Keltham: Keltham's current plan is to try reaching out to the Intrinsic-of-Keltham god, followed by Asmodeus if that doesn't work, as soon as he has the quiet and privacy to compose himself and try to arrange his thoughts into the most coherently shaped patterns he can manage, in order to maximize the apparently slight chance that he can successfully contact a god. It may be, in some sense, unreasonable to hope that it's that simple; but probably some things will be simple for him, given his unusual knowledge base. It's worth trying the obvious tactic before trying any less obvious ones, just so that he doesn't accidentally overcomplicate his own life and waste a lot of effort on difficult strategies that aren't actually necessary.
(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)
Next, maybe spend some time trying to figure out What Happened and What It Implies About the Ontology of Greater Reality? No, next stand up and stretch a bit. You're supposed to stand up and stretch every so often while thinking.
Keltham tries to do that, and nearly falls over. He ran headlong towards smoke, in freezing cold, longer and faster than he usually runs through freezing cold every day. Ouch.
lintamande: The priest raises an eyebrow at him and offers him a drink.
Keltham: Ah, yes, water. Keltham has heard of this. It's what sane people ingest after heavy exercise. A little beneath the dignity of someone who calls himself a Mad Investor, but, under the circumstances, Keltham will lower himself to briefly act like a sane person.
lintamande: If they could communicate he could offer other drinks, but they can't.
Keltham: If they could communicate Keltham could be puzzled by what was on offer and why anybody would possibly want to drink it, but they can't.
lintamande: A few minutes later a person materializes in thin air and the priest rushes over to talk to them.
Keltham: That is so incredibly cool. The logistics this civilization must have - no, wait, all this stuff is incredibly expensive, isn't it?
It should be cheaper. That is just Keltham's personal opinion, but it is already a strongly held one. Depending on how much math nobody here knows, he should have a look at the magic business too, not just steel.
lintamande: It's a long conversation and after a couple of minutes they leave to have it in privacy. They go into a room and an odd thick fog immediately seeps out of it, ringing the room in a perfectly smooth radius.
Keltham: Keltham already wants him some of that, and doesn't want it any more for seeing much less impressive applications. Though... are they trying to hide the discussions from him... actually no, that doesn't make much sense, he doesn't have the local language. They could discuss in front of him how to take all his stocks and eat his soul and he wouldn't know any better.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa comes back a couple of minutes later, sees the fog, looks pleased about it.
lintamande: And after a few more minutes the teleporting guy comes out of the fog room and says in Baseline, "I'm Fertinan Cortess, senior summoner at the Academae in Korvosa. The Worldwound is periodically swarmed by demons, and has very few people with whom you could collaborate on inventing steel, so we want to invite you to come to Ostenso, a large port city in Cheliax which we think will be a better place for this project. You have my word that I expect you to be safer, more comfortable, better resourced and more able to pursue the goals you've told us of in Ostenso than here, and that if you hate it it's possible in Ostenso to pay for passage back here, or elsewhere. Does that sound all right?"
Keltham: "So it sounds like you were warned that I'm new to this world, but maybe not about the degree to which my own world is incredibly different from this one. Am I right about that?"
lintamande: The local priest directly got a vision from Asmodeus about it which sort of sets a very high lower bound on how important it must be. They're not saying that, though. The wizard who mindread him thinks that his world has successfully figured out how to raise humans who can almost completely compensate for having free will, and think like outsiders. They're not saying that either, though.
The right tack here is humility. "I haven't actually met people from any other worlds and I would not have trouble believing I am underestimating how different yours is."
Keltham: Until this person spoke, it had not occurred to Keltham that going to some place might mean that he could not, from that place, go to other places; and the fact that somebody thinks he might need to be reassured about that is not reassuring. It brings a lot of other things into question; too many things, in fact.
