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....Wow. This continues to be the most uncomfortable assignment of Ketar's (short) life!

He's pretty sure that it's not hard to tell who is or isn't ethnically native to the Empire? Not that this would tend to matter to anyone who isn't stupid, though apparently some important historical authors were stupid in that way -

- though in fact their visitor is kind of borderline, in terms of whether she looks native? Her hair and skin are the right color, Ketar thinks, but her features are - exotic. Not in a bad way, necessarily....

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Mykos also chronicles some military campaigns (the Imperial Legions are implicitly a similar model to the Chelish army - wizards throwing fireballs, squares of pikemen, crossbowmen firing from the edges of the squares ready to dive in, lancers ready to charge if the squares break, albeit with much more use of Gates for logistics, without devils, and with much slower healing) and the various clever tricks used by generals to win wars, as reported by various soldiers he interviewed over drinks.

All the enemies chronicled are tremendously militarily inferior, barring a few rebellious provinces brought back under submission, which are slightly militarily inferior, but Mykos manages to keep the tale exciting anyway by talking about all the expansive mountains they crossed and the invincible fortresses they besieged and the tremendous difficulties they had getting any supplies in harsh and distant lands. One of the chapters is about the construction of a grand library in the capital, which is pretty clearly a major endeavor, and is basically the only thing Shakari organized that he'll admit to approving of, as well as various industrial plans organized by the civil service for digging new canals and founding new cities in conquered territory; at one point he submits a suggestion for a canal-construction project, which he includes in the history even though it didn't get accepted, along with a point-by-point comparison to the successful plan. (He cheerfully admits that what did get through was much cleverer than what he proposed.)

A number of the emperor's leading ministers are mentioned; one of them is Altarrin, son of the Duke of Kavar and graduate of the Hall of Learning, who passes the civil service examination with the highest possible marks, becomes a leading minister at a very young age, becomes a leading general at a very young age, and ends up winning a lot of wars. He's an extremely gifted military organizer, very ruthless, very efficient, takes essentially all the mages he's fighting prisoner to draft them into the factories and sets up extensive infrastructure before he comes home to becoming a leading light of politics. When Cesion died, Altarrin's extraordinary wisdom was vital to the selection of Count Bastran as his successor, who now rules as the wisest, most just, most benevolent, et cetera emperor in Imperial history.

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.....yeah seems unlikely that she dropped on the guy by random accident out of all possible places in the world to land. 

 

The book might be flattering him falsely, of course, but 'wise', 'ruthless', and 'efficient' are all desirable traits in someone who is holding you prisoner.

 

He can protect her. She can deliver on the project and figure out how to turn out a headband a day and help the Empire crush its enemies by even larger margins and expect to not die. That's all you can really ask for - more than you can really ask for. That's the answer she was looking for. 

but is it a sex thing or not though.

she's not pathetic she'll be fine she just wants to know out of curiosity

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...Is what a sex thing? How can Altarrin's ruthlessness or efficiency possibly be a sex thing??

Ketar is even more sure now that he's missing some sort of context. (Not just on the current situation; he's also suddenly confused about what categories of skill are or aren't about sex.)

Though obviously it's true that Altarrin can keep someone safe, if he wants to. And presumably he does want to keep this woman safe? 

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She'll read the rest of the books, at this point, with no further effort at unpredictibility.

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The first volume of A Grand Reckoning is like the second, in that it is extremely verbose and likes quoting primary sources. It has a lot fewer of them for the subject of the first volume, though, which is the Cataclysm through to the founding of the Eastern Empire.

The book begins with an introduction - a description of a tremendously wonderful and prosperous empire, full of magic, triumphant in war, industrious in peace, advancing every art; in it, you can go out your door and see wizards, artisans, engineers, slaves from every part of the world, all just outside your door. And it is here, the world we live in, today. (He is, yes, implicitly assuming you live in the Imperial City.)

How, he asks, did we get here? To tell this tale is (he eventually admits) his objective - beginning with the Catalcysm. Two ancient and powerful civilizations (Tantara and Predain) battled, both wielding magic of overwhelming power; this power grew beyond their control, unleashing a devastating cataclysm that blasted civilization from the world, leaving only desolation, wild monsters, and horrifyingly destructive weather that wiped out all attempts to rebuild.

