Keltham: This story begins in a place that would be, as seen by some other places, a high-trust society. It happens that this place has no histories to call upon of earlier, lower-trust societies. It is expected by this society that this historical amnesia will end up not being relevant to the vast, vast supermajority of its members. Had they thought otherwise, they would have chosen otherwise. They try to plan out everything important that way, and then not plan out everything else to the point where it stops being fun. It's that kind of society, you see, the kind with prediction markets and policy goals.
The last plane trip of Keltham's first life starts out uneventful. He boards the aircraft, strolls a third of the way down the aisle with his eyes assessing all he passes, and then sits next to the first person who looks like a more promising seat-partner than all of the previous people he passed. This is a woman reading alt 9, book 3 of Reckless Investor Miyalsvor, a book series not entirely ungermane to his own life interests. Keltham takes out his own copy of Three to Infinity by Petheriel, reading it long enough for it to be a costly signal that he actually cares about the book's content. Maybe a conversation will start, maybe it won't.
The woman's name is Thellim! She is actually a fiction matchmaker, whose interest in reckless investing is purely as fiction! She does not aspire at all to the impossible (and even self-contradictory) Art of investing in ways contrary to other investors' wisdom even as all other investors try to do the same.
"Mad Investor Chaos", as he sometimes calls himself, sees no profits to be reaped from further conversation here. After a bit of further cognition, Keltham decides that the previously viewed portions of airplane didn't contain any significant promises he was passing up, and it's not worth moving seats to go looking again. He gambled and lost, and may as well finish reading his book.
The two of them pass the plane trip mostly reading quietly to themselves, until the point where the plane crashes and everyone dies.
lintamande: This place is very cold, and very flat, and has no particular distinguishing features. Miles away there is smoke in the air, as from a chimney.
Farther miles away there's a big soap-bubble force-field kind of thing.
Keltham: Shakingly, but not slowly, Keltham rolls to his feet, does a rapid body-check to see if he has any detectable injuries after his plane crashed and his - head came off, he is reasonably sure he remembers the sensation of his head being literally ripped off his neck. It does seem to be back on, though.
Somewhat gingerly, Keltham turns his head around to check for anything resembling a familiar or unfamiliar threat.
lintamande: Plausibly threatening: the cold. It's really quite cold. The.....shrubs? They're low to the ground and look spiky but not particularly threatening.
There's really not that much else. It doesn't look like a place that has been particularly touched by human habitation.
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate. It rises to the same height everywhere, hard to judge from here but at least fifty feet, and there's motion faintly visible on the other side of it, hard to pick out at this distance and through the distortion, moving four and six-legged shapes.
Keltham: ..and the direction with smoke in the air?
lintamande: The smoke is maybe rising out of a building, or something else grey and square and purposeful. It's not very far from an edge of the soap bubble. Between here and there there's frozen tundra, and some small stunted trees.
Keltham: Keltham takes a few moments to update his store of hypotheses on all this startling new evidence, computing at the lightning speed of sheer wordless guessing that the posterior sums up to -
Keltham: - nothing. Yeah, he's got nothing.
Keltham: Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
lintamande: Up a little closer, it's clearly a building, or actually a cluster of them, all of them one story high, all of them made of grey stone, or painted like they're made of grey stone. There's...what might be people, walking between the buildings periodically.
The sun moves across the sky, but not down in it.
It's really cold.
Keltham: Yes, thank you sensorium, he is aware now that it is quite cold, that is why he is not carefully thinking through all of this in much more detail in advance, and is instead running towards the possible heat source whilst also generating more heat that way himself.
lintamande: When he gets close enough people see him. They - turn and wave, nonchalantly, and then keep going; apparently the presence of a person racing across the tundra inappropriately dressed for the weather isn't notable in itself.
Keltham: Possibility 1: that people materialize around here after death and run in towards the nearest buildings all the time.
Possibility 2: that the people seeing him have entirely misinterpreted him as some other phenomenon not in need of heat.
Possibility 3: that it is BUTT-CHILLINGLY COLD and he needs to KEEP RUNNING into the nearest enterable building.
lintamande: Its door swings open for him. Startled people turn to look at him now.
"Something incomprehensible?" one of them says.
Keltham: OH GOOD WARMTH. "Keltham," he says between breaths, tapping himself. "Dath ilan," making the gesture for thing A coming from thing B. "I died in a plane crash and woke up here. Hope somebody here speaks Baseline or has a universal translator device."
lintamande: - they glance at a girl in the corner.
Carissa Sevar: She casts Tongues. "Say that again?" she says, in Baseline.
Keltham: "Keltham. Dath ilan. I died in a plane crash and woke up here. What's the correlation between the strange gesture you just did, and your ability to communicate with me when you could not do so previously?"(*)
(*This sentence takes less than half as many syllables to say in Baseline as in Taldane.)
Carissa Sevar: " - I cast Tongues, because it's a translation spell and you were speaking an unfamiliar language. You died and woke up here? This isn't an afterlife."
Keltham: "Yeah, I was wondering if there'd been a mistake or systemic hiccup. I'd perhaps ask you how to get to a place-people-go-when-they-are-dead, but I feel like first this possible systemic hiccup should be checked for profit potential."
Carissa Sevar: " - that's a phrasing. Uh, I think Golarion ....hmmm. I think probably most dying people would rather show up in Golarion than in a proper afterlife, but they're probably wrong about that? I hadn't really thought about it before because I have never heard of such a mistake."
Keltham: "I know nothing of this subject matter, at all. So far as my people know, when you die, either Civilization manages to retrieve your brain-soul and wake you up much later, or you stop existing. I died under circumstances where my brain-soul could not reasonably have been saved. That I continue to exist at all is an unexplained violation of all expected laws of existence from my perspective. If the same holds true from your perspective - does my new world also have proverbs about violations of previously holding generalizations being interesting and profitable in proportion to the degree of previous belief in the generalization that was violated?"*
Keltham has NO idea what is going on but he is SO ready to profit from it, he has been waiting ALL HIS (short) LIFE for something generalization-violating to profit from.
(*All of this is also much faster to say in Baseline.)
Carissa Sevar: "...dead people usually go to afterlives," she says. Start with the bit you are confident about. "They don't cease to exist entirely, usually, that sounds awful. Some people get eaten in their afterlives but it's not, you know, a common thing - and you can just not go to Abaddon, which is the afterlife where you get eaten - sorry, the translation's very -
- very -
- do you mean basically the thing where if you want to be a fabulously rich adventurer you'd better have a damn good reason why the tomb you want to rob hasn't been robbed already, but generalized to everything? We ...don't have a proverb for that, I don't think it does generalize to everything, most things the reason why no one's dealt with them is that no one powerful could make that much money off it, and it wouldn't be much fun -"
Keltham: "Sounds like your universe is nothing like my universe. We don't have places-people-go-when-they-are-dead. We don't have translation 'spells'. And you don't have explicit math about inexploitable equilibria, which implies a vast amount of other missing knowledge. If you've never previously seen people like me showing up, I'd say a glitch has occurred, and that is exactly the kind of situation where you might be able to feast on an exponentially vast buffet of profitable strategies that nobody else has tried before because they couldn't take advantage of the glitch."
Carissa Sevar: " - well. We have not seen dead people showing up before, except if someone raises them as a zombie, or resurrects them, and the thing you described doesn't really sound like either of those things. It does seem important to, uh, get Asmodeus in touch with your world, so that we can collect the souls of your people when they die, instead of them ceasing to exist."
Keltham: "Yeah! Like that! That is exactly what I am talking about! Current exchange rates on true-deaths per labor-hour, Civilization will pay you at least a million labor-hours per soul you can save that way... though..."
Civilization lives in an extremely and to all appearances perfectly regular mathematical universe. Being able to descend causally from it and copy people out of it does not mean you can send information back and execute trade arrangements.
"...though I'd bet at 4 to 1 that you can't actually get a two-way arrangement with Civilization. I'm guessing Golarion can see dath ilan but dath ilan can't see Golarion. But if we can manage to exploit any of the knowledge I have that this world doesn't, I will pay Asmodeus for his impact in grabbing any dath ilani souls that would otherwise get lost. I've deliberately avoided fantasizing about what I'll do after I'm a billionaire because becoming a billionaire is the hard part, but I'm not actually averse to the part where I spend whatever I can't manage to spend on my own personal happiness on producing public goods." It is said, for one thing, that this tends to impress members of the opposite sex, and so also contributes to personal happiness in the end.
Carissa Sevar: " - all right, sounds good. Asmodeus is a god and I don't actually know that He would want a billion gold but I am sure He'll want something. I can, uh, get a priest, and let them know, about this - is it urgent, you must not age if you just stop existing when you die..."
Keltham: "Dath ilan's got about a billion people, ten million die per year, about a hundred of those are true deaths, so Poisson-process expected three days until the next dath ilani death... except that the plane I was on just crashed which is going to double the true-death rate this year. If Asmodeus can grab lost dath ilani from deaths that happened an hour ago, but not a day ago, that's pretty urgent. I'd ask 'what's a god' but that is much less urgent."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know but maybe a priest will." She starts walking out the door and towards another building. "Gods are entities that are much smarter and much more capable and very different from humans and they set up the afterlives, Asmodeus is the one who is the patron of my country and also the most powerful one. What're ...untrue deaths, does that just mean you're able to raise them?"
Keltham: Keltham takes a breath of warm air, puts his hands in relatively warmer places, and follows her out into the FREEZING COLD. "Not yet, gonna take a much higher tech level. If they're dying under controlled circumstances we pump enough vitrifactants through them to prevent ice crystal formation, chill 'em down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, atoms move around but they move in one-to-one flows which seem pretty likely to map cognitively distinct start states to physically distinguishable end states. Later, when we can, we'll scan the brain and figure out who the person was and rematerialize that person. True death is when your plane crashes and splatters your brain all over the place and lets the pieces rot in the sun or burns them in jet fuel, a process which maps many distinct possible people onto overlapping entropized ash heaps." Keltham has, a quite short time previously, spent some very long minutes contemplating this fact and trying really hard to think of some incredibly clever way to have it not happen to him.
Carissa Sevar: "Your language is really oddly optimized," she says, hurrying over to the towering, somewhat ominous-looking building with a red pentagram etched into the archway above the door. "I do know Asmodeus gets souls from other worlds sometimes because Barbatos, the ruler of the first level of Hell, got the appointment by bringing a whole world of souls for Asmodeus."
Keltham: "You know anything else about the circumstances? Were they from a world that didn't previously have an afterlife of their own, or translation 'spells'?" Keltham isn't sure how to parse 'ruler of the first level of Hell' but he can ask later what a 'ruler' is.
Carissa Sevar: "Uh, I heard that they became the barbazus, but that's all I know. Barbazus have spells now but I have no idea what they had when they were alive." She knocks on the door and enters the ominous building; it is symmetric in black stone, with a large stone altar at the center.
Keltham: Oh good, WARMTH again. "I think it's gonna be high-expected-value to at some point very soon spend a lot of time explaining to me a whole lot of locally assumed knowledge that I don't have. I can't figure out what knowledge I have that can be deployed to profit in this world, if I don't know how this world works."
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, the spell lasts an hour but I can do an hour of trying to explain things, and then tomorrow prepare better ones for this."
She switches languages to have a hasty conversation with a robed man, who listens, his eyebrows rising steadily.
"- he says he'll pray to Asmodeus about it."
Keltham: "Does that mean we completed the time-sensitive part of this in terms of notifying Asmodeus that there's a hundred dath ilani he can pick up, if he can only do that for a limited time afterwards, and then on-average one more every three days?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes. I mean, I don't know how soon Asmodeus will hear but there isn't more we can realistically do about it."
Keltham: "You mention to the guy that on the 1-in-5 off-chance you can actually trade with dath ilan, those hundred souls are worth a hundred million hours of labor?"
Carissa Sevar: "I told him that your world has a billion people and that you were ready in a heartbeat to trade to Asmodeus whatever he wanted for protecting your dead. It seems to me like it ought to get His attention but trying to understand gods with a mortal brain doesn't always work very well."
Keltham: "If gods are smarter than humans, shouldn't they be more understandable from a theoretical standpoint in the sense that they depart less often from the coherence theorems governing... never mind, if you don't have math about inexploitable equilibria you definitely don't have math about gods. Yeah, don't worry, it'll get Asmodeus's attention, unless he already knows or immediately computes that he can't do it."
Carissa Sevar: - Carissa's going to try not to feel insulted! Lots of people have done lots of studying of gods. Admittedly not usually with math, that she is aware of. "If we're needed for anything I'm sure we'll be informed. Should we sit down by a fire and I can try...explaining things to you...until my spell runs out?"
Keltham: "I don't have any better ideas. Knowledge is definitely my rate-limiting-resource in how well I can exploit Golarion for mutual gain."
Carissa Sevar: "- sure. Okay. Uh. There are probably about a billion of us, too. I think lots more than ten million die in a year. I've heard people say that half of babies live to be adults? The age of majority's sixteen, in Cheliax, that's measured in time from the longest day of the year to the next one, I'm twenty five in those years. Humans who don't die of anything or have resurrection on demand generally make it to eighty before they die of their body just falling apart, it's called aging, it's said that the gods did it because they don't want us to stick around here forever and never go to the afterlives. Wizards can delay it, make 130 or 140 or so. Wizards are - people like me, who've learned how to cast spells."
