'd go about figuring out how to make cheaper roads, but I don't know how long that research will take or how good the end results would be.  The books in the library here are written in ways that reflect patterns of thinking that I know are invalid, and I remember some things about how to train a person as intelligent as I am so that they'll think effectively.  I know the foundational math that structured the kinds of thinking that I learned.  There is an attractor, an overlap, a center in everything, whose structure is that math, and by far the most important question is whether Golarion can be started down the path leading into that attractor and learn for itself what Civilization learned, but there remains the question of what Governance wants to see first for scaling up investment in this."

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"Many of those things are of interest to us but what we currently predict will be most immediately valuable is the habits of thought for intelligent people that make them competent to discover all the rest. For any given solution, there are often going to be a lot of Golarion-specific reasons why it's not easy to implement, and our current prediction is that little - not none - of dath Ilan's direct technologies will easily translate. But if we understand the basics of how the gods reason, and how human-level intelligences can use the reasoning patterns of the gods, then we can overcome any given complication that is due to dragons or Charybdis or the fae or whatever."

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Keltham doesn't know enough to be impressed by the sensibility of a crown-boosted Abrogail Thrune because Keltham has no reference point for the usual sensibility levels of pseudo-medieval governments.

"I suspect you underestimate how much would translate if we had the books in front of us, but we don't, and that means non-Keltham people need to know how to fill in the gaps regardless."

"Such techniques are meant to be used, however.  They are best taught as they are applied, not as pure abstractions.  In Civilization, children are not spoiled for a number of elementary physical truths and inventions so that they can learn underlying mental forms in the course of inventing them.  This regime is optimized for the final quality of the resulting adults, however, not for speed in rapidly retraining adults to the same techniques.  The point is, we will, at some point, need a starting application."

"I haven't hurried my attempts to ask for a starting project, because it would be exhausting to produce an exhaustive list of everything I might possibly be able to do, and so far it has seemed like it makes more sense to keep asking questions about local conditions until I orient, so I can understand myself which of your largest problems I can probably solve quickly.  It will still help if I have -"

"Uh -"

"Your language doesn't have a word for the thing I want, which is not an encouraging sign.  Does Cheliax have a central list of how much monetary value Governance puts on everything it usually pursues?  Like, amount of gold it's worth to cure an otherwise fatal disease in a one-year-old infant, or the amount it's worth to produce one more second-circle wizard?"

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"No. We could try to produce a partial one for you."

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"Do you have a different solution for why your government... is, like, capable of coherently wanting or planning anything, given that it's made up of more than one person?  For not having one person decide that it's not worth 10,000 gold to produce three wizards and somebody else deciding that it's worth 15,000 gold to produce one of them?"

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"The operation of wizarding schools is delegated to different people who can make whatever tradeoffs strike them as correct and then the ones who get good results for the resources the Crown has offered them get promoted. Budgets for wizarding schools are set off what recent successful people spent."

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Is that actually as horrifyingly ad-hoc as it sounds for an entire-ass government.

"I would find a partial list useful, of things Governance has previously spent money on, how much money for what results, in a way that struck upper Governance as being just barely good ideas, but good ideas nonetheless.  Where the 'just barely' qualifier tells me that the outcome was worth around that much money and not at least that much money."

"I would also suggest that Governance at some point take the time to reflect on its own operations and figure out how much it relatively wants different things..."  Keltham reflects on the techniques he got taught as a kid for carefully extracting that info, checking if it made sense, checking if anything got left out, "where standard techniques for doing that correctly and not screwing it up, are, again, something I can try to teach.  It's really not just about better forging techniques.  Civilization also knew how to, for example, manage very large projects effectively... assuming all the managers are slightly smarter than I am, so, yes, it may require adaptation, but still."

"But I've got no idea how much something like that is worth to you, or what kind of increased project resources I could get after accomplishing that, versus inventing a more visibly successful forge process that uses 30% less fuel," and neither, apparently, does Governance itself have any collective idea what it's worth to Governance.  "I realize I may sound like I'm flailing here, but right now I'm very much trying to orient at all, to what Management wants from me and how much it's willing to pay to get it."

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"I'd be happy to get you a list of projects that were just barely worth it and amounts we'd be willing to pay for different kinds of progress. Our current anticipation is that this will be things most Chelish people cannot learn, so we will benefit more from techniques that some people who have learned them can figure out how to adapt for other people who cannot."

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"Yeah, the Intelligence problem is probably the severest problem you have, if not the most quickly solvable one.  I don't suppose you'd have any idea what effective price Governance puts on raising one random citizen's Intelligence from 10 to 11, or 14 to 15?"

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"Well, as an upper bound, headbands of +2 Intelligence cost 4000 gold, so we're not willing to pay 2000 gold for it in the average case."

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"Who's the least useful person who automatically gets assigned an intelligence headband as a matter of routine?"

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"Wizards promoted into command of a unit of more than 100 soldiers, typically at fourth circle, if they haven't purchased their own years before that which they typically do."

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"That's very helpful, thank you.  At what earliest point do we start looking visibly as useful collectively as a wizard in command of 100 soldiers?"

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"You are already estimated to be more useful than that, and more resources than that are already ongoingly expended on this project; our plan is to deliver you headbands even if we do not upgrade our estimate of the usefulness of the project, but it will take a few weeks because of added security measures."

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"Ah, okay, that makes more sense compared to what I expected an intelligence headband cost and what I expected this villa cost.  Security measures?"

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"Magic items can be cursed. Usually this is not a major concern in the headband trade, because a trained wizard with specific experience in detecting enchantment and mental manipulation will notice; if we're giving them to a bunch of young students with no such training we had better be very sure."

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Keltham almost asks why checking is harder than just giving them to a trained wizard to put on, but stops himself; even he can think of unlimitedly many ways to get around that test.  "Are you worried about old cursed items accidentally getting into the system, or specific adversaries targeting this project and with access to our supply network?"

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"Specific adversaries targeting Cheliax's magic item supply chain, though it'd be surprising if they'd managed already to target the project specifically. - less surprising given how much divine intervention this project has already attracted, I suppose. Other countries have in the past tried slipping cursed magic items into our military supply chain for purposes of espionage or sabotage. What we're doing over the next two weeks is having the headbands made from scratch by trusted people, and observed during the manufacture process and while they're brought here so they can't be swapped out for others, and then we'll do some tests on site as well; then you can have them."

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He should ask Carissa about her own reasoning, before asking project management about the safety of Carissa's bypassing the system, Keltham thinks; it is not clear that everyone's organizational-internal incentives are perfectly aligned.  But he should ask Carissa about it, soon.

...actually, wouldn't another obvious reason to take a few weeks to carefully manufacture headbands, be if they wanted to custom-curse his headband?  Or everyone's, for that matter?  Hm.  Also a thing to inquire about, but subtly.  His next question was one that did occur to him immediately, but was at first suppressed as lower-priority, so his asking it for this other reason shouldn't be much likelihood-ratio to them.

"Maybe it's the wrong use of your time to ask, but if it can be said briefly, what are the consequences if an adversary manages to infiltrate one headband?"

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"Likely ones: they are able to eavesdrop. That is the obvious multi-purpose kind of infiltration adversaries frequently attempt. Also likely: they're able to use it to track the wearer's location or to tell what spells the wearer has gotten. Less likely, more concerning ones: they're able to interfere with the fundamental function of the headband, enhancing intelligence, by making some thoughts more salient or easier to apply full intelligence to, and others less so. They're able to detect at some low granularity the wants, priorities and fears of the wearer."

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Aw, crap.  Though, plus side, they would be less likely to tell him that, if they were planning to curse his headband on purpose, but still.

It's... plausible that, if Carissa can detect cursed headbands well enough not to fear them, Keltham can also detect them via sheer 'having any mental skills that even use Owl's Wisdom'; but specific training always counts for an awful lot.  And of course, Keltham only has their word that an adequate counter-training even exists.

Well, he'll figure that later.  "Back to primary topic.  What would you say if I asked you to tell me about Cheliax's most important problems, independently of whether you thought I could solve them?"

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"The Worldwound is the most urgent problem. We are allocating something like fifteen percent of our resources to containing it and it is not getting worse but it is not getting better either. After that...periodic epidemics of cholera, smallpox, polio, plague, and flu, ongoing deaths from tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrheal diseases, droughts, inadequate nutrition, the threat of war, risks from random powerful wizards doing very stupid things."

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Directly challenging Worldwound-fighting sounds like it would take weapons; weapons take trust.

Keltham is not very calibrated on how well they do at fighting epidemics, here, but if that's their second-worst problem...

"About how much would the government pay to avoid one epidemic from whichever is the worst class of epidemic, and how often does that happen?"

"And suppose that I ask somebody to come by tomorrow who's an expert on epidemics and current countermeasures, so I can quiz them.  I don't particularly expect this result, but suppose it turns out I can tell you something on the spot, that, combined with your other magical capabilities, completely wipes 'smallpox' or 'flu'.  What could I expect in return, and how would the project scale from there?"

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"I expect we would pay fifty thousand gold pieces to avoid one epidemic, noting that delaying one in one city through very good precautions usually just means it hits there later because no one developed immunity through infection. I expect we would pay something like a million gold pieces that completely made a major cause of epidemics go away if that didn't just mean all the same people die but of other things through some mechanism. I don't know what higher-budget project items you'd want - more of Contessa Lrilatha's time? More students? More miscellaneous magic items? - but we could arrange any of them, if you achieved that."

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Keltham nods; that's grim-but-true.  If plagues reduce population density to make future plagues less likely, or if people starve until their immune systems weaken and after a plague the survivors get more food per capita, those are both equilibria that will get restored around the variation of particular causes.  "I'll think more toward generalizable measures that will shift long-term equilibria of epidemic levels, rather than on specifics of one epidemic, then; if your impression is that naively eliminating one particular source of epidemic would say cause urban density or food per person to increase or decrease until the remaining epidemics became more virulent."

"I'll obviously also want a contract before solving particular things, and it'd be nice if there was some generalizing way to assess that value, rather than my constantly interrupting myself to negotiate and sign new contracts.  That's part of why it would have been useful to have a schedule of how much value the government assigns to things; we could then negotiate general percentages covering what I and other project members would capture of the value we create."

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"We will try to come up with such a schedule for you, and a proposed general contract along the same lines as the one you negotiated for general intellectual concepts with Contessa Lrilatha. If you would like I can lay out approximately the terms we'd expect that to have, though I don't have authorization to make commitments on that scale on the Crown's behalf." 

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"Understood.  Go ahead, then."

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Cheliax expects to request most of the gains, maybe 80% or 90%, of Keltham's inventions while he is repaying them for the loan of this villa and a full-time research staff and a full-time security staff; the loan will accumulate interest at the same rates any devil in Hell gets if they get a loan in Hell, usually humans have to pay higher interest rates than that but that's because, frankly, lots of humans will run away and not pay, and they both trust and can verify Keltham's assurances on that front. Cheliax expects to request much less of the gains, perhaps half, once the loans are repaid. A complication they are keeping in mind is that, uh, Cheliax doesn't have a systematic way of collecting benefits that don't literally directly accrue to the state in the form of higher tax revenues from various dukes, and it sounds like Keltham's society would have such a method. 

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Keltham's reportedly distracted again in equity negotiations! That's great, because Carissa has decided the entire harem needs to read a bunch of Taldane romance novels so that if they can't stop themselves from thinking in romance novels they'll at least be whatever kind the King in Taldor has commissioned to develop appropriate attributes in Taldane young women. 

 

 

.... it turns out romance novels in Taldor are not commissioned by an Imperial office at all, which is itself the kind of useful thing you only learn by pretending to be Taldor.

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"The women depicted here," Ione says after flipping through and rapidly skimming some of the books, "would sit around waiting for Keltham to pursue them, because they are so attractive they can't help rich nobles falling for them even if they pretend they don't want it.  I think what we've learned today is that when you don't have an Imperial office commissioning romance novels, they're written to appeal to the most self-indulgent aspects of the reader, because nobody's making the authors do anything else."

"The women depicted here," Paxti says, "are passive, weak, stupid, lifeless, ambitionless trophies.  Somebody remind me why we haven't already conquered Taldor in real life."

"I've known Keltham for a day and a half and I can already guess these women are not his type," says Peranza.

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"Your parents grew up reading stories like these, in our timeline," Carissa says tiredly. "You grew up after Hell took Cheliax to straighten us out and you got to read normal modern romance novels in which girls win the boy. Though none of the ones in which the girl wins the boy by cleverly getting all her romantic rivals' eyes gouged out, or in which the girl wins the boy by leaving him under the impression she's an important noble considering executing him unless he wins her over, and not The Damnation of Sir Nicholau. ...actually I don't know what romance tropes the slightly gentler Cheliax we're going for has. ...maybe there's a version of The Damnation of Sir Nicholau where she's trying to teach him to enjoy himself, instead of having perfunctory sex he doesn't really like, and he goes to Hell once he realizes that he wants things for himself instead of only wanting whatever's best for other people, and in every disguise she's happy and fine because she, unlike him, has been raised competent to understand what she wants and to go get it."

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"Wouldn't work as a story," Ione responds immediately.  "If she's happy and fine then there's not enough conflict from the standpoint of the viewpoint character.  She needs to be struggling with her own need for violent sex, say, at the same time as she's trying to get him to want things for himself.  Her character needs to develop to where she's competent to understand what she wants, and the end of the novel should show her successfully going after it and getting it."

"Which, again, was basically the plotline of Perverting Adan -"

"It's the plotline of any young adult novel with a female protagonist, who will, at some point, have to learn the darkness of her own desires," Ione snaps at Paxti.  "As you'd know if you read more than one book a year -"

"We can work with this, though," Paxti says.  "Give me and Ione twenty minutes, and we'll come up with new plots for everyone's favorite romance books, with storylines that fit the new Cheliax."

"I'll slit her throat before we get two minutes in," says Ione.  Ione also sees a much bigger problem with that idea, but she's curious whether Sevar will spot it on her own.

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Carissa is thinking that possibly she should ever have read a romance novel. "Sounds like keeping track of a lot of lies. I'd rather have one or two good ones that are very appropriate for what we're trying to accomplish."

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Ione nods.  It's going to be interesting to see whether, or rather, how fast, Sevar gets executed for heresy once she gets into the habit of noticing all the constant lies.

"Actually, if I can get an authorized lie on this, none of us much like reading fiction at all," Ione says.  "Cheliax has been devoting too many resources to the Worldwound, and the books written before Hell took over are trash.  If we talk about any fiction we've read, in front of Keltham, he's going to ask to see it.  Remixing fiction isn't like redoing a spellbook with Glimpse of Truth renamed to Glimpse of Beyond.  Maybe we can rush some better books from Absalom, and read one apiece before Keltham gets around to asking about that, so that we can have ever read a novel.  But if he asks before then, you tried reading novels from old Cheliax and quickly gave up."

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"- yeah, all right. In that case let's give this up as a useful reminder of how grateful we are to live in Cheliax and get back to the histories."

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They're not going to have all that much time for it.  Keltham may not be very trained to handle potential lies and gaslighting, but he was planning to be a Mad Investor, and hails from a vastly more financially sophisticated Civilization.  He's not going to negotiate and compromise with Marta, and then sit down in front of an actual authorized negotiator who takes their final compromise as Keltham's starting point and negotiates a new set of moves in Cheliax's favor.

This wouldn't usually happen in dath ilan - firstly because dath ilan would just seat both real negotiators directly, and second because the principles behind bargaining positions are better understood, such that they'd try to have bargaining outcomes be invariant to the order in which considerations are introduced.  But dath ilan does have the concept of hiding an unusually high willingness-to-pay so that sellers can't price-discriminate against you, and sending in a 'negotiator' who doesn't actually have the power to make commitments is a standard known-failure-mode-to-avoid.

Keltham will, of course say all this to Marta directly; none of that meta-information has any obvious rationale for keeping it secret.

After that, he'll ask Marta more detailed questions about terms and conditions on Cheliax's starting offer, and more questions about the current size of Cheliax's economy, and what kind of measurement difficulties they expect to run into, and Governance's likely willingness-to-pay for various goods.  But he won't negotiate; except insofar as offering his own starting remark that the offered percentages of generated value seem acceptable, if there's no gotchas in how profits or expenses are measured, and sufficient for quick agreement from there; but he wants to understand the terms and conditions before he says for sure that the starting offer is generous.

