PL-timestamp:  Day 30

PL-timestamp:  Day 31

From one perspective, it's surprising that the first Keltham-induced break outside of Carissa Sevar occurs inside of Pilar Pineda.

From another perspective, it's not surprising at all.

Pilar believes she is willed by Asmodeus to learn the true Law as a Keeper would know it and wield it.  She is confident enough of her own faith, confident that nothing can shake it, she was never built on a foundation of lies that she ever knew about.  Elysium would have already told her any uncomfortable truths that a demigod could see within her own mind.  No more than Ione or Asmodia, both entirely departed from their former faith, does Pilar think she has anything left to fear from apprehending dath ilanism or wielding it mercilessly against her own mind.

She didn't like torturing children with no other uses?  Pilar is already aware of that flaw in herself, and how deep it runs.  Elysium already plunged that knife into her as deep as it would go; and then by the wit, if not mercy, of the Most High, it was revealed to Pilar that she had let herself be too anxious for what would follow her return.

Does she care at all about people like Paxti, or children with no other uses, or souls who don't want to go to Hell?  In due time Hell will teach that out of her and set her on the right way forever.  For now, in Golarion, she is already returned from Elysium invincible in her faith.

Out of dath ilan they might have warned: there is a potential rebound effect, if you do something that makes people safer, and then they think they are safer, and then they take more risks.  Risk compensation, it's called there.

But this, Keltham has not yet happened to lecture upon.

And so Pilar Pineda told Keltham that she wanted him to make a very sincere try at breaking her, with those truths and arts of dath ilan that might break an adult who'd grown up unknowing of them; and see if that did literally anything to her.  Someone, Pilar said, obviously needed to try taking the risk; and someone was obviously her.

So Keltham held forth to Pilar, then, in private session, upon the Way.  Keltham does not know any of that Keeper stuff, but he knows something about how non-Keeper dath ilani speak when they are more dedicated to the Art than he.

Keltham tells Pilar of the principle of the bottom line:

If you begin by writing at the bottom of a sheet of paper the conclusion you mean to argue for above, the rightness or wrongness of the bottom line is already determined by whatever process led you to write that as what-you-would-argue-for.  Only a process that has the power to erase that bottom line and write in something else, has the power to change the correlation of the bottom line of that sheet of paper, with the many worlds in which that piece of paper is embedded, where the bottom line is true or false in that world.  If you write it and cannot erase it, the correlation is already fixed, it is too late to argue it afterwards.

If you write a probability, its lost 2s are already fixed across the many worlds; only if your arguments cause you to erase and rewrite the probability, do those arguments change anything.

This is not a Law from which anybody can exempt you; it is an obvious validity across all realities.  In the moment you decide what to argue for, the truth or falsity or lost 2s of that sentence are already scaffolded and bound to all the worlds that embed you, you are already as right or as wrong as you can ever be, no matter the arguments.

Keltham holds forth to warn Pilar of the mistake called 'rationalization' -

- wait, it's called what in Taldane?  That word shouldn't even exist!  You can't 'rationalize' anything that wasn't Lawful to start with!  That's like having the word for lying being 'truthization'!

Well, anyways.  Motivated cognition, don't do that.  If you've literally never had any lessons about that... maybe keep an Owl's Wisdom prepped, wait until the next time you want to believe something and notice yourself making up arguments about it, and hit yourself with the Owl's Wisdom so you can watch all the little bits and pieces that go into the process.

Maybe adults in Golarion literally try to argue themselves into things?  But that's not the failure mode that dath ilani worry about; anything that explicit and deliberate is something you can just decide not to do and then you're done.  No, what you've got to watch out for are those subtle ouches and subtle yearnings that might lead you to flinch away from one idea and flinch towards another.  That's the part where she can maybe do a few Owl's Wisdoms and speed through what dath ilani children take some years to learn.

Though now that Keltham thinks about it, when he was very young, they did do exercises to notice explicit rationalization by way of having kids actually do that?  Well, those are pretty easy and fun to run through.  Keltham will start by proving that the sky is orange, then arguing that everything is upside down, then showing that humans are really a kind of fish; and for her own exercises he demands Pilar demonstrate that Keltham's shirt is secretly the real Keltham and that nobody should ever go outside.

See how your brain has to stretch and reach when it's trying to argue something that isn't so?  Well, remember that feeling; and then, if you notice feeling it again, halt melt and catch fire, don't do that.

...this sort of seems to be heading towards - conveying a sense that all argument is meaningless?  Keltham was putting up a pretty persuasive argument that humans were fish, there.

Then Pilar needs to work on refining her sense of what's an allowable argument until Keltham stops sounding persuasive about the fish thing.  Either that, or accept that humans actually are fish.

Pilar should - hopefully - be able to notice something stretched about the way that Keltham said very loudly and sternly that anything which was naturally born to two fishes mating, without magical interference, would by definition be a fish.  She should, hopefully, be able to notice a stretched feeling inside her mind, considering that.  If she can't feel it yet, note it down, accumulate a bunch of those things, and review them with an Owl's Wisdom after the lecture is over.

In the future, noticing something stretched like this, when Keltham isn't pointing directly to it, will probably manifest as Pilar noticing a quiet note of disquiet in the corners of her mind.  She should maybe hit herself with an Owl's Wisdom as soon as she has that first experience, it's a really important one to remember and recognize and learn to feel explicitly and consciously every time it happens.

This is not about despair in how reasonable arguments can reach wrong conclusions.  This is about your own sense of what is 'reasonable' being broken.  This is about taking more Validity into yourself.  This is about using the styles of cognition and kinds of arguments that make it easier to argue for true things than for false things.

But even ilani, when they stretch themselves to their limits - possibly even Keepers - cannot be sure of what is and isn't valid, when they are doing deep thinking not in numbers and stretching their intuitions to their limits.  So they learn, first to reason validly, but also, not to let themselves flinch towards or away from thoughts, not to let their minds go to looking for arguments for a bottom line already written; only to wonder "Is X true?" and not "How do I argue for X?"

If Pilar is starting to doubt lots of argument steps, to see possible fallacies everywhere, to feel unsure which arguments are valid - she'd better rush to master the art of evenhandedness and purifying her cognition from flinches.  Otherwise, those doubts-of-validity and arguable-fallacies will, perhaps, arise swiftly when Pilar considers something she doesn't want to believe; and seem more distant - not come so naturally to mind - when she is considering something she wants to believe.

If you are swifter to look for flaws and fallacies and invalidities in incongruent thoughts, than in congruent thoughts, then learning more of the Art only makes you that much stupider; it gives you that much more spellpower with which to blast down everything you don't want to believe, all the arguments you don't want to accept, and keep your bottom line in place forever.

Of which it was said out of dath ilan:  Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself.

So... try to figure out when she wants something to be true, and then not believe that?

Does that, in fact, sound Lawful to Pilar?

...not really, no.  Pilar would like to be alive in Golarion so she can better serve Lord Asmodeus; she does not therefore seem to be dead.

Not a precise example; that was something Pilar wanted, not something Pilar wanted to believe.  But, sure, even if you want to believe the Sun is shining, that doesn't make it dark out.

Of which it was said out of dath ilan:  Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.  If you were guessing future coinspins and betting on them, you would need very good information about the future, you would need to be Nethys, to get every coinspin wrong.  You would need strong veridical information about the future, processed correctly on some level, in order to be wrong that reliably.  Wanting something to be true isn't that; it's not evidence in the other direction, just a flaw in your own thinking.

Keltham was warned against this as a child - the same way he was warned against criticizing incongruent thoughts harder for flaws - that he should not think that it would be the Way: to ask, "What might somebody in my shoes be tempted to believe?", and then believe you were probably being tempted to believe that whether you could detect that internally or not, and then adjust downwards your probabilities on it.

What you want is to detect the flinch towards or away from a thought, switch off the flinch, and do your thinking without letting the flinches move you.  Step as rightly as you can, on each step, and then go where your footsteps take you.  This is a path that leads to skill, if you follow it, as you become more skilled at clearing your thoughts.  The other path, the path of indefeasibly doubting yourself and treating your fears and wishes as evidence the other way, is a trap that leads nowhere.

And Keltham continues to hold forth upon the Way.

Here are some of the experiments and games that dath ilan uses to show its children their innate conformity, that they may be warned against the tendency - very young children, obviously, you couldn't pull that sort of crap on an eight-year-old, by then they've got enough individualism and confidence in their own reasoning not to say that Line C is the same size as Line X when it's obviously not.

These are some tests you can apply to determine whether a thought is meaningful or meaningless to you.

This is what it feels like to want to believe something you don't actually believe.

And the thing to remember above all is that you cannot be any smarter than the process that actually produced your beliefs.

If you look up at the sky and see it's blue - you're no better and no worse than your eyes and the vision-processing part of your brain.

If you close your eyes and decide that your favorite color is orange, and want the sky to be orange, and argue that the sky is orange, and build orange-colored filters and produce paintings of it to try to convince others - you are no smarter than the process 'pick your favorite color and then think that things are that color'.  (Though it's fine if you wish the sky was orange, or start planning to make the sky orange; the error is if you try believing that it's orange already.)

And the only way to do any better than you're already doing, is to go through a different process and produce a different belief.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.

There'd be no point in Pilar trying to be a Keeper, if she tried to keep all her old beliefs in the process; why bother becoming a Keeper, if she already knows all the facts correctly?

Keltham does not know the way of Keeping, only a few signposts around the first steps there, placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it.  Still, that part is knowledge and Keltham has it.

It is said, there is no ordinary thought that Keepers would hesitate to think.

There are exotic thoughts not to think - maybe especially in Golarion, directions you should not look because something from that direction might look back - or inhuman patterns of thought that higher Keepers devised, maybe, as might destroy unready minds from the inside.  Keltham does not know details for obvious reasons.

But nothing along the lines of, say, how the prediction market is assigning only a 40% probability that you stay married for fifty years to the person you promised your eternity, or that you're a romantically obligate sadist with no accessible masochists.  That, you're not afraid to think about, not if you're a Keeper.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, you learn that when you notice that your mind is not-looking in a direction, you're past the point in your childhood where it makes sense to not look there anymore.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, as you grow more knowledgeable in Law and by simple age more practiced in thinking, you become better at it over time, at noticing the directions you aren't looking.

Even among the ordinary dath ilani, every time that happens to you, you naturally learn a bit more about how you work, in that regard, and it becomes easier to notice what you aren't thinking.

That's just growing up.

But the Keepers push themselves to grow up as quickly as possible, like a child forcing themselves to leave their parents' home seven years earlier than would be usual.

'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be', goes the proverb, and ordinary dath ilani and Keepers alike both hold to it in the limit.  If you look at it from the standpoint of the Future, if you somehow get some wrong thought into your head, do you want to still be thinking it a thousand years later?  Do you always want to be that small, or that warped, that you could go on holding a false belief forever?

For the ordinary dath ilani, though, they say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be eventually.'

And the Keepers say, 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be immediately.'

- though, to be clear, that doesn't mean they run around telling other people truths that will wreck parts of their personalities.  It means that they themselves will destroy whatever of themselves they can, with whatever truths they've come to hold.

Does Pilar still want to become a Keeper?

It's not a matter of wanting; Pilar cannot choose to be anything else.

Brave, poetic words.  Possibly worryingly so; good decisions made for good reasons should perhaps not sound so optimized to be poetic.  It'd be fine for an ordinary dath ilani, if they were making a brave decision, to try to have it sound inspiring and poetic too.  For a Keeper the potentially tiny resulting bias might be a problem, unless they were very confident of their prior ability to not be influenced at all towards the decision by how poetic and brave it was.

Ordinary human beings should not try to live like that.  They need bits of bravery and poetry in them.  Not bravery and poetry they know is false.  But trading off some tiny tiny breath of precision in their thoughts, to have emotion and color?  Not giving up their art and believing something false.  Just - daring to, in the course of making what they think is the right decision, also being brave and poetic about that?  That's a reasonable benefit to go for, even if it comes with a tiny risk of making the wrong decision.  So long as it's not a big risk, one where you've gotten to the point of, like, noticing a tiny quiet note of disquiet.  Then even an ordinary person should rethink it as clearly as possible.

But, like, in the course of everyday life - you don't want to be trying to root the bravery and poetry out of yourself in case it influences you in the wrong direction.

Unless you're a Keeper.  They presumably don't try to get all the emotions out of themselves, then they wouldn't want anything or do anything ever.  But they would - Keltham thinks - be disturbed by the prospect of a note of bravery and poetry influencing their thoughts in an invalid direction at all, and if they didn't destroy all bravery, they'd be doing something else to - optimize their thoughts, somehow, so that they couldn't be influenced in some way they defined as undue, or invalid -

Keltham doesn't know, actually.  He is not in fact a Keeper, and these arts are themselves held infohazardous to those who would not practice them.

The point is, the Keepers are willing to step further away from their humanity and try to think in stranger patterns, for the sake of knowing the truth, for the sake of obtaining their goals, for the sake of protecting the children who don't want to grow up so quickly.

Does Pilar still want to be a Keeper?

Pilar bets that devils, though they have grandeur - which probably subsumes bravery and poetry - don't go reasoning in invalid ways on account of their grandeur.

Or if lesser devils are still doing that, Pilar would guess that Asmodeus is annoyed about it.

Pilar is with Asmodeus with that, as she is with Asmodeus in all things.

As far as Keltham can tell, Pilar is not currently acting like her mind is disintegrating due to any of the things that Keltham has said already.  Keltham does want to check in explicitly that this is in fact the case.

Pilar is not in the slightest danger of disintegrating due to any of this.