Keltham: "I have so many Additional Questions before I can understand this world as mostly in equilibrium. Gonna say them out loud so you know what they are, but I suspect the best strategy is for you to ignore it all and then move on to the next most important facts. Like, what kills that many kids. How much would your people pay per child saved. Why would gods pick eighty years instead of eight hundred. Why are humans an efficient way of making things that get to afterlives if those are valuable. What's the rate-limiting difficulty in learning to cast spells that stops everybody from learning it. Also, my reality has something that translated as 'aging' and zero gods, and we know where that kind of aging comes from that isn't gods, but I've got no idea if that's the same here. Feel free to ignore all that confused babbling and just say whatever you would've said next anyways."
Carissa Sevar: "In what equilibrium? - uh, okay. Do you want to write those down so you remember them. There are nine afterlives. Afterlives go by attributes that the gods - use to see the world, attributes that are more fundamental to gods than to us. The attributes are Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil. Law is - duty, obedience, authority, following the rules, Chaos is - doing whatever you want, hedonism, non-coordination. Good is - self-sacrifice. Evil is - pursuit of the interests of the self. The nine afterlives, then, are Hell - Lawful Evil - Axis - Lawful Neutral - Heaven - Lawful Good. Abaddon - Neutral Evil - the Boneyard - True Neutral - and Nirvana - Neutral Good. The Abyss - Chaotic Evil - the Maelstrom - Chaotic Neutral - and Elysium - Chaotic Good. Asmodeus rules Hell.
Until a hundred years ago, there was prophecy, which is - some kind of ability the gods and powerful wizards had to look into possible futures, and sometimes nudge them, make unlikely things come to be, or fix a point in fate so that coincidences would bring the world to it. But a hundred years ago it broke and there was a related worldwide catastrophe that toppled many empires and now things are sort of settling into a new way for them to be, geopolitically and in terms of what the gods do. I don't specifically know of any reason that's important but if you're interested in - well with tombs they've been around for thousands of years so the reason they haven't been robbed must be good, but if a tomb is new, that's the reason, and the current world situation is new.
Uh. The most common kind of magic is being chosen by a god to do miracles on their behalf. That's five people in a hundred, maybe? We call them clerics. The second most common kind is wizardry. The smarter half of people can learn a little bit but only people who are well above average can learn very much. Wizards used to be much rarer than clerics but now Cheliax has universal testing and education so we find the smart kids even if they're farmers and we're actually up to eight in a hundred people who can cast at least one spell, which is the highest in the world. Overall I think it's one in a hundred or so. Then there are lots and lots of rarer kinds. Blood-borne aptitudes for innate intuitive magic, pacts with powerful entities that aren't gods, hybridization with other species than humans which have innate magic, stuff like that.
The thing north of us with the forcefield is the Worldwound. A hundred years ago when prophecy broke and Aroden died, a chasm between this world and the Abyss opened up. Demons started pouring through. Demons are chaotic and Evil and they mostly like eating people so we've been trying to stop them from taking over the whole world. It's going - stably. But people'd give you a lot of money to fix it, if you figured out how."
Keltham: (The Taldane words 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic' map onto Baseline words that respectively refer to deep underlying structures of things, and disorganization, both spoken with the inflection that indicates an everyday word is being repurposed to mean something else that it usually doesn't. 'Good' comes out as 'altruistic' and 'Evil' as 'negated-prosocial', both with the same inflection of technicality. (Baseline doesn't have a word for 'antisocial' any more than it has a word for 'nonapples'; there are lots of specific things people could be doing that are antisocial, but it hasn't been deemed wise to add a word that means 'what you're doing is bad for society but I won't tell you why.'))
"Writing'd slow us down too much on the first pass. Reactions to ignore. The way the gods are parsing up these attributes seems very inhuman and probably isn't translating well, but if gods all see things the same way they probably share ancestry as species or constructs. Hedonism and non-coordination seem uncorrelated to me, though in terms of what 'chaotic' translated to in my language we would definitely say I'm on the chaotic side of what we see as the law-versus-chaos tradeoff. Good versus Evil makes slightly more sense but I don't know where 'Get rich, fund public goods, impress the prettiest people and screw them' is supposed to go on that. We've got no idea what our world was doing a hundred years ago, but I expect we didn't have nuclear reactors then, so we're not in very much more of an equilibrium. Who gets chosen by a god, what's an example of the simplest thing you have to learn to be a wizard. Gee that Worldwound sounds incredibly interesting, could it maybe be closed if somebody knew more math, how much money is 'a lot'. If there are 'gods' running around who are smarter than humans then why don't you already know about inexploitable equilibria and all of the other math, wouldn't the gods have invented it already... actually that last one sounds fundamental enough I may want you to pause and answer it." It's sort of weird that Keltham doesn't already know a lot more standard theory about agents that would be smarter than human, now that Keltham thinks about it. It seems like an obvious speculation on multiple levels.
Carissa Sevar: "I am sure the gods have invented all the kinds of math you're thinking of, they have very complicated god-treaties with each other that involve kinds of interlocking commitments and ability to verify each others' commitments and it was explained to me on a very simple level once just so I could understand what it was that I wasn't going to understand. Why they haven't taught us - maybe the version of it we could understand wouldn't even be particularly useful to us? Maybe they're working up to it? Maybe it'd interfere with us having our purpose in Golarion which is generally understood to be - as the product of one of those god-treaties actually - the gods disagreed about which afterlives souls should go to, and the souls growing up in Golarion is meant to - draw out their natural inclinations and also maybe give them a choice, depending who you ask?
There are more complete accounts of what's Law and what's Chaos but they in fact don't hang together perfectly from a human angle because they're god-things not human-things. All the gods are in fact the same ...kind of entity, whatever exactly that means, some are more powerful than others but all of them have much more in common with each other than with a human, even one who has enhanced their intelligence as far as it can go and is almost as smart as a god.
I think if you want to get rich so you can attract pretty people and fund ...public goods...that's Evil, I think things have to be almost entirely purely selfless to be Good, like, if you were thinking 'I don't even care for money except that it'll let me help starving orphans' then I'd wonder if you were maybe Good but it's not enough to kick you out of Evil if you also do things that mostly benefit other people, we're all Evil and we're up here fighting the Worldwound.
Kids mostly die of disease. Smallpox and measles and flu and cholera and so on. Also some people kill their babies because they have babies and don't want them but that I don't think you could make any money stopping, the whole point is that they don't care to have a baby and they've nonetheless got one. People who do want babies would pay a large chunk of their annual income to save them, I'd expect? Especially once they're bigger and you've already invested in them. People get chosen by a god for being unusually aligned with the god's - values? Plans for humans? Needs from an actor on Golarion? I don't know that it's completely characterized but it's always someone close by in alignment and it's always someone who mostly agrees with the god's priorities and usually it's someone who can wax poetic about the beauty of the god's thing once you understand it even partially.
To be a wizard you have to hold a spell in your head and be able to manipulate it in space properly, I can show you in a bit."
Keltham: The number of questions being spawned per minute is increasing at a rate which makes Keltham worry about the overall convergence behavior of this process.
"Reactions starting to overload here. Interlocking commitments and verification do not sound like math we'd call complicated, somebody first walked me through the surface results at age 10 and then since I'm planning on being an actual investor I walked through the proper proofs at 14. It sounds like existence here begins as a multiagent equilibrium of gods negotiating, in the same way that dath ilan begins as an equilibrium of physics, natural selection, and human desires; possibly if I want to understand everything in proper order I should start with the gods. Are souls a fundamental unit of value underlying all economics here. Were humans here dying forever until the gods showed up, in which case we owe them, or do the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, in which case they owe us. How do humans enhance their intelligence and end up almost as smart as gods. Why does anybody spend money on anything else if you can spend money on that. How smart are we talking about, exactly, use whatever units you like to give me any idea at all. What do clerics do for gods, what do clerics get in return from gods, what if anything do humans get out of this whole system.
And, you know, I am on the extreme end of what my people call chaos and aspire to go further than that, when it comes to breaking the stultifying regularities that settle over human beings thinking and acting in groups. I've been known to go by the Network handle of 'Mad Investor Chaos'. But 'Decide you want kids, then change your mind and kill them' is fifteen hundred times more chaotic than - than I've ever - I mean. How about if instead you think about your own preferences more clearly before taking yourself off contraception, and save yourself nine months of pregnancy? Doesn't that constitute an outright preference reversal, where you could end up with more time and resources if you didn't have kids in the first place? Isn't that prima-facie time-inconsistent behavior barring psychologically unrealistic arbitrary complexities of the utility function? I, I mean, there's being chaotic, and then there's being so chaotic that it violates coherence theorems. We have now answered the question of how much chaos it takes to make Mad Investor Chaos feel physically nauseated. What is wrong with those people. Why is anyone not buying the kids. None of that seems like the actual info I need next and I probably shouldn't be asking."
Carissa Sevar: " - People buy orphaned kids but newborn babies are a pain to take care of so I don't think there's much of a market, probably if you wanted you could buy 'em and raise them, though not in Cheliax, which prohibits human slavery. People don't think they want a baby and then change their mind, they never wanted a baby in the first place but they still had sex because they thought they'd timed it well enough a baby wouldn't result or they're fifteen and impulsive or they wanted to have sex more than they dispreferred pregnancy or they were raped or they had an abusive boyfriend who'd beat them if they turned him down or they figured they could handle the baby but then the dad skipped town and now they couldn't, or they thought their family would help and then family circumstances changed, or they figured they'd abort the pregnancy but then access to that, which is not universal, vanished for some reason. Or I know someone who got an abortion and it had side effects and made her permanently infertile, freaked me right out, so if I'd gotten pregnant as a teenager I might've figured infanticide would be better, and instead I just didn't have the kind of sex that gets you pregnant but I have more options than your average teenage girl.
You get smart enough to be almost as smart as gods with magic items. It costs more than most people will ever make in their life; people who can afford it usually do do it. When I'm richer I'll get a headband. People spend money on other things because....otherwise they would starve? Or because they like living in a nice house and having nice things and having servants and the costs of those things is negligible compared to the costs of intelligence enhancement?
Souls are...valuable. I don't know if they're - like, they're mostly valuable to gods and people don't directly trade with gods very much, if you're trading with humans the most important things are food and textiles and on the high end diamonds and spellsilver, which are scarce components to magic items. I think the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, but I don't know in what sense that means they owe us, it's not like if we told them that they should be nicer to us there would be a compelling reason for them to listen. Clerics evangelize for a god and take care of their followers and run their churches and fight their wars. Gods give clerics the ability to heal injuries and resurrect the dead and fight people more effectively. Humans get...afterlives, and healing, and in the case of Cheliax Asmodeus supplies us with material wealth from Hell so we can afford a decent education system unlike all the other countries which are too poor to have that."
Keltham: "Yeah, so okay, either y'all are acting optimally with respect to alien problems I don't understand, or y'all got very different utility functions, or all y'all ain't got no idea what the ass you be doin'(*) and are ending up way below the multi-agent-optimal boundary, on levels where that goes from fun profit opportunity to not-so-fun emergency massive profit opportunity."
(*Extremely Chaos-aligned dath ilani are sometimes known, in moments of great gravity, to deliberately speak Baseline with nonstandard grammar.)
"But regardless of which branch of that trilemma if any is actualized, it sounds like you definitely have unsolved problems that are solved problems where I come from. Like safe reversible contraception. So either none of my world's solutions apply here, because the laws are different, or I bring with me knowledge and methodologies that are profitable. Though more likely the first branch of that dilemma is actualized, if there are smart gods here who would've already worked out those solutions? Except that you just said that gods have 'destructive-conflicts' that their clerics help them fight, which, either there's a translation difficulty here, or you just described the page-one-of-textbook result that should not happen between sufficiently smart entities who can do logical commitments and verify them. If the strategies are ending up with overt destructive actions being carried out in reality and not just in decision-theoretic-counterfactual-threat-branches-of-reality(**), that's the page-one-of-textbook non-actualized-outcome where both entities could execute different actions and would both end up with higher payoffs."
(**This is a three-syllable word in Baseline. Keltham has been trying to use those sparingly, so as to keep his sentences and concepts simple, and likely to pass neatly across whatever translation barrier exists.)
Carissa Sevar: "The gods outright fight each other almost never. That is what happened a hundred years ago, and my understanding is that it was in fact a ridiculous anomaly of some kind, maybe to do with prophecy breaking and the strategies the gods used for commitments all breaking. I have never heard of it happening before or since. Their churches go to war on Golarion regularly but I doubt that destroys resources that the gods value? It kills people, but their souls are fine, and casters become more powerful in high conflict situations, and people get more religious when there's lots of war, I think.
Safe reversible contraception sounds very good and you could sell that for lots of money.
My current best theory for predicting the next thing you're going to say and/or be confused about is that - so Cheliax is richer than most places, and it's got more Law and less of the bad things you were confused about and more - of peoples' preferences being consistent over time, of things that are a good use of resources for the long term happening even if it doesn't benefit anyone until the long term, of not going to war - compared to other places. So extrapolating that wildly, your world sounds like a place that is even richer, and even Lawfuler, to the point the distinction between Good and Evil doesn't even matter much to people since you haven't got afterlives and all the parts of Evil which actually involve hurting other people on purpose have been Lawed out of existence."
Keltham: "Oh, it matters. See, even after you get rich and Law all that stuff out of existence, Very Serious People go on worrying about whether it will come back a hundred years later, if we let ourselves start to drift evolutionarily on the Good-Evil axis. I hadn't actually been informed as yet, but considering the choices I made in some test-pranks as a kid, I expect I'd have been told a few years later that my place on the Good-Evil axis wouldn't have entitled me to much support for having kids of my own. Which, fine, fair enough, if I'm the sort of person who goes around constantly assessing how much reciprocation other people owe me, instead of just being nice, I shouldn't be too surprised if Civilization decides it doesn't owe me much. Because what have I done for them, right, under the rules the way I say they should work? I can either prove they're wrong about people like me being unnecessary, or get out of the gene pool, fair enough. My ambition before I ended up here was to fairly make a billion labor-hours, and then marry about two dozen women and have about a hundred and forty-four kids. The first part to show them how much they need people like me, and the second part to unilaterally give the next generation some more people like me whether the rest of Civilization likes that or not."