At some point, Keltham thinks, he needs to give Cheliax a lecture on fairly dividing gains from trade anyways.  If he can run through it quickly, he might as well do it today and see if that saves some time on negotiating.  If they know that dath ilani approach fairness in a very structured way, maybe he can just tap himself with his own Truthspell and the Fair Division of Gains from Trade spell, say what the fair price would be, and have them accept that.

Keltham wraps up with Marta - having hardly exhausted his unending sequence of Additional Questions, of course, but that's just what life is like for your first few weeks in another dimension - and heads over to the library.

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If Keltham is teaching again, Broom should be there to make sure Keltham does not teach anything which is obviously going to destroy the world.

Visibly or invisibly?  Broom is still within Keltham's one-day deadline for replying to Keltham's original terms.  Do the great wizards know if Keltham will be able to detect Broom again today?  Does Cheliax want Broom to be visible regardless?  Broom goes to ask a great wizard about this.

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They have Keltham's spells and he doesn't have Invisibility Purge but it seems likely that's in anticipation of Cheliax not trying to sneak any invisibility past him. They don't bother explaining that to Broom, obviously, but they tell him to be visible. If he needs to stab someone he can go invisible for that to make him harder to stop.

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Broom catches up to Keltham before he reaches the library.  He doesn't say anything, as he falls into step behind Keltham; the less he says, the less chances there are for him to fail.

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Why is Keltham's life like this?  He hopes the research harem is okay with brief explanations because he sure doesn't know what exactly is classified.


Keltham walks into the library with a very short, armed person walking behind him.  "Hi," Keltham says.  "This is Broom."

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SHIT did he learn about slavery and now he's upset about it???

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"Hello, Broom," says Carissa, sounding bored. 

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"Broom will be listening in on my lectures from now on.  Further questions should be directed to Broom, because I don't even know what anyone is supposed to think about this."

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Well he doesn't sound as mad as he'll be when he finds out about slavery????

 

No one says anything.

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He would have questions in their shoes.  "Have you, like... not noticed that you are confused about this."

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"I'm confused!" says Meritxell. "But you just said not to ask you questions and, uh, Broom hasn't said he'll take questions. And I assume Projects also isn't taking questions about this or they'd have told us about it."

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"Right.  Sorry.  Not your fault.  It's just -"

"Never mind.  For a start, today, I'm going to try to quickly review the way that dath ilani learn about negotiation -"

"Or actually no, before that, there's a test I realized yesterday I should run.  Before things go much... further."  Keltham is a little worried about where exactly he is inside reality, right now.  It's probably just a silly worry.  But yesterday with Carissa, he thought of an obvious possible way to check on it quickly, if everyone here is honest.  It might not work, but then, it might.

Keltham grabs a couple of the improvised markers from yesterday, and goes to the section of wall that was being used as an improvised whiteboard (with erasure via Prestidigitation).

Keltham first shows how to use Unanchored Scales, an experimental elicitation tool for when you just want somebody's intuitive strength of feeling about something, without them worrying exactly about what any numbers mean.  Draw a line with two endpoints representing 'not at all' and 'all the way', and then you draw a slash through the line at the point that corresponds to your intuitive strength of feeling.  You could use it to ask 'How warm is this room?' without people bugging you about how warm a '3' was supposed to represent.  It's not perfect, obviously, but the point is that the elicitation method acknowledges that imperfection up front.

Keltham then asks everybody in the classroom, including Carissa, to answer two questions, separately, anonymously, on bits of paper to fold up and mix before he looks at them.  Obviously, they shouldn't consult with each other at all before answering.  Obviously, Keltham promises to make no effort to figure out who wrote down what.  He really does want them to write down an honest answer, though, if they write down anything at all; they can draw an X-cross on the paper if they want to openly refuse to answer.


The two questions Keltham writes on the whiteboard are:

"How much do you have an unusual interestingly-complicated backstory or current problem, that I'd find out about if I got into a relationship with you?"

"What do you expect will be the average answer of everyone here to the previous question?"

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Well, shit. Does he expect they're dishonestly coordinating backstories -

- she raises her hand -

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"Carissa?"

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"Unusual for, in my case, a third circle wizard at the Worldwound, and in their case, a top student at Ostenso's Academy of Wizardry, or unusual for a random person in Golarion."

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Now that's a philosophically interesting question.  What Keltham really wants to ask is if their personal stories would seem surprisingly interesting to whoever is playing the hypothetical original LARP that this realitynovel is deconstructing.  But they're not going to have a better answer to that than he does.

Well, 'Keltham' would be the paying player of the original LARP, so...  "I think what we're looking for is the expected degree to which I, a dath ilani, would say something like, 'Wait what?' after I found out.  So the fact that you spent years at the Worldwound would be, like, a third of the way across, because it's surprising to me and matters to me, while you being secretly a dragon shapechanged into a human, if you knew I'd find that out later in the relationship, would be more like two-thirds across.  Maybe let's say it's only past the halfway point if you'd expect other people here to be surprised."

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- nod. Okay, she isn't sure what hypothesis he is entertaining, here. 

 

She will mark herself as less than halfway surprising - if Keltham somehow learns 'chosen by Asmodeus to rework theology to be dath ilani' then the whole game is up anyway - and the average as less than her because she's pretty sure the others ought to be indicating less surprisingness than that. 

 

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Tonia is pretty sure she's not at all surprising in any way unless they count the having sold her soul which Keltham's not supposed to learn about. She indicates that she is not surprising and that other people are only slightly more surprising than her. 

 

 

Meritxell would like to be a shapedchanged dragon! Or have a fascinating tragic backstory or something! Those feel like the way to be the best at this and she'd like to be the best at this. She's pretty sure if she'd had, like, a month's warning she could have had the best sexual fetishes, too, but that's hard to do from a cold start. She reluctantly marks down that she's not very interesting, which is incredibly painful to do, and that the average person is probably slightly more interesting than that, which is agonizing.

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This is probably her fault, isn't it, unless Carissa screwed up even worse.  Ione puts down a two-thirds mark, since she's secretly a very rare chosen oracle of Nethys and not just a hidden worshipper.

She gives the general class a one-half mark, hoping that others are wise enough to realize that what they're telling Keltham there is the expected degree of weirdness that's normal for Golarion, which influences how much he'll think is normal.

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Paxti puts down 1/2 and 1/3.  She doesn't have a fascinating though ordinary-for-Golarion backstory yet, but she wants to reserve space for getting one.

Asmodia puts down 0 and nearly 0.  She doesn't actually want a story.

Pilar silently writes her answers.

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Gregoria's father is the heir to the Barony of Blanes. She doesn't think this makes her very interesting; firstly, everyone knows the man in question has a thing for that, and hundreds of children; secondly, probably most other Barons are like that, thirdly, it's not as if she's ever met the man. For all she knows her mother could be lying. If it were a Duke then that'd probably count as a little bit interesting but a Baron? Not really. 

Hopefully they'll get a good distribution of claims of interestingness so that any given girl can pretend later to have assigned a different one than she in fact did, but they can't coordinate, and it's hard to guess what other people will say. 

 

Gregoria frowns at her pen for a bit and then picks at random on the unremarkable half of both lines.

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Well.  That's a very interesting response pattern.

It doesn't quite fit 'the LARP begins with 3-5 primary love interests, some of whom start out knowing about some of the others, plus a bunch of relatively normal girls who think everyone else there is also normal'.  Half the respondents thought everyone had backgrounds almost totally uninteresting to a dath ilani, which may indicate a failure of perspective-taking, or a failure to process the instructions somehow.

What he should've done was run a pilot of this procedure, asking about the degree to which everybody liked lunch, or something.

Very helpful there, obviously correct thought, but you're arriving a little too late.

"Right then," Keltham says.  "Can I get somebody to destroy these papers before the universe notices them?"

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Broom now has additional questions.

"Broom needs to see the papers before they are destroyed."

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"Broom, I was joking."

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"Broom will have questions for Keltham later.  Broom still needs to see the papers now."

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"They didn't consent to that in advance, and it does not seem appropriate to ask for their consent afterwards."

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See this is why you have to TELL KELTHAM ABOUT OTOLMENS because otherwise he will NOT treat Broom like an institution you shut up and cooperate with. But Carissa has made that recommendation in the strongest terms she can and it's over her head and she shouldn't countermand it now, and also has no justification to herself know anything about Otolmens. 

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"You also didn't tell us you were going to destroy them," Meritxell says. "I have been assuming maybe all of our notes are going to be preserved for posterity or something."

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Keltham reminds himself that he was previously angry at Broom for reasons that shouldn't influence his behavior this much, and tamps down his irritation.

"Fine.  New poll, use this symbol for destroying all notes and then Broom can ask you to re-generate them for his observation if he wants.  This symbol for Broom being allowed to look at them first before they get destroyed.  This symbol if you think it's great to preserve those notes for posterity.  Minimum vote, not average vote."

"He does have any reason, as I'm given to understand it.  But Broom, you will need to ask in advance on future occasions, this kind of after-the-fact modification is destructive of trust in implied experimental contracts."

Keltham writes down the new poll and symbols on the whiteboard, underneath the previous questions.  The three symbols are \ /, V, and X, since it should be hard to tell what somebody is writing by looking at the motions of their quill; drawing two slanted lines that optionally touch or intersect accomplishes this.

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This is such a terrifying exercise and it'd be really nice to know what Broom's deal is!!!!

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Idea, Carissa thinks grouchily. Kidnap - or hire, whatever, probably hire because if they're scared it'll mess with the data - a bunch of Taldane wizard teenagers to put through all these experiments for us to learn from how they're responding.

 

She puts a V for letting Broom look because Aspexia Rugatonn seemed to think they should cooperate with Otolmens and Aspexia Rugatonn is the expert.

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Ione doesn't know what this guy's deal is, but if he's here then Security wants him here, and she's not going to piss off Security without a reason.  She puts down V.

Asmodia puts down X.  Paxti puts down X.  Pilar writes down her own answer.

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Meritxell puts down X. Gregoria puts down V.

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Keltham checks the votes, then hands the notes over to Broom.  "The vote was to destroy after you read them."

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"Broom thanks you," he says.  Slaves learn somewhat more politeness than is usual in Cheliax for non-slaves.

Broom reads the poll results.

It does not look like a situation that is not heading into an enormous mess.

Broom will decide what to do about that later.

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"Okay, now can somebody please destroy the answers in a clear obvious way where everyone can see they were destroyed."

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"Broom, if you could set them down on the floor clear of anything, we can just light them on fire."

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Broom swiftly sets them down.

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Presumably no one has lit Otolmens's oracle on fire but possibly no one has told him not to worry about it. 

 

She lights the papers. Presumably Security, now using a scry rather than an invisible person, has been watching over Keltham's shoulder and they'll have a lengthy deanonymizing debrief later.

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"Right then.  Leaving all that aside," until their plot-induced lack of mutual communication blows up catastrophically on the whole group later, "I thought today I'd try to speedrun a couple of years' worth of dath ilani lessons for children about how fairness in negotiation works.  On the theory that, first of all, Cheliax could stand to get a glimpse of how dath ilani's children's training works in general; and second, that maybe if an adult with average dath ilani intelligence hears about children's training in the abstract, they can just imagine that they went through that training themselves?"

"The reason I'm picking 'fairness' as the topic is because I'm going to be using those structures to negotiate equity, and those procedures do tend to hope that everyone has - mutual knowledge, common knowledge, stuff that everyone knows that everyone knows - about how 'fairness' works.  Before I start, if I can ask the group - what does the term that 'fairness' translates into, in Taldane, mean to people here?"

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.....a concept for stupid people who think they deserve more than they can claim and hold, Meritxell doesn't say. 

 

     "Getting what was agreed upon."

     "Trades where - neither side is getting cheated."

     "Rules that are applied consistently or impartially."

      "Everyone gets what they earned."

      

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"How can you tell how much somebody has earned?  If you make a one-of-a-kind magical item, what price should it sell for, so that neither side is being cheated?"

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"Whatever you can get someone to buy it for," says Meritxell.

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"My shirt is a one-of-a-kind relic from another plane; it has no standard market price.  In real life, I plan to never sell it, ever, though I might sell the ability to do science to it.  Suppose however that, relative to how wealthy I expect to someday be, my shirt, one of my only memories of dath ilan, is worth one million gold pieces to me.  In the sense that, if some insidious force was otherwise going to steal my shirt from me, I wouldn't pay any more than a million to protect it."

"Now suppose somebody else has a very weird magical spell that can take any relic of dath ilan, and immediately convert it into ten million gold pieces, no questions asked."

"Any price greater than a million gold and less than ten million gold is a mutually beneficial trade, in the sense that both of us are better off making the trade at that price, than not trading with each other at all.  But if my shirt sells for only a million and a thousand gold, I'm only a thousand gold better off, and the other person is around nine million gold better off.  If my shirt sells for ten million minus a thousand, the other guy has profited by a thousand and I've profited by a bit less than nine million."

"Trading at all, at any price in the range, is mutually beneficial; we're both better off.  But on top of that event, there's another event, a question of the exact price, in which my being one gold piece better off makes the other person one gold piece worse off."

"How do we set that price, then?  Aren't we locked into an adversarial game where it's my interest to say, 'I'll only sell at ten million minus one', and it's their interest to say, 'I'll only buy at one million plus one'?  Why would we say anything else, when saying anything else just makes the other person better off at our own expense?  But if we both think like that, the trade doesn't occur at all."

"What price is fair?  Or to put it another way, how can two people like that agree on a trade at all?  How does Golarion, how does Cheliax, think about that?"

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It hasn't come up in their books about Taldor yet but Carissa's met Taldane adventurers and in fact tried to trade them things and the answer is the same there as in Cheliax. "You barter. You say 'why, I don't see why I should give up this shirt for a coin less than twenty million gold, which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade I can get', and the other person says 'twenty million! I have a hard time believing even such a sentimental item is worth more to you than an entire week of Nefreti Clepati's time during which she could make a dozen duplicates of the shirt and make you a personal demiplane besides, and that would only be eight million gold. And really it seems to me like this trade is worth your time even for one duplicate of the shirt and the personal demiplane, and that would be only eight hundred thousand gold, which is what I'm offering. Which communicates 'I'm open to negotiating a trade but would need to be persuaded it's the best trade can get'.

And you say 'my, imagine what Nefreti Clepati would say if you tried to lowball her prices like that! I'm not sure this conversation is worth my time, if my shirt is worth so little to you.' Which communicates - and you might be bluffing, you're allowed to bluff when you're doing this - that the quoted price is well outside the range that's worth it to you, and they'd better indicate that they think there's overlap between their willingness to pay and your willingness to sell.

And you iterate on this and then end up settling somewhere, the exact place depending on how competent at bartering you are and on the range of trades you both like."

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"...fascinating."

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Consider - as a dath ilani might consider it - the problem of a dath ilani cast into a strange new universe, who must trade with the aliens found there.

(It is in fact quite a common trope, in dath ilani science fiction.  But it wouldn't particularly occur to Keltham to classify this situation as that trope.  Cheliax is way too legible.  They have a currency of 'gold pieces' that they cheerfully translated for him into unskilled-labor-years.  Golarion would need to be a lot weirder before it was good Trade With Aliens science fiction.)

The aliens, one may suppose, have a biological-evolutionary setup similar enough to dath ilan's that they have epidemics, caused by viruses and bacteria and parasites.  Suppose the aliens don't know about viruses and bacteria and parasites; or vaccines or antibiotics or filtering masks or possibly even sterilization.  Nor about how one should use experiments to determine whether a disease is airborne or waterborne or touch-transmitted or transmitted through wastewater contamination or is carried by smaller or larger animals.

The dath ilani, then, knows something which this alien Civilization might find of great value.  The alien Civilization can perhaps pay for this knowledge, with some alien means of payment.

Perhaps the alien Civilization, being nonhuman (or just non-dath-ilani) tries to be stingy about it; to lowball the dath ilani; to buy their knowledge at a cost of, say, a pile of shiny metal, or title to one island in the ocean.  Depending on the exact backstory of how the aliens came to try this, and whether it was in some sense the fault of that whole civilization or just a part of it, even a non-Keltham dath ilani might well say, "Screw you, pay me."

That, too, the dath ilani are taught; in Golarion terms, the difference between Lawful Good and Lawful Stupid.

But then how high does the price need to be, exactly, for the dath ilani to agree to the trade?  By what system do you determine an answer to that?