"Let me put it this way. From my perspective, what you said implied a lot of facts entirely new to me, like, implicitly, it might not be good to trust somebody who said I'd be better resourced in Cheliax, unless they added 'you have my word', and then, you think, I ought to trust that. You expect me to worry that if I go to Ostenso, I might not be able to get passage back; but you don't expect me to worry that tickets would be too expensive, that I couldn't find other work, or that Cheliax's equivalent of Governance wouldn't order everyone who sells transportation to not sell me a ticket. There's this particular implied range of attempted defections against a prospective business partner, which you think I should worry about, and which you're trying to reassure me about, but that range itself is less - the word that translates in my language as 'Lawful' - compared to my world. And right now I have not observed enough facts about this world to establish basic causal entanglement between this reality and my mind; when I wonder whether your statements are true, I have to wonder whether any place called Cheliax exists, not whether you're saying something false about Cheliax. To the extent I have to worry about deception like that, I also have to worry that you would still be planning to defect even if you said you gave your word, because I haven't observed whatever system of incentives here makes people trustworthy when they give their words."
"My uncertainty is so wide, in fact, that I haven't thought of anything I can pragmatically do about it. I mean, I could try to talk to the giant six-legged things inside the bubble and ask them if they're actually demons bent on destroying the world, but that doesn't actually seem smart because it's potentially dangerous and a narrow shot inside a very wide space. So yes, fine, let's go to Ostenso, under the understanding that I am a prospective business partner trying to cooperate with Asmodeus, and your general treatment of me reflects on his reputation for reciprocating attempted cooperation; because the very smart very Lawful entity should be an anchor of sanity and good coordination if anything is; at least assuming that such any such entity as Asmodeus, or gods in general, exist. And then I request a translation spell and a library visit, so I can read a lot of random pages in random books and start to infer back the world those pages were written in."
lintamande: The man thinks about this, for about ten seconds, like it's in fact a lot of new information about something.
"- deal," he says. And then something over his shoulder to Carissa.
Carissa Sevar: Who understood none of that and has only half a guess at the flavor. "Yes, I'm coming." She takes Cortess's arm.
Keltham: "Deal? We're still operating informally under a presumption of good intentions and general attempts to repay good deeds later, or at least I hope we are. Actual proper deals should be written down for ontological stability." Keltham tentatively offers a hand, in case anybody wants a hand for magical reasons, which looks like it might be the case.
lintamande: "I don't mean that I'm holding you to precisely what you just said," the man says. "But, sure, informally under a presumption of good intentions."
And they teleport.
They're in the summer villa of the Archduke Henderthane of Sirmium, requisitioned five minutes ago in a very rushed conversation with the Queen's personal pit fiend. It's on eighteen hundred acres, the house itself at the peak of the cliffs looking out across the Inner Sea. All the prettiest girls at the local wizard school have been dragged over and set loose in the library.
The society that made this was poor but the person who made this was rich; labor was cheap for him, and it's very beautiful stonework.
Keltham: Okay this place is pretty. Maybe this universe isn't as much of a dump as it looked from the Worldwound. Keltham will probably spend a minute or two appreciating all beautiful sights in sight, especially any that don't have dath ilani counterparts, unless somebody attempts to talk to him.
lintamande: No one can talk to him until the seventh circle wizard prepares and casts Share Language in any event, which takes him about ten minutes; he sits down on the nearest bench and his fingers twitch in the air as if tracking something very complicated. Carissa watches raptly.
And then he puts his hand on Keltham's shoulder and Keltham speaks Taldane.
Speaking a language suddenly is fairly distracting; all the words you know now map to the nearest available other words in the other language, which is not at all how people learn languages when they learn them. It has been analogized to getting onto an alligator and learning that it rides exactly like the pony you grew up riding on, but this might not be a helpful analogy if you haven't ridden any ponies or alligators.
"There should be a library indoors; I don't know where, exactly, but the staff will," says the wizard.
Keltham: "I know Taldane! Relative to prior expectations, this is so much higher in my preference ordering than - wait, what -"
"Oh my ass! 'Prior probability distribution' is how many syllables? Relative to the objective targets for which Baseline was optimized, this language was not optimized along the -"
Keltham stops, concentrates, discards several false starts on Taldane sentences that balloon far out of control.
"This language isn't good at doing some things my world thinks a language should be good at. At some later point, you should try giving somebody else my language, and test whether that makes them think better."
lintamande: "Share Language only shares ones I know. Possibly you should pick up wizardry, this spell's only [two-syllable word for the complexity of the spell relative to other spells, conveying its topology and the fact that the better half of wizards could cast it and that it uses about 16% as much energy as a basic teleport]."