"...which I should, probably, just never think about again, because this world is not and never will be a test of my ability to shine inside Civilization. If I win here, it won't be because I was special, it'll be because I came in with a ton of knowledge that any other dath ilani might have. And if I lose here, it'll be because there were gods smarter than any human being who ate all the low-hanging-fruit that anybody at all in dath ilan could've found. But hey, I'm adaptable, I can reorient my entire life, might take me a couple of minutes but I can do it. I just - felt it might be helpful to say out loud, once, before it all drifts away. Help if somebody else knew, even for a halfminute, before I let it go."
"Moving on. If churches are going to war, it means that the gods being smart doesn't prevent humans from being stupid, not sure why, but it obviously doesn't, so maybe I can still help there. Priority question, how much of my knowledge still holds here, if any. Does running electricity through water produce two gases, one of them lighter than air, which can be burned to yield water again?" If molecular chemistry is the same, higher levels of organization will probably also be the same; and knowledge about steelmaking - or that synthetic hormones can signal the female reproductive system to not ovulate - will probably also hold.
Carissa Sevar: "Just being nice is very stupid, if your planet's selecting for that they're going to have horrible problems the first time they encounter anyone else. - I'm not an alchemist, I can look it up but probably after the translation spell runs out unless that information is really important information."
Keltham: "If 'nice' sounds like a kind of thing that can be 'stupid' we've got some kind of translation difficulty running, that's a type error. 'Nice' is part of the utility function. If you don't already know that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, it probably isn't... I guess you could just not know what anything is made of. Do you know what water is made of that's not two one-proton atoms and one eight-proton atom?"
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know what a proton is. Water freezes at a little above the ambient air temperature outdoors here at the Worldwound in the summer and floats when it's ice, and boils at a temperature you can get over a normal nonmagical fire and then is steam, and holds heat well compared to metal or plant matter or something. When it freezes in the sky it forms snowflakes."
Keltham: "Sounds correct. Do snowflakes have six-sided structure under a microscope? Where I come from, that happens because molecules with two hydrogen and one oxygen have a least-energy crystal configuration that's hexagonal. If all of that is still true and for the same reasons, then I still know how to make advanced steel and build electrical generators. And the methodology I know to regenerate more of that knowledge will apply unchanged. Male and female reversible contraception... was tech in a relatively advanced state where I can't reproduce it directly. I can reproduce the methodology that generates it."
Carissa Sevar: "Snowflakes have six sides. What's steel used for, what're electrical generators used for -"
Keltham: "You don't have steel. Right then, if steel is a possible thing here and you don't have it, that's step one in climbing the tech tree. It's a metal that's harder than other metals, while still possible to work with at all; variations on it don't rust, keep edges better, and so on. What's your current advanced metallurgy like? Bronze, iron..."
Carissa Sevar: "Magic weapons. They don't rust and keep an edge perfectly and they last forever. We have bronze and iron. I've seen work done in steel but I've also seen work done in adamantine, mithril, skymetal, there's lots of metals that exist but aren't mass-producible and I don't know what they'd be used for if they were."
Keltham: "Huh. Yeah, some of those terms aren't translating. I wonder if I actually know anything portable about steel, or there's just some nearly analogous metal here, or if steel still exists but there's processes that don't exist in dath ilan for building other metals above or beyond it. Let's try a basic tech on a higher level of organization. How expensive is it to produce a thousand copies of one book and how would you do that?"
Carissa Sevar: "I think it costs about what a laborer would earn in three years to get a thousand copies, and you'd go to a printing shop where they'd line up moveable metal - tile things? - with letters on them to make the pages, and then ink them and stamp the parchment. I think the biggest contributing expense is the paper and the binding. Cheliax releases national histories every few years but I don't think other places can afford to do that."
Keltham: "You got printing presses, okay. I may or may not know anything useful about cheaper paper, if a book's worth of paper costs a day's wages. Let's try refrigeration, how expensive is ice in hotter climates and what would you do to get it?"
Carissa Sevar: "...I think you mostly cannot buy ice in Cheliax. I guess you could have someone ship it from the far north but I don't know this to have ever been done commercially, and my father's a merchant, I was broadly familiar with the things people were trying commercially in shipping. Probably you'd pay a spellcaster to prepare and cast Snowball for you, which would cost ten laborer-days and be about a hands-ful."
Keltham: Keltham rapidly rubs his hands together. It produces heat.
If heat is still disorganized kinetic energy, expanding and compressing gases should make them colder and hotter.
"Promising. I very likely know how to turn mechanical motion into cold without using magic, maybe using a river waterwheel as the kinetic source. Not sure how well it'll scale at your tech level, with any luck it's two orders of magnitude past Snowball, enough to enable food-preservation at scale, if you don't already have that... I don't actually have a good sense for how that tech scales costwise. Worth having a backup plan. Do your seagoing ships travel against the wind?"
Carissa Sevar: "They know techniques for adjusting the sails so you can still make some ground. They haven't got something better than wind to power them except I met a Tian man once who claimed in his country tamed sea creatures towed them."
Keltham: "Don't know if my world's standard primitive sailing technique is better or worse. We can check later. I have notions of how to build nonmagical powered engines for ships too, but they're higher up the tech tree and take fuel and steel and engineering."
"The conventional guess among my people is that steel, better steel, cheaper steel, fall among the first things you should try to sell - or not-sell - to a civilization climbing the tech tree. We don't actually know what the past was like in that regard, but the conventional guess is that materials technology would end up being the rate-limit on most other inventions. Like, the standard guess is that things to do with better steel end up being obvious, when a lot of people are all trying to figure it out; so it's the quality and quantity of steel they have that ends up limiting their technology, because exploring metallurgy is hard in a way that thinking up the printing press is not. I wish I knew more about how that conventional wisdom was generated, but since I don't know, it's not implausible I should treat that as my point of departure. If the metals better than your current steel are still rare and expensive, more and better steel should still be worth something."
"Supposing that's true and it makes my knowledge valuable, where do I go from there? Including getting past basic accommodations quickly? As you say, this seems like a poor society and I come from a rich one, so I'd like to spend as little time as possible being poor around here. Unless Asmodeus sees me as having done him a favor with the dath ilan soul tipoff, but I'm not clear on whether that constitutes a favor. And in fact you've said some ominous things about gods which would lead me to have second thoughts about doing them favors, if they're not the sort to repay favors to non-gods who can't logically verify their expected reciprocation. Which would seem dumb to me because of the exact chain of logic I just went through, I mean, non-gods can generalize over the visible past behavior of gods in cases like that."
Carissa Sevar: "It is better to have done Asmodeus a favor than not have done Asmodeus a favor, in terms of Asmodeus's inclinations towards you, I think probably the church'll give you money and a nice place to stay once I explain all of this. You should not count on that with nonLawful gods though they're still mostly, excluding Nethys, sane, and aware mortals can track our incentives ...probably the church'll want you back in Cheliax, not here at the Worldwound, where sometimes there are demons. I think you'll like it better, the weather's nicer and there are more - nice things of the sort I presume you're accustomed to, are there specifics I should mention?" The running list in her head already is 'admiration, women, money beyond ability to spend it', which seems like quite enough, really, but maybe also he likes a specific fruit.
Keltham: "Probably, but at this point I have no idea what they are. If I want to cool my house in summer in Cheliax, it sounds like I either need to get rich enough to hire wizards, or, like, invent air conditioning first. So it sounds like all of dath ilan registers as Lawful and Evil on your whacked-out scales, but - are there exactly nine gods total, or is there more than one Lawful Evil god I might want to work for? For that matter, I might want to check out exactly what the Lawful Neutral and Neutral Evil gods are like, maybe the Neutral Evil one pays ten times as much to make up for being unreliable."
Carissa Sevar: The church is super not going to let him leave. "Uh, Lawful Neutral's Abadar, you'd probably get along but He doesn't have a presence in Cheliax and Cheliax is the richest country and the place it makes sense to start things. The other Lawful Evil gods are - arguably not proper divinities in their own right and don't have independent churches, they work for Asmodeus, I think He cleared out independent Lawful Evil competition before humans had writing, except for Zon-Kuthon who's the god of pain and misery, long story. The Neutral Evil gods are, uh, Urgathoa, goddess of disease and the undead, I've never heard anything about Her paying well, and Norgorber, who's an ascended human so that's promising in terms of being more aligned with humans but also He's the god of crime and assassins and I am not sure how interested He'd be in this project, which sounds like it optimistically involves no crimes and mostly only defensive dealings with assassins."
Keltham: "I would have intuitively hoped, going on the description you gave me, that there is somewhere a Neutral Evil god of people pursuing their own sunlit interests without fretting about whether they are being too lawful or too chaotic. Also, ascended human whoa possible new life goal how does one do that and does it trash your existing personality?"
Carissa Sevar: - giggle. "There's a rock called the Starstone in Absalom, it's behind magical protections Aroden put in place and the purpose and nature of which He hid with magic and never clarified, you can touch it and ascend to godhood, hundreds of people try every year, the last success was about a thousand years ago, personality seems.....in some ways intact? As much as it could be, I guess, when you're getting that much smarter and getting a bunch of new sensory modalities and operating in a completely different context. But people stay the same alignment and some of their holy books detail new god-perspectives on the events of their life, so they at least remember it and can have opinions about it.
There might be somewhere a Neutral Evil god pursuing its own interests without worrying about Law or Chaos but if so their interests don't include the people of Golarion knowing about them."
Keltham: "That's unfortunate because I can't deal with them, but at the same time, it's hilarious. I mean, if I ascended, I would not actually fuck off and leave everyone else to go rot with no stainless steel, but the counterfactual me that does is within eyesight among the counterfactual universes. I wonder if knowing god-math has anything to do with being able to touch the Starstone? Seems worth a quick shot if trying is cheap."
Carissa Sevar: "I mean the overwhelming majority of failures die. They're usually high enough level adventurers they just arrange a resurrection in advance if they want it, but I don't know that the church'll front you that."
Keltham: "Resurrection is advanced clerics, right. Can you give me a quick description of how one becomes a basic cleric or basic wizard? I am wondering if knowing god-math or knowing regular math makes me sufficiently talented to do those without despecializing from my other work, and it seems like even small services there are worth tons."
Carissa Sevar: "Wizards learn how to manipulate and stabilize spells, and then spend an hour every day - you can learn how to do it faster, I'm working on it, but average is an hour - preparing and stabilizing their spells, at which point they can cast them on very short notice with a couple seconds of work. Cheliax tracks people to be wizards at 14 and generally if you haven't washed out you can reliably cast and retrieve cantrips at 16. Possibly an adult with all the math background and none of the spell background can pick it up in days or weeks. More complicated spells are the same thing but you need to follow more complicated math and you need more working memory - which necklaces are great for - the specific math is topology, did that translate -"
Keltham: "Closed sets, open sets, fixed-point mappings? I was okay at topology at age 12, didn't follow up, probably better at it now. Hour a day sounds expensive in time but it'd be nice to have an instant employment fallback option. Clerics?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, that sounds like the right kind of math. I can check if you're smart enough to be a wizard, if you want, there's a spell for checking that. For clerics a god picks you. Usually when you pray to them, not necessarily the first time you pray to them but the first time you've - grown up, in some relevant way, or understood something new - sometimes it's just at an apparently random time, though. They get more powerful through time in their god's service and deeds in their god's service and sometimes, again, apparently at random - I'm sure it's nonrandom from a godperspective."
Keltham: "'Pray'?"
Carissa Sevar: "Uh, you clear your environment of distractions and kneel on the floor and try to - acknowledge that you're in the presence, or could be, of something much bigger than yourself, something that can see much farther, and you think about their priorities and your desire to serve them, and sometimes ask for things, but, like, 'the strength to do Your will' sorts of things, not for things to specifically go your way, since the god knows better about what's best."
Keltham: "Do people who become clerics ever regret that in retrospective expectation without benefit of hindsight? Can you easily resign the position and pick another god if it doesn't work out? Is successfully 'praying' enough evidence of purpose-alignment that it never happens with a god you'd rather not partner with under reflective equilibrium? I'm wondering if there's any reason I should not just immediately do this with Asmodeus and cut out the middleman, in case that other cleric decided he needed to go cut his toenails first."
Carissa Sevar: " - I think probably you should do it but you might be too Chaotic or something," or insufficiently informed about the things about Asmodeus that you're going to object to, "so I expect it to not work. I have never heard of anyone regretting become a cleric except if they eventually got ex-clericed, which I think can be traumatic. I think if you no longer want to serve the god that'd probably break clerichood, or if you change alignments to be too far from the god that does it, though I haven't heard of anyone breaking clerichood on purpose."
Keltham: "Yeah, I'm getting the impression that gods are very much the big factions here, and if that's true, I am starting to wonder whether becoming a cleric is an obvious sort of thing to try if you don't want to get noisily moved around by clerics - supposedly on behalf of gods, maybe, but maybe in fact the clerics don't even know logical decision theory and start wars. How is being ex-clericed traumatic? Is the part where nobody does that on purpose because it's so traumatic? Or because nobody forms a successful cleric bond unless they're gonna get along great with the god?"