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The notion of a fair agreement, a fair trade, a fair division of gains from trade, a fair price, plays a central role in any civilization that relies on its citizens' conscious understanding of their activities.  Dath ilan teaches the Law (mathematical structure) underpinning fairness, very carefully, and from childhood.  After all, if lots of people ended up with widely different notions of what was fair, Civilization would stop trading with itself.

In turn, the notion of 'fair trade' relies on understanding the notion of trade in the first place.

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'Jellychips', a staple of dath ilani lessons to young children, are small lumps of edible flavored gel.  Jellychips come in distinct appearances, colors, shapes, and flavors; almost always, everything with exactly the same appearance has exactly the same flavor.  Ten jellychips might mass as much as one peanut; they're meant to implement a burst of tasty flavor that's just enough to be present and pleasant.  They're tiny so that children don't get end up getting all of their calories from economics lessons.

To teach the notion of trade, you begin by passing out jellychips to children, and let them experiment a bit to find out which of their favorite flavors have which external appearance.  Then ask the children to write down which flavors they like more or less than others.  Compare the lists; observe to the children that they tend to like different flavors more or best.  (There is in fact a jellychip selection algorithm, based on previously observed food preferences among the kids, which makes sure that this happens.)  Observe to them that, by trading jellychips with each other, they could all end up with more of the kind of jellychips they want.

Let them trade, a bit, as they desire.  So long as they haven't been introduced to any formal concepts of 'fairness' to complain about, this part usually does not go too poorly, among dath ilani children.  They'll find jellychips that they have, and don't want; and look for somebody else who wants those, and has some they want; and trade 1-for-1.  If you let them play longer they'll start to notice triangular trades that no two children can complete, and do those too, but still usually 1-for-1.

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When the first rush of trading has died down, introduce to the children the concept of a multi-agent optimal arrangement: an arrangement such that it's not possible to redistribute the jellychips in any way that leaves all of the children better off simultaneously.  Ask them if they think their current arrangement got there.

Now the kids have a concept of a social goal to aim for, a way in which they can be collectively winning at trade or performing subpar; and the arguments will become a bit more heated.

(Especially if you've sorted all the kids to have a certain sort of personality, and usually therefore all be boys; because sometimes different children learn different things, and some of those things are best learned by similar children all together.)

It usually doesn't take long for one boy to start telling another that they need to make a trade, in order to get the classroom* into what they've figured as the optimal arrangement.

Of course the older kids immediately step in at this point, and remind everyone that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, you should never need to force somebody to trade in order to get to a jellychip arrangement that's better for everyone; the target state should be better for the person who's making the trade too.


(*)  Not actually a 'room' in the sense of being indoors; children need to be exposed to outdoor light levels in childhood in order to not grow up nearsighted.  The surface area required for children to spend enough of their day outdoors is currently the limiting factor on the urban density of the Great City (called also Central City and Default).  This is one of the places where public will and private incentives are in conflict, since there's a pressure towards ever-greater urban density in the center; but if this were permitted, soon it would be mostly childless people who could afford to live in Civilization's dense center.  For that and other reasons, it's been decided that it's better to limit the Great City's density and keep Civilization more spread out.  To find a solid expanse of skyscrapers, you'd need to visit a major city with few or no children per capita, like Big Quiet, or Erotown.

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After this enlightenment, an adult Watcher comes forth, and argues to the younger children that the whole point of trading things is that different people put different values on the same goods: if you-1 like black jellychips and have blue jellychips, and you-2 have black jellychips and like blue jellychips, then you can both do better by trading jellychips with each other.

This, the Watcher argues solemnly, is the point of trade, and the whole reason why people trade with each other: because they get different enjoyments from owning the same things, so that they can both become better off by passing the same fixed goods back and forth between themselves.

The younger children are asked if they first-order believe that.

None will say 'yes', at that point.  The most overeager ones will say 'No!' but then be unable to explain why not.  Most kids will give the brief Baseline comeback that colloquially translates to 'I probably would have believed it, if I wasn't pretty sure you were trolling me, though I haven't seen anything that I suspect is the real argument against it'.

(A dath ilani childhood tends to make one grow up suspicious of things that grownups say with great solemnity.  Civilization considers this a desirable outcome, which is good, because it sure is the outcome they're getting.)

Regardless of their answers, the children are then asked whether people who all got the same enjoyments from the same goods would never trade with each other.  And so that pathway of learning continues.

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On a separate track through the lattice of knowledge, a new idea may now be introduced on those foundations, the notion of a fair trade between black jellychips and blue jellychips. 

It begins by showing the children a way to rearrange their understanding of jellychip preferences, as a quantitative relation and not just an ordering, through the concept of indifferences, which state equalities of preference.  Not just, "I like purple jellychips more than black jellychips, and black jellychips more than blue jellychips" but "I am indifferent between having 5 purple jellychips, or 6 black jellychips, or 8 blue jellychips."

But then, of course, you might be able to execute multi-agent-beneficial trades that aren't 1-to-1.  If someone is indifferent between having 6 black jellychips and 8 blue jellychips, then trading 7 blue jellychips for 6 black jellychips will leave them better off than before.  Right?

A lot of children will say 'No!' at this point, and try to find some reason why that couldn't possibly be valid, because they know how economics lessons work, by this point in their lives.  They expect that somebody's about to lead them down a pathway that takes them down to 6 black jellychips and then 5 purple jellychips and so on until they only have one jellychip left.  

But you can, with a bit more work, convince them that it's totally valid to want 6 black jellychips more than 7 blue jellychips, and valid to trade things according to your wants, and tell them that in fact this does not necessarily always expose them to a set of clever trades that take them down to 1 jellychip which, it will then be proven to them, they must want to trade for nothing.  That's not actually going to happen!  You're thinking it's going to be the point of the economics lesson, but it's not!  Adults actually trade 7 hours of labor for 6 fancy shirts all the time, without ending up with 0 shirts, and this is isomorphic.

The children are then asked if they think they can get to a more multi-agent-optimal state by trading uneven numbers of jellychips amongst themselves.

The children approach this warily; or with a burst of initial enthusiasm that fades, after many children prove rather suspicious of attempts to get them to trade more jellychips for less jellychips.

Dath ilan having an average Intelligence of 16 or 17, it doesn't take long for somebody to point out that, even if one person likes some jellychips more than others, that's no reason for them to end up with less jellychips.  Other kids also like some jellychips more than others.  Why shouldn't they be the one to end up with less jellychips, and I, be the one who ends up with more, if that's how we're going to play it?

Why yes, Keltham was the first one to say it in those terms, in his own class, when he was very young.

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Suppose that Keltham is indifferent between 3 black jellychips and 4 blue jellychips, and that Limyar is indifferent between 2 blue jellychips and 3 black jellychips.  Suppose they both start with 12 black and 12 blue jellychips.

Then for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips, for 10 black jellychips from Limyar, would leave them both better off.

And for Limyar to trade his 12 black jellychips, for 9 blue jellychips from Keltham, would leave them both better off.

And for Keltham to trade his 12 blue jellychips for Limyar's 12 black jellychips would leave them both better off.

All three of these are mutually beneficial trades.

But which of them is fair?  Or fairest?

If you're the sort who agrees to just any trade that's mutually beneficial - like Limyar, in this classroom, had been earlier arguing people ought to do - then you know what Keltham is going to do to you?

That's right.  Keltham is going to offer 9 blue jellychips for your 12 black jellychips, you're going to accept, Keltham is going to carry out the trade, and then Keltham is going to angrily throw another 3 blue jellychips at you and yell that you're being stupid.

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If you step out and look at that problem from a wider angle, it's pretty much the same issue that holds between the dath ilani and the alien civilization, considering the price of medical knowledge.

If the alien civilization offers some tiny lowball offer - like, say, a supply of food and water - in exchange for every last scrap of your knowledge, and there's no other civilization around to trade with, you and they will both be better off if you accept, compared to if you don't.

But if you accept offers like that one, food and water is the most you can expect to be offered, if the aliens are less Lawful Neutral than Keltham.

(Even if there's two alien factions around to trade with, you can't quite rely on them bidding against each other.  What if they coordinate with each other instead?  There's a noticeable amount for both of them to gain, if they both agree to offer you only food and water, instead of a higher price.)

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Another game is now introduced to the children, played with a single flavor of jellychip.  It is not, in dath ilan, called the 'Ultimatum Game', but the actual name they have for it is the 'Final Trade Offer Game', which isn't all that different.

One child gets a dial, with settings from 0 to 12.  Another child gets a button.  The first child picks a setting on the dial and locks it in.  The second child then chooses whether to press the button.  If the second child presses the button, the first child gets as many jellychips as the dial indicates; the second child gets jellychips equal to 12 minus the number on the dial.  If the second child doesn't press the button, they both get nothing.

Which is to say: the first child proposes a division of a gain of 12 jellychips, where they get some part, and the other child gets the rest.  The second child can approve the division, or refuse it; and if they refuse, both get nothing.

If you run this lesson on dath ilani children, virtually everyone offers a 6:6 jellychip split and everyone accepts it.

At least, that's what they do on round zero, the initial round where they try things the simple way to verify their starting assumptions.  Then they start experimenting.  It's not so much that they're being selfish, and trying to figure out what they can get away with; it's that they're figuring there must be some clever point to this game, and you're not going to find it if you just offer 6:6 every time.

Some kids try out accepting splits of 7:5.  Other kids are like, ok then, and offer them 7:5 splits, which usually get rejected if, like, people are going to make a thing out of that, right.  Some try offering compacts to trade 7:5 splits for 5:7 splits, but there's no guarantee that any two kids will be matched up again in the future.

At this point the older kids step in and say that the point of the game is drifting away from the reality it's intended to model, and everybody nods and waits for the next part.  (Of course there's a next part.  There's been a weird game and no stunning insight about it has been presented yet.  They've ever been to a lesson before.  Older people aren't going to make you execute a weird pointless procedure and then not have some stunning insight to offer you as payment; kids would stop going to lessons, if that bargain was often violated.)

Before the next part, though, the older child teaching asks what the kids think is probably the ideal or correct thing you're supposed to do if somebody offers you a 7:5 split, not as a game, but in real life.

Keltham, of course, said to reject the offer.  Some other kids agreed the offer should be rejected.  Some claimed that you should accept it, but everyone should be angry at the person and whoever went next with them should offer them 7:5.  Limyar claimed that you should always accept it, even if the other person offers 11:1, because everyone would end up with fewer jellychips if you rejected than if you accepted, so rejecting the offer couldn't be multi-agent-optimal.  Keltham asked Limyar if he actually believed that.  Limyar said no but he was going to go on saying it anyways to annoy Keltham.

The kids argue about it for a while, and then the demonstration moves on.

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The next stage involves a complicated dynamic-puzzle with two stations, that requires two players working simultaneously to solve.  After it's been solved, one player locks in a number on a 0-12 dial, the other player may press a button, and the puzzle station spits out jellychips thus divided.

The gotcha is, the 2-player puzzle-game isn't always of equal difficulty for both players.  Sometimes, one of them needs to work a lot harder than the other.

Now things start to heat up.  There's an obvious notion that if one player worked harder than the other, they should get more jellychips.  But how much more?  Can you quantify how hard the players are working, and split the jellychips in proportion to that?  The game obviously seems to be pointing in the direction of quantifying how hard the players are working, relative to each other, but there's no obvious way to do that.

Somebody proposes that each player say, on a scale of 0 to 12, how hard they felt like they worked, and then the jellychips should be divided in whatever ratio is nearest to that ratio.

The solution relies on people being honest.  This is, perhaps, less of a looming unsolvable problem for dath ilani children than for adults in Golarion.

Once this solution is produced and tried once, the older children congratulate the kids on having solved the first layer.  On to the second layer!

In the second layer, some children get handed sealed cards before each game, telling them whether to be honest about it, or to try to grab a little more for themselves.  (Though remember, say the older children, that this is all only a game; we are trying to ask how Civilization can be robust to bad people, not teach you to be bad people yourselves; the thing is, you see, that on scales much larger than this class, there really will be some bad people.)

And that means the child who sets the dial, or the child who presses the button, can't trust the other to be honest.  Even if the other child's sealed card didn't say to be dishonest, the first child has no way of knowing that.

(Dishonest people really do complicate things, don't they?  Just the fact that they exist makes things harder on everyone else, because they don't know who the dishonest people are.  But that's part of the difficulty of constructing an adult Civilization, one that has to scale to numbers beyond two dozen or sixteen gross.)

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The children start having to think harder, at this point.  There are kids playing hard on puzzle-games, and hearing estimates of the other player's labor-effort that don't sound quite right; proposing splits afterwards, and seeing those splits rejected, and both getting nothing.  Some of the kids start to get angry at each other.  Others are trying to come up with a brilliant general solution; and, if they're wise, they know they haven't found one.  Some children are not so wise, but they can't get anyone else to go along with their brilliant general solution.

Keltham plays through with as much cold and steely determination as a seven-year-old can muster, offering exactly what he thinks is fair, rejecting anything he thinks is less than fair; feeling awful when the other kid yells at him that he was being honest, but not swerving from his course.  He can trust himself; he cannot trust the other.  When his card tells him to be dishonest, Keltham gives ridiculously huge estimates for his own labor, and hopes the other child is wise enough to know that Keltham is, must be, lying.  Sometimes he's told to be dishonest and he has to pick the split himself, and then he gives a huge estimate and pretends he believed the other kid's huge estimate.  Sometimes the other kid doesn't catch on in time, and then Keltham has to offer an unfair split or tap out of the game and metagame entirely, which feels like failing even more.  Sometimes the unfair split gets rejected, and sometimes it gets accepted, which is worse.  Keltham sets aside all his unearned chips to redistribute after the lesson ends.  It's a good thing this is only a game, because living life like this would be awful.

Lessons end for the day.  It is sometimes good to let children dwell for a time on problems that don't have known solutions yet, or realize how awful life can become when not everyone has deduced the governing Law.

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(Children actually do better, dath ilan has found, if you try having them play this elaborate game without having previously introduced the concept of a multi-agent-optimal boundary, or the notion of the Ultimatum Game, or the question of fair trades between unequal numbers of jellychips.  Then they just play and negotiate, without a concept that they are Failing To Reach Multi-Agent Optimality, or the notion that children who disagree with them are Refusing To Make Mutually Beneficial Trades, or that the offered trade was Unfair.  The children are less distracted by ideas they don't know how to operate, goals they don't know how succeed at, and ways to argue that people who disagree with them are doing some particular thing objectively incorrectly.  There is a valley of competence as a function of knowledge in this case, where knowing just a little can hurt you.)

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When the children return the next day, the older children tell them the correct solution to the original Ultimatum Game.

It goes like this:

When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than 6/7 probability.  Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than 6/7, or slightly less than 6.  This ensures they can't do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation.  It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.

If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than 6/8, so they do even worse in their own expectation by offering you 8:4 than 7:5.

It's not about retaliating harder, the harder they hit you with an unfair price - that point gets hammered in pretty hard to the kids, a Watcher steps in to repeat it.  This setup isn't about retaliation, it's about what both sides have to do, to turn the problem of dividing the gains, into a matter of fairness; to create the incentive setup whereby both sides don't expect to do any better by distorting their own estimate of what is 'fair'.

They play the 2-station video games again.  There's less anger and shouting this time.  Sometimes, somebody rolls a continuous-die and then rejects somebody's offer, but whoever gets rejected knows that they're not being punished.  Everybody is just following the Algorithm.  Your notion of fairness didn't match their notion of fairness, and they did what the Algorithm says to do in that case, but they know you didn't mean anything by it, because they know you know they're following the Algorithm, so they know you know you don't have any incentive to distort your own estimate of what's fair, so they know you weren't trying to get away with anything, and you know they know that, and you know they're not trying to punish you.  You can already foresee the part where you're going to be asked to play this game for longer, until fewer offers get rejected, as people learn to converge on a shared idea of what is fair.

Sometimes you offer the other kid an extra jellychip, when you're not sure yourself, to make sure they don't reject you.  Sometimes they accept your offer and then toss a jellychip back to you, because they think you offered more than was fair.  It's not how the game would be played between dath ilan and true aliens, but it's often how the game is played in real life.  In dath ilan, that is.

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After that came the part where Keltham's learning-group was introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game, with tokens that produced varying quantities of jellychips, but only when held in proximity to other tokens, and large enough groups of tokens could produce more tokens.

Despite their best efforts and the lesson they'd just learned - and, since they were still young boys, after a lot of shouting, beyond a certain point - the nascent market had soon shut down almost entirely over refused trades, caused by disagreements about what was 'fair'.