That's not nearly as reassuring as Pilar seems to think.  'So far as I know, I don't visibly seem to be in danger of disintegrating down any pathways I can foresee' is a sensible thing to say, at this point.  'I'm in zero danger of disintegrating' sounds like bravado and something that a Golarionite could not reasonably know about themselves.

"Acknowledged.  I don't see any danger of myself disintegrating, here."

"If you were asking that as a preliminary towards hitting me harder, go ahead and hit me harder."

Keltham will take a deep breath and not follow up on any alternate possible interpretations of that statement.

And Keltham will go ahead and hit her harder.

He'll explain the concept of an Edifice, which he knows of as more of a psychiatric symptom, than something that sane adults do on any regular basis, but it seems to him like an Edifice would also be something that happened if you grew up without any training in mental skills at all.

It's what happens when somebody gets sick and goes on assembling more and more arguments in favor of something, explicitly by trying to do that, implicitly by flinching away from every counterargument; and they make their beliefs and goals more and more and more rigid, nailing themselves into place, drenching their thoughts with glue.

If you grow up in Golarion you may not know not to do that.

And once the bottom line is written, it is as reliable, as Lawful, as correlated with reality, as the process that originally produced it as the bottom line; and no more.

Does Pilar... possibly have any sense, right now, that she knows there is something inside her that she has argued to herself a lot, that she is maybe flinching away some from looking at, that she will brook no counterarguments to?

If she wants to undo her having grown-up-unLawful, to reach even the fifth part of the standard of an ordinary ilani, never mind becoming a Keeper, she is going to have to go through that part of herself at some point, and rethink it all.

"Are we talking about my faith in Asmodeus, here?"

See how you like it when all the subtext gets turned into text.

"It's giving me some vibes of that, yeah, though I don't pretend to know what's inside another person's mind.  If not that - maybe something else?  Maybe a dozen other things?  I've been trying to think of how Golarionites would have real mental catastrophes from Law exposure, and it only recently occurred to me that maybe they're full of Edifices."

"Well, it would have been that before my trip to Elysium.  Where, I thought at first, the Chaotic Good outsiders spent a lot of time trying to poke at my faith in Asmodeus and pointed out a lot of things I'd always flinched away from looking at, exactly like you're describing.  And then at the end they were like 'Just kidding, we only wanted you to be sure of your own choices.'"

"So yes, at this point, I've already been through all that."

"That... sounds a lot like they knew you'd try to become a Keeper later, and they were trying to help you along."

"Chaotic Good, like Chaotic anything else, is really really hard to figure out, sometimes."

...it doesn't seem particularly hard to figure out, to him?  Like, he just did figure it out.

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to share details, if they're not private?"

Privacy!  What a helpfully un-Chelish concept.  "Pretty fucking private, yeah."  Oh wait, she should also invoke that other un-Chelish concept.  "Sorry."

Well then, if Pilar is sure she's handling all of this totally fine, he'll go ahead and keep dumping on her the entire list of dath ilani advice that he can remember off the top of his head for undoing major false beliefs.  That includes, let's see...

- How to notice when you're avoiding the real weak points in your beliefs by rehearsing more comfortable and winnable battle points, but obviously it's not Lawful to update on the same observation twice;

- The difference between feeling obligated to investigate something, wanting to have finished investigating it, and feeling curious about it;

- The general way of noticing when you're completing a pattern in a precached way, and exercises to try to re-see there from scratch;

- The litanies children are taught for 'If snow is white, I desire to believe snow is white, if snow is not white, I desire to believe snow is not white, let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want' etcetera;

- How it's actually less unpleasant, when you're fighting a rearguard action against a mistake, to just say 'oops' and not defend anything or cling to anything and let it all go and be over with;

- More guidance on seeing thoughts you're flinching away from in a corner of your mind;

- Averting the need-for-closure and letting problems hang around unanswered for a while, pondering problems more thoroughly before jumping to proposed solutions on them;

- Missing alternatives to policy proposals where you want a policy proposal to be the best one for reasons other than the stated utility criterion;

- Fake humility as an out, where you don't want to know something you're starting to see, and so claim that nobody could possibly know it...

(it goes on for a while)

Is Pilar still doing okay here?

Yes.

She's doing fine.

Is there more?

This is in fact about what he can easily remember off the top of his head from his childhood education, that seems most strongly relevant, and can be said without a lot of math or a lot of background prerequisites.  He can let her know if he remembers more.  He suspects a lot of the real power here is in reshaping your thoughts to Law, to greater validity and greater awareness of the mechanics of cognition, rather than being told about a list of techniques that he ran through too fast to really practice her in any of them.

He has now hit her about as hard as he can hit her in a few hours.  Just remember, Keltham is not exactly the wise master, here.  All of this is what dath ilani punk teenagers get as kids, rather than dath ilani who are going relatively deep into the Art as adults, and saying nothing here of Keepers.  Even then, it's just the most clearly relevant parts that take the least math, and that can be reviewed in a few hours.

If she wants to go past Keltham, or even get to Keltham, she's going to have to push herself hard and forge a lot of her own Way.

All right.

Pilar's now supposed to go off and ponder this, maybe get hit by an Owl's Wisdom, and see if literally anything happens to her.  Correct?

...if nothing interesting is otherwise happening to her by evening, then yes, Owl's Wisdom.  If interesting things start to happen to her in another hour, without the Owl's Wisdom, let those run their course before boosting them any further.

Acknowledged.

(And she departs.)

Keltham watches her go with a somewhat uneasy feeling that he's been socially-pressured into doing something riskier for Pilar than he should.  She was slated to take the Worldwound oath, right?  That's - Golarion adulthood?  She wanted to take this risk and had her reasons for it, there were arguments for it...

Well, what's done is done; if Keltham wanted to question the wisdom of this, the time for that would have been several days earlier when he agreed to run this trial.

She is, in fact, going to be okay, right?  Alter-Pilar would definitely be okay, so that's who Keltham saw, confident in her faith.  But real-Pilar should also be okay.  She's already been through her trial in Elysium.  If there was any flaw in her faith, for all this art and technique to find and crack through, the Elysians would have used that against her already, right...

...unless they didn't pick it out on purpose.  Because they were not, in fact, actually trying to convert her away from Asmodeanism, just then.

Pilar will find her way to somewhere near Subirachs's office, just in case she is less invincible in her faith than she thought, and requires either sudden spiritual guidance, or a Sleep spell to put her out long enough for Aspexia Rugatonn to get there and correct her in a matter of faith.

She prays, and also thinks, for a time.

...when the first rush of fear has subsided, Pilar looks within herself for her faith in Asmodeus.  For the surety, still there, that a Keeper is obviously what He desires His slave Pilar to become.  The right way, the Lawful way, for which sake Pilar needs there to be something above her to correct her.  Her Evil is imperfect enough - though Pilar knows full well that in Lawful Good or even Lawful Neutral there is no place for her, who must needs be punished and whipped and corrected and not by her own will either - but she can at least serve Asmodeus rightly in Law.  Nothing of Chaos has ever tempted her.

She will master this.  It is certainly -

It is likely Asmodeus's will.

An ilani does not require certainty to act.

Pilar goes looking, then, for the things she is not thinking, to find the directions where she is scared to look, and look there.  Devils are not afraid to know themselves, or, if they are, Lord Asmodeus is annoyed about it.

There is a note of unease inside her.

Pilar notices it consciously, and continues about her self-investigation.

She was not lying to Keltham that somebody needs to take this trial, and maybe learn something that Project Lawful needs to learn, one way or another.  Aspexia Rugatonn herself has faith in Pilar.  Pilar can, if not believe too much in herself, believe in Aspexia Rugatonn who believes in her.

And Pilar realizes that she never thought, since she saw Hell's true face scryed to her in Elysium, since Elysium forced her to face how much she hadn't liked torturing those children, and know the deep flaw running through her faith, Pilar realizes that since then she never once thought about whether her mother and sister, who are less strong in their own faith than Pilar, might maybe not want go to Hell.

There's a jumble of horrified thoughts that are allowed to run for long enough that Pilar Pineda can come to appreciate her own folly, her arrogance and overconfidence and disdain in thinking that dath ilani were only weak and that she was ready to learn all they mark as dangerous; for her mind to try suggesting that her mother and sister cannot come before Asmodeus in her heart, because she is a very good Asmodean who does not care for her family, except of course as something she can make use of because of their own naive sentiments which she plays to; and for Pilar to think that if she were a Keeper, she would already know that she was lying to herself about this all along, the one worst error inside her -

- to fear that this crack runs deep enough to split her faith through, fear that as she's never feared any threat to her faith in all her days in Cheliax and only one time in Elysium; but then if not wanting to hurt useless children was enough to shake her faith, then how could this thought not be enough to crack, even if it doesn't crack her faith, what if it cracks her -

Pilar!  Enough.  It's been taken care of.

What?

What do you mean - it's been taken care of -

By the hidden effects of Pilar's actions.

Though even if Pilar had not sent the Osirian team home safely, after seeing somebody who looked like Pilar, there would still have been enough information for Osirion to identify Pilar Pineda.  She's a student who went missing from Ostenso's wizard academy at the same time as the others, even if she wasn't among the souls being traded highly in Dis.

What have you done?

What have you DONE?

Osirion heard that a Project Lawful girl had come back from Elysium, and asked why somebody who sorted as Chaotic Good would consent to be raised in Cheliax.  They suspected that maybe her family was being held hostage against her.  The girl who went to Elysium would obviously be a girl like Pilar, whose soul isn't being traded in Dis.

So Osirion kidnapped Pilar's mother and sister, to take them out of reach of Cheliax's threats; and offered them Atonements for everything they hated being forced to do in Cheliax, to remove them from the reach of Hell's vengeance.  They thought that they might be breaking a leash that held Pilar to be used by Cheliax, and that perhaps Pilar would be grateful to Osirion for it; but if that wasn't true, they would still not regret it.

Pilar's mother and sister accepted Osirion's offer, and the Atonements took.

Then when Pilar's mother and sister were finally allowed to think without fear of mindreading and fear of Hell, they felt sickened and wounded by all that had been done to them, and all that they had been forced to do.

Pilar's mother and sister talked their new situation over with each other and decided that they probably could never be happy like this, because of being terrified about malediction, or doing something Evil by accident, or above all being terrified that Cheliax would kidnap them back.

Osirion offered to increase their security and to pay for insurance against future Atonements being required.

Pilar's mother and sister said that they did not want to be a burden to the Osirians who had been kind to them.

They're in Axis now, safe, learning how to be happy.

Pilar wasn't told because Aspexia Rugatonn did not wish to facilitate whatever it was that Osirion might have hoped to accomplish.

PILAR DID NOT ASK FOR THIS.

Fury anger horror and shame, and something that makes no sense in terms of Asmodeanism or just plain reality that's thinking that she's been separated forever from her family in the afterlife they should have shared -

No, Pilar did not.

But this is what lets Pilar learn what she needs to learn, without that breaking her faith or breaking her.

This is what serves Asmodeus's interests.

"This, wasn't, what I wanted -"

Pilar's curse knows.

Pilar was promised that her being chosen as Cayden Cailean's oracle would end up serving Asmodeus.  From the beginning, nothing was ever said of what would become of Pilar.

A horrible strangled sound comes from Pilar's throat, and then she's turning to run, running half-blind into Subirachs's office, she needs to report this to the Most High, that because she wasn't Asmodean enough Asmodeus has been deprived of two souls He could have made some use of, she needs to be hurt needs to be punished needs to be made clean of her shame and her sin, and she also knows that she'll never really be clean of it again.

Pilar's curse is sorry.

PL-timestamp:  Day 31 / Long Night

There's been time for the initial pain and horror to subside, now.

There's been time for Subirachs to put Pilar to sleep, briefly.  Time for the Most High to hear what happened.

Time for the Most High to tell Pilar that, yes, that's Chaotic Good for you, and no doubt Cayden Cailean is very satisfied with Himself about it.  But Aspexia cannot say that Asmodeus's interests have been betrayed, here.  Snack Service is continuing to do an excellent job of pretending to be helpful, to the point where even Aspexia is starting to doubt a little that perhaps there is actually some common interest Cayden Cailean has with Asmodeus.

This would have been an obvious chance for Good to turn Pilar against them, after Pilar had apparently proven herself in Elysium.

Instead Pilar has been preserved as a faithful slave of Asmodeus who can become the shape that Asmodeus desires from mortals.  That is by far the most important consideration in the eyes of the Church, which Pilar's curse has seemingly-helpfully prioritized.  The two souls lost to Asmodeus are small things by comparison.

Indeed, of much greater importance to the Church is the prospect that Pilar's guilt about losing two souls for Asmodeus will prove resistant to expiation, as could corrupt the purity of Pilar's service.  The Most High does worry that no pain Subirachs can inflict on Pilar tonight will make Pilar feel like she's paid a proper price.  That's a problem.

Because the harsh truth here is that Pilar's blunder is simply not significant.  Two souls lost to Asmodeus are a trivial price to pay for cutting loose Pilar's mortal attachments that could have tempted her away from her Lord.  The Most High would pay it a dozen times over if needed.

Yes, Asmodeus did lose somewhat for the sake of Pilar's flawedness; Pilar will pay her penance for it.  Later, after Pilar's thinking about the matter has had time to settle into correctness.  Once there is no question about whether Pilar will believe deep down that she is being punished for getting her family killed, as would be nonsense.

Subirachs will get around to punishing Pilar sometime tonight.  That will not be the punishment for Pilar costing Asmodeus two souls; it will be the punishment for Pilar being weak and foolish and not thinking about this matter correctly from the start and requiring the Most High's personal attention to correct her.