Carissa Sevar: "I think mostly - people don't form a bond if they won't get along with the god, and also if you're clericed then the church is - yours, it trains you and pays you and gets you help and guidance and is full of people like you, which for lots of people is hard to find, and also you get magic powers which you get in the habit of using for everything from drinking water to temperature tolerance to lighting - magic can make hot weather feel nice, that might be part of why we don't have a ice industry - and then being de-clericed is being told you aren't worth that, and losing your magic powers, and losing your job, and losing your economically valuable skills? I don't know any ex-clerics, though."
Keltham: "Can you talk to a god without being a cleric? Have you ever communicated with Asmodeus?"
Carissa Sevar: "You can. There are a billion people and gods have...maybe a hundred thousand times peoples' attentional capacity but they're also not spending most of it talking to people on Golarion, there are other planets and other things they're doing on their own planes. Also reportedly gods talking to you causes significant pain afterwards, if you're not using a high level cleric spell that prepares you for it. Because your brain is just - doing a bunch of stuff brains don't do on their own and then the resetting afterwards involves the brain sort of flailing wildly. But sometimes gods talk to people who aren't their clerics, if they're paying enough attention to notice and it's important enough."
Keltham: He doesn't want to be too obvious about the meaning of the next question, so he'd better toss in a distractor first. "I guess if the gods can talk to non-clerics, that's some evidence against the picture I was building up, where the clerics might be misrepresenting what gods say, and that's why some of this picture doesn't make sense in terms of smarter-than-human beings acting in coherent ways. The part about clerics ending up fighting wars is still very strange, even if it didn't destroy much that gods care about. It's much more a behavior I'd expect from flailing nongods under the influence of something like Chaos, if Chaos here is a kind of reified factor that can affect people. But I may be stupidly missing the extreme basics of the equilibrium of this entire world. Is it possible for you to - quickly sketch out who the major factions are and what they bargained for in the god-equilibrium that underlies everything? So far I know about Asmodeus, the Lawful Evil god of people pursuing selfish interests but in an organized way that I'd ordinarily say is icky except that your standard of Chaos is fifteen hundred times more Chaotic than I want to be, Norburger, god of killing-people-for-money, and Abedder."
In fact Keltham has carefully memorized the names Norgorber, Neutral Evil god of crime and assassinations, and Abadar, Lawful Neutral god that Keltham would probably get along with; but he does not wish to show that he has.
Carissa Sevar: "Yeah. So the biggest thing is that there was a very powerful god, Rovagug, who ate planets, and had eaten a bunch of them already when He came to Golarion, and it took an alliance of all of the non-Chaotic gods to stop him from eating Golarion too, and He couldn't be destroyed but they imprisoned Him. People say in the center of the world but I think that's probably a metaphor. But the imprisonment took the cooperation of all of Them, and I think any of Them could let Him loose, so that's sort of the base of the god-agreements, that all of the gods have to continue thinking Golarion ought to go on existing under any particular conditions on Golarion that obtain, or They could just destroy it.
The restrictions on cleric magic are generally understood to be part of a godagreement, for basically the same reason - that if any god who wanted could just put much more of Themself into Golarion then the others would have to do it reciprocally and then there'd be much less space for mortals doing mortal things - and so clerics are restricted to the more positive sum set of the things they could potentially be enabled to do.
The afterlives are a godagreement. Each plane gets to do its own thing and gets those souls judged by Pharasma, who is True Neutral, to be theirs. Abaddon, Neutral Evil, defected on that, they eat their souls and they were eating some directly from the transit to judgment instead of waiting until they were theirs, so Pharasma changed the rules, and now people damned to Abaddon can choose Hell or the Abyss instead, and also most of the other afterlives volunteered some forces to defend the souls on their way to judgment.
Asmodeus has agreements with most of the other gods, that protect Hell and the souls in it and advance His goals elsewhere. I know He's a party to lots of things protecting Golarion continuing to exist, and the sorting system for afterlives, and the compromise that cuts Abaddon out, and I think also agreements about intervention among the afterlives with each other, and with worlds other than Golarion. I know that long ago the gods broke into coalitions that disagreed on what we called "free will" - what I think you'd call preference incoherence, the thing about humans where occasionally we don't do what's in our interests - and Asmodeus was opposed to it, and in Hell teaches it out of people.
Good and Evil are opposed but the Lawful Good and Lawful Evil afterlives don't fight each other directly, which is a godagreement of some kind. The Lawful Good gods are ...Erastil, who does agriculture, Iomedae, who is an ascended human and the god of the fight against Evil, Shizuru, who I think...used to do things on Golarion? but lost interest millennia ago - She's got a residual church in Tian Xia though - and some minor ones probably. I don't think the Lawful Good 'side' has unified priorities, Iomedae's all about defeating Evil but I don't think the other gods care about that very much. Iomedae's the one who's a signatory to the Worldwound treaty.
Sarenrae's the Neutral Good goddess of redemption, the potential for goodness in everybody, and her afterlife spends most of its resources on arguing at Pharasma's trials that every single person should be sorted as Neutral Good, even if they're quite cheerful about being headed elsewhere, on a principle about how there's Goodness in everyone. She smote an entire city once for defying Her will, and She was instrumental in the Rovagug truce. I don't know much about Her. She's popular in the Kelesh Empire. Shelyn's the Neutral Good God of love and beauty and joy and music, She's in favor of those things I guess? I don't know Her to be in any important agreements either, which doesn't mean She isn't, but they're probably not ones relevant to Golarion or to Asmodeus."
Keltham: "When you say Asmodeus teaches people to be more coherent, are we talking teaching people to not have kids and kill them, or, like, full-scale Keeper 'let's see how much god-math humans can become and wield' coherence? Is Iomedae fighting Abaddon eating souls, or also fighting Asmodeus? What's the entire anti-Worldwound coalition? Where does Norburger or Abedder fit in?"
Carissa Sevar: "Iomedae fights Abaddon eating souls but also fights Asmodeus - or, they don't fight, but - they're opposed, and their agreements are the agreements of enemies, renegotiated off relative power levels. Because He's also Evil. The anti-Worldwound coalition is Sarenrae, Iomedae, Calistria - who I didn't get to, she's the Chaotic Neutral goddess of revenge - Abadar, and Asmodeus, mainly, I'm sure there are other gods involved but They don't have large forces committed here and They aren't among the advertised churches you have obligations towards under the treaty, though the treaty also imposes obligations towards anyone who is here and fighting the Worldwound, regardless of their god. I have no idea what a full-scale Keeper is but devils - the kind of being that people turn into in Hell - are not just people who don't have kids and kill them, they're much more different than that. I suppose some of them eventually become mostly god-math, because some of them eventually become mostly gods."
Keltham: "How is revenge Chaotic, what? Not punishing defections is the kind of defect of instrumental strategy that you could mistake as niceness but is actually stupidity... feel free to ignore that if the answer is gods just not seeing the world the way humans do. Are there afterlives besides Neutral Evil where people don't turn into mostly god-math given enough time? What did Calistria, Abadar, and Norburger bargain for in the god-equilibrium?"
Carissa Sevar: "Uh, I agree that not punishing defections is - you'd think nice, actually stupid - but I don't think Calistrians are very interested in only punishing defection as opposed to bad things in full generality and I don't think they care about the punishment being - systematic, calibrated in punitiveness - they're not a legal system - Maybe revenge is the wrong word. Reversals of power relations? I agree revenge could be a perfectly good Lawful Evil domain if approached differently.
In the Abyss people turn into demons. In the Maelstrom - the Chaotic Neutral afterlife - they turn into chaos beasts, which can't interact with causality - the Maelstrom doesn't have any - in Elysium I have no idea. In Nirvana they turn into animals for unclear reasons. The True Neutral afterlife kicks you out into other afterlives as soon as you develop a slant on Law/Chaos or Good/Evil but if you manage to never I think you turn into a very specialized kind of godmath aimed at enabling the sorting. Heaven and Axis I think work mostly like Hell in that eventually you turn into mostly godmath but with, like, different emphasis, Heaven'll strip all the Evil out of you and Axis I think just makes you pure Law with no other desires.
I have no idea what Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber bargained for."
Keltham: Keltham keeps a neutral face. It is, in dath ilan, mostly a theoretical study, because the incentives have been set up not to do that, to punish any attempt at doing that. But he is starting to wonder if possibly the woman in front of him is a theoretical entity that ought to appear in only counterfactual branches of reality: The overtly biased salesperson, speaking bad judgments of a sort she can potentially be caught out on later, and for which she will not later be able to plausibly present an unbiased line of reasoning leading there after-rewinding-hindsight, for purposes of executing more favorable trades now. It seems like the sort of thing that could go along with a world in which people end up fighting wars. It is possible, though by no means certain, that this information is being filtered.
In the Chaotic Neutral afterlife you can't interact with causality, hm? Maybe it's just a translation error, but.
"Huh. What do clerics or other faction-members of Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber do in practice?"
Carissa Sevar: "Calistria runs abortion clinics and shelters for women who've made marriage vows and want to run out on them. Often for good reasons, like that their husband sucks. Abadar runs Osirion, which is a country south of Cheliax, and runs banks in other places. Norgorber's followers are - mostly criminal gangs. Orders of assassins, most of them that I've heard of, but overwhelmingly criminals aren't assassins and other kinds are less notorious so I bet it's mostly less notorious kinds of crime.
Did you want me to do the thing that checks if you are smart enough to learn to be a wizard, I bet you are but if you are I can ask them to also get a spellbook for you, while they set up somewhere nice."
Keltham: "Cost, side effects, is there a reason to bother running it if I can already prove basic theorems in topology? Also snerk about the Lawful Neutral god running the banking system. I was about to ask how you did banking in such a way as to not make a profit for yourself or try to benefit anybody else, but then I realized that a crazy ideal bank setting ideal prices would drive all other banks out of business, so of course the Lawful Neutral god runs the banks. Not sure why you think I'd get along with that god, that is very not the kind of investing I aspire to. Is there a Lawful Good god of unselfishly wanting people to know more stuff and figure out more stuff? Obviously I couldn’t be their cleric, but they'd be the god whose thingy benefits most directly when I disseminate knowledge and methods of creating knowledge. They should potentially be going in with Asmodeus on backing me, if Lawful Good and Lawful Evil ever do mutual projects. Separate dumb question to ignore, how do Chaotic gods think at all, let alone be smarter than human? Cognition is built of shards and fragments of higher mathematical structures that we'd consider extremely the word that translates to us as 'lawful', unless the godly concept of Law and Chaos only applies to overt social behaviors."
Is he being too obvious in his strategic objectives as inferable from his tactical maneuvering, despite the distractors he's throwing in? Not much he can do about that without slowing down, and he's under a time limit.
Carissa Sevar: "Good and Evil do collaborative projects sometimes and this sure sounds like one but I don't actually know of a Lawful Good god with prosperity in their domain? The reason why you'd hear in Cheliax is that Good people are so obsessed with unselfishness that their societies can't even sustain positive-sum things like wealth that run on selfishness and I think the way a paladin would say it is that wealth invites greed and corruption and so on, and societies that are trying too hard at pursuing it lose the selflessness." She is at this point dancing along the line of saying things that are supportive of other churches, which is illegal, but letting him decide he can't work with Cheliax would be catastrophic too. Plausibly she should pretend the spell has run out but it has six minutes more and maybe he could tell. "...I don't know that much about Chaotic gods, they're barred in Cheliax because Asmodeus mostly can't form god agreements with them, I think.....just thinking of things I know about, and I don't know all that much about gods, you can have a very short time horizon or very high discounting so you don't care very much if your values will be different tomorrow because you don't care much about anything that happens tomorrow, and will trade off lots of it for things that happen today, you can probably have the equivalent of that in dimensions other than time, you can prefer that future instances of you share your values but otherwise have entirely different attributes, I think gods have lots of attributes that are not overdetermined by their values, you can - I don't really know. Some kinds of outsiders you can summon and ask this stuff but obviously you can't summon full-on chaos beasts and the things you can summon from the Maelstrom are generally not very easy to get answers out of, is my understanding."
Keltham: Interesting. Push on that slightly harder and see what happens? Maybe his strategy will then be too obvious, but inferring other people's strategies from the infinite possibility space seems like it should actually be hard, or at least, fiction writers talk about how often their readers misinterpret them even when trying to telegraph things.
"Not a god of prosperity, a god of - teaching? Knowledge? Aside from everything to do with parents and kids, people who unselfishly want other people to gain knowledge are, like, one of the few examples I can think of Good that doesn't seem fully inhuman. I'm not one of them, but there are dath ilani teachers who want you to learn their whole subject matter in a way that seems - as unselfish as anything ever gets? And more importantly, there are people driven towards gaining new knowledge in a way that should code as either Good or Neutral, as I understand it? If there's a god for that, and people going with that faction are actually competent at the god's thing, I am going to need the best of those people if I try anything on the order of reconstructing a nonmagical sailless ship. The sort of people who invent math before any wizards have a use for it because they are just that obsessed with math. Those people. Is there a god for that one?"
Carissa Sevar: "A god of teaching. I'm pretty sure not. I can ask once the spell runs out and give you a signal yes or no - yes looks like this, no looks like this - my books list all the gods including the minor ones by domain, and there are lots of minor ones, but that I expect I'd have heard of, it's not a rare profession exactly, my mother's a teacher. ....honestly I think lots of people like that are Neutral and worship Nethys, the god of magic and knowledge. Nethys is said to be omniscient, but He's also insane, His plans don't make any sense on the material world and his clerics get steadily less capable of talking about things to humans over time and usually blow themselves up doing ridiculous magic experiments. ...Irori is a Vudrani god - ascended human - of perfect self-knowledge - no, I guess that doesn't seem like the thing either -"
Keltham: "Sounds like we're running out of time. Are we running out of time?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes. Last questions? Planning to get you nice accommodations, spellbook, writing implements, look up gods."