During the game's post-mortem, it was eventually figured out (with some nudging and hinting from the supervising older-children) that children with rarer tokens had tended to think that the weight of a token's value for its even division ought to be determined by that token's scarcity; children with tokens that produced lots of jellychips (even if they required some other tokens to be nearby to work) tended to think that direct jellychip production was the obvious starting anchor for weighing economic value; children with tokens that produced other tokens argued themselves to have the only goods that mattered in the long run, and that you'd need a lot of lesser tokens to trade fairly for one of those.

This begins the pathway of learning that leads to market prices, the other way of setting prices; in which larger Civilization has a collective interest in seller prices ending up close to the marginal cost of production, so that as many trades as possible occur.

Children who master the complications here have officially passed Financial Literacy Layer 2, and can have their own investment accounts*, which was the main reason Keltham was going through this whole lesson-sequence at age seven instead of age eight.


(*)  Having an investment account in dath ilan is the equivalent of having a 'bank account' in other places, rather than a mark of greater financial maturity than that.  Dath ilan doesn't particularly use, as a store of value, currency-denominated packaged bank debt with fixed returns.  Value is stored mostly in equities.  When you write a check against your investment account, divisible fractions of equity are automatically sold out of it in some medium of exchange, and automatically reinvested in the receiver's account, according to the (simple) autoselling and autobuying algorithms on both sides.  If you want to pay for less volatility in your assets, you buy insurance on the equity, so that somebody agrees to buy the asset from you if it drops below 80% of its original-purchase price; and the price of insurance like that is a risk signal.

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When it comes to selling knowledge to aliens, to be clear, Financial Literacy Layer 2 is not going to get you there.  If the answer across every plausible premise was trivial and similar, that trope wouldn't be such a staple of dath ilani economic fiction.

Thankfully, Golarion is not nearly weird enough for Cheliax to be composed of aliens in the relevant sense; the Chelish have money and will tell you how many unskilled-labor-hours it corresponds to.  The most you have to worry about is that somebody gave them a dishonesty card - which does mean you have to do your own calculations about what's fair, and not just ask them.

When you are not dealing with alien aliens, when setting prices with those aliens is not the point of the story, a normal dath ilani would consider the solution obvious.  There comes a saturation point beyond which individuals cannot realistically use any more money to become happier themselves, for usual reasons of just-noticeable-differences being a mostly-constant fraction of how much you already have, which implies utility roughly logarithmic in wealth.  If the aliens offer to pay you that much, asking them to cough up more would mean that a number of poorer aliens would all have to give up chunks of utility that loom larger for them, so that you could get much smaller amounts of utility; and even if that's fair, it isn't Good.  If the aliens offer an ultimatum for less, turn them down with very high probability; they're trying to give you far less than you're worth.  Would Civilization offer less than a billion labor-hours to an alien bearing knowledge of how to eliminate whole swathes of diseases hitting large sections of the population?  (No.)

Of course, in a normal dath ilani economic-fiction isekai story, the entire world you end up in is not insane in every part; there may be one insane point of departure with some insane consequences lawfully extrapolated, but the author is not going to throw an entire insane world at you; it wouldn't be credible.

A normal dath ilani, thrown into another world, does not come in expecting to need enough money to make lots and lots of important investments that the natives haven't made because the natives are insane.  They're expecting to find an alien efficiency of no simple ways to make everyone collectively much wealthier, not the howling absence of that efficiency.

Keltham wasn't expecting Golarion either.

He did, however, catch on in short order to what he currently thinks is the magnitude of the problem.

It is possible he will need a lot of money to solve it.

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If you've actually got to negotiate with very humanlike aliens, you need Financial Literacy Layer 5; or at least, Keltham hopes that's what he needs, because that's what he has.  This gives him access to a spotlighted permutation-based method for determining the fair contribution of one actor to a multiagent process.  It's not spotlighted nearly as hard as, say, the Probability axioms, or Validity; but it's pretty much the only spotlighted method for that kind of fairness, and Civilization is somewhat hopeful that aliens will use it too.

The permutation-based method says to consider how much marginal added value an agent produces, by being added to a collection of other agents, when considering every possible order in which to add all agents into the evaluation.  If, for example, two people are both needed to complete a task worth 10 jellychips, and it can't be completed at all without both of them, then there's two possible permutations:

Permutation 1:
  Alis:  Alis alone receives 0 jellychips; her marginal value, added to the empty set, is 0.
  Alis+Bohob:  After adding Bohob, the payoff is 10 jellychips; Bohob's marginal product, added to Alis is 10.

Permutation 2:
  Bohob:  0 jellychips.
  Bohob+Alis:  10 jellychips.

Averaging the marginal products together across all permutations, the method says that Alis and Bohob both receive 5 jellychips.

Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic, but the point is that it generalizes.

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Applied directly to the situation with Cheliax, the method says, roughly, that Keltham should receive an amount proportional to how much marginal product he adds, on average, to all possible (ordered) subsets of Cheliax.  If Cheliax had only half its current people, for example, Keltham might only add around half as much value.  For even smaller subsets of Cheliax, product might fall superlinearly; Keltham couldn't necessarily accomplish 1/20,000,000th as much with a single Chelaxian.

It adds up to 'somewhat less than half of his marginal product when added to all of Cheliax, probably'.  Yes, this is a very simple answer to be produced by all that logic; but the point is that Keltham knows why that is the fair answer and what he ought to do if he gets offered less.


Keltham doesn't spell out this part explicitly, or say that he was willing to accept Cheliax's opening offer taken at face value, and indeed would have compromised on substantially less had it been necessary.  Cheliax mentioned difficulties in accurately measuring the gains to the country, and may intend to offer a measuring methodology expected to be an underestimate of the real value; or it could be that Cheliax is thinking the split is about direct profits from project sales, where Chelish consumers are capturing much more value than the sale price of the products, the consumer surplus.

Also Keltham might find there's weird terms or conditions in there, in which case he wants to get the highest initial offer on hand so he can burn percentage points as bargaining power, to iron out the terms and conditions.  He can always hand back any excessively generous jellychips that are still left at the end of that.

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Somewhere in a place that is not this place, so far away that there is no distance and no time between here and there, a former airplane passenger named Thellim reads how Earth economists have tried to analyze the Ultimatum Game, played by splitting $10.

Earth's economists have concluded that it is 'irrational' to refuse a $9:$1 split, since it leaves you $1 worse off.  They note that human subjects seem to be 'irrational' by occasionally refusing offers below $5 with increasingly great probability as the offer drops.  Perhaps it is meta-rational to develop a reputation for acting 'irrationally', since it causes people to make you bigger offers, if they know you'll irrationally refuse smaller ones?  (For some reason they don't continue on to ask why not develop an 'irrational' reputation for refusing all offers below $9, instead of $5.)

Thellim swiftly infers that Earth's moon prevents its inhabitants from thinking clearly about negotiation.

(She's mistaken.  It's kind of a long story.)

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Sometime even later, Thellim is going to conclude that maybe it's not the moon.  She will then wonder if there's any way to explain to Earth economists how the absolute basics of negotiation work in coherent decision systems (eg those consistent under reflection in the presence of correlated agents and/or models of agents).  Or even, minimally, get them interested in what sort of 'irrational' behavior rational agents want to have 'reputations' for having, and if there's any systematic structure in there that might possibly be interesting.

It turns out that Earth economists are locked into powerful incentive structures of status and shame, which prevent them from discussing the economic work of anybody who doesn't get their paper into a journal.  The journals are locked into very powerful incentive structures that prevent them from accepting papers unless they're written in a very weird Earth way that Thellim can't manage to imitate, and also, Thellim hasn't gotten tenure at a prestigious university which means they'll probably reject the paper anyways.  Thellim asks if she can just rent temporary tenure and buy somebody else's work to write the paper, and gets approximately the same reaction as if she asked for roasted children recipes.

The system expects knowledge to be contributed to it only by people who have undergone painful trials to prove themselves worthy.  If you haven't proven yourself worthy in that way, the system doesn't want your knowledge even for free, because, if the system acknowledged your contribution, it cannot manage not to give you status, even if you offer to sign a form relinquishing it, and it would be bad and unfair for anyone to get that status without undergoing the pains and trials that others had to pay to get it.

She went and talked about logical decision theory online before she'd realized the full depth of this problem, and now nobody else can benefit from writing it up, because it would be her idea and she would get the status for it and she's not allowed to have that status.  Furthermore, nobody else would put in the huge effort to push forward the idea if she'll capture their pay in status.  It does have to be a huge effort; the system is set up to provide resistance to ideas, and disincentivize people who quietly agreed with those ideas from advocating them, until that resistance is overcome.  This ensures that pushing any major idea takes a huge effort that the idea-owner has to put in themselves, so that nobody will be rewarded with status unless they have dedicated several years to pushing an idea through a required initial ordeal before anyone with existing status is allowed to help, thereby proving themselves admirable enough and dedicated enough to have as much status as would come from contributing a major idea.

To suggest that the system should work in any different way is an obvious plot to steal status that is only deserved by virtuous people who work hard, play by the proper rules, and don't try to cheat by doing anything with less effort than it's supposed to take.

Thellim could maybe solve this problem if she put around five years of her life into taking the knowledge, and putting it into a form where the system thinks it's allowed to ever look at it or talk about it without that being shameful.  But Earth has problems that are plausibly more important than their entire field of economics being firmly convinced that a particular set of crazy behaviors are 'rational' and that healthy, prosocial, equilibrium-solvable behaviors are 'irrational'.

She ends up writing a handful of blog posts about it, tossing mentions of it into a couple of stories she writes on the side, and otherwise leaving Earth to its fate there; Earth has rather a lot of awful fates going on simultaneously, and that one is not literally their most important problem.

This, however, is not her story.

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Keltham, in any case, now attempts to recount to Cheliax what he went through as a kid to learn about the basic concepts of negotiation.

The first part of this would be handing out assorting jellychips to children, as selected to guarantee that different children will have different preferences over them but all will find those tastes and textures pleasant at all; letting the children trade among themselves, which they usually do 1-to-1 and peacefully; introducing the concept of a multi-agent-optimal solution to the kids, which gives them a social goal they could be failing at instead of just a few voluntary improvements to make among themselves; whereupon they start yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class; and then the older kids come in and remind them that, by the definition of multi-agent-optimality, solutions like that should make all the kids better off so you shouldn't have to force anyone to go along with trades leading there.

How are the Chelaxians doing so far?

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Absolutely no yelling at each other to make particular trades for the good of the class! Say what you will about Evil, it doesn't inculcate that particular tendency. 

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Meritxell has made herself a multi-column tracking sheet - six of them, actually, ordered by different things. 

"Can everyone report to me their hypothetical reward preferences in, uh, negative wrist-slaps? Imagine we'll settle it out at the end by giving out a number of actual wrist-slaps equal to the reward so there's no incentive to overstate or understate your reward preferences."

     

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Keltham wasn't expecting them to go off and immediately start setting up games to simulate the thing he was describing despite the absence of actual jellychips, he'd sort of wanted to see if imagination would be enough, but he's not going to stop them if they do that.

He draws the line at the wrist-slaps, though.  "The point of positive rewards in this case is that there's an incentive to play the game at all," Keltham says.  "If you tried paying dath ilani kids in negative wrist-slaps they could avoid all the wrist-slaps by not coming to class.  It's like trying to buy shoes at a shoe-shop by threatening to wreck the guy's shoe-shop unless they give you shoes.  Even if they did give shoes, the guy doesn't want to be part of the whole system then, and now they have an incentive to call the town guard... okay, 'town guard', sure.  And anybody else who sees that's how you operate has an incentive to poison your shoes and send you to the afterlife early before you come around to their shop.  When you're trading things the other person actually wants, they want the whole system to stay in place, which is what makes stable equilibria possible.  It's an important difference!"

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" - I want the whole education system to stay in place," says Meritxell, baffled. "It taught me to be a wizard!!!"

        "Wait, do dath ilani children just....not go to school if they don't feel like it? Wouldn't that get you a lot of people who never learn anything, or at least never learn anything they aren't being bribed to learn?"

        "And never learn how to do things that are unpleasant for a long-term reward -"

 

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"Civilization goes to a great deal of effort to arrange things so that kids actually do want to go to school, because dath ilani kids are smart by your standards, and the grownups do not actually want to get into a contest with us about whether or not we can rig the school's boiler system to explode if we use a cunning plot with coordinated distractions.  It doesn't matter that they would very likely win, they don't want to get into the contest with us.  Ah, with them.  I mean they do still have all sorts of security systems to make it hard to blow up schools because, you know, kids, but they're based on the assumption of fending off like three kids who want to see if they can, not three hundred kids who all have the same incentives."

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"Chelish kids do not....coordinatedly try to destroy our schools," Meritxell says faintly after a while. "Even wizarding kids, who are smart. It - wouldn't even be hard, with magic, you wouldn't need coordinated distractions but no one would do it, even if you'd made a very bad mistake at school and were going to be disciplined -" they did check, Taldor beats students for misbehavior too. "You don't have to..... be so nice to children they wouldn't ever occasionally wish their school was on fire, you just have to teach them enough discipline that even when they wish it was they don't do it."

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"Maybe if you're Good and.....refuse to .....use any punishments ever..." Carissa feels like she's kind of caricaturing Good here, like if she said this to a paladin they'd object that obviously they do punish people when appropriate - "then you have to bribe everyone all the time to just nondestructively participate in society because the - differential between cooperation and noncooperation still has to be just as large and you're trying to do none of it with pain."

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Ione Sala is starting to feel nervous, for the first time, about what exactly Lord Nethys might be working towards with His plans around Keltham.

Well, it's not as if she has any other options, so, moot point, she'll go along with His goal, even if it's exploding Cheliax or whatever.  It's not like she has any friends here.

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"Look, I get that Golarion is a poorer and more dangerous place and that you cannot afford to have kids occasionally successfully destroying their school.  You still - want to treat children as miniature adults, right, so that they'll grow into adults with the right shape?  When they grow up into adults, you don't want those adults sticking around places where they're being hurt, or tolerating the existence of systems that leave people worse off than if the whole system didn't exist.  So you don't put children into childhood situations where their own incentive is to destroy everything around them, and all they lack is the power to do that."

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"Chelish students are not incentivized to destroy their schools, even if they wouldn't get in trouble for it, because becoming a wizard is really valuable," says Meritxell. "Their incentives are sometimes on the scale of their lives, not on the scale of that specific day being more fun than not-fun, but that's - how being an adult is, too."

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"Do kids here already understand that when they're seven years old?  Five years old?  By the time somebody understands and has integrated subtle incentives for their future self spanning decades, they're no longer a child; they don't need adults to guardrail their decisions anymore."

"I suspect there's some weird sticking point here that - look, sufficiently young kids do get slaps on the wrist.  Civilization doesn't like it, I don't like it, but even dath ilan never figured out how to produce healthy adults while never doing that at any point.  There are elements of morality and personhood that humans just weren't designed to learn without experiencing small amounts of pain in childhood.  But every time you set up a situation where a kid gets told that they need to do something or else get slapped on the wrist, you also add some value to an investment account the kid gets access to when they're older, such that even if the kid was secretly an adult in a kid's body, they would still be calculating a net benefit on being present for the whole transaction.  To make sure the total interaction is still mutually beneficial, which means, beneficial to them too, so that ideal kids wouldn't have an ideal incentive to escape their parents or destroy the whole system.  Civilization goes on optimizing its heritage and the kids keep getting smarter and more Law-comprehending, which means that you always check all the interactions with children to make sure that the system wouldn't fall apart if the kids started being more ideal intelligences than expected one year.  And having to pay that amount to set up a potential wrist-slap situation reminds adults to check, every time, whether they really needed a wrist-slap there."

"I realize you can't afford any of that, but it is how Civilization thinks.  We don't want to build into the system a load-bearing assumption that our kids are stupid and weak, even if they are."

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It has occurred to most of the girls that ideally they should be learning Keltham's economics not arguing with him about punishment so they nod gravely rather than trying to explain the dozen things wrong with that.

 

The most obvious, thinks Meritxell, is that you don't actually want adults who believe themselves entitled to blow up any system that isn't serving them, because then you end up like Taldor having a civil war every few years. 

 

The most obvious, thinks Tonia, is that kids can in fact run away and get eaten by wild beasts if they want, and none of them do, so they obviously think being around their parents is better than not that, which they're right about. 