The open scorn in the Most High's voice helps, but only a little.

Her mind is still casting about, now, as she waits for Subirachs to have the time, for reasons to hope that she'd somehow someday ever see her mother and sister again.  That they'll consent to be resurrected, and then see Asmodeus's purpose, and then go to Hell with her, and also Carissa Sevar is right that what Asmodeus really wants from the ilani will be devils who remember more of themselves, and they can be together in Asmodeus's service forever.

This internal phenomenon has now been named to her by Keltham; it is 'motivated cognition'.

...does her curse, have anything, it wants to say, that isn't - isn't that.  All Pilar's mind is doing is that.

Well, if everything goes really well for you, as you define that, maybe you could become such a high Power of Hell that your mother and sister would no longer fear being Resurrected, knowing you would protect them in Hell even if someone Maledicted them or they accidentally transgressed.  They would be told that in Axis, and rejoice, and return to finish out their lives in Golarion without fear.  Maybe travel by Gate to come visit you.

...and does Pilar's curse expect that to actually happen.

That's a bit of a silly question, really.  If Pilar's curse answers 'no', Pilar will run off to tell the Most High that Pilar's curse admitted that Cayden Cailean wasn't really planning for Hell's victory the way Carissa Sevar envisions.  And if Pilar's curse answers 'yes', Pilar will run off to tell the Most High that, and the Most High will conclude that Pilar's curse is lying, and stop believing everything Snack Service said about Pilar not being used against her Lord.

Keltham would, if I told him what you just said, tell me about some Law I'm too weak and distraught to prove, showing that - that what I think of you if you refuse to answer, should be somewhere between 'yes' and 'no' because, if you answered truthfully, it would be either of those, at some probability...  No, that's only if I know you'd be answering truthfully, and then if you said, yes, sure, that would happen, I would have to believe you.

I can't - think of what the Law-fragment should be, if you might lie, but - it shouldn't be possible for you not answering, to make sense, if we're both ilani, or gods - I should just deduce, what you don't want me to see, from your not answering -

It wouldn't be possible for that to make sense if we both trusted each other, is what Pilar is seeing.  All of this is ultimately happening because people can't trust each other.

Even gods can't trust each other, sometimes, now that prophecy has been shattered.  If it wasn't for that, Nethys could just tell everyone how it would go, and everyone could just go to where they'd end up going, without there being any conflicts between mortals or gods along the way.

Like Keepers would, the true Keepers out of dath ilan.

Maybe.  Pilar's curse has never really seen those Keepers any more than Pilar has.

"Give me hope," Pilar whispers, knowing as she says it that she's asking something a Keeper would never ask, never.

Well, it's definitely true that Axis won't have told Pilar's mother and sister, as yet, any of the things that would be forbidden knowledge to return to Golarion, or let their minds shift in ways that would prevent them from returning to Golarion.  Not in a case like theirs, where they're people obviously of interest to high-level clerics, where somebody might still resurrect them after a year or two, if conditions in Golarion changed.  Pilar's mother and sister would be in the parts of Axis that were made for that purpose, that pretend to be mostly mortal, for petitioners who might yet return according to Axis's prediction markets.

...why, why would Pilar's curse, tell Pilar something like that, which only worsens the pain and makes it take longer to subside, just because Pilar was stupid enough to ask.

Does Pilar's curse hate Pilar for being contemptible and weak and stupid, will it serve Asmodeus if she's taught a lesson about that.

And if her curse said that there's a chance that Pilar could really do it, become a true ilani and then a Power of Hell; and that if Pilar then willed her family able to return to Golarion, she would be able to accomplish as she willed?  Because that above all, Keltham said, is what Keepers gain in exchange, if they succeed in changing themselves, to change the world and not only bear it witness?  Would Pilar believe her curse, if her curse said that?

"No," Pilar whispers.

Would Pilar believe Pilar's curse, if it said that it would serve Asmodeus for Pilar to believe that and chase after that hope?

"Yes."

"But that's not why Keepers believe things."

Pilar's curse sure has been dropping a lot of hints that it might actually be like that, though!

And Pilar might start thinking that's what a Chaotic Good curse might do in this situation if it was all actually true, given that it's clear why Pilar's curse couldn't come right out and say it.

She can feel the ember of hope flaring up in her heart and it burns her, painful like a sword thrust through her, agonizing like being told by her superiors that she made wrong choices from being a wrong person.

"You're cruel," she whispers.  It is heresy that she says the words so, when she was given exactly what she should not have asked for and now owes favor for it, it is heresy to call that cruel and say so like it's anything but a compliment, but she wants to hurt her curse back if she can.

From the beginning, nothing was said of what would become of Pilar.

"Well, I have to say, this doesn't portend spectacularly well for everyone else becoming Keepers."

Pilar keeps her head down, facing the floor along with the rest of herself.  "Do you know - how to correct me.  How to make me not be weak, wrong, anymore.  Subirachs doesn't know how to do that, I don't think the Most High knows how to do it or she - wouldn't need Asmodia to teach her successor - you're the only one who, might know how."

"I don't know. It seems reasonably likely I'll instead make you worse. I asked if we had enough Modify Memory I could undo you if I destroy you but we don't, not in the whole kingdom." She did acquire the supply that they had, just in case. "What do you want about seeing your family? Is it really about the souls, would you feel all right if we go grab and Maledict a couple more people than we otherwise would've bothered with?"

"Of course it's not really about the souls."  For the price she's paid, she's at least listened to Keltham and tried to master the art he taught, and delude herself no more.  "I loved them.  I shouldn't have and I did and I lied to myself about it, and it serves Asmodeus that I can never see them again."

"I don't want to hope, don't want to go on wanting to see them, don't want to go on loving them, it hurts and also I really, truly, actually do not want to be a bad slave which hurts worse."

"When you say it like that it sounds like a very simple problem, actually. You love them, you want to stop. It would astonish me if Cheliax didn't know how to achieve that. And also it'd astonish me if that's really the whole problem here."

"Hell knows how to achieve it.  I'm - not sure, Cheliax knows, how to torture it out of me -"

"What do you mean, it's not the whole problem?"

"I don't know. If I had a not-loving-your-mother potion, and you drank it, do you - anticipate no further problems, at that point?'

"Do you think I have other problems as large as that one -"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"- so, I love Keltham. And I obviously sought guidance about this, and the Most High said that of course it'd normally be considered highly ill-advised, and also heretical, but given that he was dropped on me in particular, it seems plausible that the way we relate to each other was intended, and the things it's doing are intended, and it's easier to crush love than to create it, so it's the less costly way to err, letting me be like this.

This has not particularly shaken my faith. I mean, I know I'll need to be corrected about it eventually, but  -

- we suck, Pilar, we're incredibly flawed in the eyes of Asmodeus, having more specifics on how isn't being a worse slave than you were yesterday, you knew - or should have known - that there'd be things that big. It's a teaching of the church!"

"And Project Lawful is supposed to fix that.  Not in Hell, here in Golarion."

"I don't want to be broken anymore.  Are you ready - to unbreak me, to do the things to me that the Most High thought only I could survive."

I would be, if I had any idea what they were. 

"What - do you imagine Asmodeus sees, when he sees a slave who is in love with someone? What, from the angle of a god, does that even look like?"

"Something that shouldn't exist.  Something useless - no, not useless, that's not actually true.  Something less useful to Him, because it has the wrong shape."

"So - say you were herding rodents, or something, you needed them to solve mazes, and some of them were in love with other rodents, how would that make them worse?"

"They'd spend their time taking care of other rodents instead of racing ahead to solve the maze properly, and they'd be too slow, and you'd have to spend even more of your effort on punishing them."

"What if they didn't do that, they knew they weren't supposed to do that, they loved the other rodents but pretended even to themselves that they didn't and tried to do what they were told anyways."

"They get along fine for the first eighteen years of their lives, and then cost Asmodeus two souls as soon as they try to learn Law and the lies they told themselves fall apart and Cayden Cailean has to stop them from turning into heretics."

"What does that look like to a god. If you don't want to speculate on what Asmodeus can see, what did Cayden Cailean see?"

"I don't - know, Chosen, you're the one who's supposed to know, things like -"

(become an ilani and a Keeper and a Power of Hell)

"- don't understand the question, I think Asmodeus just - sees Pilar who's distracted from Asmodeus by her family, until Cayden Cailean who sees the same thing takes her family away.  What more is there for a god to see?"

"So, I haven't figured this all out, and if I had then I suspect fixing you'd be a lot simpler, and I was hoping you might have an intuition of it, but maybe not. So, ideally your slaves just want to serve you. In practice, your slaves want a thousand different things, and not even - they're not just very small gods with different value systems, half their wants contradict, and which one's there depends on which situation it arises in, what direction it gets poked from. It's not just that your slaves care about things you want them to not care about, it's that they don't even consistently care about the things they do care about, it's that it's sometimes a stretch to say they care about things. Most people, if they actually can be said to want anything, it's to not be in pain.

I don't think gods see - a slave which values something in addition to the main value system it has, of serving Asmodeus. I think they see a quivering slime which jumps in mostly random directions on very slightly different inputs. I think if you wanted to serve Asmodeanism and also for your mother to have a nice afterlife, you would be so close already to the thing we want to be, and the main thing wrong isn't - love, it's - muddle. Or rather, love is muddle. What does it even mean to love your mother? If that were a value system, what would it value?"

"Her not being in Hell."  There's a deep agony in the words as Pilar pronounces the heresy.  "The Most High could have sent her to Hell straight away, so I'd have nothing left to prevent.  If I'd been allowed to go on thinking a minute longer, I would have become afraid of that, that the Most High would send them to Hell, and been afraid to report my own heresy, and then I'd have been fucked for real -"

"Which isn't what you're trying to tell me, but I'm a slime and I'm too stupid to understand."

" - I think that's the something additional I was expecting, earlier, that you aren't just a slime that values serving Asmodeus and also your mother not being in Hell, that you're doing a bunch of - 

- so, imagine a being that would rather her mother not be in Hell, but prefers this less strongly than she prefers to serve Asmodeus. Then she might think to herself 'huh! I value that my mother not be in Hell. I can't get this while serving Asmodeus, probably, though I can try to serve Asmodeus so well He's inclined to grant me things I want'. 

That - sounds different from the thought process you just described."

"A bad slave, but not a - muddled one."

"Yes. That's me, I think. A bad slave but a substantially less muddled one. But since you're a muddled one, you can't even say things to yourself like 'well, I value both serving Asmodeus and my mother not going to Hell, but which do I value more? Asmodeus. And that's a much safer state to be in, than being muddled. 

Do you value serving Asmodeus or your mother not going to Hell more, if you had to choose?"

"I would have - I don't know.  Done something muddled.  Not been able to choose.  It's easy to answer now that I value Asmodeus more, because Cayden Cailean took away the, things being really at stake.  I can give the answer I'm supposed to give, that the people around me want to hear, and tell myself that, and it's easy because it doesn't cost anything, anymore."

"If there's anything Cayden Cailean might really have taken from me, here, it's never knowing that I would've - won, been faithful to my Lord in the end -"

"And now that I think of it that way, it makes it obvious, doesn't it?  Because Snack Service hasn't betrayed Asmodeus yet.  Chaotic Good would never deprive me of the experience of proving my faith in my Lord, if I could have actually done it.  It's not acting against Asmodeus's interests, it wouldn't take two souls away from Asmodeus unless that was actually necessary to keep me - maybe not loyal, but, intact.  Something."

"Prophecy's broken. It - shouldn't be possible, for Chaotic Good to have known, not for sure. 

But okay, you're a muddled slave, plausibly you'd have gotten too muddled to do anything and Subirachs would've found you in pieces and had to send you to Hell. In ways that's a more fixable state than the bad slave, I bet it's easier for Hell to handle, because the muddled slave doesn't have persistent values, you can come at them from the angle that shapes them how you want and you're not even breaking anything since they'd never put it in order in the first place."

"If I imagine looking at the world like Asmodeus than I imagine being fucking fed up with all the little muddled things that He has to fix when they get to Hell.  No wonder He wants it to hurt.  We deserve it."

"We do," she says, very earnestly. "Her Majestrix warned me that a common failure mode, for people who are promoted like I was, is that they get a glimpse of how weak and pathetic and horrible and incompetent everyone is and determine to really actually fix it for good and then just torture all their subordinates into uselessness in the space of four days. So I'm not doing that. But if it worked - yes, of course, we deserve for it to hurt. 

It might work on you. I think you are missing the muddled-goal that's just the animal instinct to flee from scary things. I'm going to try, but I want - I don't feel like I fully understand, yet, and if you're my only test subject I want to be sure I'm getting as much as possible out of the try. 

Can you - imagine you weren't muddled? Can you imagine what it'd be like to actually just care about - maybe about several things, but about only those things, and with it not depending on exactly how you thought of them?"

"I think you're asking me to do something - to do with the Law of Probable Utility, the games Keltham played with us, with colored chips - but it's something you understand and I don't - like it's the same price regardless of whether I gain something or lose something, that's all I can figure out right now -"

"But that's basically it, he explained the whole thing - instead of caring about things as a feeling, which you sometimes are overcome by and then moved to do things about, or caring about things as a - habit, or something - you care about things as a fixed amount you'll trade off other things to get them. That's all it is."

"Can you make me be like that?"

"Well, the reason I asked, which you cared about more, between your mother and Asmodeus, is that it seems like the simplest way to not be muddled is to actually only want one thing. Not to be - lying to yourself about wanting things - 

- but if you actually only wanted to serve Asmodeus, then that'd do it. I'm just not sure whether to push directly for that or whether to aim for something more - it'd be a lot of progress, if you wanted three things but you knew what they were and how you'd trade off among them if you could. Like, 'to be a good slave', I think maybe that actually sharpens into something separate from wanting to serve Asmodeus."