Keltham: "Sounds correct. Look, I'm sorry if this is impugning your honesty, but I hope you realize that I'm in a strange place with a visibly low level of Law where people fight destructive-conflicts. I do not actually know that people here have set up all the careful structures and customs you use to incentivize honest business arrangements. I am going to be taking some precautions based on that and I am genuinely sorry if those are unnecessary and lead to suboptimal outcomes from your own perspective, but please consider my own ignorance."
"So, you could have reported all that to me completely honestly and I just went picking for coincidences until I found some. Or it could be not-coincidence that you're willing to tell me the identifying things of all the Good and Neutral gods I can't become a cleric of, but not actually give me Asmodeus's key identifying info, plus there's supposedly no other Lawful Evil gods worth mentioning, plus all the Neutral Evil gods you identified to me are horrible. I am not actually going to get myself into a situation where other people are playing middleman between myself and Asmodeus, and pawning off cute financial rewards on me, while keeping the intelligence-enhancement rewards to themselves. Again, sorry if you're not even considering that, but I need to consider what your incentives might be. I am currently considering options that include praying directly to Asmodeus about this, tonight, based on my guesses as to what the top Lawful Evil god's thing might be, starting with 'making money'. If that's a terrible idea because, for example, I can accidentally get Iomedae if I accidentally think about how I'm unhappy about the Abaddon business, or because the existing Asmodeus clerics get snippy when somebody tries to talk to Asmodeus without them, maybe explain very fast why I shouldn't do that. Alternatively, tell me how to make sure I get Asmodeus."
Carissa Sevar: "I swear to you, as a servant of Cheliax and of Asmodeus, that as far as I know, the Neutral Evil gods really do all seem to suck and there are none I'm failing to mention deliberately for strategic reasons. My best guess why is because Abaddon eats souls and anyone with better priorities hangs out somewhere else. Asmodeus is also called the Prince of Hell, or the Prince of Law; Hell is nine planes and He's on the deepest, called Nessus. His holy symbol is the pentagram, his domains are -" tyranny, slavery, "authority, contracts, and pride, trying to pray to Him sounds like a good idea to me, I pray to Him every night and nothing's happened but no one's ever minded, afara ghe esssent savat see a - Gurre." Helpless handwave.
Keltham: Keltham tries for his best smile. "Thanks," he says uselessly. He draws a pentagram in the air, to show he got that part.
He's very rapidly trying to invent an art form of playing inside counterfactuals that shouldn't exist, where dath ilan teaches only arts that improve defense more than offense. Given how much people complain about illusion of transparency even when people are trying to communicate, Keltham's actual thoughts as a complete outsider to this system may in fact be fully opaque, given the number of possibilities from her standpoint that she doesn't know how to rule out. But if not, if he's less safe than that, maybe it will help that he tossed her one of his lesser suspicions, as a distractor from some of his larger suspicions. Because Keltham was not confident of his ability to completely conceal, in his body language and attitude and pauses to think, the fact that he has become suspicious, from -
Did he actually forget to ask her name this whole time? "Keltham," he says, tagging himself again, and then looks at her.
Carissa Sevar: "Carissa."
And she trots off to find the priest.
Keltham: Keltham will sit quite still, trying to control the hammering of his heart and the visible sweating that might also be giving info away. Stupid body, it shouldn't reflect his thoughts like that during complicated negotiations.
Carissa thought that he would think that her oaths meant something, which is a good sign that the Algorithm is not completely unreflected here. Though Carissa also thought she needed to swear in her capacity as a god's employee for her oath to mean something, which is sort of awful and sad but also makes an awful kind of sense. Among his current suspicions is that knowing logical decision theory may make it a little too easy to call out to gods, and also entities like, say, Rovagug; and that's why people here aren't being taught the purer forms of the Algorithm, left to struggle along with intuitive honor, the Algorithm's fragmentary emotional shards.
It was, in fact, one of the more convincing things that Carissa could have done at the last, not to convince him of that exact point, but to show him that multiagent coordination still really holds here at all. So that could be true, or she could have correctly guessed what would convince him...
He's not going to be able to guess her thoughts either, across this level of social gap.
But if Carissa is trustworthy probabilistically, then he should not go with his Plan A, to contact the Knowledge entity and ask for 25% of the orientation packet he can safely sustain, because that way he will end up bringing his knowledge and methodology to this world. Gambling on Carissa's knowledge base having misinterpreted the natural tendency to mess with high-energy reactions, in a world with afterlives, as "drives everyone insane", seems like a little too large of a gamble. Nethys could also just know all the infohazards. This is still Carissa's world and not his...
This isn't what he should be thinking right now. He should be reviewing the information he needs to remember.
Pentagrams, contracts, authority, pride, the deepest layer Nessus of a nine-layer plane.
Abadar, who runs the banks and a territory called Osirion. The part about the prices being ideal prices was just a guess; he was fishing for information via contradiction, but Carissa didn't confirm or deny.
Norgorber, god of violating regulations and killing people for money, whom Carissa swore was in a class all of whose members sucked.
Calistria, god of women who want to leave their husbands, get abortions, and get revenge. Why this doesn't also apply symmetrically to men who want to leave their wives is one of the things he didn't have time to ask Carissa.
Nethys, god of knowledge and mad experimentation, an extreme to which he could still be forced.
And, he supposes, Sarenrae.
Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.
Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.
Carissa Sevar: The priest has his eyebrows raised and that, of all things, reminds Carissa to be terrified, which she’d been attempting to forget on the grounds that lying’s harder than just having the right opinions in the first place. She’s not sure that was the wrong tack but - probably in hindsight this should have been handled by a specialist in dealing with prospective defectors from other countries, someone who actually knows what they say about the gods in other places, not just the things they say to Chelish soldiers in the uneasy context of the Worldwound truce.
Failing that - she should probably have been stupider? It was pride, motivating her there, he’s obviously very clever and she doesn’t like being outdone, doesn’t like hearing that god math is easy, taught at a younger age than the age where she started training as a wizard -
- is he lying about that? He gave a credible impression of being not very good at lying but that’s only sort of lying, really, claiming you were twelve when you studied topology instead of twenty, people exaggerate more when telling stories of their conquests and don’t even consider it deception -
- if he’s not lying about it then how? There’s a classroom-full of children of a given age as intelligent as Carissa in all Cheliax and it’d be logistically difficult to put them in one place. Maybe steel can do that. He didn’t mention being tracked for it - maybe he was tracked for it and just didn’t think it bore mention but he mentioned that they checked for Evil and thought he was somewhat there inclined, and surely no society checks for Evil inclination and not for intelligence, which is much more obvious and easier to test for. Not impossible, she concludes, thinking about it, if you have a good way of putting all the smartest children in your country in the same place. But he doesn’t carry himself like someone who thinks he’s one of the smartest people in his country. And no sane society would be discouraging its most intelligent people from having children.
- she’s getting distracted. She should be composing her report for the priest, which should include these inferences and exclude the error analysis. They’ll probably mindread her for it later but by then she can have shaped it to be a little more generous.
“He’s from another world,” she says. “I think…. I think they’re smarter and Lawfuller, and I’m not entirely sure they have free will.”
The priest looks at her impassively.
“There’s a billion of them. Unless he’s lying - which, with permission, I can check in a minute, I’ve got a Detect Thoughts left - people who are not particularly notably smart have the prerequisites for wizard education covered when they’re twelve, not because they have wizardry or any reason to have treated it as an educational priority. He wants to try to reinvent his world’s technology here. I think he can do it. I assume we want it done in Cheliax, and probably that means you want to take him back there tonight, because here there’s nothing we can do if he talks to Iomedae and decides to walk out the door - I think he is probably going to. Plausibly going to try to talk to every god I mentioned, He had lots of questions about them. He has Chaotic sympathies and I’m not sure if he believed me the Chaotic gods are no good for this. And he was confused about why all the Evil gods outside Asmodeus are…so terrible… because he is lacking the context that Evil gods mostly hurt petitioners badly, I only had 50 minutes and that always takes a really long time to explain to people in a way that doesn’t send them running out the door screaming so I judged it better to omit it. But he noticed, uh, that without that and without the context that heresy is prohibited in Cheliax and without the context that it’s recommended not to learn about other gods lest you get yourself in trouble, then it doesn’t - quite hold together, and I think he’ll have a lot of questions for someone who knows more than I about defectors and how to explain those things.
He said he wants - to be so rich he can’t keep track of how much money he has, and to have lots of beautiful women to have lots of children by, which I think was - well, obviously, a normal motivation in its own right but it was significantly about his country not thinking he was particularly valuable to it? I think you could get a lot of goodwill just by treating it as very obvious that we want ten thousand of him. Which we might, even if he’s Chaotically inclined he gave a credible impression of not thinking people should - commit crimes or overthrow governments - and he wouldn’t choose Abaddon.”
“Did he like you?” the priest says.
- an obvious question. She’s unprepared for it in the sense her thoughts hadn’t gotten there yet, but not in the sense she feels at all surprised. “I don’t know. Or - I think yes but possibly if you give him twenty pretty girls at that point it’d be not particularly.”
“Your recommendation is that I get him to Cheliax tonight?”
“Yes. Somewhere - abundant in ways even a much richer world might not be abundant, if they didn’t have magic -“
“I’ll talk to some people. Go read his mind.”
She does that.
Keltham: Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.
Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; women getting revenge on their husbands but somehow not the other way around which like why the asymmetry no he needs to memorize not puzzle; knowledge and mad experimentation; Good in everyone. And Carissa went out of her way to mention that Sarenrae had destroyed a city which, like, possibly reasons, especially if people go places when they die. But also implies maybe Carissa doesn't want Keltham talking to Sarenrae in particular which - which mostly implies her trying to steer Keltham away from places that Keltham does not think he really wants to go. He does not know that Carissa and himself are in anywhere near the level of zero-sum destructive opposition where 'do the thing Carissa least wants you to do' is a recipe for anything except suicidal contact with eldritch person-transforming entities he should not touch. Except that -
- he's just going to keep thinking this until he actually thinks it. It's profoundly unhelpful and not at all the most important thing going on, but he's going to actually think it, just to get it over with.
Once, when Keltham was a child, they placed him in an unreal situation, as children are sometimes placed. He saw a person in distress, seemingly lightly injured; but very lightly, for dath ilan does not wish to distress its children too much in the course of testing them. Just earlier that day, also, seemingly by coincidence, Keltham had been told that a fine fun party awaited him, but only if he arrived exactly on time to depart with others.
So Keltham went out of his way to find an adult, despite the party. But Keltham also made very sure that the adult promised to share with him the credit for helping this person, and told the injured person that he wanted to be paid for it, plus extra for missing his party.
It's hardly terrible - even from an average dath ilani perspective, that is, if you're Keltham it's not terrible at all. He didn't refuse to help, he just asked to be paid for it afterwards. Cities wouldn't exclude Keltham on that basis, if they could even access that information about him. Dath ilan doesn't think him outcast like a murderer. It's just that -
There are a few places, besides just parenting and teaching, where pure unselfish Good is a thing that humans ever do. One of them is the will to help others in distress.
Dath ilan has an image of what it wants to be. It wants to be the sort of person who hears about Abaddon and is suffused with a pure horror that Keltham does not, in fact, feel. He feels revolted and sad, but he does not feel the thing that others feel when they hear about true death, that would lead them to be able to contract with Iomedae on the basis of that alone; and, if strength of emotion counts for anything, channel however much power of a god that lets them channel, to tear one more soul out of Abaddon. That is what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up. And that is not what Keltham is. Dath ilan does not want to be Keltham when it grows up.
He's not outcast. He's not prohibited from having children, if that was even a thing outside of the Last Resort. Keltham just has to fund those children himself, if he wants them, because dath ilan is not particularly trying to grow up to be him. Or so they were very likely going to say to him on maturity, despite Keltham having otherwise gotten +0.8SD on intelligence.
And that was that, and Keltham had made his own proud accommodations with it. Because people are what they are; and can only attain what they can, in the course of being what they are, better; not by wishing they were somebody else. Keltham spoke to a Confessor about his life's master plans, in case a Confessor had anything unexpected to say; and the Confessor formally predicted to Keltham that if he had his 144 children, and screwed all the elite desirable women who hang out with elite male public-goods-producers to mutually prove their respective eliteness, Keltham would at the end still not feel happy. Unless, perhaps, he'd gotten to know a few of his children much better. And Keltham had shrugged, and said that then perhaps he'd get to know a few children better. But in terms of overall life ambitions, Keltham can't think of anything with higher expected value to him, for he feels the way he feels. If he's not what dath ilan currently wants to be when it grows up, then that's not who he is. He can maybe prove to dath ilan that it was wrong about who Civilization needs in order to grow; he cannot be other than what he is.
But there's a god of there being potential for Good in everyone.
It's a stupid thought. He's never going to do it. And if he did, modifying his own utility function to fit in, is not, quite, provably incoherent, because human beings are not starting out coherent, but it is still not - the Way, as the Keepers would put it. Keltham is what he is, and needs to find his own way to be himself. Dath ilan itself would tell him never to do that, because it is horrifying self-mutilation for the sake of conformity and that is also not what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up.
So he's not going to pray to Sarenrae. At all. Considering that explicitly, leads him to realize that he is horrified by the prospect of changing himself according to an external criterion; and he knows that. Keltham likewise already understands, and acknowledges to himself, that he would not even be doing this for his own sake. It is just a stupid thought about how to fix something that somebody else said was, not even wrong, but not the thing they most ideally wanted to see. It is perfectionism gone wrong to imagine that this aspect of himself, of his own utility function, might be fixed.