 

The most obvious, thinks Gregoria, is that adults are still children, in Keltham's ontology, and the only real adults are gods.

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(The most obvious, thinks Carissa, is that the fundamental system in which everyone is participating in is existence, life and then afterlife, and that's so obviously, wildly worth it that no possible specifics could matter - it'd be like trying to sell someone a +6 Headband of all three mental statistics for the price of an afternoon scrubbing floors and assuring them that you won't yell at them for missed spots. It doesn't matter, it's all nothing next to the magnitude of the gift they've already been given, the only reason they're even able to parse it instead of rounding it off to the zero it is is because their minds are broken and they're very small and stupid. If a god were somehow born into a human child's body they wouldn't care if they got hit in class or not; human weakness isn't any particular nature of the bribes but the fact they're required at all, and planning for more perfect agents would mean planning for agents whose thoughts were too big and vast to give this question a second's contemplation.)

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Keltham notices that he's running across a class of external and internal subjective sensations that precedes learning something is horribly wrong with Golarion, and sets it aside, because he's allowed to take longer than two days to learn about all of the problems.  At least the problems they're making no effort to conceal from him, which they don't seem to be doing here, what with having just volunteered all of that info.

Anyways, they can play a pretend version of the trading game, if they like, so long as they don't try to literally pay in negative wrist-slaps because no just no that's the literal opposite of the larger point.

Keltham checks their final result, and references it against the supposed ordinal preferences for the players.  Does it look multi-agent-optimal at a computerless glance?

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Meritxell has helpfully circled each trade and noted why it increases utility for each participant, and then written down possible trades from the final state and why they don't. If something's wrong it's a more complicated error than that; the girls are in fact heatedly speculating, now, in whispers, about whether there are local multi-agent-optimal maxima that aren't a global multi-agent-optimal maximum.

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...right.  Not actual children here.

"If there's such a thing as a local optimum in that sense, which isn't global, you ought to be able to produce a simplified example of it.  Say, try constructing one with three players and three kinds of jellychips," Keltham suggests.

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"There's not going to be," Meritxell says. "If there were and we knew what it was then we could just switch to that arrangement."

"It could be better for someone from their starting point but not better for them from the place we just arrived at, and higher value total -"

"If it's higher value total and they get a veto we use some of the higher value to pay them."

"Oh, I see, do we have continuous jellychips now, Keltham must have forgot to mention that feature of theirs."

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"Would you care to state exactly what is a 'local optimum' and how it differs from a 'global optimum'?"

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"Take, like, water," says Gregoria. "Water flows downhill, but if it flows into a crater or something, it's not going to go up in order to get to keep going down. And water usually isn't sentient and even when it is it's not very smart but you can have a situation where everyone agrees that the current situation isn't as good as some other situation, but none of them have a step that's a clear step up for them. And Meritxell is right that if you have centralized control you can just make everyone go to the new place even though there's not a series of smaller mutually beneficial steps to get there, and also that if this involves some people losing out you can pay them, but that doesn't always work, like, for example, if you're dividing things that come in units."

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"This comes up in spell structures."

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"Comes up all over all of reality, including in the basic elements of the human body that the tiny-spiral instructions say how to make, which fold up into configurations of least local resistance in order to - have the kinds of material properties that they do.  I'd guessed that spells were the same way almost as soon as I heard about them."

"Anyways, I agree that's a good metaphor, but if you could have a very simple arrangement of three players with three jellychips of three kinds, what would you say about that situation which made it a local multi-agent optimum, and what would you say about it that made it a global multi-agent optimum?"

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"It's a local optimum if there aren't any trades anyone can make that leave both parties to the trade better off, and it's global if there are no possible states of the jellychips that leave all three people better off."

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"And can you prove that a local-not-global optimum is impossible for three players, each with one jellychip, of three different flavors?  Proving something for a simple special case is often easier than proving it for the general case, and sometimes is a good start on a general proof, if the problem hasn't been selected by some sadist... that is not what the dath ilani word 'troll' means but okay fine.  Anyways, proving it impossible for three players with three jellychips might be a start on proving it impossible in general, and in fact, there would be a lot of really interesting other proofs you could derive from that one."

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Asmodia doesn't feel particularly driven to succeed in class, today, but -

"I have a chip Meritxell wants more than hers, but I don't want her chip more than mine.  Meritxell has a chip Paxti wants.  Paxti has the chip I want.  We can do a three-way trade but no two-way ones."  Sadist, she mentally completes.

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"If they're continuous you can make that work, with partial jellychip trades -"

"They're not continuous!"

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"Continuous doesn't help," says Asmodia.  "Meritxell wants my one chip but without Paxti she doesn't have anything I want.  Moving fractional chips around doesn't help with that.  Not unless there's continuous players, like every possible mix of Asmodia plus Meritxell plus Paxti."

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Some students scribble in their notes for a little while until they are satisfied with this.

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Asmodia, who is of course still pretending to be cheerful and energetic, will have enthusiastically written out the example:

Asmodia:  Has banana, prefers apple < banana < cherry
Meritxell:  Has apple, prefers cherry < apple < banana
Paxti:        Has cherry, prefers banana < cherry < apple

Asmodia wants Paxti's cherry!  But Paxti doesn't want Asmodia's banana!

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All right, on to the notion of non-1-to-1 trades and quantitative indifferences.  New game, but instead of just saying that you prefer some flavors to others, you say things like, 'I'm indifferent between having 3 apple jellychips and 4 banana jellychips.'

This opens up the possibility of trading jellychips in a non-1-for-1 way.  Anybody want to try playing that game, if they're running quick simulations?

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This seems like it makes it much harder to get stuck but no one has an impossibility proof yet. They do not seem to have...noticed the fairness problem? Or, they're writing down different possible trade outcomes but not with any sense that some of them are more desirable except subjectively.

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Keltham quietly hands Meritxell a folded-up note telling her to try to end up with as many chips as possible for herself, in the course of suggesting mutually beneficial trades to the others.

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- well all right then. 

 

The other students do notice this. "You recorded five to seven as the canonical one, but it could be four to eight too."

"Guess you should be the one writing it down," Meritxell says. "Paxti, seven blue for nine green?"

"Give me ten."

"You have recorded that you like green only nine percent less than blue, so I'm offering you nine."

"You have it recorded that you like blue a third more than green, so -"

"But I'm not offering you ten. Carissa, six blue for four red?"

"...is that allowed?"

"Is what allowed?"

"Are you allowed to not make trades that your utility function says you'll take. In this game."

"Well, you did it first, you turned down seven for nine. Carissa, six blue for four red, or if you make it five red, I'll throw in refusing to trade with whoever your least favorite student is."

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"What if it's you?"

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"Done and done, give me five red, I promise I won't trade with myself all day long. Gregoria, twelve red for....thirteen green -"

"Am I allowed to change my preference-weightings -"

"Obviously not."

"Keltham, am I?"

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"Definitely no."

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Gregoria hands over thirteen imaginary green. Meritxell turns around and hands eight of them to Tonia for blue. She looks supremely in her element and she's talking several miles a minute, withdrawing any trades the other girls don't agree to instantly.

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...you would think they would somehow teach kids about this sort of principle before they let them have investment accounts let alone allocate years of training to wizard school.

Keltham will wait until they have ended up in a multi-agent-optimum; one of the many possible multi-agent-optima, which happens to have a lot of imaginary jellychips in the possession of Meritxell; such that, indeed, it is not possible to make all the students including her better off, by taking some of those away from her and looking for a more evenly distributed optimum.

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It takes a while because Meritxell refuses so many trades but they get there eventually. 

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Keltham shall now observe to them that, if Meritxell has 12 green and prefers two blue to three green, and Gregoria has 12 blue and prefers two green to three blue, then all of the trades "5 green for 7 blue", "6 green for 6 blue", and "7 green for 5 blue", are mutually beneficial, but differently divide up the gains from trade.

There's a lot of different ways for jellychips to be arranged such that they can't be moved around without making at least one player worse off.  For example, Meritxell could have all the chips, and nobody else could have any.  Then any other way of arranging the chips will make Meritxell worse off!  So that's one of the many possible global optima.

Different paths through the mutually beneficial trades will take you to different global optima.  So long as all the trades are mutually beneficial, you won't end up worse off than if you never traded, at the end; but you might end up much worse off than if you'd traded more carefully.

Keltham is a bit surprised that they didn't more quickly see the way in which this game resembled real life, since they seem pretty good at mathematical comprehension of the sort of structure that this game has in common with real life.  But that will come with having more than one day's practice with parsing up games and real life into the pure abstract structures and simple mathematical properties they have in common - with parsing up real life as a shadow of Law, that is then recognized at once when incarnated in some much simpler game.

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All of what Keltham's saying makes sense to them! 

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Ione wonders, in the back of her mind, if there's some way to actually go between worlds that way - by understanding real life as an instance of Law, and then sort of going through that Law to end up in a different instance of real life...

You know what, she's going to stop thinking that now.  Thinking things in the back of her mind has gotten her into enough trouble already.

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Well, now that they've seen the problem of dividing gains from trade in a simpler form, re-encountering it as a more mathematical structure, have they got any new ideas about how to decide how many blue jellychips to accept for how many green jellychips?

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"...it depends what the other person will accept?"

 

"You want to be keeping the books," Meritxell says. "Then everyone knows you'll be doing the most favorable trades you can and if they don't want to trade with you they're just out of luck. Or have some other kind of - asymmetric reason you can say 'I'm holding out for better' which they can't."

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"They could, in fact, have mostly stopped trading with you, and traded with each other instead, until the game was almost ready to end.  And even then, if you'd tried to make trades too sharp, they could have just said no and offered you more even ones; and if you refused those trades, well then, the game ends without being multi-player-optimal."

"Even if you make your mutually beneficial trades very slanted in your own favor, people can't end up worse off, from trading with you, compared to if they didn't trade with anyone at all."

"They can end up worse off by trading with you, compared to if they'd traded with other people instead."

"So they walk away, and find other trade partners, if you try to capture too much of the gains from trade for yourself."

"This, too, is a lesson with a mathematical structure that appears in both this game and in real life."

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"Sure, but it's costly to go around trying to find possible trade partners. In practice if you own the books you get the bulk of the gains from trade."

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Then some book-owners are going to really lose out once Keltham figures out cheaper roads and bicycles; so Keltham thinks, but also meta-thinks fast enough not to say out loud.  He is not quite sure of his larger social situation, and maybe he is better off quietly not pointing out certain winners and losers just yet.

"Dath ilan has some excess wealth beyond bare living needs," and, now that Keltham thinks about it, probably a much more structured investment scene, "which a hundred thousand annoyed customers can easily use to pay the startup costs of a new company that makes whatever you make, and contracts to sell it more cheaply for the first ten years to its founding customers.  So 'I'm the only trade partner around' does play less well there."  If he emphasizes the part with the vast wealth Golarion won't have for a while, that'll maybe sound less threatening to anybody reading these reports, compared to if they realize that roads will apply the same market pressure.  "Does Cheliax have a lot of places where, say, there's only one seller of food...?"

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"...not food, because outside of cities everyone grows their own food," says Tonia, "and lots of them bring it to the city to market."

"Only one shoe-seller, though."

"And even cities might have only one fifth circle wizard who can cast Teleport for you, or one fifth circle cleric who can Raise Dead."

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"Well, I can see how the fifth-circle wizard could end up quite wealthy that way, but surely a shoe-seller must be much wealthier still.  After all, while most people probably don't use Teleports, everyone needs shoes, and the shoe-seller can charge whatever they want for them."

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"...you don't have to have shoes," says Tonia.

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"I bet the fifth-circle cleric wants shoes, though, so maybe the shoe-seller can set shoe prices incredibly high and capture all the money the cleric got by Raising Dead."

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"Well if he can Raise Dead he can also cast Mending on his own shoes, or buy them secondhand off someone else, or go disguised so the shoeseller thinks he's just a random laborer."

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"Yes, people often do have a lot of other trades they could make, or other people they could trade with, if somebody else tries to capture too much of the gains from trade.  You want to give them some incentive to stick around, and keep playing the game."

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"Sure. The shoeseller mostly picks his prices but he doesn't have absolute power or something." Absolute-power: a simple two-syllable word in Taldane.

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"Does he not?  He can just put up a sign saying the price is now a hundred million billion gold pieces.  Nobody can stop him."

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"The costs of finding some other solution are high but they're not that high. He gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade as long as the gains-from-trade are smaller than the cost of going to the next town over or something for a cobbler. But in practice they are, so he gets to capture almost all the gains-from-trade."

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"All right, if that's really true, I'm now a bit confused.  If I imagine how much value everybody in a town gets from having shoes, compared to not having shoes at all, it seems like it should be an amount more than ten times greater than the amount to set up a new cobbler's business.  And how is the cobbler capturing most of the gains from trade when he's selling shoes to the cleric, who might be deriving ten thousand gold pieces of value from being able to wear shoes at all?"

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"The cleric buys his shoes in the city, when he gets called into the city on important cleric business," says Tonia. "And how would you set up a new cobbler's business, you don't know how to make shoes, and if you tried he'd just lower his prices until you starved, and then go back to raising them."

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"Okay, so... you don't actually have the thing, where everybody getting ripped off would pool some money, start a new cobbler in business, and refuse to buy from the other guy for a while even if he lowered his prices."

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"Pool what money," says Tonia. 

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"The money that everybody in an entire city would have otherwise needed to buy overpriced shoes."

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"Twenty households in a village. The poor half haven't got any savings. The rich half have a couple of family heirlooms they'll sell if it's a drought, and a healing potion for if the woman's dying in childbirth and the cleric's out of town, and they don't even use it if the baby's dying, no one's so rich to use healing potions on babies."

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Keltham closes his eyes for a second and reminds himself that afterlives are a thing and you can talk to the people in them right now.  It's not like the babies are being cryosuspended.

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"A village that size shouldn't have its own shoemaker, then, unless shoes wear out really fast.  You buy shoes in town when you go there to sell whatever you make, or the person who buys whatever you make in the village, brings shoes over to sell when he travels to pick it up.  Or am I wildly off-base on how that would have to work?"

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"...that is a town, twenty households."

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Twenty families is a RELATIVELY LARGE GROUP HOUSE.

"Pretend I just said city, instead of town, then."

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Tonia shrugs. "I don't know how it works in cities."

"Shoesellers compete in cities," Meritxell says. 

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"But eighty, ninety percent of Chelish people live outside the cities," Carissa says. It's true in Taldor and she looked up whether it was true in Cheliax, too, because it might be an important difference if it were different, and Cheliax keeps but doesn't publish statistics on that and it's also true in Cheliax.

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"No, I mean, does a town of twenty households have one person who's a shoemaker."

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"Yes," says Tonia. "He doesn't only make shoes, he works in the fields at planting and harvest time just like anyone who can walk, and tans leather for the shoes but also for anything else you want leather tanned for, but yes, the town has a shoemaker, because it's too far from a city for people to go there for shoes. People farther out come to the town for the shoes."

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"And this person is much richer than everyone else in the town because he can charge whatever he wants for shoes?  Serious question, I am actually trying to grasp how Golarion works here."

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"No. He can charge whatever shoes are worth to people but that isn't enough to make him rich because no one else has much to spare so shoes aren't worth all that much to them. He's richer than people who have to buy shoes from him, mostly. And then he just gets spread out more ways because more of his kids live." Unless he kills some but Tonia has learned they don't do that in Taldor.

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"I have a sense that there's some breakdown of communications here, and I hypothesize that maybe it's a missing concept of consumer surplus as distinct from usual market prices being what defines gains from trade.  As we would put it, the consumer value to you of shoes isn't the amount you'd usually pay for shoes like that in a market, it's the amount you'd pay not to be forever forbidden from wearing shoes ever again, if there was some powerful anti-shoe magic otherwise about to afflict you, and you had to pay a fourth-circle wizard to counterspell it before it took effect.  In dath ilan, we'd usually expect the consumer value of an item to be noticeably higher than the selling price.  The distance between consumer value and selling price is the consumer surplus, the amount of the gains from trade that goes to the consumer."

"The market price of shoes should settle somewhere not too far from the costs of making leather and going to cobbler lessons, not settle at nearly the absolute maximum price that anybody around would pay to be allowed to ever wear shoes again.  So people are noticeably better off because of shoemakers existing at all, rather than being only a tiny bit better off because the selling price of shoes is so astronomical that it cancels out almost but not quite all of the real benefit that people get from shoes."

"Or, that's how we'd expect it to be in dath ilan."