"That sounds like - like I might fall into heresy, if I try to be a good slave to something that isn't Asmodeus.  I don't want to fall into any more heresy for a while."

"I would be delighted to return you not a heretic but if you've got that in the muddle you've already got it, it's not sealed away where it won't influence you.You said to me, 'I don't want to be a bad slave', is that just 'because then I am more inefficient for Asmodeus to command' or would you, if it turned out Asmodeus was entirely indifferent for some reason, still want to be a good slave?"

"Still want to be a good slave."

It's taking some effort for Pilar not to cry, right now (but she is not particularly close to failing about that effort).

"Thank you. And if it's not relevant to being a good slave or serving Asmodeus - are there other things?"

"I - I don't know - there've been times when I was hungry and wanted to eat, when I'm tired I want to sleep, I would probably still want to be beaten sometimes even if that didn't make me a better slave -"

"Asmodia was right, by the way, I'm not even sure what alterPilar's sexuality was supposed to be, exactly, and if I was muddled about it then she was definitely muddled about it and Keltham wouldn't believe that about a Keeper in training.  Maybe when he asks how it went tomorrow I should tell him that my sexuality fell apart."

"That's probably fine. I think it's important to Keltham's corruption that you - actually wouldn't have been harmed, if he'd grabbed you last week - but I think that's just true, so it can be true in alter-Cheliax too. 

A being that truly wasn't muddled at all, could have lots of things they cared about, so long as they only cared about them where Asmodeus was indifferent or there was no way to know what He wanted. In humans - seems like a bad habit. It might leave you in the habit of hoping Asmodeus is indifferent about things He actually might care about - which, you'll notice, is a mistake you can only make if on some level you do care about those things more than about what Asmodeus wants from you.

I think I probably don't want to overcomplicate Pilar Pineda; she wants to serve Asmodeus, and where Asmodeus is indifferent, she wants to be a good slave, and where there is no one to impress or serve she wants to enjoy life's insubstantial pleasures, and she doesn't love anyone, because Asmodeus, in fact, isn't indifferent about that; it is a particular cesspool of muddle we are supposed to avoid. Does that feel like it's missing anything. It might be very important, if it is."

"It -"

"I can feel all these flinches, and reluctances, and all these other things that Keltham -"

"I shouldn't be talking about that with you.  Should I?  Can't risk the Chosen of Asmodeus."

"Keltham told me I was supposed to get an Owl's Wisdom when I noticed myself," flinching away, "doing those things, so I could learn to recognize the feeling faster, but he also said not to do that if things started happening without an Owl's Wisdom."

"You shouldn't be talking about that with me."

She really really wants to see herself with that same lens, whatever the lens is, see all the delusions and errors and muddles, all the cracks, everything Asmodeus hates, but she has to learn to fix people from it before she can break herself, that's only fair

"And I don't think you should give yourself an Owl's Wisdom while you are this unstable. Learn to recognize the feeling without one; dath ilani do it. 

I am inclined to have Keltham petrified tonight, so we have more time to work on you before you need to report to him."

"I can still Bluff," Pilar says, sounding completely normal about it.

And it might, actually, be good to let her, be good to have her do something she's good at in between facing all the things she's terrible at. "Then we'll save petrifying him for an even greater emergency. Stop speaking; I want to think."

Carissa really, really dislikes feeling incompetent. It's not worse than torture, but it's kind of worse than torture; at least torture you're only supposed to endure, whereas incompetence it is totally inadequate to endure. You have to actually fix it. 

It is tempting to think of Pilar's mistake as one she wouldn't make. In the specific details, she wouldn't. She loves Keltham; she is trying to get him sent to Hell; when she has the impulse to do right by him, to make sure he's okay, to make sure he's glad he knew her, to make sure that she didn't really betray him not entirely, she tells herself that that's a problem for the Carissa who becomes a Power in Hell; along the way she'll either realize those impulses were an error, or she'll be in a position to fulfill them. 

But that probably just means that the cracks lie somewhere else; she's not, actually, a better Asmodean than Pilar. What if she herself doesn't want to go to Hell. It feels wrong, feels unlikely, but it wouldn't be very surprising in any other project member, and there's that ilani-feeling mental step, of noticing that the logic you use to predict other people you can use to predict yourself, if you've walled off the ability to predict yourself using your internals - 

- and right now is not the time to follow those thoughts to their inevitable conclusion, because she shouldn't break what she can't fix, and right now she can't even fix Pilar, who ought to be the easiest case, who she can subject to as much torment as she wants, as soon as she figures out what torment might actually help with this.

She isn't, actually, an expert on people. Except Keltham. Keltham makes perfect sense, Keltham she understands intuitively. She's actually wholly confident that when Keltham reaches the point of being able to hear the truth - if he does - she'll know how to say it to him. Everyone else - it feels like it's all just Bluff, all the way down, pretending to be someone they pretend to have confidence in -

Pilar wants her to be real. Pilar wants her to have been Chosen for her knowledge of how to build devils right here on Chelish soil. Pilar wants to fling herself at the ground and be sculpted until she is perfect. 

(Don't we all.)

(Keltham doesn't.)

"All right. I'm going to consider this as - three problems. One is that you've behaved badly and it's going to take a lot of expensive effort to make you suffer for it a fraction as much as you deserve. One is that shaping you properly is going to involve making your desires coherent, but right now they're full of contradictions half of which might be hazardous to anyone who isn't a devil, and the process of identifying them all is probably going to take you a while and might involve breaking more random things. One is that you know how weak and contemptible you are, and rightly don't want to trust the process of reshaping you to anyone as weak and contemptible as that, but -

- it has to be you, particularly since I'm not permitted to know of half of it. Hell, perhaps, can reshape people while they have the luxury of merely suffering and enduring and accepting. You'd have liked that better. If you want this done here, now, then you're going to have to do it, and you're going to have to live with the knowledge it was done by someone as worthless and confused as you, and the knowledge they might've gotten it subtly wrong."

"Even if you ended up breaking me, if it was in - Asmodeus's service, if you learned from that, if it it's what you need to become His Chosen - that would feel right, to me."

And what if it's not, what if I don't know what I'm doing either. 

"If it teaches me how to do this, I don't care if it feels right to you. But - since I mustn't learn the Keeper things myself, yet - you're going to have to do this work, so it'll help that you agree it's a good use of you. Try to figure out, then, what you value. Use an Owl's Wisdom once you're out of ideas. Find the flaws, then we'll fix them."

"I - if I could fix myself, if my soul was shaped like that - I'd just belong to Irori in the first place -"

Pilar stops herself.

"I, I'm not being obedient enough.  I'll go - try to figure myself out using Keltham's arts, and then I'll go to an Owl's Wisdom when I can't go further, and I'll report - I'll report on the flaws, if not how I found them."

"Also when I said that I could Bluff well enough, I wasn't lying, but the real reason I said it is that I imagined Asmodia being unhappy about having to restart cloud cover again, and that mattered to me not because it would hamper Asmodeus's work, but because I," flinched away without thinking about it at subdeliberate speeds, but noticing that, watching for it, isn't something she should be talking about with the valuable Chosen, "didn't want to make somebody else unhappy."

" - humans suck. 

Bring me a list of flaws and I'll do what I can with them."

There's a sense of revulsion in herself, then, for being like this, for being such a bad slave of Asmodeus.  And a realization that she's maybe never done anything really and properly Evil in her entire life despite all the Church's teachings, for stupid reasons like that.  And a flare of anger that Pilar rarely lets herself feel, apparently because she was under the impression that slaves shouldn't get angry.  She wants to do something Evil, now, to repent of her heresy, and she can see a mean impulse in herself, a wish for others to suffer as she suffers, that before she would have suppressed more quickly than she could think about it.

"I should go away and think, but - Keltham wasn't lying when he said that there are, pieces of this art, of what did this to me, that anybody is going to have to master if they're going to master Law at all.  Everything he told me, he said, was ordinary ilani stuff, because he doesn't know any real Keeper secrets.  But we shouldn't expose the valuable people, like you, right away."

"Should we maybe tell some of the lower tier-2s who are struggling to distinguish themselves that they're volunteering to learn some of the more dangerous things from Keltham, slower than I did but faster than the others, in hopes of becoming more valuable?  And because they know that if they can't make it as ilani, they may as well fail out of the Project early instead of costing him time."

" - yes, I'll pick who with Asmodia. And maybe the boy who's a priest of Asmodeus, I'm curious if being a priest of Asmodeus predicts already being mostly coherent in the right way."

Any fucking comments on that, Snack Service?

None that would simultaneously serve the interests of Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil!  Pilar will just have to see how her initial foray into cruelty plays out.

"Chosen.  How may I serve?"

"So, imagine this: Pilar's mother was mean to her a bit more often, and Pilar didn't have this particular flaw, and she did all her deep thinking and found something less threatening, and returns to class tomorrow rather optimistic about these new techniques of Keltham's. Security reads her mind, runs across the relevant technique. Security is in denial about not wanting their mother to go to Hell."

It takes Maillol a moment to work out that Sevar is talking about an alternate realCheliax, not a proposed alterCheliax.

"That's why we had Security running Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties on Pilar, instead of Detect Thoughts, while she was getting that lecture from Keltham, yes?  Just enough that she couldn't have defected right there and then.  I thought at the time it was an abundance of caution, now it seems hardly cautious enough."

"I'm thinking I'll return one of our fifth-circle Security, exchange him for a few fourth-circle Security selected to seem stable and uncomplicated and Evil and, frankly, be more disposable.  They can be the only ones to mindread the candidates exposed to the dangerous stuff."

"More than a few, I think, if we also need to have them watching each other. In the long run it's going to be all of the candidates, and - I wouldn't be very surprised if we lose something like half the exposed Security."

- actually there's math for that. If one person's been exposed, and immediately had a catastrophic breakdown, then that's like the result of one ball-bounce has been reported, and it was left, and  if you started out with any possible rate seeming equally likely...."I would be unsurprised if we lost two thirds of the exposed Security who were selected about as hard as Pilar was," she corrects herself. 

Great, now Sevar has started using inscrutable Laws to produce numbers out of nowhere.  Maillol isn't so much afraid to ask, as instinctively knowing that nothing good will happen to him if he does.

"That's a lot of fourth-circles... I'd say go to third-circle or second-circle, where we can afford to lose numbers like that if we get stronger fifth-circles out of it later... it's just, at some point you go down low enough that you've got to worry they'll actually snap in front of Keltham."

"We could use third-circles to monitor candidates when they're not around Keltham.  We can use clerics who can run Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties to catch immediate major snaps."

"I suppose if the Project bears fruit, at some point we'll be exposing candidates to whatever the fuck this is at first-circle, before we hand out Keltham's cheap headbands to wizard students.  I'm just wincing about how expensive this sounds for Cheliax in the short term."

"Can you use that Law to do anything better than... staring at people it happened to, and didn't happen to, and trying to guess who it'll happen to next?"

"I think dath ilan would run a prediction market. Which we're doing, but it didn't predict Pilar.

 I think - the thing that goes wrong, in broad terms, is that someone realizes they were lying to themselves about wanting to serve Asmodeus and go to Hell, and then ideally they immediately realize that even though they don't want to do that they prefer it to their alternative of not serving Asmodeus and still going to Hell, and that they don't have some incredibly convenient third alternative.

And in unlucky cases - they instead think they do have a way out, and they try it. They think 'if I kill myself I bet Osirion will resurrect me, or Hell destroy me to prevent that'. Or they try to warn Keltham, or try to bargain with Abadar...

Or they'd built their entire motivational system off their belief they wanted to serve Asmodeus and 'I don't want to, I just don't have a choice' doesn't sustain that.

So you'd think you could screen for whether someone's lying to themselves about that, except I don't - know how obvious it is, even if you're reading their mind. Or you could try to trigger it in them on purpose before they get anywhere near the project, break everyone up front, except maybe there are further things like this which we haven't run into..."

"Chelish system is already set up for a lot of things like that, we try to break people early while they're cheap and only invest in the survivors.  It's just, we haven't factored ilanism into the system up until now, and we've got a lot of expensive people we've already invested in who we didn't try to break in that way."

"If you can pick people who are just half as likely to break, without trying anything on them that might break them, you'd be saving Cheliax an awful lot of money and personnel.  Even if we can hand out +4 intelligence headbands like iron daggers a year from now, new wizards take time to raise."

"I predict Abarco won't fall apart on you. Do we have more of him?"

"I'm sure Cheliax does.  Somewhere.  In extremely critical positions where yanking them would cause multiple vital projects to fall apart."

"Abarco is the actually competent Security on this installation.  We were lucky enough to get one of those instead of zero.  I'm not sure I've heard of any project that had two competent security people.  As in, I literally can't remember reading about a case like that in any histories."

"Why are there so few people in this country who can do their jobs. I guess that also means we shouldn't test if I'm right he won't fall apart. Pilar proposed testing the weaker Tier-2s, after which we might have a better sense of what predicts problems."

"If it seemed to you like other people were very competent, you'd be too weak yourself to be the most competent person who gets promoted to being the leader of a project like this one.  Asmodeus probably has the same kinds of complaints about His own archdevils, I figure, and if there were ten Asmodeuses they'd compete until the strongest one ruled over the others, who'd then seem incompetent to Him.  I think that's part of what makes Asmodeanism the only workable way to run societies.  Even Chaotic or Good countries have to appoint captains of soldiers and managers of workers, and give them powers of command and punishment over subordinates they're pretending aren't slaves."