In one particular part, though, there was an attempt that wasn't destroyed. A number of soldiers - including wizards - from the warring countries had been stranded there, and with their knowledge of advanced civilization and powerful magic, they could protect the ruined countryside and gently guide the people around them into better ways. They instituted many imperial systems, including the equal-field system, the working of iron, and the use of compulsions to prevent crime, all of which were necessary because they were constantly being attacked by monsters and overrun by famine and mage-storms. For generations, they struggled patiently to preserve all that they could, and build a world of order, justice and learning.

Reading between the lines, he has no idea what was going on and is backdating everything he can think of. He says "surely it must have been" a lot, and has almost no primary source quotes until he gets to the actual founding of the empire, where we run into the same crew that appeared in the second volume, who are working enthusiastically on building a functional civilization. ("Empire," as they are using it, pretty clearly means "the area we have power," and "emperor," "the guy with the power to make decisions," whatever the word translates to in Taldane.)

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Carissa isn't thinking very much. The Empire seems like a good place, a place that makes sense, but not exactly the kind of place where you should think, which is dangerous at the best of times. But she remembers the names and dates and approximate shape of things, and she is glad to be in the Imperial City and not in a wasteland full of warlords, and glad to have guards outside her door. 

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It's going to bother Altarrin that Carissa doesn't feel safe having thoughts. Ketar is confused about a lot of things, right now, but - he's pretty sure that people feeling allowed to think is important, critical, for having a functional Empire?

And he's never felt like it wasn't safe to think, here. Though maybe that's partly because of his Gift - he's the person who reads other people's minds, and he knows how to shield, so even when other Thoughtsensers read him, he can tell when they're doing it... 

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The Personal Record wishes to begin by explaining that it is not written to excite the prurient interest, but to explain the unfortunate and tragic history of how the Empire has declined from its golden years; the historian begs you to understand that he puts his pen to the page with a heavy heart, knowing that you would rather not hear these tragic events, but nonetheless it is better that some record remains.

Then it goes straight to the tabloid gossip. It starts off with Emperor Almer III, wise and just, chosen successor of the great Emperor Siman II (“The Stargazer”), who everyone knows was the finest of emperors. Almer was wise, gifted, a wonderful ruler; the Personal Record quotes a lot of witty quips and clever solutions to impossibly knotted problems, most of which depend on the implicit fact that he had everyone in the palace mind controlled. He spent long hours working on infrastructure and construction and overseeing the integration of regions his predecessor had conquered. 

Uuuunfortunately he married a beautiful young woman of high and noble birth forty years younger than he was, and she was not happy with the arrangement, especially since he stayed up so late every night instead of paying her any attention. The only man he trusted near him without compulsions was his barber, a former soldier who’d been his bodyguard for years, now ‘promoted’ to shaving the imperial chin. She seduced the barber (the author quotes just enough rumors about what they got up to in bed to make the reader curious before ‘saying no more’), and cut his master’s throat and ruled as Emperor for the empress’s clique for three hours, nine minutes before one of the Imperial wizards fireballed him and took over. Since the wizard in question had no claim to the throne, he lasted only thirteen seconds, himself. The war of wizards took the palace with it, and there was nine days of anarchy, which was how long it took for the first general to arrive with an army loyal to anything other than compulsions.

He declared his intention of restoring order, but since he had three sons and nine daughters and had never refused any of them anything, he didn’t last long; he left his family in charge when he went off to war, and their reign of terror is described in gratuitous detail. Fortunately for the Imperial City, he never came back, and from then on sex scandals alternate with massacres with poisonings, all without taking a breath, for page after page after page. Finally it ends a few years before the start of Mykos's chronicle - with an archmage-general finally, finally restoring order, and Cesion (Emperor when Mykos begins writing) as one of his leading ministers, “and our tragic tale, the like of which we may never see again in history, coming to a close.”

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What the fuck!!!

 

 

Actually she doesn't know that Abrogail's takeover wasn't that messy and embarrassing; just, if it was, Abrogail would never permit anyone to write a book about it. 

 

It does seem like a potential failure mode of the apparently-effortless geases they employ across the board here; no one has any reason for loyalty but a spell, and if the spell's gone, they've had no space to sort into their natural factions. Or maybe it's just the inherent, unfixable state of Imperial courts. The Emperor should have compulsioned his barber, obviously, but more importantly his wife. 

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Huh. Somehow Ketar never thought of it that way before, even though now that it's been flagged to his attention at all, of course it's reasonable of Carissa to be alarmed and unimpressed about that time period. 

They learned about it in school, of course, but it's occurring to him now that he doesn't really understand why it happened. Things were fine before? And things are, again, back to being fine afterward? It almost reads as though everyone in the capital went inexplicably insane for a few decades?? 