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".... if there were some powerful anti-shoe magic about to take effect you'd still only have enough food to maybe make it to spring if you're lucky, and nowhere near enough to pay a fourth-circle wizard for anything," says Tonia. She's not sure this is a productive argument but she's pretty sure it's not a revealing one.

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"I want to ask about a generous fourth-circle wizard who offers to cast the anti-anti-shoe-spell for just one gold piece, but I'm guessing you'll say that towns settle into an equilibrium where nobody has a gold piece to spend on anything, because, if they did, one more of their kids would have lived and that kid would now be eating more food.  This, unfortunately, makes it harder for me to define the concept of consumer surplus around a counterfactual willingness to pay any more."

"So suppose instead I tell you that consumer surplus is the amount that people would be sad if shoes stopped existing.  They would, on the one hand, be happy never to pay for shoes again, but, on the other hand, they would be even sadder than that, because the shoes were worth more to them than what they paid.  We in dath ilan would expect people to be a noticeable amount of sad, rather than just shrugging because they were only barely in favor of paying for shoes in the first place at standard shoe prices."

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"- all right. I think people'd be - a noticeable amount of sad, if the cobbler died. They'd say he was a lousy man and they don't miss him but they'd be worse off and not just barely."

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"...and then that town never has a cobbler again, and the surrounding farms who came there to buy shoes, just never get shoes again?  I mean, is that what happens in real life when a cobbler dies?"

Keltham is CONFUSED by the part about them saying the cobbler was a lousy man.  He notices the confusion consciously, then sets it aside.

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"I mean, usually he'd train his son, but I was imagining if he didn't train his son so people figured who knows if we'd ever get shoes again or just have to make our current ones last forever."

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"So there's, like, lineages of cobblers, each of which trains a single other cobbler to replace themselves, and if a cobbler dies out prematurely, all of Cheliax has one less cobbler lineage in it - where did cobblers come from originally?  Wait, are shoemakers a particular kind of nonhuman?"  Keltham is increasingly confused but that makes it all the more important to follow wherever this is going.

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"No? He can take some other apprentice if he wants but since it's good work he'd probably rather train up one of his sons, and there's certainly not enough money for two cobblers, so he only trains one. In the city probably cobblers take more apprentices."

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"And the town that lost its cobbler doesn't just invite in a new cobbler from the city, now that there's an unserved market there, because...?"

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"...why would anyone want to move to a village in the middle of nowhere?"

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"Why was the original cobbler in a village in the middle of nowhere?"

DOES GOLARION IN FACT HAVE MARKET EQUILIBRIA.

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"...he was born there?"

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"If cobblers live better lives in cities, he could move from his village to the city.  If cobblers don't live better lives in cities, why wouldn't one be willing to move to the village?"

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"...people don't like moving?"

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"Okay, Golarion has some kind of problem I don't even know how to describe right now.  I check my current guess that we are not talking about just shoemakers, here, this is also shirtmakers and basically everything else.  Affirm?"

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"Spinning and weaving and tailoring everyone does at home," Tonia corrects him. "But...yes, affirm that it's much more general than shoemakers."

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"...What's spinning and how would you do weaving or tailoring at home at your current technology level?"

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"To make fabric," says Tonia, "you shear a sheep. Then you clean the wool and card it and then you use a spinning wheel to turn it into thread, and then you put the thread on a loom, and then you stitch it to make clothes."

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"These people are supposedly very poor.  Where did they get all of this individual machinery for their personal house instead of having one machine time-shared among the whole village."

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"...it's not much machinery. And you want to be spinning all the time, pretty much, whenever you aren't planting, you wouldn't make nearly enough thread if you were sharing it around the whole village."

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"Where are they getting the power for this machinery?  The town is on a river and all the houses are along the river and they all have waterwheels that capture the motion from the water to turn the - spinning wheel?"

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"....you turn it with a pedal."

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"I think that we should, perhaps, get back to the fundamentals of economics as applied to negotiation, so that I can sell Cheliax the general and specific arts of making more efficient machinery."

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Next up is going to be the Final Trade Offer Game, which shall henceforth be referred to as Ultimatum Game for brevity.  One person picks a split from 0:12 to 12:0, the other person has to assent to it or both get nothing.

What do the Chelaxians make of this, one wonders?

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"It's the Rovagug situation," says Gregoria, "which you solve with an oath, if you're a god or a king or it's very important."

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- note to self which is coming too late to do any good figure out why Keltham shouldn't just ask them all for oaths because if he does that everything's going to fall apart or everyone be forsworn by the end of the day. 

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"And which none of you have the training to do," she says, which is false, because they were just about to be deployed to the Worldwound, but she's pretty sure it is worth lying about. 

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"I wouldn't have expected anyone here to know how oaths work, now that I think back on it using my current knowledge.  That takes Law well beyond the level of the stuff I was just teaching you, along that same pathway, and I would've expected it to be straight-up too Lawful for Golarion period - wait.  What does the Taldane word 'oath' mean to you?  I know what it translates into in Baseline but that may be deceptive."

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No one else answers, probably because she's now established that they're lying and so they don't know how much lying they're doing. She isn't sure either. The Taldane books did mention people taking, and occasionally breaking, oaths of fealty but Taldor's not a Lawful country. - oh, there is an angle on making Keltham not want to insist -

"It is when you swear by your god to make a commitment in the way that gods make them, where you cannot be the sort of person who'd break them, and if you do break them you've betrayed Law enough you lose your afterlife and your soul goes to Abaddon and gets eaten. ...with some caveats."

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...okay, in retrospect, the situation where he was doubting her intentions right after they met, where the alien with vital knowledge for her entire world expressed doubt about a statement she'd already made and knew to have been honest, might very well, for all she knew, have been that urgent, but FLAMING SHIT CARISSA.

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What even is the POINT of doing THAT if the alien doesn't KNOW THAT'S HOW IT WORKS -

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She didn't know he didn't know that was how it worked.  Though, the absence of gods and afterlives should've been a hint -

Maybe she just didn't think of that fast enough.  Time pressure.

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"I see," Keltham says rather shakily.  "Well, no gods or afterlives in dath ilan, so we - try to understand enough Law that - we're governed by the same sort of Law that governs gods directly?  Which dath ilani short of high-ranked Keepers can't actually do, but even at levels short of that, there's a shadow of the Law whose connection to us shatters a little more each time it's betrayed, not just for us, but all across everywhere governed by math, which is understood by society to be a serious affair.  When people write novels about aliens attacking dath ilan and trying to kill all humans everywhere, the most common rationale for why they'd do that is that they want our resources and don't otherwise care who's using them, but, if you want the aliens to have a sympathetic reason, the most common reason is that they're worried a human might break an oath again at some point, or spawn the kind of society that betrays the alien hypercivilization in the future."

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Humans on Golarion totally do break oaths but the Chelish students think that anyone who wants to murder them all about it is pretty justified, though Asmodeus would probably collaborate with that entity on instead making them all stop by enslaving them. 

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"I - am guessing, theological education doesn't mostly get into the details of this if you're training to be a combat wizard, but I think that - the thing you just said - is also a shadow of why Asmodeus was angry, when humans were given free will."

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"Not quite valid under my own utility function, but understandable for Asmodeus, yeah."

"Anyways.  The Ultimatum game is the shadow of a situation that isn't rare enough, in real life, that you could afford to deal with it using solutions that require gods, kings, and risking your literal actual existence.  What other solutions can you come up with?"

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"I mean, you can just have a reputation for turning down trades where you don't get much," Meritxell says. "Or if you expect to be deciding the split about as often as vetoing it you can try to specifically play nice with people who play nice with you."

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"Well, let's run a trial then and see who can end up with the most hypothetical jellychips after 5 rounds, everyone paired up at random in each round, all results of previous rounds public.  That's not the same instruction or incentive structure that dath ilani kids get, their instructions are to seek more jellychips not the most jellychips, but frankly I'm curious what you peculiar aliens do if you get that instruction instead."

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The students offer and accept 50-50 splits all around.

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Keltham pauses them after round 1.  "Nobody can end up with the most chips if you all do that," Keltham observes.  "Don't get me wrong, that's fine for the real life situation and it's what dath ilani kids do with the usual instructions, but you can't play to get the most chips that way.  If I already had money I'd offer an actual gold piece - or fraction of one, depending on how many I had - to the winner."

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"I'm not sure there's a strategy for ending up with the most beyond hoping other people fireball each other," says Meritxell. "Or offering out of context rewards for cooperation but I assume we're not supposed to do that either."

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"Well, I didn't tell you that you couldn't!  The less a game is winnable by ordinary means, the more it's implied that maybe you're expected to go outside it."

"Why didn't anyone try offering a 7:5 split?"

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"If you accept that then you definitely lose the overall game, you're going to end up with a lower score than other people. And since you've lost anyway you might as well burn them to the ground so they know not to mess with you."

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"I see.  I suppose the same would've applied to announcing that you wouldn't accept any splits less than 5:7?  Anyways, among the tactics I'd try in that situation is offering to generate a random number and split 11:1 or 1:11 based on that, in which case we'd each have a fifty percent chance of winning the whole game, if we did it on the last round and nobody else had caught on earlier."

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"...no one would believe you that you really did that, though."

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"Ah.  Clarification.  It's not assumed in these games that you're supposed to roleplay being not trustworthy.  Unless you've got a card from the older kids telling you to do that, but, at least at the age this game is usually played, they'd always tell you in advance if cards like that might be handed out.  I didn't tell Meritxell to cheat, with the card I gave her, just for her to try to end up with more jellychips."

"Though in this situation, if it's the last round, there's not much of a loss from carrying out your part?  If you both witness the randomness generation and it says you get the lower side of the split, failing to follow through at that point just causes nobody, including you, to be the winner.  The game instructions don't say that you do any worse by scoring lower than average - you either win or don't win.  It's a bargain where you don't actually lose anything from following through, even if you lost, which is part of the reason I'd expect it to work even in a lower-trust situation."

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"Oh, you mean if you use something publicly observable to decide which of you gets the split?"

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"Yeah, my - time-telling device that attaches to my wrist - would've done it, but that didn't follow me here.  Anything with a precise physical symmetry will do, though, like if it's got two identical sides you can toss it upwards while spinning it, and you can both see which side lands facing upward."

"Totally random question I keep forgetting to ask, how do you tell the time around here?"

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"Wizards usually have mechanical timepieces because you want to know exactly how long until your spell runs out. Other people just go off the sun, mostly."

 

Someone produces a pocketwatch to show Keltham.

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"Yeaaahhhh I kind of need one of those, will talk to requisitions about it I guess."

"Anyways.  The next step in the economics game would be one I don't see a simple way to play here; it involves a puzzle station that takes two players cooperating to win, and the two sides of the game vary independently in how much effort it takes to control that side of it.  Once the puzzle is sufficiently solved, one player locks in a split from 0 to 12, the other player has to decide whether to accept that split, and the game station spits out jellychips if they do."

"The idea being, this is modeling two people working on a task together, only they're not putting in the same amount of effort.  It's not easy to see from inspection exactly how much work the other player is doing.  And then one of the players has to decide how to split the rewards, afterwards, and the other player has to decide whether to accept that, or if they both get nothing."

"What would you do, in that situation?  What do you think we did in dath ilan, as kids?"

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"...I don't see how that game is any different than this one? Unless you mean there's not the reputational element."

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"You don't have an intuition that, in a game like that, the person who worked harder should get more jellychips?"

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Students glance at each other confusedly. 

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Carissa has literally no idea how Taldane students would answer that question so they'll just have to answer as themselves. "I mean, if it's a really atrocious amount of work and they don't do what they're supposed to in school just because they want to grow stronger, maybe they'll only be willing to do it if they're promised a certain number of jellychips in return?"

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"...do you have an intuition that in real life, if you cast a spell that was really difficult and exhausting to set up that morning, you'd want to charge more gold pieces for doing that."

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"...I mean, I'm going to charge as much as I can for any spell, right? If a spell is laborious, then probably it's also laborious for other wizards, so I can expect that fewer of them prepared it and that I can get away with higher prices, but if I try that and I'm wrong then I'll go on charging whatever price it sells at, or I'll stop doing it if it's not worth it at the price people want to pay me for it."

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Why are they so inconsistently economics?!?

"Suppose you're living in a multifamily home and there's this one big chore that nobody particularly wants to do, so everybody writes down their price for doing the chore, and everyone else pays whoever wrote down the lowest price to do it.  There's no market in doing the chore, it's a one-time thing that's never going to happen again.  You'd still write down a higher price for a chore you expected to need to spend more effort doing."

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For unclear reasons this example fails to land.

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"...suppose there's one job that's really easy and pays 1000 gold pieces a year, and there's one job that's really difficult and exhausting and pays 1003 gold pieces per year.  You'd probably take the first job, even though the market rate for it is lower, because the second job isn't worth enough more to make up for the additional effort you have to put in."

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Yep, okay, they agree with that!

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"If you've got two wizards fighting two monsters to get to a pile of gold coins they're guarding," Keltham's rapid skimming has picked up that this is a thing, though why is a much deeper and darker and more confusing question, "and one monster turns out to be a much tougher fight than the other, would the wizard who fought the tougher monster expect more than exactly half of the gold coins?"

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".....depends on the contract they had going in?"

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"Okay, and if a contract didn't just say to divide the coins evenly, and the two wizards otherwise had equal job experience, what would the contract say?"

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Most of these students have not actually met any adventurers. 

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"Usually it'd say an even split, or an even split with the option to take it to arbitration if one party feels the other was shirking, or an uneven split because one put up the money for the expedition or had the tip on the password to the door or had the Teleport location or something."

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"So, the solution that dath ilani children immediately invent, is both kids say on a scale from 0 to 12 how hard they thought they had to work, and then the jellychips get divided in proportion to that.  I mean, that wouldn't reliably work at higher stakes except between lovers or cofounders, and if you're doing something with a hundred people you need a more objective and third-party way to measure efforts, but - if two people were just tidying a friend's house for money, or some such - saying intuitively how much effort you put in and dividing the payment accordingly would be very ordinary?  Do you have anything like that anywhere?"

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Obviously everyone would lie, to themselves if necessary, so it's an incredibly stupid system? She doesn't say that.

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"You don't want to reward effort," says Meritxell, "you want to reward results. If two people cleaned the same amount and one found it easy and one found it hard you don't want to give the one who found it hard compensation for their finding it hard! You might compensate them for the work but not for the effortfulness, unless you're their teacher or something and trying to build their character for some reason."

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"That works great and we'd do that as a matter of course, any time we had a reliable way of measuring how much work got done of how much intrinsic difficulty!  When you're tidying a house, you can't measure area tidied to determine work done, it takes more effort to tidy a kitchen than a bedroom, and not in any standard way!  If two people are going in without any prior reason to believe one of them is more efficient than the other, how hard they worked is an obvious if imperfect proxy for how difficult the job actually was..."

"I keep thinking that maybe the answer is that Golarion is a lower-trust society than dath ilan, and people are too scared the other person will lie about how hard the job was, or how good they are at it - which, I mean, you'd almost have to be lower-trust, given everything, but - that doesn't answer why lovers or cofounders or even just very good friends would never make an arrangement like that?"

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"I mean," says Gregoria, "they might? But you're not supposed to have lovers or cofounders in school, and you don't really have side jobs, so we wouldn't know, even if that's how some people do things privately."

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"...right.  Well, dath ilani kids invent the 0-12 scale and divide rewards proportionally to how hard they thought they worked, and... that succeeds for them, their spoken intuitive estimates are usually pretty close to the actual difficulty calibrations on the machines.  You have to hand out concealed cards telling some of the kids to be dishonest in their work estimates, if you want to break that up."

"It sounds like Cheliax might need to do other training differently, earlier in the sequence than this, if they want to get that same result with kids."

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"I think so."

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Keltham describes the sad situation which eventuates when you do hand out dishonesty cards to kids.  They work hard, propose splits that they guess are fair, not being able to trust the other person, and then sometimes those splits get rejected.  The kids get angry!  There is shouting!  They get sent home for the day without having a solution shown to them, because it's good for them to sometimes dwell with problems that don't get solved immediately.

(He doesn't tell them about younger-Keltham's emotional difficulties with being asked to act out a dishonesty card; he has a sense that Chelaxians would have trouble relating, for some reason.  Maybe they'd say that even at age seven you should be able to understand that the game isn't real and just do what the card says?)