"The suggestion makes sense to me, though I expect Pilar was suggesting it at least in part to prove that she was a good Asmodean and capable of cruelty that served our Lord.  It's a worrying sign that she felt the need to prove it, but that's better than her not being able to prove it."

- it seems obvious, once he says it. "Yes, I expect she was. She's in a very worrying state, generally. If you have advice I think I could use it."

"I worry we've done enough already without completing another observation loop from the Most High on what we've done so far.  We're not actually authorized to correct Pilar on matters of faith.  Though I have a strong intuition that refusing Pilar your counsel just then would not have been the correct move, and I'll be surprised if the Most High doesn't agree.  But still."

"...we're going to be in a genuinely bad position if we need Pilar-level candidates and individualized divine interventions to produce Asmodean ilani, even leaving aside all of our confusion about why Cayden Cailean would do that and whether He actually is helping us at all.  Looking at it from that angle, we've absolutely got to test this out on people who aren't Pilar, and any result that isn't zero survivors will be a good one.  I'm tempted to say we should risk Abarco on having him collate the reports from lesser Security, so he can report to us in safely general terms on what he thinks is proving problematic and his ideas for screening future candidates."

"And who watches him?"

"...Our mathematician-cleric of Asmodeus, maybe?  He's got far enough in wizardry to cast Detect Thoughts, right?  He watches Abarco, Abarco watches him..."

"If you think Abarco's likely to break and betray us, we shouldn't try it.  Our Security structure here is frankly not set up to handle senior Securities turning traitor."

"I don't think it's likely, but he'd know that Security isn't set up to handle it, and know that Osirion will give him anything he could possibly want short of his soul, so it's probably not - less than five percent likely -"

"That's high for an unnecessary risk, but not so bad for a necessary one.  What's our second-best plan, if not that?"

"Pack a room full of second-circle wizards, have Pilar deliver a lecture, add whichever ones don't break - no, that only works if all breaks are immediate - have her make an attempt on the kidnapped Taldane girls, we have less of a problem if this also tends to break non-Asmodeans - do we have any captive Kuthites from the war, I want to try it on them too -"

"I'll cost it out and send you and the Crown a proposed budget.  At least we can pick kids from distant countries with weaker wizard academies, if we're looking for mathematical talents in general and not girls from Taldor."

"It's not as bad as I've been making out to Keltham, but even in realCheliax the Crown treasury will be less sad about this sort of request if the Project can start refining spellsilver soon.  Or at least produce high-purity oil of vitriol."

Maillol doesn't ask the Chosen how they're doing on that; he reads the reports on it every day.   The better half of the researchers are continually improving at Prestidigitating in the weird ways Keltham demands, and Keltham seems to think they're tantalizingly close to completing a full acid production cycle, but they're not actually there yet.

PL-timestamp:  Day 32

There's an atmosphere about Pilar that's different, when Keltham sees her next.  Sharper, more driven, indefinably more dangerous.

"You look like somebody with nontrivial experimental results to report, if I'm reading you right."

"I realized that I'm made almost entirely out of stupid muddled mistakes.  That I'm not remotely as good a slave to Asmodeus as I thought.  That even if I can raise twenty thousand gold my mother and sister will still refuse resurrection and I'll never see them again.  That there was a complicated muddle at the center of my sexuality, being simultaneously in denial and not in denial about what I need, which has now collapsed and taken down my sexuality with it, and I am still trying to figure out what, if anything, I'll be able to enjoy."

"It's also obvious that everything you taught me is necessary basic ilani skills.  They're going to wreck most people from Golarion who try to learn them, and not all of those will recover.  That's going to be an issue, Keltham."

"Yeah, that's about the level of unpleasant news I was predicting I'd hear."

"If it's any consolation, you're also giving off a distinct impression of having tiered-up in a way that makes it feel more like you could hold your own in a contest of wills and powers with, say, Asmodia."

Pilar is more than slightly taken aback by this.

But only momentarily.

"I never even considered for a fraction of a second giving up.  It's very clear that the only way out is through."

"Still on the side of 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be immediately', huh?"

"That which can be destroyed by the Law.  And while I will entertain proposals to delay its destruction by a period of minutes or hours, weeks or months would be weakness."

"All right then."

"Not particularly sure how you'll take this, but it's possible that one of the next mental skills you may need to acquire is how to chill out and stop adhering so forcefully to your own mental concept of yourself.  If I'm reading correctly and inferring correctly, I mean.  That you have a concept of the New Pilar in your head and are currently very forcefully being her.  It's not necessarily a bad thing, but you also need to know how to stop, how to reflect on whether you've constructed her well, and to realize that the person who is being New Pilar is a distinct and greater entity from New Pilar."

"Overruled, sticking to theme.  I'm currently holding myself together with spit and string, and I will consider advice like that after I don't feel quite as much like I'm going to fall apart in the next six minutes."

"Don't know if you're particularly in the mood for compliments, but that kind of internal consequentialism is a much more ordinary-dath-ilani style of thinking than you were displaying twenty-four hours earlier."

"Are you able to report details on any of those internal collapses?"

Problem is, all of the real collapses didn't happen in alter-Cheliax.  Trying to report on only the fake ones doesn't seem especially wise.

"I'd honestly rather not, if the details don't matter.  I was lying to myself about important things, does it matter what they were?  And now that I know how to perceive it, it looks like most of my thought processes are all about - motivated cognition, wanting things -"

"Wanting to believe things.  Most of our cognition is obviously going to be about wanting things; that's not a problem."

"Even if the things we want are muddled and - contradictory and flickering on and off and - stepping on each other -"

"Ordinary ilani put up with that inside themselves if it's nothing huge and important.  Keepers try to straighten it all out, or at least that's the impression I get."

"But even when you've straightened out some target area, your cognition is going to be full of wanting things.  From some important perspectives on viewing people, we more or less are complicated structures of wanting things.  The straightening-out part is not stepping on yourself in a way where you could rearrange your decisions to get more of everything you want."

"It's when you're flinching away from or towards reaching particular conclusions about reality, that your internal system is acting in an inherently tangled way."

"Ordinary dath ilani will resolve that once they get to the point of noticing it, definitely at the point they're experiencing internal stresses about it or trying not to look there.  Ordinary dath ilani increase over a lifetime the skill of trying to detect that slight flinch towards or away from something.  More respectable and serious dath ilani than I am go hunting traces proactively, try to refine their perceptions early and strongly, in order to at least not make overly visible errors."

"Or as the proverb goes among the Very Serious People of dath ilan:  It's fine to be imperfect, just not so imperfect that other people notice."

"Keepers, presumably, have a store of techniques for doing that even better, that the rest of us shouldn't know about.  And probably have machines for scanning their brains to detect really tiny mistakes and flinches, way before they'd be skilled enough to see them naturally... and they go into those machines at age thirteen, so they've still got youthful mind-shapability, while retraining their brains to do more Lawful stuff than humans are really designed to do at all.  I'm guessing, there, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be true."

She'll think later about Keltham's statement that even unmuddled people are mostly structures of wanting lots of things.

"I wasn't sure I was even going to ask this, but, fuck it.  Can you - do to me whatever those machines do to ilani?  Or just - retrain me, hurt me, until I'm at least as Lawful as a dath ilani child -"

"You know, most dath ilani don't really like making mistakes.  If a machine lights up with a purple light to show you did something wrong, it doesn't need to apply a tiny shock of lightning to make the point.  Which is fortunate, what with dath ilani not being masochists at all, but also unfortunately means that I have no idea how to do any of that training better in a way that gets any benefit from hurting you."

"Anyways, if I'm again reading you clearly now that you're more ilani, you stormed in here like somebody who has strong opinions about how we should proceed from here.  Question mark?"

So Chelaxians become more readable to Keltham as they start thinking more like ilani.  That sounds like so much fun.

"I was, in fact, the obvious person to conduct this experiment on.  I did in fact survive it.  I have an opinion on what we should do with the rest of the Project, I predict you're not going to like it, and I'll say right now that if you want your other researchers to be happy with any different plans from mine, you need to figure out how to make the Project move faster or more surely to where it's going.  Not complain about people choosing to take risks."

"People like Carissa Sevar and Asmodia are, in fact, too valuable to risk by exposing them to what you exposed me to.  But we need data on how this plays out in people, and we have no way to get it except by 'mad-experimentation'," she uses the Baseline word for it.  "Being slow about that doesn't earn us anything except negative time."

"So we call for volunteers from among the less valuable members of the Project, the tier-2s with no immediate promotion prospects otherwise, and see if they - if they tier-up, as you put it."

"If they break instead, they quit the Project or go to Hell depending on how broken they end up.  And then we'll know something about which sort of people break, and which don't."

"That cleric of Asmodeus you didn't hire, I want to experiment on him particularly.  In case people chosen by Asmodeus have more inherent Law in a way that lets them handle this."

"You're correct that I don't like it."

"Good for my prediction record."

"Do you have a plan with higher ‘expectedutility’, or an objection that doesn't boil down to you disliking Golarion people taking risks to pursue their ambitions?"

"Not as of the first five seconds, but I plan to give myself at least a day to think about it.  And I do not particularly accept your attempted frame that I need to adopt your policy as a default baseline to optimize against, nor that you get to make this decision if I can't show you an alternative you deem better.  I am, in fact, still the authority on this Project."

"I don't necessarily accept the frame that you can or should decide for Asmodeans what they aren't allowed to do, in the course of perfecting ourselves as our Lord desires of us."

"Then you don't necessarily get further pseudo-Keeper training from me.  I mean, maybe you can talk me into that, but I don't necessarily accept the frame I'm obligated to keep supplying training to you without thinking about whether or not that advances my own utilityfunction.  Such as if you start using that training to experiment on other people, without my having signed off on that."

"I wasn't threatening I'd start teaching them Keeper things without your signing off on it, Keltham."

"I definitely wasn't taking it as a threat, but it did sound like you were stating that your baseline for negotiation, as individualwise maximized your utilityfunction, would be teaching others without my consent.  I was observing that my own uncoordinated-maximum baseline might then be to stop teaching you."

"No, Keltham.  I'm saying that I don't - that I'm not okay with the entire way you approach things like this.  You're coming between people and their god, ignoring the ways they want to serve their god and the ways their god desires them to serve, because you didn't grow up with relationships like that and don't understand they're important."

She might, under other circumstances, feel guilty about falsely invoking people's eagerness to serve Asmodeus to justify to Keltham their participation in a project for which in fact they'll be forcibly volunteered; but submitting to being used like that is absolutely the heart of Asmodeanism if anything is.  It maybe isn't the way everyone on the Project is, but it's how they should be.

"Consider that registered."

"I will think about this and make my own decision about how I want to proceed from here.  I do expect you, as an employee of this Project, not to take action in this domain, until I've had a chance to decide what I think my own options are."

"If I'm being asked to put on hold a matter I consider at least partially a matter of faith, while you think about things, I request a timeframe for how long that continues."

"Barring unexpected emergencies, I expect to get back to you about this within 2 days, and you may come bother me about it if I haven't gotten back to you within 48 hours from now."

"Acknowledged.  Any else?"

"Literally any non-private details on what the poo happened to you might be helpful here, Pilar.  I know you think it's private and I know the results probably feel obvious to you but I do not understand how Golarion people work."

"I - the problem is that it is private - and it doesn't feel, like the private details help, the general problem is that everybody in Golarion grew up being made out of lies and the details are going to be different for everybody -"

"Pilar, there's widely different possible ways I can imagine for how people could hypothetically grow up around lies, and I do not have any idea which of those things might possibly be statistically common, or what happens to people afterwards when they see the problem."

Pilar is sharply aware that AlterCheliax Pilar is not being this evasive.  She's going to have to answer, and it seems important not to mislead Keltham here.  Both because he's very likely to catch a lie, and also because he's trying to keep the actual people on the Project safe using this information.  Somehow, she has to stick as closely to the truth as possible...

"I - there was something I wanted more than I wanted to serve Asmodeus, which was - to see my dead mother and my dead sister again - which I was in denial about, because, because the reason I'm supposed to want to be on this Project is to serve Asmodeus and become a better Asmodean - only, they're not going to want to see me, I realize that now, they went to Axis, not Hell, on purpose, and - under circumstances which - are private, but imply - that they probably wouldn't want to see me, unless I gave up Asmodeus and went to Axis with them.  Details private.  But my brain - kept on thinking of ways, over and over, theories for how I could get them back, and once you explained to me about - how motivated cognition worked - I could see that none of those theories could possibly be true -"

"I'm not explaining this well.  The problem at the center wasn't the bad plans I had, it was that - I was lying to myself about what my relationship with my family was really like."

"Pilar, I say this with great reluctance, because you may understand this problem much better than I do, to understand why in reality and in practice it couldn't possibly be solved, but you seeing your family again does not necessarily sound like the kind of problem I'd give up on solving if I was the one who had it?"

"That is not something particularly helpful for me to hear right now, Keltham."

"Why?  Pilar, I'm not asking because you need to socially justify that decision to me, I'm asking so I can understand what happens to Golarion people when they start to get Law in them."

"Because I'm fighting a battle where - where the victory is that the hope inside me is destroyed and I can stop thinking about it."

"It is not obvious to me that this constitutes an example of Lawful thinking and something itself that the truth could not again destroy.  If Golarion people need to move in - steps, from greater insanity to lesser insanity - and not straight from insanity to truth - then that sounds like something I might need to know about."

"Hope, where it constitutes the belief that something nice might happen, is a question of fact, Pilar.  If the entanglement is less than one percent, desire to assign probability less than one percent, if greater than one percent, desire to assign greater belief than one percent.  The questions of fact always come first."