Abrogail is - the monarch of Carissa's home country, in the other world? Ketar is of course going to write down anything he's able to pick up about her, even though it's been candlemarks now and he can feel the beginnings of a reaction-headache. 

Altarrin's closest allies aren't compulsioned, he thinks – at least, not to be loyal to Altarrin, they have the usual suite of compulsions not to sabotage the Emperor. He thinks it's on purpose, though now that he's thinking to ask himself why, he's actually kind of confused too. Everyone knows that Altarrin is relentlessly paranoid and careful.

But he does think that quite a lot of people have reasons to be loyal to Altarrin even without compulsions. Because Altarrin keeps his allies safe, and is pretty competent at it. 

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The Chronicles of Foundation is a history of the first five reigns, by the Fifth Emperor’s court historian, Sorthos. His main interest is in painting the first three emperors as extremely wise and good rulers; he’s trying to imitate the same terse style as Arvad and the Second Emperor (and, by the people he quotes, something like it has become the standard court style for writing in his period), and he largely agrees with A Grand Reckoning and My Reign as to the events; he isn’t putting explicit expected value estimates on them the way My Reign is, but he’s at least including statistics, ideally to make the Emperors look good.

After writing My Reign, the Second Emperor did extensive research into life-extension, he did not, however, get the chance to use them before being dying “in a spell-research accident.” Assassins were, of course, suspected, though not by agents of the Third Emperor, who largely kept his predecessor’s policies and advisors. Throughout the book, Sorthos traces the careers of a number of the Third Emperor’s ministers; the most common fate for them is death, mostly at the hands of religious fanatics or unknown assassins, but one does die to a bridge breaking under him. All, of course, are honest, loyal and incorruptible, until their tragic deaths.

The Third Emperor reigned for 70 (some sources say 90) years, which were of peaceful, successful expansion. Famines went down, roads were built, and the Imperial City, Jacona collected a university and dozens of specialist craft guilds. Spells were developed to make land scarred by the Cataclysm habitable, permanent Gate-networks were expanded, and his reign is remembered as a golden age.

Unlike the Fourth Emperor’s. The Fourth Emperor was worried that the line of Good Emperors would break, and (says Sorthos) caused the catastrophe he sought to avert; his writings survive, in the same dry cost/benefit analysis style as the Second’s, and he thought that the risk of someone failing to select a good successor who could select a good successor were just too high to continue risking.

So he decided to have all the people of Jacona elect an Emperor to rule them. The politicking around it was horrible, the leading candidates died in implausible accidents, and the fourth-runner ruled as an utterly incompetent ‘People’s Emperor’ for four years of bad decisions before civil war broke out, Jacona was in flames, and the Gate-network was destroyed.

The Fifth Emperor was the one who sorted the mess out, ruled for a hundred and twenty years, established schools in every town in the empire, and conquered a few small, badly-run kingdoms that were significant enough to be more than bandit tribes; Sorthos admits that starting wars is theoretically bad, explains why it was the right thing to do (the kingdoms were really very badly-run; he has Second-Emperor style statistics), and then explains how they developed into excellent provinces of the Empire that are happy and never have any rebellions.

The Fifth Emperor also commissioned this history of the foundation; now that all the crises are over, unwise experiments are concluded, and the Empire is set on a path of science, industry, and expansion, we know exactly what we should be doing and can continue doing it for the rest of history. Hurrah for the Empire!

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That is a terrifying track record of assassinations that everyone isn't even willing to admit are assassinations and Carissa is terrified. She will just have to try incredibly hard to not be worth assassinating. 

 

Of course the Empire is expanding; you're either gaining new land to assign new nobles to, or all your society's pent-up scheming for power will be directed purely internally. And war is the only real test of a people, anyway. She is fine with helping the Empire expand and conquer. She does vaguely wonder how they stamp out religion; obviously you can execute all the priests and burn all the temples, but from there it sounds hard.

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...He hadn't thought of it that way before, either, but on reflection it is terrifying. The number of 'accidents' recorded earlier in the history of the Empire is implausible and suspicious, and - he learned about them in school, in a number of cases it's not clear to him how it could have been done by an assassin. Or why. It's not as though anyone or any faction particularly benefitted from the various fatal ends that befell so many of the Third Emperor's ministers.  

Carissa...seems to be better at thinking through these sorts of problem than he is, whether because she's older and wiser, or because she has magic to make her smarter, or just because her world taught her more. But her analysis fits together, in a way that his own muddled thoughts about history never have. 