Keltham: "Yeah, that was definitely on my ordered list... on my list of things to try. I reciprocate... for your game-theoretic... oh my ass, does this language really not have a less than ten-syllable way just to say 'thank you' - there it is. 'Thank you' for your helpful help, which I do understand to have been offered in a spirit of intended mutual future profit and not just friendship."
There's a polite dath ilani thing to say when you're thanking somebody and you're not sure how much of their help was pure altruism or not, but if he tries to say that thing, it'll take eight thousand syllables and then the other person still won't know how to interpret it colloquially.
lintamande: The wizard reminds himself of the thing he's been reminding himself of for the last eleven minutes which is that this is an alien and even if they look deceptively human they don't think that way.
He nods. "You're welcome. The spell expires every day. Since it's only [second-circle], Sevar can cast it for you when it needs refreshing. People find that after a couple months of it they usually just know the new language even without a spell, at least for the words they in fact use. Cheliax is glad to have you here, and hopes for the success of your endeavors, and hopes that your genius will be represented in our children."
Keltham: "You're welcome. But I'm not - smart, or not more than 0.8 root-of-average-of-squares-of-deviations-from-average smarter than average. I just know some things that weren't taught here."
lintamande: He raises an eyebrow at Carissa.
Carissa Sevar: "Eighteen," she says.
lintamande: "That's four, uh, root-of-average-of-squares-of-deviations-from-average, for Golarion's unenhanced population."
Carissa Sevar: "There's a spell to check."
Keltham: "That's a fucking planetary catastrophe what the ass happened."
lintamande: " - Earthfall?" the wizard says uncertainly. "But that was eight thousand years ago and I don't actually have reason to think people were smarter before that, I have always assumed that we're just - at the intelligence level we were created at, or if you like at the right tradeoff between the costs of creating us and the benefits of having things at our intelligence around - my time is expensive, why don't you get oriented on things like 'history' and 'average intelligence' and then if you want to buy some of it later you can spend it better." And he's supposed to report to the Queen.
Keltham: "Absolutely fair."
Keltham is still fundamentally shaken by the notion of a -3.2sd g world. It changes everything, on the same level as magic... no, a lot deeper than that.
"Also, hi, Carissa," he says out loud. "I noticed you came along, was wondering if you were just here to do the local equivalent of checking in with a Keeper for alien thought process exposure, or are you thinking of joining whatever project gets set up?"
Carissa Sevar: She's so absolutely been entertaining heresies since her last mind review and she's relieved his society has that concept too. "I assume they'll send a priest along for that eventually but I was -" She's enlisted and goes where the crown sends her, which is here. " - thinking of joining whatever gets set up. My time isn't comparatively expensive and I can top you off on translation spells and the weather magic we do instead of air conditioning. And, you know, a girl doesn't get mysterious alien strangers dropped on top of her every day, and wouldn't want to spend the whole rest of her life wistfully wondering what they got up to."
(The other wizard teleports out.)
Keltham: Most of Keltham is still trying to get to grips with the local intelligence level. It's like something is optimizing for making his previous life narrative as unworkable as possible. +4SD g is at the level where you don't need to master an impossible art of nonconformity, to look in a direction no other nonconformist tried looking, in order to see what nobody else saw. At +4SD g you're just going to look at random poo and see improvements on it, because you are the very smart people who are as smart as the smartest other people who looked at the random poo.
He is nonetheless a teenage male, and some things are capable of catching his attention even so.
"Wasn't somebody named Sevar supposed to do the translation spells -" Is that last line flirting?
- she probably only wants him for his brain -
- okay he can work out how he feels later, first he needs to preserve optionality which means he needs to flirt back -
dath ilan: (Of course Keltham has ever had instruction on how to flirt, in the institutions that dath ilan has instead of colleges. He is familiar with the theory of common-knowledge-avoidance that underpins how standard flirting works.
Dath ilan isn't going to fling its children out into the world with no concept of how to find, explore, build or maintain a romantic relationship.)
Keltham: "And if I'm not in the news everywhere, it means I failed. Unless you're looking for a bit more detail than that."