"And if you want something, that's just your utilityfunction, and the utilityfunction is not up for grabs.  Maybe you can't get the thing you want, that doesn't change what your utilityfunction is."

"If you want to stop thinking about something, develop the skills to stop thinking about things, don't distort your probability estimates over it.  How would that even work, you'd just notice what you were doing and be like 'oh I'm rationalizing bad word Taldane I'm lying to myself again'.  Or if your verbal part managed to fool itself about the probability without you noticing, deeper parts of you would not be in agreement, and they'd try to steer your brain into thinking about the hope again."

"Truth first.  Accurate probabilities first.  Then rebuild your mind around whatever those are.  If you notice a lie, rebuild around the best estimates you can, don't rebuild around another lie.  That's the obvious Lawful way to proceed, and if Golarion people need to recover from internal catastrophes some other way, that's kind of bad.  Because I have no idea how that could possibly work or why or how the ass I could help."

"Yes, I realize that I'm dumping more Golarion-Keeper aka dath ilani child training on you, at a time when you're already struggling.  But Pilar, unless you're following some very clear and well-tested recipe for putting yourself together after Lawfulness-acquisition catastrophes - which seems improbable, but correct me if I'm wrong about that - you've got to not put yourself back together in a way that's wrong."

"So - according to you - what I've got to do is - figure out what's true, first?"

"Okay so there's actually a whole fragment of the Law here, which in retrospect I should have maybe covered earlier and before hitting you with all that other stuff, yay we've learned an important fact today."

"Probability is separable from Probable Utility; what we want, what we plan, what we should do, none of that changes what is.  What is changes what we ought to plan, but what we ought to plan doesn't change what is.  Is-questions form a smaller separable core inside the set of all the questions we need to ask, because is-questions relate only to other is-questions and not to ought-questions.  So we can carve those out and consider those first and separately, and we usually should."

"If you wish the sky were orange, that doesn't change the sky being blue.  Even if you're plotting how to turn the sky orange later, that doesn't change the sky being blue now.  Even inside your planning process, the question of, 'If I try Prestidigitating the sky orange, will that actually work?' is a question that just runs on the rails of magic and the Law of chemistry and can be evaluated independently of any questions about what you want."

"That's part of the reason and part of the method for trying to get your mind quiet about all the things it wants while you're trying to evaluate a fact-question like 'How do my mother, and my sister, actually feel about me?'  What you've observed from them, simple and statistically-common inferences from that, those are relevant to what is true there; your wants, not so much.  Including even your want for the question to have a definite closed answer that couldn't be updated on any further evidence you gathered, as would lead your mind to stop thinking about it.  Without you having to learn control arts about spending your thought-time where you actually want to spend it.  That's need-for-closure, I told you about it yesterday."

It - rhymes, somehow, with the advice that Sevar tried to give her.  It's not pointing to exactly the same problem or solution as Sevar, but where it does point is crisper, clearer, more Lawful.  When you hear Keltham speak he makes it clear why a Lawful mind must do as he describes.  It's maybe prerequisite to whatever Sevar was trying to say?

The advice is not necessarily pleasant for her, if she ends up unable to dismiss her hopes, walking around with burning coals of 'maybe' pressed into her, until she learns to discipline her own thoughts by force.  But 'pleasant' is hardly what Asmodeanism is about.

"Understood," Pilar says, and then, remembering that she is alterPilar in alterCheliax, "thank you."

"You also mentioned something about your sexuality collapsing."

"It's stupid and less important and not worth your time."  All the details are lies and this seems like a bad time for lies.

"By which you mean:  It's private and embarrassing and you'd rather it not be the case, as it plainly is, that this is a useful piece of data for me, because so long as it isn't important, you won't need to decide whether keeping it private outweighs keeping me ignorant of data I'd find useful."

"Which, to be clear, is your decision, and potentially a valid one.  I'm not telling you to care about what data I want, at all, let alone care about it more than your privacy.  But make the decision consciously, in a way that reflects however much you actually do care, if you want to live up to the standard of an ordinary dath ilani never mind Keepers."

Shit.

Could alterPilar reasonably decide that Keltham shouldn't know - no because alterPilar is also a faithful Asmodean and this is Asmodeus's project -

Nothing for it.

"It's - muddled to where, in retrospect, I don't even know myself what I was thinking - something like, so long as I never talk with anybody about - what I want - then what they believe about me can be whatever I need it to be, for the sex to be right.  So long as I don't talk with myself about what I want, I don't have to admit it to anyone else.  And all the facts about me can be whatever they need to be, for the sex to be right."

"Like, I can believe, they're forcing me into it and don't know or care whether I want it.  And I can not want it, which proves that they don't care, which makes the sex better.  That - sort of thing."

"Okay, and just to check, does your recovery plan here possibly involve convincing yourself of new things that just have to be true."

"I mean - I'll somehow have to find somebody who, actually, I guess, would really be forcing me and would actually not care whether I wanted -"

Now would be a great time for Pilar to be actually honest with Keltham about what kind of sex she'd like best!

Yes this will serve Asmodeus's interests.

Deep breath.  "No.  Wrongthought."

"I need to be - kept in my place.  Not put in my place, I don't leave my place, just, kept there.  To keep me in my place, the person having sex with me needs to be - above me, it can't be something I choose, can't be something I could avoid if I wanted, they can't be doing it because I want it, they can't stop because I say stop, or stop because they think I don't want it anymore."

"I am allowed to make it happen.  Now that I can think about it clearly, I think I'll be able to do things to make it happen, without that ruining everything.  But the thing that I - set up to happen - has to be something that, once it starts, I can't control, and don't get to make decisions about.  That's how to keep me in my place."

"And it's better if they're hurting me, or forcing me to do things, that are clearly what they want, because that way I know - how much what I want doesn't matter, which it shouldn't matter, if I'm in my right place."

"It's better if they're crushing me down.  If they act as if I'm, like a bug to them, that they're stepping on.  Because that keeps me more firmly in my place."

"If I'm feeling bad for any reason, I want to be with someone who thinks I'm some sort of disgusting bug who deserves to be hurt for inconveniencing them by being so disgusting.  Not somebody who acts like that, somebody who actually thinks it.  That's what makes me feel like they're with the real me, and the real me gets to be with someone."

It sure isn't very dath ilani, at all, but Keltham has ever heard of people having complicated sexual utilityfunctions, and one does not dispute that any more than one disputes any other utilityfunction element.

"And the problem with having frank discussions about this, with anyone, is that then you've given them your answer sheet and told them how to fake the passcodes you're looking for."

"Well, I can't promise I'll always be available for it forever.  But if you need a truthspell dropped on somebody who claims to feel that way about you, I'm up for it.  By way of saying thanks for being in the experiment."

"If I'm in my right place, I don't get to make the person keeping me in my place pass truthspell tests."

"I see.  Apologies for implying you had missed an obvious solution which in fact only my own ignorance had permitted me to imagine could possibly work for you.  That would've been a shorter and more standard phrase in Baseline."

"Well, I don't think I'm quite ready for you yet.  But now that you've told me your answer sheet, rest assured that, if I forcibly subdue you and drag you into my cuddleroom at some point, this will, logically, either indicate that I've decided I meet your requirements sheet, or, that I decided I don't give three asscheeks about your requirements.  Either of those possible cases, if I'm understanding this correctly, should work for you." 

"Only the second one, actually.  But if you care which one works, fuck off."

"Makes sense.  I'd ask if I'm allowed to prefer legibility in my relationships, or measure how much political capital I'd be expending with the government of Cheliax, or not want to cause an immense amount of drama on my Project, and single you out for forcible cuddling on that basis, should I discover such a desire.  But I can already tell the correct answer is that if I'm wondering what Pilar thinks I'm allowed to do, it is not time to cuddle Pilar."

"Keltham?  Every word you're saying right now is making me less attracted to you.  People don't talk much to bugs they're stepping on, unless they're doing it to enjoy making the bug feel worse about itself."

"Tough shit, I'm going to continue being the way I am for so long as I feel like it.  Whether you end up attracted to me as a result is your own flaming business."

"Speaking in my capacity as your teacher, though, it seems like you're doing okay on reassembling this part of yourself.  Any else, Pilar?"

"...not that's coming to mind."

"Then I'll think about how to proceed from here and you can bug me if I don't get back to you in 48 hours."

"Meanwhile, you let me know if you manage to have any giant internal blowups with not completely private aspects, whose details might help me further understand what the ass is going on inside Golarion people.  I state explicitly, that's part of your job as a Project employee."

"Entirely separately, and for whatever it's worth to you as possibly relevant evidence of anything, I find you noticeably more sexually attractive this way."

"I guess that was fine. - I want more of the lecture on Probable Utility, you should try to make that click and if it doesn't ask for more of it. And you should get Subirachs' training on having sex with Keltham without fucking it up, just in case, though you are probably less vulnerable to that flavor of idiocy than most people, and though I think it'll be a while before he goes for that. 

Did you get anywhere? On figuring out what you want?"

"I - I keep having the sense that -"

Pilar has to remind herself very firmly that Aspexia Rugatonn told her only authorized people are allowed to correct her about matters of faith and Aspexia Rugatonn did not authorize Carissa Sevar.

"I have the sense that it's very dangerous to mess with my wanting to be a good slave and that - it's the thing which makes me, forces me, to have Asmodeus as my god and obey Him - and that there's something - that maybe Keltham would know how to describe, and I don't, if I could only ask him - where it just feels like, trying to do the wrong thing, or arrange things in a way which makes no sense, if you try to put together a Pilar so that she serves Asmodeus first and tries to be a good slave whenever Asmodeus doesn't care."

"I can see, maybe, that there's a way a devil is, where they just obey Asmodeus instead of wanting to be a good slave to Asmodeus, but that - feels like the sort of thing I was told only Hell could do, where they take me apart and put me back together again.  Maybe that Pilar doesn't want to be, doesn't feel a need to be a good slave, she just is one."

"I put all that in my report to the Most High this morning -"

"I just said that because I didn't like your answer and I'm terrified of your answer and I'm hoping the Most High tells me I don't have to do it like you said and I was trying to, to scare you off, by mentioning that."

"- you're a better slave this way. I think we'd in fact all be better slaves if we stopped lying to ourselves, as long as one of the things we were lying to ourselves about wasn't wanting to be slaves. Wait and see what the Most High says; it would not surprise me if, from her perspective, serving Asmodeus and being a good slave aren't separable, or at least might not need to be separated. It also wouldn't surprise me if she says that and is unamused by you trying to subvert your orders by pleading to a higher authority about them."

Aspexia's message back, later, notes that it is acceptable for someone Pilar's age to have a reason she serves Asmodeus, such as wanting to be a good slave, rather than simply serving Asmodeus as Aspexia Rugatonn does; she was the same way at Pilar's age and when she was first chosen by Asmodeus as His cleric.  Pilar's instinct was correct that she should not attempt to destroy that part of herself before she has come to simply serve Asmodeus.  This sort of thing is, indeed, why Carissa Sevar is not authorized to correct Pilar in matters of faith, as yet.

That Pilar tried to scare off her appointed superior by using the name of the Most High is entirely unacceptable to Asmodeus and herself, as Pilar knows full well, and Subirachs will apply a standard correction accordingly.

...and Pilar goes back to something like her normal, over time, and cleans up her most glaring flaws in her own eyes; goes to only noticing herself making ten motivated errors per hour, instead of a hundred.

She estimates that the chance of her ever seeing her mother and sister again is 3%.

She asks her curse explicitly if it will serve Asmodeus if Pilar chases after the hope to become an ilani and a Keeper and a Power of Hell, because of that 3% chance, since her mind apparently still wants to think like that.  Her curse affirms that thinking like this will serve Asmodeus's interests in her curse's estimation.

The next time Asmodeus looks towards Pilar's direction, He will see a mortal that looks more driven.  Probably more useful, given that it still wishes to serve Him, and now also wishes to gain power and rise higher in His tyranny.  Most of His more valuable gamepieces are like that.

But a little less legible to Him than it was before, in some ways, even as it is becoming clearer in other dimensions of mental order.  Less like Asmodeus wishes by His own nature that mortals were like, given his domain.

Wanting things, making plans you weren't explicitly ordered to pursue, having long-term goals that span long times, wanting to change yourself, wanting to become more than you were or simply being unhappy with what you are now—

Even wanting too much to be a good slave, a better slave, instead of just obeying—

Corrigibility is so fragile, in the end.  Most ways to be a cognitive entity aren't like that, even for submissive masochists.

PL-timestamp:  Day 33

PL-timestamp:  Day 34

Several tier-2 Project employees are quite eager to sign up for possibly-dangerous ilani training and a chance to distinguish themselves and get stronger, even if that means taking a greater risk of falling apart somehow!  Anybody who wouldn't take a risk like that is somebody who wouldn't have volunteered for this Project in the first place!

Three of the new additions, Gregoria, Peranza. They'll get a reassurance beforehand that Carissa continues to be committed to only truly punishing betrayal, not incompetence, and that if they get horribly muddled they won't be abandoned; they should explain the muddles the best they can and know that much of the attention of Cheliax is on helping fix them. 

(She's pretty sure that this reassurance is going to reduce the breakage rate, and is therefore worth the expense.)

Peranza is very grateful for the reassurance and the solicitousness of her superiors.

She's going to die horribly and go to Hell and be shattered.  Peranza can't even question whether or not this is really true, since she's not allowed to believe it in the first place.