He is starting to see why Altarrin thinks this woman is so important. At this point, he's badly hoping that Altarrin will actually come talk to him soon, so he can try to explain everything while it's still fresh in his mind. 

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Altarrin is working. 

There's a lot to do. The south is having problems with their most recent conquest. Altarrin is fairly sure that, ultimately, this is mostly due to insufficient causal separation from regions under the control of gods, which is a nearly-inevitable consequence of expanding in that direction, but centuries of data have shown that the Empire ends up less stable when it's not expanding - it seems to result in all the scheming and power-seeking energy being turned inward, accelerating the process whereby the Empire's institutions start eating themselves from the inside out. And they do, in fact, need the land, or will in the future, if only for its natural resources. 

The proximate cause is that the commander in charge, General Isktar - while very competent, he was promoted during Altarrin's time - turns out to be unfortunately vulnerable to manipulation from certain directions. Altarrin is still trying to pin down who has been manipulating him into a series of out-of-character questionable decisions, while also doing as much damage control as he can while he's five hundred miles away and has to avoid tipping his hand. It's probably not going to be a disaster either way, there are fortunately some hard limits on how far Isktar can be pushed, but some unfortunate precedents are being set, and it's a pattern Altarrin recognizes. One he can extrapolate ahead for a century or two, and that's how you end up falling into some of the worst attractors of the Empire's history... 

 

The northeast is having different problems, which he assumes are mostly related to their attempts at trade with Iftel, but Vkandis has gotten subtler over recent centuries and so far he's not sure what path Vkandis is actually nudging; it doesn't involve starting underground religious cults, at least. The most obvious problem is that several Barons have been embezzling tax money at a rate much higher than chance, and that shouldn't be in their incentives, which means he's still missing part of the picture - 

His mind keeps going back to Carissa. It would be really useful right now to have her mental-augmentation spell; he's pretty sure that even a few minutes would be long enough to untangle some of this. 

Altarrin sends some new orders that should help with harm-reduction while still being unsuspicious to all of the many, many political actors spying on his actions constantly. He arranges to send some much more secure orders to his spies, which will unfortunately have a much longer delay, that's the price of security and obscurity. 

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And then it's time to take a few mental steps back, and think about Carissa, and how this new information ought to factor into his model of the world, and thus change his plans. 

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Right now, he mostly has a very long list of facts that he's confident Carissa genuinely believes. They aren't really fitting together, yet, and he's not sure if it's because there are other key pieces he's still missing, or because Carissa was lied to and some of her beliefs are false, or what. 

Start with what he knows. He has notes to review but they aren't very organized - his mind wasn't very organized at the time - and they're badly in need of work. 

Carissa's background, before the part where everything gets more complicated and implausible:

- She is from another world, one with substantially different magic. He's missing a lot of details and context, but it's already clear that her world's magic has both advantages and disadvantages, relative to Velgarth mage-work. 

- Its key disadvantages: are among the reasons they were able to subdue her at all. Though some, perhaps most, of that is because of her expectations, her home country is one where she expects any sign of resistance to be crushed, and where she assumes her mind will be read - but she didn't notice opportunities to escape, and she was, sort of, looking.

- Its key advantages include the intelligence enhancement, which changes everything in itself; the context-independent language translation; it also seems to be easier to do planar manipulations at least in certain well-delineated ways, like her bag; the Ring of Sustenance is both amazing in itself, and hints at how deeply different the entire ontology of her world's magic must be. 

- She is unusually talented even for her world at creating mage-artifacts. 

- She seems to be quite traumatized, in a way that's both familiar and...not. There are a lot of things she flinches away from thinking or talking about, even when she's clearly trying very hard to be cooperative. 

- Her world has gods. The gods are unexpectedly legible-to-humans, or - try harder to interact, or something - and they also vary more broadly. 

- Her world's gods run afterlives, that (for the most part) hold onto much, much more of the existence of dead mortal souls than even his most optimistic cases for Velgarth. Though not always under the conditions those mortal souls would prefer. 

- Her world has 'alignment' categories that are apparently somehow fundamental to its metaphysics, and don't entirely make sense but...make more sense than he would expect god-concepts to, for mortals. 

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- She is planning to overthrow Asmodeus, the god of tyranny and slavery and compacts and maybe also torture, who rules her home country and also the afterlife plane they call Hell. 

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That's jumping ahead, though, because Altarrin is pretty sure it has to do with Keltham. 