Should he smile after he says the last part? No, that's escalating way too fast. This may not even be flirting, what with the enormous cultural gap? The whole careful common-knowledge-avoidance process makes even more sense than usual, in this case. The appropriate level of signaling back is exactly enough to show that he didn't completely miss the potential implication, if it was an implication, but no more.
Keltham keeps a straight face throughout.
Carissa Sevar: Oh, are they doing straight faces. "Sevar's my family name. Carissa's my familiar one. Do they not have that, where you're from?"
Keltham: "No, with nearly a billion people, we calculated globally unique names would need to be too long to remember. We go by birth order for unique IDs. Two syllables is long enough that you'd be moderately unlikely to be good friends with two people with the same name, so it's what most normies like my parents use in the modern generation. I've considered changing mine to something four-syllabled just to be Chaotic about it, but common wisdom says I should let my personality finish shaking out up to age 25 first."
Carissa Sevar: "Well you'll have to decide before you're in the news all over the world, I don't see how you'd change it afterwards."
Keltham: That gets a smile out of him that he decides not to suppress. "If nobody else has it, that's good enough for me. But yeah, I'll check whether there's anyone else on the planet named Keltham before I go public with that one. Wouldn't want to snare any innocents into the dreadful mire of my search shadow."
Carissa Sevar: "It's not a Chelish name but I don't know how you'd check the whole planet - we don't all speak a common language, or have, uh, a common mail system or whatever you're imagining. The most powerful wizards I know of are Nefreti Clepati and Felandriel Morgethai so four syllables wouldn't even be pushing what you could get away with, really."
Keltham: "Ha. I'm Evil, but I'm never going to be Evil enough to wantonly make people memorize seven syllables just to say hi to me."
Carissa Sevar: "It is also traditional, I think, for Evil wizards to have a menacing tower that turns everyone who approaches it into a chicken, so as to only be interrupted by people who are very competent or have priorities important enough to them that they'll be turned into a chicken about them."
Keltham: "Your world possesses housing options my world did not, but not entirely unintriguing ones. Speaking of which, I should probably figure out domestic things like where I'm sleeping before I hit up the nearest library for some quick page glimpses. You're relatively more local than I am, want to point out my next step or meta-step there?"
On reflection, Keltham decides, he should hesitate to flirt any further than this before he has actually thought at all about Carissa/Sevar.
Carissa Sevar: "Well personally were I given the run of the Archduke of Sirmium's summer villa I would go look at all of the bedrooms before I decided which one I was claiming, and probably take his own personal bedroom unless he's decorated it grotesquely, like with the skulls of his enemies, but if you're terribly eager to go to bed we could just ask the staff what their plan was and I'm sure they'll have a skull-free, very lovely bedroom."
Keltham: The skulls of his - they can resurrect people, right, it just costs money. That must sure make for some weird social dynamics.
"At some point I'm going to have to figure out the larger social process I'm embedded in, but I appreciate that it is taking the matter seriously. And it's not that I'm eager to get to sleep, it's that I expect to be predictably completely sucked in by the new planet's library, until I finally stumble back, vision blurring, to finally shower and get to sleep. So I need to have planned out all of that final process, and asked all the relevant questions about it, before I do anything as stickily-self-motivation-altering as stepping into another planet's library. Sort of thing that drives all other thoughts out of your mind, I expect."
Carissa Sevar: "You talk about libraries like wizards talk about magic." She waves impatiently at - a child? A person proportioned not quite like a human child but about the height of one. "Show us in so Keltham can look around."
The person bows to Keltham. "Of course, master. This way."
Keltham: The Taldane word 'Master' floats around in Keltham's mind; he can tell that it doesn't map onto 'employer' which he's not, 'polite-dath-ilani-address-to-a-customer', or for some reason owner... he'll figure it out later. Right now there's a very short person to follow.
lintamande: The very short person shows him a lovely stonework guest wing, with a suite. The suite has a very large bed. The mattress looks suspiciously like these people haven't invented enough materials science for really good mattresses, but everything else looks nice.
The short person stokes a wood-burning fire in a fireplace across from the bed. "There's plumbing!" he adds proudly, and demonstrates a sink.