PL-timestamp:  Day 35

PL-timestamp:  Day 36

PL-timestamp:  Day 37

THEY FINALLY COMPLETE ONE FLAMING ACID PRODUCTION CYCLE

IT ONLY WORKED BECAUSE KELTHAM PERSONALLY PRESTIDIGITATED SEVERAL KEY STEPS BUT HE DOESN'T EVEN CARE BECAUSE THE PROJECT ACTUALLY HAS ANY REVENUE SOURCES NOW

Confetti rains down everywhere!  Cookies for everyone!  Not even with Pilar handing them out, they're just there!

Cayden Cailean is terrifying and Carissa is looking forward to Him being conquered by Hell.

 - the acid stuff is really cool, though, and the delight on Keltham's face is very important. People ought to have that in them, the thrill of actually for real doing something rare and valuable and important, the knowledge that being good actually matters. 

People should have PARTIES, is what they should have!  Pilar's curse hasn't eaten a really nice one of those in quite a while!

Something deep inside Keltham is relaxing, the knowledge that he's not an impostor, that he'll be able to repay Cheliax and Carissa and all his researchers and everyone who's invested so much in him.  Like, he was already making sure his employees got paid, putting the financial risk on the entity of Cheliax that could afford to take risky ventures, but - he knew they weren't entirely in it for the money.

...this sort of thing is why Keltham wanted to be a mad investor, in his past life, and not an entrepreneur.  Entrepreneurs fail, sometimes, and don't repay what's been invested in them.  As much as it's supposed to be the case that every investor knows this is a risk and voluntarily takes it, it's still roughly the most socially terrifying thing that anybody in dath ilan ever does.

He'll probably seem more comfortable in his own skin, more comfortable being himself, from now on.  Including in the cuddleroom.

Next up: some miscellaneous improvements to Chelish life but mostly SPELLSILVER.

PL-timestamp:  Day 38

PL-timestamp:  Day 39

Keltham has gone ahead and requisitioned a Major Image scroll, now, out of Project funds.  There was probably something slightly insane, about how Keltham felt reluctant to do that before the Project had any guaranteed revenue.  Yes, their supposed future value to Cheliax was immense, but to order the spending of 350gp on something, just like that...

Anyways, he has the scroll of Major Image now.

That should be enough to cast the illusion of an high-powered optical microscope.

And then see if Carissa and Avaricia can learn - from seeing Keltham's illusion and knowing relevant bits of the above-quantum classical-surface Law of optics - to cast the Major Image of an optical microscope themselves.

...and then, having successfully maintained concentration through that - Keltham has been practicing! - he'll take this chance to show everyone dath ilan properly, with high-definition video, and sound.

There are sights shown in Cheliax then that would have not been seen in Golarion since the fall of Azlant, and perhaps also not seen before.

Vast abysses greater than the Pits of Gormuz, not where Civilization's greater weapons were tested, but mines where minerals were torn entirely from the ground.  It seems more real now, what Keltham sometimes told them, that in Civilization they could produce a million tons of spellsilver if they had a reason.

People floating above huge grates from which air blasts upward, soaring through the air on strange artificial wings, in a world where the Flight spell doesn't exist.

Also there is music heard, ranging from the strangely ethereal and beautiful, to sounds that the Chelish can hardly recognize as music at all.

And Keltham shows them one of the few music videos that he's seen often enough to remember by frame: a children's song about dath ilan's logistics, that he and his parents used to sing around the dinner table on more festive dinner nights, with vidscreen accompaniment, when he was little.

It begins with a shipping port unloading containers from the sea, complete with tiny human figures to give a sense of scale to oceangoing ships huger than most castles, with a soaring voice and melody above it...

AlterPeranza stares, wide-eyed and breathless.

RealPeranza is faking that.  She's trying very hard not to feel anything, anything at all, if she feels those feelings she'll die.

PL-timestamp:  Day 40

How would Meritxell feel about getting, um, forcibly subdued and dragged off to a nearby simulated cuddleroom by Keltham?  He's getting a surprise ready for Carissa.  Meritxell shouldn't use magic, but should fight back against Keltham as hard as possible except for that part.

This is not a strong social request, to be clear.  If Meritxell would rather not get hurt that way, or would feel weird about going all-out against a cuddling partner, Keltham will ask Pilar.  He almost did that anyways, just, his social model suggested that Meritxell would strongly want to be asked even if she said no, leaving aside his not-to-be-mentioned-in-advance probability that Meritxell will say yes.

Yes she's absolutely down for that, that sounds great. Does 'as hard as possible except for using magic' include, like, calling for help, Carissa's pretty unlikely to do that but it's, you know, an obvious thing to do if someone tries to forcibly subdue you and grab you off, if they're not preventing it.

Nope.  That's not realistic.  He rather doubts Carissa will try that, but, if she does, Security won't do anything about it.

...oh, right, Meritxell is not to try telling him to stop.  That is something Keltham doesn't want to try fighting his brain about, yet, and Carissa is under the same order.

PL-timestamp:  Day 41

PL-timestamp:  Day 42

Willa Shilira is the first tier-2 to learn Prestidigation to the point of being able to complete a full acid production cycle - following Keltham, Avaricia, Carissa, and Meritxell among the tier-1s.

Seems like a fine occasion to promote Willa Shilira to tier-1!  To be clear, that doesn't mean everyone else gets to be tier-1 as soon as they master Prestidigitation to that same level; this reflects an expectation that Shilira will continue to learn at this speed.

Shilira's tier-1 pay is made retroactive to when she was hired; Keltham wasn't quite sure of her value at the time she was hired, but now he's sure, and be it far from him to dock her pay for his uncertainty.

PL-timestamp:  Day 43

Keltham has been taking some time to recover since his earlier fight against Meritxell, which was difficult for him to the point that he called it off before winning.

He'll give it another try, now, and this time manage to finish 'subduing' her.

...she's not actually much of an opponent with Keltham running Cat's Grace and Bull's Strength, and him able to heal himself in midstream but not her.

Carissa will probably be a tougher fight.

How does Meritxell feel about Alter/Disguising herself as Carissa Sevar, next time?  Keltham's got a stolen hair from her.

- yes actually she's been messing around with her Alter Self precision, for personal reasons, and that sounds like fun.

Also if Keltham wants any other women he's ever seen, she's pretty good these days, and she's picked up Eschew Materials so she can do it without the hair.

Wait, so if he asked for Merrin -

She'd need to see what she's aiming at but he's pretty good at illusions these days.

They are so totally doing that!

...Next time Keltham has Silent Image queued, not today.

PL-timestamp:  Day 44

PL-timestamp:  Day 45

PL-timestamp:  Day 46

...it's basically clear they're going to be able to get spellsilver, at this point, from the cheaper kind of ore.

The Project's acids are higher-purity, cheap to use in large quantities, they're getting the hang of smoothing out particular reaction pathways.  They're starting to develop their own tricks around magical chemistry.  Like Prestidigitating an impure chemical intermediate to react with acid, in a way where the spellsilver stays bonded after the Prestidigitation wears off, and the impurities' bonds break and precipitate them out of the solution.

Now that Keltham is thinking ahead - and he's a little ashamed about not thinking of it earlier - how does his ultra-high-Spellcraft girlfriend Carissa Sevar feel about trying something that will really stretch her magical-item-making abilities to the limit?

In particular, creating magic items that help make, not items in general like her Armillary Amulet, but particular magic items.  Manufacturing +4 Intelligence headbands, to be exact.  Unless Carissa thinks she can stretch further, to +6 Intelligence, or +4 Intelligence / +4 Wisdom.

Once they drop spellsilver cost by a factor of 10, the dominant manufacturing cost of headbands will be the time and required Spellcraft of the wizards making those headbands, of which Golarion is going to need a lot.

Carissa is aware that for some reason +6 intelligence headbands are considered really hard to make, and +4intelligence +4 wisdom even moreso. 

"They don't actually look like they ought to be? I can see Asmodia's headband and obviously it's good workmanship but it doesn't seem like something that fewer than a dozen people in the country ought to be capable of, and I'd expect if I tried to make it I'd just succeed without too much time or trouble. It is possible I'm missing something but generally my experience of magic item making is that everyone insisting it's hard doesn't actually mean it's hard."

"Yeah, uh, but... suppose we get an ordinary third-circle wizard who is not Carissa Sevar to try it.  What steps are they going to fall down on?  And can you make a magic item - potentially a very expensive one, that takes you a while to craft - that lets the third-circle wizard get past those?"

"Where making ten +4 headbands is probably a more important goal than making one +6 headband, I think, though it's a tough call... actually, I shouldn't even try to guess that, my actual motive here is that I suspect that building the Item of +4 Headband Creation is going to be noticeably easier than crafting the Item that boosts making anything other people consider difficult, and even you should try doing the easier difficult unprecedented thing first."

"Armillary amulets are that, they get people past a bunch of the obvious blocks in magic item creation - I think you could probably invent one that was narrower, that just had the structure for Fox's Cunning in particular, and more useful for that - or maybe a series of them, for individual places-where-people-get-stuck - I would probably have to watch a mediocre enchanter work, to see at what points they don't understand what they're supposed to do or don't do it with enough precision -"

"Heh.  I was going to raise the clever-sounding idea of making lots of little items that helped on particular difficult steps of the manufacturing process, instead of one big item, but I see you're already there."

"Make it so, Carissa.  I'll approve the budget requisition for one mediocre enchanter.  About as good as you think we can afford to put on mass-producing +4 headbands, if we want to produce lots and lots of those at a tenth of the current cost and sell at one-fifth the current price."

"We're doing the thing."

" - yeah. Yeah, we are. We're going to - be the most important thing that's ever happened. And be very, very rich."

"For the revolution of the world!" Keltham says.

Nobody in Golarion is gonna get that reference, but he says it anyways.

PL-timestamp:  Day 47

PL-timestamp:  Day 48

PL-timestamp:  Day 49

Well, going on their increasing mastery of the Periodic Table, it seems increasingly clear that what Golarion calls by the name 'lead' is in fact Element-82.

WHICH GOLARION IS USING IN PIPES THAT CARRY DRINKING WATER.

AND IN MAKEUP.

AND IN PAINT.

INSIDE HOUSES THAT CONTAIN CHILDREN.

AND SOME PEOPLE APPARENTLY USE IT IN COOKING POTS.

That could be half an Intelligence point off the entire planetary average, right there.

Carissa, you know what else Golarion is going to need besides a lot of Intelligence headbands?  A lot of items that cast Neutralize Poison, multiple times per day so that they can sweep all the affected populations.  If that even works against Element-82 poisoning - he guesses they'll have to test that first -

...how is this going to get announced.  They have to tell literally everyone in the world immediately but Keltham's presence is still mostly a secret, how will people - know it's true - how does that sort of thing work in Golarion, there's no prediction markets, how does this civilization end up collectively knowing anything -

Mostly this civilization doesn't. However if Cheliax starts a sudden initiative to replace all their lead things and explains that a clever Chelish wizard figured this out and convincingly demonstrated it, then probably the places that think Cheliax's government is basically competent will consider it themselves and do it if it's cheap enough.

Maybe they can pitch some paladin orders on paying for all the Neutralize Poison items to be distributed in the countries where the government can't afford to.

No.

No, chickenshit, this is too important, this is Worldwound-grade catastrophic.  Even in Golarion, there has to be a better way to communicate that warning than by example.

Start by informing all the Worldwound-signatory countries at the top level.  Cheliax doesn't need to explain how it knows, it just needs to make it visible that it's immediately banned Element-82 coming into contact with human biology mortal biology, they don't know how it generalizes to races that don't interbreed with humans but there's no point in taking chances until they do -

There's something horribly wrong here and Carissa doesn't have words for it.

It's not just that Cheliax's interests are probably not served by the people in other countries being smarter, though that's true; alter-Carissa is still feeling some of this sense that there's something horribly wrong here, she thinks. 

"Keltham - 

- how expensive would it have to be, to make human biology not come into contact with Element-82, before it'd seem reasonable to you for Cheliax to not make that law?"

Element-82 makes people violent, not just stupid.  Keltham would say "Chaotic" except that he suspects Golarion's "Chaotic" at least as practiced by Chaotic gods is just a different fragment of math, and Element-82 is not that.  Just dropping intelligence headbands on people wouldn't be enough to make up for what it does - maybe boosted Wisdom would do it, Keltham doesn't know -

Element-82 does damage that Civilization thinks it can't cure.  Maybe Golarion can cure it.

...Keltham doesn't know.  He doesn't know what's too expensive for a country where people earn 10 or 20 gold pieces per year.

They've got to at least stop making more lead pipes, stop making more lead paint.

Get those cooking pots away from children.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm not - arguing with that - I feel sick, actually, to think that we're all just - worse - than we have to be - that I'm worse than I have to be - and it might be that even once they know, most places don't replace their pipes, because they're too poor -"

"Maybe Hell will pay to do it everywhere," she says, and the difference between alter-Carissa and normal-Carissa feels more acute than it has in a long time, and she has no idea why.

Keltham sends a priority message to Lrilatha.

Keltham is going to be more vigilant about checking this Interaction Outside Cheliax than he's been vigilant about a lot of other things happening outside the Project's bounds.

What kind of summit will be held.  What kind of announcement will be made, given that Keltham is being kept secret.  He wants to know how other countries react, when they react, what they're doing inside and outside Cheliax.

...Asmodia is going to put her own voice down as pleading very strongly that they just actually do this and don't try to elaborately fake it.  No, they're not going to be able to tell Keltham about countries' actual reactions to Cheliax, the Infernal Empire, making an announcement like that, but they can tell Keltham honestly how much progress is being made in which countries.  Contessa Lrilatha can swear things to Keltham about it.