Most of what's really going on, probably, is that some part of him is curious what it would feel like, to be more centrally dath ilani just once; and whether it would make him feel better in some way he's not seeing in advance. Well, above and beyond the pleasant sense of being more socially acceptable in principle. But that wouldn't actually be the result, that the real him feels something different temporarily; it would be the temporary cessation and possibly the true suicide of the true Keltham, beneath the manipulators of some inhuman thing.
Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys. Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; revenge and overturning of relative status; knowledge and mad experimentation.
Keltham: ...and before he tries any of those, he's going to try to figure out who his own god would be, the hypothetical god that would actually fit him; and call out to that hypothetical being, backed by explicit meditation on coherence theorems to make him more a kind of thing that gods can see. Maybe there's a god like that.
And if instead it calls in some entity that's new to Golarion, he'll know why they don't teach people here logical decision theory. Heh.
dath ilan: (Even at the level of surface thoughts, Keltham's mind moves from thought to thought in a way that is not within the variation of ordinary mortal minds on Golarion. Keltham's thoughts are explicitly labeled as 'meta' or 'object-level'. His thoughts don't move in the frequent circles and loops that any telepath would be familiar with, of mostly going over the same points and occasionally diverting from them in a new direction. Any time Keltham thinks the same thought twice, or at most three times, he undergoes a reflexive wordless motion and focuses there and starts thinking words about why the thoughts are not-quiescent after having already been spoken. Occasionally Keltham thinks single-syllable or two-syllable words in Baseline that refer to mathematical concepts built on top of much larger bases, fluidly integrated into his everyday experience.
Everything inside Keltham's mind has a very trained feeling to it, his moment-to-moment thought-motions each feeling like a punch that a monk throws after twelve years of experience in martial arts, when the monk isn't particularly focused on showing off and simply knows what he's doing without thinking about it. When he is sad and upset, Keltham goes into a reflexive motion of letting those parts of himself speak. When he is uncertain and worried and doesn't know what to do next, he weighs probabilities on his uncertainty, and knows explicitly that his current worries are causing him to currently be trying to figure out what to do next. Keltham is lost in a different world, but it has been years since the last time he felt lost inside himself. The present situation is not enough to induce that. He has mostly forgotten what that feels like. He has too many options for what to think next instead of feeling internally lost.
Keltham is hardly perfect at any of the things he's been trained to do. Often he does think the same thought three times in a row. Frequently his current attempted cognitive tactic fails. And Keltham notices the failure; and undergoes a recovery tactic or moves on to the next thought; all in motions so practiced that they don't distract him from the content of the thoughts themselves. That meta stuff is all mostly the same from minute to minute, so it's been trained to the point of being ignored so long as it's not breaking down.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa listens. Sits at a table and writes everything down, firstly because otherwise she's going to forget half of it and secondly because sitting at a table writing is a reasonable thing to do, and hopefully won't alert him to being mindread. When people aren't used to being mindread their thoughts, on being alerted to it, are all about the fact of someone having access to their thoughts, and while maybe he has the - mental discipline - to not do that if he chose, he also might well choose it, over having strategic thoughts where she could hear them.
She wants to die.
She has known for as long as she can remember that someday she will die and go to Hell and be trained out of her bad human habits, free will, nebulously defined and not the sort of thing you were supposed to ask a lot of clarifying questions about, but it's suddenly clear, looking at his head - free will is the tendency for the mind to wander away from its goals, for the emotions to override thought processes instead of informing them, for the brain to be sticky, burst-driven, impulsive, animalistic-
- it was not a correct parse of the situation to guess that Keltham doesn't have free will. He's imperfect at the thing he's been trained to do. He's more like - someone raised from babyhood by Lawful outsiders, or something. He might have free will but he's never been around anyone who used it. And he's - nearly perfect - she would not have guessed that a living person could be that, could have that -
She has known that she would go to Hell and become perfect but she hasn't been impatient for it. She's impatient for it, now.
- set that aside. There's a lot to do first.
There's another thing here which she's not going to unpack, but it goes on the list of reasons to ask someone important, if she thinks she has enough bargaining power, which is that - she has read a lot of minds and in general the meta-process, in all of them, is directed at not thinking anything treasonous, or thinking and then immediately rejecting and mentally apologizing for it. His society is ...going for Lawful Good, evidently - but they seem to have not instilled that instinct, he checks when his opinions are heretical to dath ilan but he isn't scared when they are - perhaps because it sounds like dath ilan, as a consequence probably of going for Lawful Good, uses a very light touch on heresy, though of course maybe Keltham would've vanished in the night and just doesn't know it, perhaps his 'plane accident' was in fact deliberate -
She reads his Intelligence at 18, maybe 19. Innately as smart as her or a bit smarter - and not particularly notable for his society - his society must be terrifying. A tremendous asset to Asmodeus, if He successfully claims them, and - well, Keltham thought they'd side with Iomedae, immediately, instinctively, just out of horror at the destruction of souls -
- she needs to start thinking about how to explain the thing where Hell hurts people without it seeming a conspicuous omission or an obvious dealbreaker, if it ends up being decided that Keltham ought to know.
(She is acutely aware of her own meta-thoughts right now, from all that poking at Keltham's, and they're scared, because usually when she tries thinking about things like Hell hurting the correct thing to do is to steer her mind away, not pressure test counterarguments -)
...this is the kind of thing you ask a priest about.
It's also the kind of thing where asking a priest gets you looked into, as a potential dissident. She should wait and see whether in fact someone with Greater Teleport shows up here tonight to take Keltham to a comfortable place; if they do then she has the measure of safety that Keltham might ask about her, and might be annoyed if she'd been arrested and with higher likelihood annoyed if she'd been executed, and that they evidently value Keltham highly. She doesn't know that yet, so no thinking about that yet.
If Cheliax were more Keltham-like, would that serve Asmodeus? It seems obviously so. Keltham's world is rich and lawful and selecting for Good, but not necessarily so, you could do the same thing but prefer the tiny children who suspect a trap in the injured stranger and go off to their wonderful party - or who don't even think of an injured stranger as a fact about the world that demands a response of any kind, any more than people pluck worms off the cobblestones after a rain -
She sets that aside, too, and composes a second report for the priest, and resists the urge to watch out of the corner of her eye while Keltham tries to make a god, which she's pretty sure isn't how you make a god but - well, it wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened, and it would necessitate some rapid changes of plans.
Keltham: (If Keltham knew Carissa's impression of his own thought processes, he would give a sad wry half-smile. His half-disciplined thought processes, nearly perfect? He's some wild kid, not a Keeper. The Keepers would also laugh, at the same thought; they're not superintelligences. Superintelligences capable of laughter would laugh too; they're not unbounded. What unbounded agents capable of laughter might laugh about is unknown, but extrapolation says it would probably be something.)
And Keltham goes on thinking about the god-of-Keltham. Well, that and occasionally rehearsing some short-term memories he needs to keep. Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys. Abadar runs the banks and Osirion; Norgorber is about violating regulations and killing people for money; Calistria does revenge and inversions of status; Nethys, knowledge and magic and mad experimentation.
Keltham notices that he has now been thinking for a while about the proverbially difficult and crucial problem of Finding a Cofounder, in the special case of finding a god; is he still thinking about the right thing? Should he be thinking about something else instead of this? Like deciphering and abstractly-reversing the specific way that Carissa was filtering his info, if she was in fact doing that? But Keltham may not realistically have enough info to figure out what Carissa could have hidden from him (or even outright lied about); he is too unfamiliar with this world. Across whatever unknown distance, it is not an epistemically safe stretch to presume even that, just because Carissa is shaped like a human being, she would like to have more money.
There is the question of what really happened after the plane crash, of why the whole impossible thing. There is the challenge of decoding a whole new world that has not as yet been reduced into math, nor into things that look like they should reduce to math. But the tractability of that is unknown. Whatever discoverable insights wait there could influence arbitrary decisions in arbitrary ways, it is not safe to assume even that the parts he could figure out in an hour will not influence decisions in the next hour. But there are not known missing insights like that.
Right now, Carissa thinks he should work with the Asmodean faction, but Keltham has not yet talked to Asmodeus about the local equivalent of equity allocations; that is a known open question. Before talking to Asmodeus he might want to search on the god that fits Keltham, in case the first god he meets tries to cleric him. So thinking about that.. still seems like the schedule-blocker? This is what he should be thinking about?
Enough meta-scheduling; on to the meta of figuring out how to figure out the god that fits Keltham.
Carissa didn't mention any Chaotic Evil gods at all, unless he's forgotten that part. If Carissa is trying to hide things from him, does that mean that Keltham should be searching for ideals that are more individualistic and selfish? But there's too many different possibilities for what Carissa could be hiding; he shouldn't stake a lot of time-mind-resource on hoping he got that guess right.
It's tempting to approach the problem by asking which gods would be most helpful for his Golarion industrialization project; or which gods would give him the largest equity allocations, if that's how Good works (it probably doesn't). But on reflection, looking for the most exploitable god may be the wrong idea on a deep level, if other things Carissa said weren't false. To become a cleric of a god, he needs a god that resonates with something deep inside him, preferably something that would make him feel good about working with a smarter person who had the same feature. Some goal that Keltham shares, some ideal that Keltham holds... the god that tries to make a world into which Keltham would fit in a way that he never fit into dath ilan... obviously Keltham wished dath ilan had been more individualized (Chaotic?) and had more room for non-unselfish good (Evil?). But the feature needs to be more specific than that, gods are not just alignments...
Does he already know what his god looks like? Before doing a lot of setup work on a problem, you should check to make sure you don't already know the answer.
Keltham doesn't think he already knows. A few seconds of direct soul-searching doesn't solve it. But in terms of how to productively think for longer... this seems related to the writing exercise for Environmentalized Intrinsics, doesn't it? He's never actually gone through that exercise, but he has heard of the concept, in detail, via sheer memetic contamination at gatherings he has ever attended. Doing that exercise seems like it might also turn up the features of the god-who-matches-Keltham?
dath ilan: (There's a metafictional trope in dath ilan which is popular to the point that even Keltham, who is not an especially avid consumer or producer of fiction, knows all about it. It's the kind of trope where people talk about their own takes on it, on outings romantic or friendly, even if they write relatively little fiction themselves.
The Baseline phrase for this trope is a polysyllabic monstrosity that would literally translate as Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge. A translation that literal would be misleading; the second word-pair of Boundary-Edge is glued together in the particular way that indicates a tuple of words has taken on a meaning that isn't a direct sum of the original components. A slight lilt or click of spoken Baseline; a common punctuation-marker in written Baseline.
When the words Boundary-Edge are glued together into a special term, what they've come to mean - by processes of mere convention rather than explicit decision, a form of linguistic drift that happens even in dath ilan - is 'Cartesian Environment', the Environment as falsely distinguished from the Agent by a boundary, an edge, which does not ultimately exist within the territory.
This glued term for Cartesian Environment has in turn been double-glued (the max recursion depth being three, of course) with Intrinsic-Characteristic, to take on the new meaning "externalization of the inward self's innate distinguishing characteristics into a world"; the Environmentalized Intrinsic or Environmentalized Self.
This trope began as a novel about people who could externalize themselves into pocket worlds, which became popular enough to pick up vast amounts of secondary and tertiary literature as this concept was further explored. As it turned out, a lot of early-career-phase secondary-literature authors were quite interested in the question of what worlds are inside characters; it is also apt for artistry and memeing.
And when the original author decided the original series was over, the conversation about the trope began again, more seriously and up a meta-level. As the original author revealed afterwards, the Environmentalized Self was meant not just as a metaphor, but a productive metaphor, for writing in general and worldbuilding in particular. The question, "What is within myself that can be externalized into a world?" is a place to begin, when an author takes the step from secondary fiction to primary fiction and starts making a world of their own.
Say that you, yourself, have always wanted all of the houses to look like glowing crystals; instead of, as is more commonly the convention in dath ilan, old stone covered in plants. Then making a world out of that piece of yourself is likely to have an authenticity to it, which does not appear when you are only trying to throw in random variations to make your world be Different. Some part of you knows why houses have to be glowing crystals, some part of you knows what kind of glowing crystals they should be. Or maybe it's not so much that you want glowing crystal houses, but that they fit better with you; or that you know in your heart of hearts that, if the world was made out of you, the houses would end up made of glowing crystal whether you liked that truth or not.
It is a facile and not-quite-right proverb, to say that characters are made of authors, or that characters are made out of carefully selected pieces of author. You can write a character who has some feature that is not drawn from yourself at all; it's just harder. It requires you to have a theoretical understanding of a psychology you do not yourself possess, strong enough to ring deeply true to anyone who does have that psychology. It is easier to draw deep on the well of craft when you are writing a character who is enough like you that the thoughts they think seem to you, not just 'reasonable' or 'defensible', but like thoughts you almost thought yourself in a closely neighboring reality. The further you go from that, the more likely you are to stumble and turn the character into a distant Other who is not really animated by an inward spark that reflects and optimizes the same way you do; the more likely you are to stumble and try to construct something alien to yourself, based on a psychological theory that is false.
Universes can be made in part out of memories of your true world, including the parts of the outer world that you wouldn't have made yourself and that don't fit well with you. But built worlds can also be made out of you, and that's why the Environmentalized Self trope spread as rapidly among authors as it did. To the extent a world is made neither out of true world-experience, nor out of yourself, you are making it out of explicit theories about alien worlds drawn from neither memory nor the wells of self. This is possible, but harder; it can stumble in the same way as trying to write a character based on a psychological theory of the Other.