 

Keltham. Who came from a third world. One with no (known) gods - and it doesn't feel right to them that their past-hiding conspiracy is hiding gods, either, though he doesn't yet have a clear explicit verbal explanation for why not - 

(His thoughts are much more scattered, here. Which makes sense, all he knows about the world of dath ilan is at two removes and Carissa is clearly traumatized in some ways specifically related to Keltham.) 

Keltham's world has advanced technology. They're doing heredity-optimization on purpose, aimed toward - at least in Carissa's conception of things - getting more people to be "Lawful" "Good" (Altarrin suspects this is missing a lot) and he's not sure if she said this explicitly but they're presumably optimizing toward intelligence as well, that would explain everyone being very smart. They're wealthy. Their civilization is very well coordinated. They are led by an elite class that calls themselves 'Keepers' and know special mental techniques for reasoning, and other secrets. 

...She thinks Keltham was working toward destroying her world. For reasons that, according to Carissa's knowledge and beliefs at least, flow naturally from how dath ilan reasons about living in a larger multiverse. 

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He's confused about Keltham, and dath ilan. It's going to be rather difficult to address that productively if and until he can put together a research program to get access to Golarion.

(Altarrin is not even going to try to get access to dath ilan directly, not until he knows much more. He's not taking any of Carissa's assumptions here at face value, but if she's right, then his own world is one of the uglier corners of the multiverse, and one that's hard to fix - he's certainly tried hard enough, for long enough - and dath ilan's ethical philosophy might prefer to just remove it from existence.) 

He's confused about Carissa, and this is much more productive, because it's something he might actually be able to make progress on. By talking to her. Not that this will be easy, since she (quite reasonably) doesn't trust him, and assumes her mind is being read (which it is) and that any sign of disobedience or rebelliousness or generally being difficult will end badly for her - and since she doesn't know what would count, here, she's playing it safe. 

 

 

 

...He suddenly feels very tired. However promising it is for a different, maybe better, future, this is another complication, and he's spent so long tidying up one relentless complication after another, and handling this one safely is going to be inconvenient and costly. He has to make sure that none of his enemies in the Palace have any reason to be suspicious of Carissa.

Some of them have Thoughtsensers too, and Carissa is shockingly (appallingly?) good at not thinking the "wrong" thoughts, when she knows or suspects she's being observed, but she doesn't know which thoughts would stand out here. Altarrin isn't sure she knows how to responsibly handle a world with gods more hostile and more alien than the ones she knows, either, but - 

- but that's less urgent, right, they're in the capital of the most powerful and least god-contaminated Empire on the planet - 

- and she did, in fact, end up deciding that she needed to personally oppose the god of Hell. 

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Hopefully she's been actually reading the history texts they provided for her, and that will help her orient. He needs to talk to her, though, ideally under conditions where she feels safe thinking. Almost certainly she can make contributions here far more valuable than just crafting magical artifacts for them, but at the very least he wants her to be safe enough to do that, for long enough for it to matter, and he's not nearly as confident as he would prefer that he can unilaterally keep her safe from his many, many enemies. 

(And he does, still, want to ask her to cast her mental-enhancement spell on him.) 

Well, he does in fact have a process for situations like this one. 

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It's evening by the time anyone interrupts Carissa, other than a servant bringing her lunch. 

It's one of Altarrin's mage-guards, again. She isn't actually sure if their visitor/guest/prisoner from another world actually has a translation spell up right now, but she knocks and then enters without actually waiting for Carissa's response.

"Altarrin wants to see you, if now is a good time. He wanted you to have these clothes," an elaborate formal gown, of pretty much the highest quality you can actually get in the Empire even now, "and I am to escort you to the bathhouse." 

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....Well, that's unexpected and he's really not sure what Altarrin is plotting here, but if she doesn't have a translation spell up or cast one, then Ketar can probably relay? Though he's going to wait a bit to see if it's necessary before drawing any attention to himself. 

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That is not unexpected, and she is not confused. 

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She is going to be fine. But this is not a situation that calls for a prideful and dangerous and ilani-influenced Carissa who people in the palace in Egorian nervously bow to, who could realistically plan to go sell her soul to Dispater for 30 Wishes and some headbands, who was cultivating around her an aura of something-out-of-legend. This is a situation that calls for a younger, smaller, more careful Carissa, whose file notes that she is almost never a heretic even in her thoughts, who looks and feels and is safe to hurt and safe to turn your back on.

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