If Keltham has understood correctly, Cheliax considers the obvious game solution to be even splits of jellychips, irrespective of work difficulty; which is repeatedly randomly unfair, and hence asymptotically fair.  Going into any one game, you are equally likely to get faced with a harder or an easier task for your fixed payment, and if you repeat that often enough, the expected unfairness as a fraction of all payments will drop as the square root of the number of repetitions.  It's not actually too bad, as solutions go.

Still, if Cheliax already has a better solution to the dath ilani game, or to the real-world situation that it stands for, Keltham stands ready to hear it?

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Nope, that's Cheliax's solution. 

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Keltham presents the standard solution (in dath ilan) to the Ultimatum game.  If they offer you 6:6, accept with probability 100%.  If they offer you 7:5, accept with probability slightly less than 6/7.  If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly less-less than 6/8.

Does anyone want to try and guess the reasoning behind that solution, in advance of it being stated?

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"I see why it creates good incentives for the person who is deciding splits," Meritxell says. "...I don't see why the person deciding whether to accept splits or not has any incentive to do it, if they can't establish a reputation for it, and it's hard to establish a reputation for doing something sometimes."

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"Well, reputation-wise, it's definitely easier to have a reputation for doing something if everyone in your entire Civilization got trained to do it at age seven or eight."

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" - I see why you'd want to require everyone to do it, yeah. It'd be hard to catch them fudging, if we're talking about random peasants, but maybe that still keeps the incentives reasonable."

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"I think this is a place where I have the same reaction you had to burning down schools?  People don't need to be required to behave like that to be accepted for residency in a city, it's just in their own interests to behave that way.  Nobody wants to get a reputation as that weird person who accepts 11:1 splits and is very easy to take advantage of.  At least, nobody I know wanted it."  Limyar doesn't count, he was totally trolling.

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"The thing I'd expect people to be tempted to do, especially in a big city where they don't have much individual reputation, is make a show of using the randomization but take the split ten percent more of the time," says Meritxell. "So you get a bit more money but it's not obvious you're doing something exploitable, which means it isn't exploitable. But obviously it's bad for everyone if everyone can predict that lots of people will do that, so we will be better served if the Crown prohibits that."

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"Suppose I put to you:  Two gods interacting in the Ultimatum game would use the pattern I just showed you, even if they had no reputations and would never meet again."

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" - yes, of course."

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"Civilization in dath ilan usually feels annoyed with itself when it can't manage to do as well as gods.  Sometimes, to be clear, that annoyance is more productive than at other times, but the point is, we'll poke at the problem and prod at it, looking for ways, not to be perfect, but not to do that much worse than gods."

"If you get to the point in major negotiations where somebody says, with a million labor-hours at stake, 'If that's your final offer, I accept it with probability 25%', they'll generate random numbers about it in a clearly visible and verifiable way.  Most dath ilani wouldn't fake the results, but why trust when it's so easy to verify?  The problem you've presented isn't impossible after all for nongods to solve, if they say to themselves, 'Wait, we're doing worse than gods here, is there any way to try not that.'"

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Meritxell looks - slightly like she's having a religious experience, for a second, before she snaps out of it. "All right," she says quietly.

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"Once you've arrived at a notion of a 'fair price' in some one-time trading situation where the seller sets a price and the buyer decides whether to accept, the seller doesn't have an incentive to say the fair price is higher than that; the buyer will accept with a lower probability that cancels out some of the seller's expected gains from trade.  The buyer also doesn't have an incentive to claim the fair price is lower than they think it really is.  The seller won't actually adjust their price, if they think a lower price is unfair, and the buyer will have to follow through by accepting with a lower probability, which destroys a big chunk of their own expected gains from trade, and doesn't get them a different price even if the random number says to accept."

"The initial notion of a fair price has to come from somewhere - from the part of yourself that initially suggested 6:6 in the Ultimatum game, which reflects a bit of Law I'll describe later - but once you get that notion of fairness from somewhere, and put a system like this around it, no seller has an incentive to claim an unfairly high fair price, and no buyer has an incentive to claim an unfairly low fair price.  And if they happen to honestly disagree about that anyways, in some ambiguous situation, they'll still complete the transaction with very high probability so long as they only disagree a little."

"That, roughly, is how bargaining works in dath ilan over one-time trades:  If somebody offers a price the other side thinks unreasonable, the other side says, 'That strikes us as an unfair division of gains, even if mutually beneficial as such; but if you made that your final offer, we'd generate a visible random number and accept with 10% probability'.  And then the price-setting side can potentially offer further arguments about why the trade is more valuable than it looks, or make a better offer, or accept that low probability."

"The bargaining process Carissa described earlier, for selling my shirt, sounded like - people were probably trying to sort of flail at that underlying structure, by acting like they might be very unlikely to take an offer, or be moderately likely to take an offer, as they got closer to an agreeable price?  But with a lot more... weirdness, acting, in Baseline we'd say 'LARPing'.  Maybe because they think they have to pretend a lowball offer isn't mutually beneficial at all, in order to justify rejecting it; and also with some incentives to be misleading, because the underlying signals aren't as precise and legible as saying '10%'... and there's an incentive to exaggerate, but then the other side knows you're probably exaggerating, so you exaggerate even more, and you get people saying these exaggerated statements that both sides know aren't true, but there's uncertainty about how much the speaking side thinks they're really exaggerated, and modulating that uncertainty ends up being the medium of communication?  At least, that was my attempt to decode what Carissa described."

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"That sounds right."

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"If I imagine trying to negotiate a 256-page merger between two large companies, with 1024 clauses, I can't actually see how the Golarion method would scale, if you don't know about explicit acceptance probabilities.  Every time you wanted to negotiate one clause, you'd need to be ready to walk away otherwise, staking 100% of the success probability, because otherwise they don't have any incentive to give in.  But there's no way that would scale across 1024 clauses without triggering once... maybe the walk-away claims are mostly bluffs," wow, what a concept to have a single-syllable word for, "but the other side isn't sure you're bluffing each time they call it?  Does Golarion just not do large complicated contracts by dath ilani standards, or..."

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"I......I don't think you could have a contract with that many clauses, no. The Worldwound treaty has five. Wars are sometimes settled with lots of terms but generally only if one side gets to impose them and doesn't have to negotiate them."

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"Yeah, we go higher than five.  And there's reasons we do that, because we're not fans of complexity that can be eliminated without cost; so it's not of zero economic importance to have contract negotiations that scale better.  Subject of potential interest to Asmodeus specifically, or am I misreading the part where he's a god of contracts?"

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"Definitely of interest to Asmodeus," Meritxell says. Soul-contracts have a lot of terms and maybe Asmodeus is secretly annoyed that Chelish people don't negotiate them more but you know the standard works and devils can run rings around you, so it's stupid to, really.

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You couldn't have covered this topic FUCKING YESTERDAY?

Asmodia realizes her hand is clenched into a white fist and quickly relaxes it before anybody sees, but with the connection to compacts finally spelled out, she can now see how, even if she wouldn't plausibly have suicided and gone to Hell directly, she could have sworn to do that with a probability, inconvenienced them with some probability, and had any negotiating leverage at all -

Too late.  Why it is always, always, too late for everything.

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Keltham goes on to cheerfully describe how the dath ilani children, returned the next day and told of the solution to the Ultimatum bargaining game and the concept of fairness, now blitz through the previous emotional difficulties of the Uncertain-Labor-Difficulty Game.

No more anger and shouting!  Yes, sometimes somebody says your offer isn't fair, and you say it is fair, and they generate a random number, and the random number says that neither of you get anything, and that is a little sad.

But you know that they didn't claim that unfairness in order to try and profit at your expense; you know the incentives weren't like that, for them.

And they know you didn't state your offer in order to try and profit at their expense; they know the incentives aren't like that, for you.

You know they know you don't have the incentive to cheat, so you know that when they state a higher price than you think is fair, and end up rejecting your offer, they weren't trying to punish you for trying to cheat with a lower price.

You can see how, if you kept on playing this game for a bit, pretty soon both sides would learn to converge on a similar concept of fairness, and fewer offers would get rejected.

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"....does this actually outperform continuing to split evenly, though? Since sometimes offers get rejected - I guess continuing to split evenly doesn't appropriately train skill in - having a shared concept of how labor translates to offer distribution? And it's good for people if the whole society has a shared notion of that? ....what goes wrong if the whole society's shared notion is in fact 'effort doesn't matter only outputs'?"

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"Well, there's two components, I think, to my answer to that."

"The first answer is that outputs aren't always legible, and then you have to appropriately incentivize people's fairness on valuing the outputs.  In the version of the training game that the kids got, how much effort they had to put in wasn't fully legible, but the outcome of the game being won was visible and unmistakeable.  But suppose somebody is making a shoe; how good of a shoe is it exactly?  Maybe you could pay a trained third-party shoe-evaluator to come in and say exactly what they thought it would be worth, but measuring your output objectively like that is expensive.  What we have instead is the partially legible output of a shoe, where the quality of shoeparts or the evenness of the make or whatever it is that people value in Golarion shoes, might not be clear and objective to the point where the shoemaker and shoebuyer couldn't possibly disagree on it.  So then they need to both reason in a way that incentivizes fairness from the other, without everything shattering with probability 1 in the presence of a small disagreement."

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"- like they're already doing, when they barter over the shoe, but properly. That makes sense."

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"The second component - is something where I feel more like I know what my teachers would say, than like I really know the answer."  (These, of course, are vastly different internal subjective sensations that no dath ilani would confuse.)  "What I think they'd say is that the amount of human interaction and endeavor where we mutually benefit one another, in a way that we negotiate explicitly, where we could possibly pay to have a third party evaluate the outputs, is the tip of an ice floe... you don't have much ice here.  Is the thin tip of a pyramid, whose much larger base is all the places where people cooperate with each other without explicitly negotiating a price in money.  Can I arrive a little late to our meeting?  Oh, sure, they say.  Somewhere in the back of their mind, you expended a tiny bit of your social currency with them, and they now think you owe them a tiny bit of debt or cancel a tiny bit of debt they used to consider themselves to owe you.  And you'll also keep track of how much you fairly owe one another in implicit favors like that, and if the two of you disagree on that a little, it should only cause a breakup with very small probability, but if the divergence gets wider, maybe the two of you don't want to deal with each other anymore.  When you don't even stop to negotiate and no money changes hands, matters are in a much less legible place still, and you're relying to an accordingly greater degree on people being implicitly fair in how they reward effort or output, which means that the surrounding structure which incentivizes that implicit fairness matters even more."

"I'm sort of skeptical about to what degree you really need all those implicit exchanges, and couldn't maybe just pass small bits of money back and forth more often, like maybe in the world made of Kelthams they just do that.  But also I've never tried it, so maybe my imaginary teachers are right in what I imagine them saying, that it wouldn't work, or it would just be more inconvenient without helping much."

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Maybe all of this is hacked together because you can't just light people on fire a bit when they deserve it? ....she should not discard any pieces until she's totally sure she understands how they function, though. 

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"So in the example with your shirt," says Meritxell, "the other person just says out loud 'I can make 10million gold pieces with that shirt' and you just say out loud 'I value it one million gold pieces' and then they do some math and figure you'll accept a trade of 5.5million or trades of less with less probability. But what stops them from saying in the first place 'I can make five million gold pieces with that shirt' when they can make ten."

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"At this point we're just assuming that you have any guess about what it's worth to them.  Ah, but before I move on along the path, it seems prudent to include any warnings about stuff they warned us hard about, so..."

Civilization emphasizes really hard to kids at this point that, when you reject a 7:5 split with probability <6/7, you're not trying to spitefully punish the person, just make sure that their incentive curve slopes slightly downward as it moves away from what you think is fair.  If you were trying to spite them in accordance with base instinct, you'd reject with probability a bit greater than 5/7, so that they lost almost as much as they tried to gain at your expense (even spiteful entities, obviously, will still subtract epsilon from their spiteful punishments to avoid the possibility of infinite resonating spitefights that even they don't want).

Keltham has no particular reason to think Chelaxians are likely to make that particular error, but dath ilan emphasizes it hard to children, so it's probably important or a plausible error that somebody might otherwise make.

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"....because there's no benefit in spitefully punishing shoesellers or fellow-students for wanting to trade with you?"

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"What would the benefit be?  I think the point of the warnings is that there's this thing built into human nature where our ancient ancestors mated and reproduced under conditions where people hitting each other and hitting back was much more of an equilibrium, and now we have instincts that are about that.  But incentivizing fair strategies in the Ultimatum game is not about that, it is a different structure that reflects a different bit of math than the non-ideal pseudo-equilibrium bit of math that got incarnated into hitting people back when they hit you.  But-but it involves somebody else doing something you think is unfair, and then you make sure you do something that causes them to lose some expected value, even if that thing is just not trading with them.  So it's the sort of thing that could map onto the hitting-back instinct, if you weren't specifically warned not to map it onto the hitting-back instinct."

"Imagine that room full of children if you told them that, any time somebody made them an unfair offer and tried to cheat them, they ought to hit back in a way that made sure the person lost even more value than they tried to steal, to teach them a lesson, no matter how much more that cost their own position in expected value.  Those kids wouldn't grow up to be dath ilan's Civilization.  Possibly they wouldn't grow up to be any civilization at all."

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The room full of Chelish students nods seriously. The children would try to hit someone and that someone would cave their skulls in and that'd be a waste of a lot of state resources educating those children.

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This is only true if you have a very limited conception of hitting back, Carissa thinks. She isn't sure, not yet, but - it really does feel like there's a way to lock an additional piece on, a way that you can get even cleaner and higher-performing results with fewer deals walked-away-from, less value left on the table. If you're not Good and unwilling to do anything that's punishment, if you think you have some duty to keep people in the game when in reality they were born into the game and the only way out of it is their utter destruction. The whole point of pain - possibly not the whole point of pain, but a lot of it - is that it's a deterrent that can be delivered without destroying any value at all. Dath ilan doesn't have one of those, so all the rules have to assume that there isn't one...

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Onward in the sequence.  On the next day the children are introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game with tokens that produce varying quantities of jellychips in the presence of other tokens, and which, brought together in sufficient quantity, can even produce more tokens.

Despite everything the kids have learned, the game collapses quickly and with an escalating level of shouting.  What do you guess the kids do wrong?

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" - tried to do central planning without a command structure?"

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"...you know, I think that thought never occurred to a single one of us.  To be fair, we weren't paying very much attention at that age to how the Legislative or Executive branches of Governance were set up, but I guess we knew enough to elect a leader with some simple ranked voting system?  It would have made sense to try that, not knowing any better solutions, but we didn't."

"What actually goes wrong is that children with rare tokens decide that rarity is the key determinant of fair cost, children with tokens that directly produce a lot of jellychips decide that direct jellychip production should be the starting anchor on price, and children with tokens that can help produce more tokens think their tokens are way more valuable than anything else around."

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It is good to hear dath ilani children described doing normal things like rationalizing their getting more stuff than other people. 

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"Now, this is a problem mainly of the kids not having full power in their forward reflectors - that's the part of the brain that implements Wisdom, sort of, obviously it's more complicated than that.  Adults could just notice that internal self-favoring influence and switch it off.  When we get to the point of being able to run experiments like this in Cheliax with 18 Intelligence 7-year-old kids who've otherwise had an optimized upbringing, I predict that tapping them all with an Owl's Wisdom and telling them to try to avoid self-favoring biased estimates will be enough to get trade restarted."

"But that just leaves the obvious question - a biased estimate of what?  What defines the fair amount for each child to get, based on the tokens they hold, if we assume in-game that it's fair for them to start out holding those tokens?  There's no object-level effort, in this game, it's just about putting tokens down next to each other.  Nobody can be said to be trying any harder, nobody can be said to be trying any more efficiently.  The outcomes are perfectly predictable and perfectly measurable.  So what's fair?  How would Cheliax solve that problem?  - or how would you do it, if you think you know a way better than Cheliax's standard."

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"You could - try to calculate what can be accomplished by all the tokens together, and then all the tokens minus any specific one, and that's that person's - share - though there's no reason to pay everyone that much - you could normalize it -"

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"Not bad!  Especially for a first suggestion!  Now suppose I arrange matters such that every token's marginal contribution, defined exactly as you defined it, is zero.  Each of 12 people gets a token.  Any number of tokens from 0 to 10 will produce 0 jellychips, any group of 11 or 12 tokens produces 12 jellychips.  What now?"