After proposing that the World of You has glowing crystal houses, of course, comes the real work of worldbuilding. To depict a realistic world with houses of glowing crystal, you must understand the causes that lead the current world to have houses that look like old stone covered in plants, and you must postulate those causes to be different, and their own ancestral causes to be different too. You have to ask the question of how a world found its equilibrium in the You-place, where the real world's equilibrium was different. Unavoidably you must now go to the other deep well inside you, the deep well of theory; your knowledge and understanding of counterfactuals, why the world is the way it is; how it could have ended up differently, given different inputs or different parameters. And so the real meat of worldbuilding, as with so many other things, tests one's explicit understanding of economics.
The level-1 beginner's form of this exercise - the form that early authors do to practice starting out, and the conversation that gets made at unserious parties - is the exercise "How would the world be different if everyone was like you?" or "Suppose a world's median was around yourself in all dimensions?" or "What is the world from which you were an average random draw?" or "What is the history and present state of a world which, in mostly-equilibrium, ended up with its medians mostly around where you are?" or "What world-with-a-history spits you out as a very typical person in all respects, instead of the very atypical person in many respects that you are in real life?"
If the harsh truth is that you've always thought the obsession with the exteriors of houses is silly, when their interiors are what counts - and therefore, in your world, buildings look like exposed metal and concrete - if the cities are less pretty as seen from outside, in the world that is the externalization of your interior - then you are faced with a test of self-honesty. You can either admit the houses aren't as pretty because your utility function wouldn't really care enough to spend a lot of money on that, if the World of Yous had never seen 'normal' dath ilan for comparison to feel competitive about that. Or you can fail the self-honesty test, and end up trying to worldbuild a world that is not made out of the true piece of yourself, because you were not able to be honest with yourself about who you were.
Conversely, of course, if you claim that the World of You has a substantially higher per capita GDP, while otherwise having the same physics and biology as dath ilan, you're going to face a lot of skepticism about that one. By market efficiency, your soul is unlikely to contain a realistic economic policy that yields better results than the policies spotlighted by counterfactual-conditional prediction markets. But that is a very obvious trap that any dath ilani sees as soon as they contemplate the exercise, even if they weren't explicitly warned against it.
So you look within yourself for possible features of a world that would be, or reflect, you; then you do further worldbuilding on that world's history, to explain how it got that way and ended up in that mostly-stable equilibrium; then you write a few stories set there, to shake out the world, to make it more consistent, as you are forced to visualize it fully and make sure your axioms have a model. And then, you have something to compare and contrast to your friends' own Intrinsic Environment worlds at parties!
All this is the long background story behind why, when Keltham asks himself what god and domain would fit Keltham and be clericable for him, and doesn't immediately come up with an answer for that, he already knows an exact complicated thought process he can try to use to find an answer. Similarly, if one asks why Keltham is able to go through this thought process without much in the way of blind alleys - and without falling into obvious pitfalls despite his young age, like self-flattery, or blaming everything wrong with the world on other people not being as well-intentioned as himself - part of the answer is that Keltham has heard secondhand-repeated advice from famous authors on how to do this writing exercise correctly and without falling into common pitfalls.
It is also why, in trying to do all this, it will not occur to Keltham that in searching for his own true god and world, he is asking a Question about Himself that is such a Big Serious Question that it ought to take longer than ten half-minutes to figure out. It's a worldbuilding trope. People do it live at parties.)
Keltham: How much room does Keltham have here to godbuild/worldbuild? Is he searching for one key feature of himself, or a collection of them? Gods can do more than one thing, if they're related things. Asmodeus has related thingies for contracts, authority, pride, is called Executive of Law. Keltham may not need to squeeze the god-address down to one characteristic of himself... no, that's the wrong way to think about it. Even if he can call beyond the locally known universe, there is no guarantee that gods are dense in characteristics. It's probably better to find one idea or aesthetic that defines the god that Keltham would want to partner with. In any case, the correct search ordering is to begin with the most important requirement; after that, he can see if there's room or need for anything else.
...Keltham notices that he has spent an awful lot of time on meta. His mind is probably flinching away from this. Why?
...the same reason he never did the Environmentalized Intrinsic exercise in the first place. The incredibly obvious thought is 'what if - instead of there being a few more people like you in the next generation, if you succeed - rather, dath ilan had been composed of people like you to begin with'. And that is painful, it is should-ing, if you are actually stuck in dath ilan. There was no reason to think about things that way, to contrast reality to its alternative and make himself sad. Now he actually needs to solve this question for other reasons in real life, and needs to just go ahead with it.
What is the Kelthamverse like?
Does the Kelthamverse have higher GDP? He's going to think that just to get it over with. First order, 'no'. Okay, fine, in the details, if you literally do the version 'what is the world-in-mostly-equilibrium from which somebody like you is a median random draw', then the Kelthamverse has +0.8SD g over dath ilan and therefore a higher GDP. But by convention you are to ignore that, because re-extrapolating a world with higher intelligence or rationality is impossible for known reasons; you'd have to predict the effects of the actions of more extreme geniuses than any geniuses than exist in your current world. Or maybe Kelthamians care more about higher GDP compared to other considerations, relative to the average dath ilani, and the policy prediction markets' results are weighted accordingly. But mostly, there is no obvious reason the Kelthamverse has higher GDP in virtue of the people inside it... caring less selflessly.
Is a Keltham even happier, in the Kelthamverse? Would he actually feel more like he belonged, if he'd grown up there and never seen dath ilan for comparison? Maybe a Keltham is a person who needs to feel unbelonging over something, and his neurotype would find some other oddity of himself to obsess over instead. Maybe everybody in the Kelthamverse feels like an outsider there, based on their own personal least socially acceptable random variable.
Keltham recognizes a thought of undue self-uncharity, whispering in its way under the guise of counteracting some bias you might have, and sets it aside. His self-model does not actually say this is how a Keltham works, and that is that. He has been taught to distrust himself a little, not infinitely. No more distrust than he has earned from himself, under his own accounts of his history; the alternative is a kind of inescapable madness and helplessness, and he's not into that.
Does the Kelthamverse have fewer public goods, because, in fact, the Kelthamians do not care quite as much? Because those who become rich find better paths to romantic success than producing public goods, since that is the pathway that dath ilan laid out for rich people to be romantically more successful, and the Kelthamverse would not have laid out the same path? Keltham's brain immediately wants to shout back that the Kelthamians would find their own way to produce the public goods that were actually needed, just as well as dath ilan. But this seems not necessarily true, especially if the Kelthamians never saw dath ilan and never felt competitive about doing at least that well.
The fact that Keltham can no longer actually call a Confessor is no excuse for his not doing the same mental operation of betting on what a Confessor would tell him, just never again rolling an electronic d144 and actually phoning a Confessor if the die comes up 0 to keep himself honest. Would a Confessor, told this scenario, formally predict to Keltham that a Keltham would be unhappier in the Kelthamverse? Because he has been, in some sense, free-riding on the nice environment that was created by those dath ilani whose outrage at Abaddon would be enough to make them clerics of Iomedae?
There's a common wisdom, in dath ilan, that even after spending 3% of GDP on generalized coordination enforcement, most of what makes a high-tech society like dath ilan actually work, is that the people inside it have truly altruistic components of their utility function. That most people are not just being cooperative for instrumental reasons. That most people won't commit crimes even when they're pretty sure they won't get caught. The number of tiny opportunities for defecting and getting away with it, every day, is just too large to make it work if people don't actually care about other people. Dath ilan is much closer to the multi-agent-optimal boundary than it would be, in the world with the same institutions, but genuinely actually selfish people. The crime-reporting mechanisms are built for a world in which most people will take a minute to call the police if they see a violent stabbing in progress; and you don't have to pay people $5 to do that; and then worry that they'll set up violent stabbings to earn $5. The system is built to be resilient against rogue psychopaths, not against everybody being a psychopath. The police architecture is set up on the assumption that it might need to catch an individual bad police officer, not on the assumption that police collectively would just take your stuff as soon as they thought they could get away with keeping it.
If a high-tech world could be put together out of entirely selfish people at all, it would probably require much more spending on explicit coordination to set up a system that could stably run factories, without them just being looted by every employee simultaneously plus any police who showed up. Who even puts in the work to build the whole coordination structure in the first place, if they're not motivated by the good of Civilization? Maybe perfectly selfish beings who were more coherent and crystalline in their thoughts would find their way to a multi-agent-optimal boundary, kept in place by institutional structures ruling out defection at every point. None of the crystalline minds would need to altruistically spend the time to negotiate institutions into existence, because all the crystalline minds would see the possibility simultaneously and choose it at the same time. Beings like humans, but who didn't care at all about others' welfare, wouldn't do that; they would not end up with factories, just roving individuals looting each other. So says the common wisdom of dath ilan.
Keltham was, in fact, honestly shaken when he heard that the Neutral Evil afterlife was eating souls. He'd always questioned that common wisdom in the back of his mind. But - but apparently not. Apparently, if you're not explicitly Lawful or explicitly Chaotic, if you don't care about social structures either way, then what's left is simply Selfishness the way it might be materialized in an alien or a construct.
The sense in which actually, all of society working depends on people being altruistic - because the incentives just aren't that perfect, and otherwise the whole structure of dath ilan would fall apart almost instantly - that's part of the justification that dath ilan could give, if Keltham tried to explicitly argue with it, for why heritage-optimization should try to preserve explicit altruism in the utility function. It's a reason dath ilan might give, for why Keltham shouldn't have subsidized childcare; unless occasional people like him are valuable enough to society that he can pay for the childcare himself.
So yeah. The Neutral Evil beings - just eating souls - yeah, that shook him. Because if that's where being a little more selfish leads, in the end, then dath ilan is right.
But maybe that's still - the voice of too little self-charity.
(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)
Keltham did not abandon that lightly injured person that he passed upon the sidewalk, even as a child with his own frontal cortex less than fully formed. He wanted to be repaid, since the other person was capable of repaying him, but he didn't abandon them. A bird once flew into a window right in front of Keltham, when he was a child, and fell to the ground and didn't move, and he ran off crying to find his father. He didn't think about whether the bird could pay him back, because it obviously couldn't. If Keltham came across an injured child now, with a lot less money than himself - well, he'd help, but he'd feel a lot better about a world in which that Civilization would repay him and not give him any second stupid glances about his having insisted on payment, because, why is this child his problem in particular. But Keltham wouldn't ask the child to repay. And he'd cheerfully pay a proportional amount into public-good funds to repay other people who helped children when it wasn't particularly their job.
He's not a bad person, not by his own standards. And if he was, he could choose to do things differently and meet his own standards. If he's not completely incoherent under reflection, he ought to be able to reach into himself and imagine the world that's nice according to his own notions of niceness.
The writing exercise for the Environmentalized Self is allowed to include ideals inside you, hopes inside you, not just realities inside you. The point of the writing exercise is that the feature is inside you, so some part of yourself knows how the feature should work, and it is not just an oddity added out of a vague wish to make your writing different. This isn't that writing exercise, but for purposes of calling the right god, nearby ideals may also be the way to go; if they are Keltham's own idealizations, that the real Keltham could at least come close to attaining on his own.
So the Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse are not selfish, not the way that whatever eats souls in Abaddon must be really actually selfish. Keltham doesn't think that he, himself, is flawed in that way. He does not think he is actually just plain selfish and picked up the rest through acculturation in dath ilan. And even if he's wrong and the real Keltham isn't that nice, fine, so what, he is envisioning a universe in which he is not exactly the median, sue him.
The Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse, Keltham decides, do not have to go to fantastic lengths to enforce and punish and pay for coordination; they are not in a world where nobody actually cares about anybody else or has any honor. Kelthamians keep their promises, always, whether or not anyone is watching. Kelthamians don't betray their business partners, whether or not anyone is watching. They don't qualify as 'Good' by Golarion's bizarre standards, because they are perfectly aware of how a positive reputation benefits them, and they are ready to exploit that and would be very snippy about not getting their due for it. But they would also keep their promises in the dark, even if nobody ever knew. Keltham thinks that is actually true of himself; and even if he is wrong, and flatters himself too much, the corresponding god would be one he could work with. It is one of his ideals, and one that would be very close to him even if in fact he doesn't have it already.
And - it's not the part Keltham needs to be thinking about, but he's going to think about it anyways, just to get it out of the way of the rest - it is actually true, it is not just him trying to stick it to dath ilan in his mind, it is actually true that a neurotypical dath ilani would feel less outside and alone in the Kelthamverse, than Keltham felt in dath ilan. Because nobody in the Kelthamverse thinks it's a problem if you're more altruistic than the rest of the Kelthamverse, so long as you still keep your business promises, and don't murder people even in the dark, in all the forms of honor that keep Kelthamverse society running and coordinated. They don't withdraw public support for your children's childcare if you're nicer than other people. The Kelthamverse doesn't want to be dath ilan when it grows up, but it's fine with there being dath ilani inside it in the Future.
The Kelthamverse has more of an expectation that people fund childcare individually or through individual philanthropy, in the first place; they have much less of a collective Future-optimization thing going on. The Kelthamverse doesn't have voter-aggregates deciding on heritage-optimization criteria for policy-prediction-markets resolving 20 and 50 and 100 years out. They're leaving it up to individuals and philanthropists, and just checking the prediction markets to make sure that the default course isn't predicted to end up with huge probabilities of anything awful; so long as the prediction markets don't predict catastrophe, they're fine letting the larger world go its own way.