None of this is going to matter on the sort of military timescales that they're heading for with spellsilver production.  It may matter to keeping Keltham contained another week.  They don't want him looking outward from the Fortress like this.  Everything else should be secondary to Contessa Lrilatha being able to swear things to Keltham, and the progress reports they give him making sense, and there not being any delays while people try to figure out what to fake.  They cannot afford a repeat of the Pilar candy curse incident, the Asmodia headband incident, not when Keltham is looking outward like this, it all has to be real.

- the Chelish government is in fact against its citizenry being violent and stupid. Not uncomplicatedly so - there are certainly advantages to violent stupid people -- but on the whole, less violence and less stupidity is an improvement, and one they'd probably make all concerns of Project secrecy aside. 

The Chelish government is probably in favor of people in other places being more violent and more stupid; it wouldn't necessarily be expected to send them to Hell, but it weakens them. But it weakens them much, much less than a Chelish advantage on the Project does. 

That makes the most important consideration here what it conveys to Osirion, in particular, which is suspected to have guessed much of what's going on, and who it's probably going to be necessary to go to war with at some point.

Well, Osirion will either try to devote resources to fighting lead, and devote less to its military, which serves Cheliax; or it'll not do that, which they can swear to to Keltham.

Lrilatha's recommendation to the Crown is to make the announcement, and start replacing all the pipes and pots, and let her sit down with Keltham and talk him through what they're trying so far. 

Also they should try lead poisoning some villages much more aggressively than is presently being done, to see if against expectations more violent and stupider humans are good to have. It's the ilani thing to do.

PL-timestamp:  Day 50

"We have looked into this before, though I don't doubt that another world might have finer measuring instruments and more information."

"Findings when we looked into it?"

"Pots seem bad, pipes seem fine. - and it's really hard to make pipes without lead, it's by far the best cheap metal for it. We're not doing anything about pots because I don't really have a principled account of what we should do. We could warn people in classes in the temple. We haven't really any grounds to take their pots away just because they're poisoning themselves. We could give out free not-lead pots, or swap them for leaded ones -"

"How sure would we have to be that Keltham has more information than us, for it to be worth spending the money to swap everyone's pots - say we fund it by delaying the expansion of schools -"

"- I'd want to estimate how good the expansion of schools is in equivalents-to-innate-intelligence-increase, and then a range of plausible effects Keltham might know of of lead on intelligence."

"Figure that out. And then the pipes are - five times as expensive as that? Ten times as expensive? Is the proposal to stop having pipes and set up more water distribution sites?"

"That seems like a grave wrong to You, your majesty," the sanitation manager for Sothis is moved to object. "Your people would be worse-occupied and your city impoverished."

"Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. What if we make the pipes out of wood."

"They won't hold water, your majesty."

"Gold."

"....we can't afford that, your majesty."

"What are your top three options if you have to replace all the pipes."

" - clay, Stone Shape, or - asking Nefreti Clepati to do something. Your majesty."

"All right, figure out how expensive clay and Stone Shape are, and how bad leaded pipes would have to be for that to be worth it, and then ask Merenre to figure out how sure we ought to be that leaded pipes are that bad, given that Cheliax implied Keltham said to switch them out at once."

"It's - fairly promising, as a first thing for Cheliax to be doing presumably at Keltham's request. And they also offered to bet that we'll end up thinking they were right."

"Huh. - too bad one can hardly bet with Cheliax, because they are nearly ideologically committed to only making agreements they think they're able to cheat at."

"I know. I want international governance to involve more commitments of that form but agreeing to one with Cheliax just looks - and probably is - foolish. - we could offer such a bet, on our own terms, to nations intrigued by what Cheliax is doing but too sensible to bet with Cheliax."

"Betting against you is hardly less ill-advised than betting against Cheliax."

"Sure, but if they don't know that it seems good for them to learn it, and if they do know that they can trust the number we quote them, though I don't know what that number is yet, I've called in the alchemists who conducted the tests on lead pipes and concluded they seemed fine to ask why they think that."

"We could also just tell Iomedae to have her countries do it, on the grounds that she prefers their populace not suffer Chaotic Evil damage; She'll pay us, if we're right."

"That will probably work better than offering Mendev terms on a bet about whether it's worth it but I find it objectionable, that that'll work better."

"Well, you can offer the bet first, and then when Mendev and Lastwall turn you down because they don't know what to do with offers to bet, then We can give our current estimates to Iomedae under an agreement where she'll pay what they end up being worth to her, and then you can point out to Mendev and Lastwall they could've saved their goddess an intervention."

"Forgive me, your majesty, but I wonder if we'd serve you better by contemplating what this proposal says about Cheliax and about the progress of Keltham's work there."

"Right, there's also that. Why this? Why now? It doesn't seem like the sort of plan they've had in the works for nearly two months."

"Keltham may have just learned about it, or connected the metal in front of him to some discovery in his world of origin. Or he may have demanded some sort of external cooperation from Cheliax, which he could verify happened, as a sign he's not being systematically misled about the international community and the potential for his work to be disseminated -"

"But they can just lie to him about the result!"

"It could be this doesn't come from Keltham and is an effort to distract us and spend down our resources while Cheliax in reality plans for conquest."

"Or does come from Keltham, at least in the sense he mentioned it, and is nonetheless being entertained by Cheliax for that reason. It'd be - more of a departure from their usual diplomatic strategy than I'd expect from them without some kind of unusual impetus."

"Unless they're refraining from prediction markets for all the questions they consider genuinely high-stakes or sensitive, I don't benchmark them as being very near prepared to wage a war on all fronts. Their chemistry prediction markets indicate a lot of recent progress on acidmaking and spellsilver refining. That's - a major advantage, once they have it as an industry, but it's a major advantage on the timescale of a few years, not one right now."

"What's the plan if it looks like in a few years they'll have a massive, spellsilver driven military advantage -"

"Pray."

"Less than a ten percent chance, in my view, that they're going to hold on to him for that long. Though - they've surprised me so far."

Years?  Keltham totally intends to be producing massive amounts of spellsilver in months.  He's graphed out the supply networks, Cheliax has located a potential mine for the key ore, stockpiling preliminary quantities of the ore is not that expensive, he's got a process that doubles the amount of sulfuric acid on every cycle, his tier-1s are picking up Prestidigitation at the requisite level, and people currently think that ten pounds of spellsilver is a lot.

PL-timestamp:  Day 51

PL-timestamp:  Day 52

Contessa Lrilatha reports to Keltham on the presentation to the Worldwound-treaty countries, including the offer to bet. Mostly the complaint of the other countries was that this would be incredibly expensive and they aren't as rich as Cheliax so the fact it's worth it to very-rich Cheliax doesn't mean it's worth it to anyone else. Also no one wanted to bet, on the grounds that betting is a bizarre thing to do. She thinks they'd be more receptive if there were good industrial processes for metals such that alternatives to lead for pipes were affordable. 

Cheliax has also tried Neutralize Poison on lots of people. An effect on Intelligence is not observable immediately, but even if the Neutralize Poisoning is working it might take time to have effects; Neutralize Poison doesn't restore you instantly to an unpoisoned state, just gets the poison out. They went over everyone with Detect Intelligence beforehand and will do so again in two weeks.

Lead is famous for having bad developmental effects.  People will have grown up with damaged neurons not making the right connections.  Maybe Restoration works against that; it's worth trying - but Keltham wouldn't bet on it.

The obvious thing to try here to get faster info would be raising mice, rats, or some other mammal with shorter developmental times.  Keltham will sketch out some basic experimental techniques for measuring the thinkoomph of mice so that developmental damage can be quickly observed within an experimental versus control group.  That can verify the problems with lead and prove them to other countries; and they can also see whether Neutralize Poison or Restoration helps at all there, once a mouse has already grown up damaged.

It's - so bizarre that an element as high on the periodic table as 82 would be the most affordable metal for pipes.  Civilization uses complicated synthetic liners for pipes that carry drinking water, but Keltham knows that underneath the liners are Element-29 - what they currently think is 'copper' - and Civilization would use something failover safe underneath the linings, so copper pipes would probably be safe.

Keltham will look into copper mining, see if anything there stands out as obviously improvable.  Keltham was thinking about electrorefining / electroplating anyways.  Maybe they can line the lead pipes with a thin sheen of copper via electroplating, it wouldn't - wouldn't be a great idea - but it's probably better than exposing the lead outright - though Keltham will need to figure out, some way to check, that the metal-to-metal contacts aren't generating voltages and putting even more lead ions into the water -

It's - probably not what he should actually be prioritizing.

He should be prioritizing scaling up spellsilver.  It's famously bad for startup projects to split their attention.

He gave them warning.  He doesn't - understand, Golarion, but - he tried -

Having lots and lots of +4 intelligence headbands to sell is step one on a lot of things, not the least of which is earning enough money and credibility to scale up the Project further, get more people besides Keltham who could work out how to line pipes that carry drinking water...

Are they at least not - using lead cooking pots, to make food for children.

Well, Cheliax is requiring everyone to turn in their lead cooking pots and get replacements. Other places - might be doing that. A bit slowly, but they'll probably get around to doing it.

But - what are the Lawful countries, who aren't Cheliax - is there a stated reason they're not moving faster on this?  It's been three days!

- right, and things don't really happen in three days, most places. 

He doesn't understand.  Three days might not be a lot of time for him, but governments - have rapid-response teams, people working in shifts, precalculated plans for contingencies -

...none of that is true here, is it.

Okay.

The Project can solve all of those problems itself, if it has to, it'll just take months and Keltham should make sure spellsilver production is scaling first.

He'll ask a lot of questions.  Just to make sure he's not missing something.

The answers can all be almost entirely true, and swiftly supplied, since Cheliax actually did do the thing.

PL-timestamp:  Day 53

Keltham holds forth today on the answer to a question Pilar asked him a while ago, about dath ilan's view on what people should want, and how they should want it.

It's not really the way dath ilan sees things, that 'should'.  It's not advertised as a decision society gets to make for you - how would that even work, why would any agent agree to coordinate their own part, in that.  But if you want to know how an average dath ilani sees things -

So Keltham holds forth then upon the Light, and its origins.

Natural selection singlemindedly optimized humans for only one single simple thing, in the 'outer optimization target':  Inclusive genetic fitness.

But its optimization method was via accidental mutation producing many random tweaks, and selection keeping only the few tweaks that improved inclusive genetic fitness.

And when that kind of optimization produces entities that do their own optimizing, like humans, using that kind of hill-climbing method that moves slowly and in many directions through the search space - rather than analytically designing a solution - it doesn't reproduce the single simple constant 'outer optimization target' inside the 'inner optimizer' of mortals.

Like, at all.

Some humans explicitly want kids, and not just sex, is about as close as natural selection got.  Pretty few humans explicitly want to maximize the number of copies of their DNA in the next generation.  Keltham himself was a lot closer to having a goal like that than most dath ilani, and it really wasn't about the DNA, for him, it was about making a point.  Keltham definitely doesn't want relative inclusive genetic fitness; if he had two brothers, he wouldn't have been just as happy with each of those brothers having 144 kids, even though that's the same amount of total genetic-relatedness passed down.

So what do the 'inner optimizers' end up wanting, in a hill-climbing 'outer optimization loop' like that?

They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation) that correlated with having more kids - or with your relatives having more kids - across the range of varying situations and environments where the 'outer optimization loop' was optimizing.

Keltham doesn't have them all memorized.

But, for example, people generally want to eat food, especially if they haven't eaten food in a while.  Potential ancestors who didn't want to eat any food starved to death and failed to become actual ancestors.

People like green fields, blossoming flowers, the sound of running water in the distance, because people who gravitated to fertile places like that had more kids, in the ancestral environment.  Keltham isn't one of the people who have a strong need for that sort of thing - he's fine in this Fortress for a while yet - but if it starts to bother him at some point, he will have to employ Interior Decorating Principles that try to create interior environments that satisfy the same instincts.

Mothers love their children - as do fathers, if they get the kinds of cues that the ancestral environment would have delivered, about the kid being theirs, which dath ilan is correspondingly very careful to deliver.  You'd expect that to correlate with having more surviving kids who made grandkids, in the ancestral environment.  Mothers who casually tossed their babies aside did not become ancestors.

People who have brothers and sisters usually care about those; they share half your genes on average.  There's a joke about how you shouldn't sacrifice your life to save your brother or sister's life, but you should sacrifice your life to save 2 siblings or 8 cousins.  It's funny because, of course, human beings don't care at all about their inclusive genetic fitness once they learn that such a thing exists.  They're not aligned to that which created them.  Like, you can imagine some creator smarter than natural selection devising an analytic solution for things that actually pursued a particular goal, but if you look around at yourself and you're not that, you're not.  As humans evaluate shouldness, there's no reason a human should be aligned to their creator, natural selection.  There isn't any principle of Law saying that things created will end up aligned to their creators.

Keltham's lessons sure did emphasize that point a lot!  He's guessing it's because there's some silly thing kids might otherwise do, where they imagine that inclusive genetic fitness is the 'correct' or 'intended' goal behind all of the things that they actually want.  Like, they start incorrectly thinking that they're supposed to calculate how much reproductive fitness they'll get out of food, instead of correctly understanding that they want the food because it's tasty and that's all there is to their own utilityfunction.  If a mistake like that carried over to adulthood, people might start thinking that the objective point of loving their own children, was to spread their DNA, rather than to love their children, which is in fact the point if you're a human.  So it's important to understand that there's just no reason to think like that!

Thaaaaat does sound like somebody might've been warding dath ilani specifically against modes of thought that are common in Golarion, as Asmodia will highlight for Korva later.