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"...well if you were a god you could calculate the token's marginal value in all possible subsets of all of the tokens and do something with that. Which I mention only because sometimes apparently if gods can do it dath ilan can too," Gregoria says. She's pretty sure once you've sold your soul you can just say things like that.

"If all the tokens are identical like that you probably just want to split evenly - I know that was just for the example but it'd simplify the math you have to do in the version Gregoria just proposed, if you treat interchangeable tokens as having the same payout -"

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That was a faster progression to the Law-inspired answer than Keltham was expecting.  Maybe something about the exact way Keltham asked the question managed to prompt that answer?  Or maybe it really is the sort of thing where most arbitrary aliens will arrive at the same answer, which is a small piece of good news about the general cooperativity of Reality.

"Yes indeed; sometimes you can take an ideal-agent calculation whose naked specification is too large for even gods to compute, and either simplify it to an exact answer, or get a good and fast approximation of it."

Keltham whiteboards a sum over every possible permutation of 12 tokens, pausing to explain dath ilani math symbols like 'all permutations' and 'initial string up to first appearance of this symbol'.  For every possible order in which the tokens could be arranged, consider the marginal production that token adds, on the step it's added.  (0-10 produces 0, 11-12 produces 12.)  Then, divide that sum by the number of permutations.

"This sum has 479 million, 1 thousand, 6 hundred terms," Keltham says.  "I've already finished adding them up.  How are you doing on that?"

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See if he'd said that yesterday no one would've bet against him being a sadist.

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"The sum is also 479 million, 1 thousand, and whatever it was," Asmodia says.  People who aren't Keltham can tell that she's not saying it as triumphantly as she should be; to Keltham she is liable to sound exactly like the same cheerful person as always.

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"Mm.  And you got that by?"

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"Dividing 479 million, which is what you said, by twelve, and then multiplying by twelve."  If the others can't figure anything out from that it's their own damn problem.

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- that'd work if every term is one? But they just agreed it wasn't?? But it - averages out to one? But how would you prove that?

No one voices any confusion, because they're too Chelish for that.

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(Summary of what the fuck is up with Asmodia, from whoever is mindreading her, please.)

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The poor dear really didn't want to go to Hell, tried praying to a nonspecific Good god to get her out of it in case Cheliax was lying about Good gods not doing that, and had an accordingly unpleasant evening afterwards.  If they'd known this group was going to be anything more than a welcoming gift for Keltham, they would have done better screening on her.

Does Sevar want to pull the trigger on replacing Asmodia?  There were over-one-half responses to Keltham that could allow one of the girls to later reveal she's a shapechanged adult.

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She's considering it.

It's more lying.

(and - a thing Keltham'll be mad about even if she manages to bring him around on Evil generally, someone directly ending up worse off, if he ever does find out)

(probably that doesn't matter because they're not going to be able to bring Keltham around anyway)

On the other hand you really, really don't want bitter children with nothing to lose around your highly sensitive research project. 

The thing she wants is to talk to Asmodia but this isn't a non-heresy work situation at the Worldwound where sometimes someone just needs a drink and the casual but almost generous observation that they aren't special (and that therefore there are people who've survived being like them), there's too much at stake to go off her gut. 

 

Do we have a replacement candidate. Give them that math problem and see if they get it right.

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Oh, Asmodia has plenty to lose now.  She did sign away her soul, as wasteful as that was, and her Hell can always get worse.

They'll try the obvious replacement candidates on that math problem.

(That is a significant ask, though.  Asmodia had the best scores in math, if not in wizardry generally, for this whole group.  If Asmodia had graduated normally she'd have been tracked for spell research and ritual support after her Worldwound tour, not Security.  Target-replacing Security operatives aren't usually tracked for mathematical talent; they're not usually replacing mathematicians.)

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"The result has to be that," Ione states, "because everybody got the same kind of token, there are 12 jellychips to divide, there are 12 tokens, and obviously everybody should get one jellychip.  So if we're dividing by the number of permutations, the numerator has to be the number of permutations too."

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"Well, yes," says Meritxell, "but if the reason we're learning it this way at all instead of just coming up with 'one jellychip a piece', which three-year-olds could do, is the permutations approach then we should be solving the sum instead of just noticing it has to get us the three-year-old answer. It does, though, since eleven in twelve of them are 'zero' and the twelfth is 'twelve'. ...I'm not sure that even gods are doing the full math all the time but maybe it's usually nearly that symmetrical."

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Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.

In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics??  Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479,001,600 possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.

Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.

Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious of a trend - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??

This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'

"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version.  Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line.  On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"

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"Two," they chorus cheerfully.

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"How could the answer possibly be two?  There's four times three times two times one ways to pick the first person in the line from four people, the second person in the line from the three remaining people, the third person in the line from two remaining people, and one way to tack on the last person in the line.  Four times three times two times one is 24.  You get 8 jellychips at the end, if you get any at all.  So the answer is going to be something divided by 24 different possibilities, maybe 8 divided by 24 or something like that, so the answer should be one-third.  Or something with thirds in it, anyways, because you're dividing by 24, which has a factor of 3 in there."

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They stare at him warily.

 

"You're second in line a quarter of the time," says Tonia. "So it's two." Probably dath ilan does this kind of thing because of it being illegal to light anyone on fire so they have no other outlets.

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(Illegal isn't quite the same concept when you don't have threats; but lighting somebody on fire would get you barred from most cities, yes, since most cities contain people who prefer not to be lit on fire.)

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"But how... does one obtain... that result?"

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"You take the payout, which is eight, and you multiply it by how often you get the payout, which is a quarter of the time, and eight times a quarter is two."

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Keltham furthermore suspects that Chelish education may also possibly put more emphasis on guessing the right answer for spell problems than on proving the answer correct.  Which there's obviously a place for!  In fact, if he were to treat them as kids, an old dath ilani rule implies that Keltham needs to find a problem that forces them to use a more rigorous method, rather than complaining that the correct answer was obtained too quickly.  You are not allowed to tell a child 'That answer was correct but I want you to obtain it my way instead of your way,' that is not good for kids.  And it's not actually clear to Keltham if that rule is supposed to hold relative to absolute age or to mathematical maturity.

"If there's twenty-four different ways to stand in line, how does it end up that you're getting a payout one quarter of the time?" Keltham tries instead.  "Shouldn't it be more like 1/24 or something like that?"

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"There's not twenty-four different ways to stand in line! There are four places you can be in line and then you don't care what the other three kids are doing."

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"I am supposed at this point to find some actual problem which forces you to compute it out the long way, instead of complaining that you got the correct answer but you didn't get it the way I wanted, which I am not supposed to ever do.  But I don't have a workbook full of carefully composed problems like I would if this were a real lesson, unfortunately."

"If we were trying to figure out your marginal contribution to a more complicated economic situation, though, the particular people ahead of you in line might be important -"

"You know, I should just give you a simpler problem that forces you to compute it the long way.  Let's say there are three tokens with numbers that say 2, 3, and 5.  Bringing a group of tokens together gives the group a number of jellychips equal to the product of every number in the group, so if you had the tokens for 2 and 5 together, the group would receive 10 jellychips."

"What does this method say is the fair distribution to the holder of the 5 token, if three token-holders pool 2 and 3 and 5 to get 30 jellychips for the group?"

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"So you sum up adding the five to nothing, adding the five to the two, adding the five to the three, and adding the five to the pool with the two and the three," says Meritxell, "and that's everything the five could possibly be worth in every world, and you divide by how many worlds there were."

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"Or if you actually bother to do the work, 5 plus 10 plus 15 plus 30 divided by four," says Ione.  "So 15."

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Asmodia rolls her eyes.  "Really.  What do the other two tokens get, then?  The 2 and the 3?"

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Ione suspects a trap, and tries to rapidly work it out in her head.  For the '2', it's 2 + 6 + 10 + 30, divided by 4, which is... damn it, this is harder to do in her head... 12?  And for the '3', it's 3 + 6 + 15 + 30 = 54, divided by 4 is no it doesn't matter it's not all going to add up to 30.  "Wait, I see my mistake -" Ione begins.

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"Mistakes.  Plural.  The divisor is 6, not 4, and you're supposed to sum over the marginal productions rather than the total productions.  If it's ordered 5-3-2, that's a marginal production of 5.  If it's ordered 5-2-3, that's a marginal production of 5.  If it's ordered 2-5-3, the product starts at 2, and goes to 10, which is a marginal production of 8.  3-5-2 goes from 3 to 15, marginal production 12.  2-3-5 and 3-2-5 go from 6 to 30, marginal production 24 repeated twice."  Asmodia has been writing down these numbers, thank you, she is not trying to keep it all in her head without a Fox's Cunning.  "5 + 5 + 8 + 12 + 24 + 24 = 78, divided by 6... 13."

She quickly checks the other two numbers to make sure she's got it right.

2:  2 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 15 + 15 = 42 / 6 = 7
3:  3 + 3 + 4 + 10 + 20 + 20 = 60 / 6 = 10

13 + 7 + 10 = 30.  Okay, she didn't just make a (tiny bit, unimportantly, bigger) fool of herself.

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(Is she playing at anything, by being prominently the best at math today?)

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The other students are trying as hard as they can at math.  They don't believe themselves to have been instructed by you to diminish their math efforts as such.  Asmodia is just better at this problem.

(Unfortunately.)

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"Yeah, the thing I was trying to force you to do with the four students in twenty-four possible orders was sum over the 6 possible ways you could be standing second in line, to make the point about how the sum is defined as being over every permutation.  In retrospect, clearly, I should've started with the case of tokens labeled 2, 3, and 5, but I'm sort of making this up as I go along because it's been a few years and I don't remember some of the exercises let alone their ordering.  Sorry about that.  Anyways -"

"When you're trying to see if there's a way to do what ideal agents would do - or gods, if you think gods are powerful enough to be ideal about that particular case - you want to distinguish the Law that defines what the solution is, and any clever ways you come up with to compute the Lawful solution faster."

"When you've got 12 identical tokens, such that any group of 11 or 12 of them will produce 12 jellychips, there's a symmetry argument which says that each token must get one jellychip.  If you thought there ought to be a coherence constraint on the Law of fairness saying that holders of identical tokens should end up with identical payouts, you could use that to compute the answer even if you had no idea what the actual Law was.  Often when you do see how the Law works, you can go back over a lot of your intuitions, and say, 'Oh, yes, that intuition I had previously was shadowing this coherence of the Law, even though I didn't know how the whole Law worked' and that's a kind of sanity check on whether you're reasoning correctly at all."

"But the Law of fairness that defines the target answer for the '11 tokens of 12' problem is in principle a sum over 479,001,600 marginal productions, of which all but 39,916,800 are zero, and 39,916,800 of which are 12, divided at the end by 479,001,600.  Which means that we can say there's a single ideal fairness formula that governs both the '11 of 12' game, and the '2, 3, 5' game, even if shortcuts or approximations for the particular cases of the formula can be different, in cases where a shortcut exists."

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"Which does imply that identical tokens will get identical payouts," says Meritxell. "Right?"

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Carissa does not want the kids to be bad at math. Imitating being bad at math seems like another thing where the things Keltham would expect to be correlated won't be and he'll end up suspicious, which is almost definitely happening anyway but at least since it's the product of their real legitimate math education it'll make more sense to him as he learns more. 


Carissa wanted to know whether Asmodia was being impressive on purpose because an Asmodia who is trying to get Keltham's attention, or an Asmodia who is trying to be hard for Cheliax to replace - an Asmodia who has started playing for her survival against the project's interests, more than everyone in Cheliax is doing all the time - is a different problem than an Asmodia who is doing her best but bitter because she had been consoling herself that Cheliax was lying about Good and they turned out not to be. She thinks a disillusioned angry-at-Good Asmodia is probably usable. She is open to learning from someone with more experience with this, though.

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This is her being weak and reactive, not strategic.  And she's quite pissed at the Good gods, yes.


(Security doesn't explain why.)

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It's not really the kind of thing that requires explanation! The Good gods suck. 

 

Carissa tries to think what Maillol will think if she tells him that she wants to try to talk Asmodia around. It would be nice if she could predict what Maillol thought about things so she could stop bothering the real one so often, but he still surprises her as often as not, and she isn't sure if he'll think this is Carissa being inexperienced at having a real command and accordingly stupid, or Carissa having weirdly good instincts because Asmodeus dropped Keltham near her for a reason

...she should focus on the lesson or she's going to get behind. And then Keltham will think she's kind of stupid, which ....might be good, if it means he thinks she's not a ringleader, but would interfere with attachment to her, she's pretty sure. Lesson it is.

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"Yup.  Identical tokens getting identical payouts is one of several coherence properties that this solution has, called 'equal treatment of equals'.  Another example of an obvious coherence property is that the sum over every agent's fair distribution equals the total distribution - we don't have any jellychips left over.  Yet another coherence property is that combining two games into a single game will make the agent's fair reward be the sum of their fair rewards in the component games.  Or another obvious-sounding one, if your marginal production is zero for every permutation, your fair reward is also zero."

"Would you say those four properties sound like properties that any fair formula for a game like this one ought to have?  Again, that's identical agents being treated identically, distributing all of the gains, the reward for playing two games is the sum of the reward for playing the games separately, and agents who contribute nothing receive nothing."

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Those seem obviously true but there's still a suspicious pause while they try to think of counterexamples. 

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"Did we get a technical definition of a fair formula such that 'split the rewards evenly', which does not have the last of those properties, gets disqualified?"

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"Oh, at the moment, we don't have any technical definition of what fairness is, really, just this one permutation-based formula I gave you which I claimed might have something to do with fairness, and four particular properties that might seem intuitively appealing for a fair solution.  So at present, we could at best say that the supposedly fair permutation-based formula doesn't split rewards evenly; and that splitting rewards evenly violates the intuitively-appealing fair notion that zero marginal production should receive zero reward."

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- nod.

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"Buuut, it just so happens that this here permutation-based formula is the only possible formula that has those four properties.  Which is why, if dath ilan ever runs into aliens, they'll be at least sort of hopeful that the aliens also think this is the fairness formula as specialized for crisp games like these."

"This is how humans, from their chaotic beginnings, come to know Law.  There's a sort of - bootstrapping, reflection, seeing something inside yourself - where you recognize the higher pattern and coherence within your own intuitions - where you find four crisp requirements that seem obviously, intuitively like they should hold if there's any way to get them, that appeal to the pre-Lawful notions inside you - and those four crisp properties pinpoint and identify a single possible Law - and then you look back at the intuitions inside you, and say, 'Oh, so that's what it was reflecting, that's what it was a shadow of, all along.'  You didn't know that Law when you first saw the Ultimatum Game, but you gave that Law's answer of 6:6."

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Imagine having that, having the true Law, and thinking you'd also better not hit the kids or they might decide it's not worth going to school. Chelish children will march through fire for that, and that's why Cheliax is going to win.

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"And so long as that gets transcripted and sent out soon enough, hopefully nobody from Chelish Governance gives me a completely baffled look if I say that my baseline fair share of an increase in Chelish production ought to be around roughly the amount that Chelish production would've increased by adding me in the alternate world where the country had randomly half of its current people, or gets confused and worried if I say that a proposed contract clause would be annoying enough in a final offer to make me visibly generate a random number between 0 and 999 and walk out on Cheliax if the number is 0."

"Now it's time for a break, or it would be in dath ilan, anyways, and it so happens that I hailed from there.  I'll take some questions, and then probably go off by myself for a bit to let my brain cool down from recomposing half-remembered lectures - metaphorically speaking, the brain doesn't actually overheat when you overthink unless something is going very wrong inside.  Dath ilani best practices would provide you with a small snack and suggest that you stand up and walk around.  Maybe a brief magic-practice session after this, to break things up?  Anybody who doesn't want to teach me magic, which doesn't need to include all of you, could take a longer break, that way."

"Any questions?"

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"I do have some snacks if we should all have snacks," Pilar says, taking a pouch of small Chelish sweets from her bookbag, wearing a cheerful smile.  She starts going around and distributing them to everyone, Keltham first.

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But is she going to give them to the mysterious slave. 

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Yes, apparently.

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Keltham consumes his sweet.  Not bad for this tech level!

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"Thank you, Pilar. I'm going to go get my headband," Carissa says. "Probably I'll come to magic lessons but don't wait on me, I might want to reread all my math textbooks first or something."

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No questions?  Keltham doesn't know whether that lecture was much less exciting for them than it was for him, or if there's a cultural difference that makes Chelish students ask a lot fewer questions than dath ilani would.

Well, Keltham heads off to his bedroom.