Maybe a dath ilani will feel sad that the entire world isn't as altruistic as they are, that only 5% of the population feels the same strength of feeling about the true deaths of strangers as themselves. But if so, the Kelthamians won't feel too sad for them, because a Kelthamian doesn't think you have the right to expect all of Civilization to think the same way you do. Keltham didn't complain about Civilization being of a different mind than himself, because he had no right to demand that of strangers; he just set out to test himself, and prove Civilization wrong if he could.
So that's the first defining quality of the Kelthamverse. In one sense, yes, people care differently and less about each other; when they help, they do so much more in expectation that somebody will repay them, even if they're helping a child. But the Kelthamians still help children, and pay into the public funds to pay off other people who help children, they do have the sense that somebody ought to be doing that. And the Kelthamians still have all the emotions about intrinsically caring about coordination, the emotions that are shards of the higher structure for Coordination and shadows of the one irreplaceable logical copy of the Algorithm. Kelthamians keep their promises, even in the dark when nobody will ever find out. They aren't first to betray their business partners, their mates, their friends - and not because they are calculating the value of their reputation, but because that isn't who they are. They would pay their debts even absent any legal enforcement for debts, the vast majority of them, under the vast majority of circumstances; and so they don't have to pay more of their GDP for coordination enforcement than dath ilan.
If a Kelthamian sells you something, it does exactly what it says on the label, and disclosed all the facts you needed to know. In fact, if the Kelthamverse is literally all exact copies of himself, not a distribution from which he is the median draw, then advertisements are more trustworthy than in dath ilan; because when everybody is exactly Keltham, there is no variation in trustworthiness, so there is no adverse selection favoring producers who got ahead by being a little less trustworthy in ways they couldn't be caught. And the GDP is actually slightly higher. Though they'd also better get cracking on biotech really fast, because, reproduction.
If there's a god of doing really honest business in both business and friendship, with personal and commercial advertisements true in letter and spirit, all debts repaid whether monetary or informal, all promises kept without exception, never the first to defect - even in the dark, even if reality is ending the next day and there's no more iterations of the dilemmas - where it's also perfectly socially acceptable to be nice, because you're not hurting anyone by doing that - but you don't just demand people be nice to lightly injured strangers, then look oddly at them when they want personal or public reimbursement - a god whose thingy is a little more selfish than dath ilan's, in one sense, but unselfishly utility-function-desiring the shards of higher Coordination, in some more coherent but still ultimately bounded version of how humans have honor - and never defacing the Algorithm - then Keltham could see himself working with that god on the Golarion industrialization project. Maybe even being its cleric, depending on the benefits.
That, Keltham thinks, is the true meaning of Chaos, if there's a Chaotic Evil god like that.
(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)
Abadar: There is not a Chaotic Evil god like that, because Keltham was somewhat misinformed about Chaos and also about Evil.
There is, as it happens, a god like that.
Abadar: Among the many disadvantages of shattered prophecy, is that sometimes strange attention-demanding things happen which are unscheduled.
The situation of a god on the planes could be compared to a titan with a hundred thousand eyes, standing atop a mountain, gazing down at a dozen surrounding countries each filled with a billion squirrels. Even as a titan, You cannot think about all the squirrels individually. You can at best set a fraction of Your attention to watching for predefined signals that You have trained the squirrels to use. The squirrels cannot understand the coordinates to align their eyes across many dimensions to look at You. But You can give them a word like "Abadar" and a holy symbol and say a few words about why banks need to exist; and then notice when a squirrel looks in that direction, not quite at You, but more in Your direction than the other titans atop their own mountains.
One day, a fraction of Your attention notices a squirrel looking, in one set of subdimensions, along an angle that would be aligned almost exactly on the real You, if the squirrel could get the other dimensions right too. It's surprising because You have never seen a squirrel look in that direction before. You have wished You could explain it to squirrels, but prediction always showed their heads exploding when You tried that, so You didn't try it.
Then the squirrel thinks for a bit, and turns its head into another dimension, and looks almost right at the correct angle in that dimension too.
The squirrel pauses, visibly (to a god) staring inside itself and deducing further conclusions from premises, and then angles its head and looks almost directly at Your angle in yet another dimension.
If the power disparities were not what they were, the squirrel's behavior might be considered reminiscent of a stalking predator, the more humanlike and sadistic kind of monster; who is deliberately crouching down to look under the dresser, standing up, and then crouching down again, only to look under the desk; and the stalker knows all along that you are actually under the bed. You are not frightened, under the circumstances, where the circumstances are that You are a god; but You are definitely noticing.
Then the squirrel gathers itself, angles its viewpoint -
- and turns to stare almost directly at You, including some mathy parts that nobody in Axis is allowed by treaty to explain to anybody who might go back to Golarion.
You wait for the squirrel to pray to You, to make one of the appeals which You are allowed by treaty to respond to without that being incredibly expensive, so You can (very softly and carefully so it doesn't explode) ask the squirrel what the Abyss is going on, and how a squirrel even got this address.
The squirrel thinks loudly about how it might not mind being Your cleric, but doesn't actually ask.
Then the squirrel looks at five gods one after another in the stories-for-mortals coordinates, one of which is the standard wrong address for You.
Then the squirrel goes back to thinking.
Also the squirrel's body is in an Asmodean church near the Worldwound, its mind looks like a teenaged male raised by modrons, and its immaterial soul is ninety-three minutes old.
You would have more attention to pay this sort of anomaly if the surprise had been properly scheduled like in the other worlds you deal with.
Abadar: Entities with very high Intelligence don't make quite the same kind of comical mistakes that humans do. They know what they don't know; they pick up on alternate hypotheses and incongruent facts very early on. They still make comical mistakes, to be clear, as seen from their own perspectives; but different ones.
Why is the mortal thinking loudly about being a cleric, but not actually asking? Abadar doesn't know, but He knows that He doesn't know. Among the possibilities is that the mortal, who is in an Asmodean church, is in a life position where suddenly becoming a cleric of Abadar would be inconvenient due to the Asmodean reaction to it. This is only one hypothesis among several; Abadar does not leap to the conclusion. It is not even certain that the mortal was deliberately choosing not to immediately pray for clerichood, or that the mortal knew that Abadar was watching and might otherwise have responded. That is only one hypothesis group among several.
But it is a large enough strategic-equivalence-class of hypotheses that Abadar is not dropping cleric levels on the mortal right away, in case the mortal definitely didn't want that and was trying to signal so.
Could the five gods in the sequence be a deliberate message? The tiny fraction of Abadar's attention that He can spare does consider some possibilities like that; it would be stupid in a sense not to think of them at all. Asmodeus-Abadar-Norgorber-Calistria-Nethys could be interpreted as tyrant-Abadar-murder-revenge-magic, and be an attempted message that somebody was about to assassinate the prince of Osirion, vengefully, using magic. This comical misinterpretation does not actually happen, because if the mortal had wanted to send a message to Abadar, its posture would have changed in a way Abadar could detect; it's part of the posture of treaty-defined prayer.
But something strange is clearly happening. And it would be a huge wasted opportunity if this mortal ended up being squished by Asmodeans before it could, at least, tell other mortals some things that Abadar hasn't been allowed to explain directly.
But if Abadar calls up Asmodeus and offers to buy the avoidance of squishing this particular squirrel, might that not call the attention of Asmodeus down upon this squirrel, in exactly the way that the squirrel might (on some hypotheses) have been trying to avoid by deliberately not asking Abadar for clerichood?
If one were a mortal, one might, perhaps, reason that there is nothing to be done here. But Asmodeus is a Lawful god and does not generally prefer accidentally stepping on Abadar's goals, over being paid to avoid stepping on Abadar's goals. It would be in some sense silly if Abadar-and-Asmodeus had no possible coordinated strategy better than Asmodeus's church accidentally squishing a valuable squirrel because Abadar was afraid to talk to Asmodeus about that. They would be noticeably off the Pareto-optimal boundary.
Abadar sends a brief packet to Asmodeus which might translate as:
Hey, Asmodeus. I want to reveal information relevant to negotiating a potential gainful trade, where that information itself might otherwise worsen my negotiating position for the trade, on the standard condition that you promise not to use that information to implement strategies that lead to worse outcomes than would have obtained in the counterfactual where I stayed silent, as evaluated by either my utility function or by the best-guess probable utility function of another party who revealed that information to me.
Asmodeus: Acknowledged, agreed to.
Humans trying to make a similar arrangement might be relying on reputation: "the last thousand times we did this, he kept his end" - or character: "he seems like the sort of person who'd keep his word" - or consequences: "breaking his word would be punished" - or the prospects of future cooperation: "if he betrays the agreement this time, we won't be able to do this in future, which would be a loss to him". Gods can just make parts of them legible to one another, and promise with those; Asmodeus is in part keeping-of-agreements, and if all of those sources-of-motivation suddenly failed to obtain there would still be the agreement itself, in no sense weakened. Not everything about Him is knowable, not even to other gods, but this is.
(Some humans understand this, in part, and think that it means Asmodeus can be outwitted; if He gives His word unwisely, after all, He will keep it, and if you cleverly trap Him into promising you wealth and power, or the right to reign in Hell, or anything else, He would follow through. This is true, but if you think you've found an opportunity to do it, you haven't.)
Asmodeus is curious, but only slightly; most of His attention is in other places, doing other things.
Abadar: A mortal has had an unshared insight into Abadar's domain. This mortal is probably but not definitely under the power of or threatenable by Asmodeus/Cheliax/the Asmodean church. Abadar wants to pay to modify future events so that the mortal doesn't end up dead and soul-trapped/maledicted in a way that prevents Osirians from resurrecting it; nor spending nearly all of its natural lifespan in Cheliax or prison never talking extensively with Abadar's followers; nor tortured by Asmodeans into not being in an Abadaran shape; nor traumatized (eg by having all of its friends and family tortured) to the point where it'd no longer be an inspiring teacher if Abadar/Osirion paid it to do that. (Abadar doesn't need to explicitly list brain damage and mindwipes as also undesirable; He mainly sends a specification over ultimate consequences.)
Abadar honestly discloses that this mortal may or may not be opposing some ongoing Asmodean plan, as mortals sometimes end up doing. Abadar doesn't know this, but has seen 1.8 bits of evidence over the prior. If so, Abadar is not offering to pay for letting the mortal have free reign to oppose Asmodeus unopposed, or anything that expensive; He just wants to pay for having the mortal delivered to Osirion afterwards instead of squished. Abadar did however find all this out, through what seemed like a voluntary high-trust action of revelation from the mortal. So information from this negotiation itself, especially that the mortal might have plans opposing Asmodeans, must not be used to further Asmodeus's interests at the mortal's expense, if Abadar points out the mortal to Asmodeus. (That Asmodeus should not eg try to falsely depict Abadar as having betrayed the mortal to Him, follows automatically from the previous goal-spec.)
Abadar mainly predicts this would cost Asmodeus one revelation to Asmodeans via priest or devil; whatever marginal value Asmodeus could otherwise get by torturing one mortal instead of coaxing it; possibly it being marginally harder to oppose the mortal's opposition to some unknown plan; and attention / cost-of-thought.
If Asmodeus has a price on that, agreeable to Abadar, Abadar can give distinguishing characteristics for the mortal in question.
(It's a marginally more complicated negotiation than, say, Iomedae would demand; with Iomedae, Abadar would just offer to pay for some utility, since She knows Abadar's utility function. Indeed, Iomedae could just ask for fair reimbursement afterwards; He's Lawful, She's Lawful. Asmodeus has stated a preference for fully specified contracts with advance-agreed payments based on expected values instead of actual values, and the thing where parties retain some private information while trying to guess how much private information the other party has. It tends to favor the party with higher Intelligence in negotiations, but Asmodeus apparently still does it even when the other party realizes that and adjusts prices accordingly. He just likes contracts. Abadar is happy enough to go along with it in cases like this one where that reduces Abadar's payment's variance across counterfactuals.)
Asmodeus: Asmodeus considers this. A human would be tempted to try to identify the mortal based on the information provided, and it happens that in this case that would probably be possible, but Asmodeus does not do that; it would be resource-intensive, and He is committed to not using the information, and He is not in the habit of acquiring information He can't use.
He names a price.
Abadar: Sold! It's this mortal in an Asmodean church at the Worldwound. You can't miss it, it's the incredibly odd one.
Asmodeus: - huh, that is an odd one! Does Abadar happen to know why it's adult-shaped but apparently a newborn baby? He's not willing to pay much for that information but it seems of mutual interest if there were a way to make adult-shaped humans without the expensive baby stage.
(The cleric praying to Asmodeus in that church gets a vision.)
Abadar: Abadar has no clue (lit: plenty of hypotheses and no evidence) who this mortal is or what is going on, but it sure does look Lawful. It is possible that some glitch has occurred, and that this represents a profit opportunity for Law.
lintamande: The priest stands up, shaking. Waves Carissa over. "There's a scroll of Sending in a locked box in the back room; here's the key. Bring it back."
Carissa Sevar: She's not going to ask what happened; it's none of her business. She goes and gets it.
lintamande: "Urgently with direct input from Asmodeus requesting seventh-circle pickup at the Worldwound, pursuant to earlier communications, more info on arrival."
Carissa Sevar: "Should I - pack."
lintamande: "Hmmm? Your notes, leave your spare uniform. Don't interact with him further until I've briefed you, absolutely don't enchant him."
Carissa Sevar: There is something - heady, terrifying, validating - about knowing Asmodeus has involved Himself. He sees it too, she thinks, even though that's absurdly prideful, to imagine they're seeing the same things at all, to imagine 'seeing' is a good word to cover the both of them. She goes and packs.