Carissa Sevar: - wow, plumbing. She casts Detect Magic to get a better look at how it operates, even though she needs to figure out whether Keltham expects her to stay here and navigate that gracefully and can't afford to be distracted - actually, maybe 'oblivious because distracted by magic' would go over well.
Keltham: "I'm going to mention once, just to get it out of my system, that it looks like your civilization doesn't have the technology level necessary to build real bedrooms, and won't have that technology level for a good long time even if we all do our best. Okay, that part's done, moving on. Carissa, what'd you just do to the plumbing?"
Carissa Sevar: "Detect Magic, just to get a good look at it, I haven't seen an indoor plumbing with hot water before." In his guest suite, even. Sirmium must be doing well.
Keltham: "I'm glad I'm more Evil than the average dath ilani, and am not flipping out as hard as they would about a planet full of people who have to live without indoor plumbing. That's going to be a matter of scaling Element-29 smelting, for the pipes, and... I'm starting to wonder if energy to produce heat to smelt metal is actually going to be the sticking point, if indoor hot water is even rarer, and I should be looking into the fossil fuel scale before the metallurgical scale? Anyways, is this room magically advanced enough that the concept of a hot-water shower is also known to it?"
lintamande: "You can put the hot water in the bath, Master Keltham," the small person says.
Carissa Sevar: "Do you happen to know how this house heats the water?"
lintamande: "Contract with a fire elemental, I believe, ma'am."
Keltham: "Does that scale to where we can contract a fire elemental to melt 1728 third-tons of steel per day? If that's a spell somebody can cast once per day, without them being so expensive as to be completely unhirable, we can do an awful lot with 1728 third-tons of steel per day squared."
lintamande: "I don't know, Master Keltham."
Carissa Sevar: "Binding's fourth-circle. I don't think one fire elemental could melt that much steel and I'm not sure they could melt any. You could maybe take the steel to the Elemental Plane of Fire if you had a plan to get it back once you've melted it, that'd be two fifth-circle spells a day, one to get there and one to get back, plus whatever you needed to survive there."
Keltham: "How much water could they turn to steam in a day? And do fire elementals continually add heat energy to wherever they are, so that I can melt anything if I can insulate them well enough, or do they have an ordinary temperature that only transfers heat to lower temperatures... I need to visit the library first and then think about this stuff more later. What do I need to know before I go to the library and then stumble back to my bedroom, take a bath, and go to sleep? I should plausibly eat a very quick dinner first or not eat it at all, I should know where to find Carissa/Sevar in the morning for translation spell, and right, toilet."
...the thought occurs to Keltham for the first time that he may now have occasion to figure out where this sub-apartment's cuddleroom is, if people keep flirting with him, and he ever wants to do anything about that. Well, not a top priority. Probably.
dath ilan: (Why would you do that in your bedroom. Why would you do that on your bed. That is not what a sleeping-pod or sleeping-sink is designed to do, any more than a sex-and-cuddling pillow-surface is designed to be slept on.
Any flirting Carissa may have hoped to accomplish by mentioning beds or sleeping has been lost forever in the abyssal depths of the cultural gap.)
Carissa Sevar: "Bring dinner," Carissa tells the small person, who hurries off to do that.
"I'll ask for another room on this hall I guess, I might be out later in the morning than you because preparing spells takes me about an hour and I can't give you the language until I do that but your existing one shouldn't have worn off yet. I don't know how fire elementals transfer heat. That's the toilet." It's a marble bench with a small round hole in it and a pit beneath, at least fifteen feet deep.
Keltham: "There shall be weighty conversations on this topic later, at a point where those conversations could actually result in better-designed houses springing into existence. Noted on wizard morning patterns, is there a sign I can detect to know when it's safe to knock on your door?"
Carissa Sevar: "In the army there is, and also protocols for when to interrupt me before that, but I don't actually know what civilians who aren't students do, I enlisted right out of school. I'll use the symbol from the army."
Keltham: "No need to say what that is, it's surely the same symbol used by dath ilani military wizards."
Carissa Sevar: "If there's any symbol on the door, don't knock. Knock only if the door looks like a plank of wood devoid of symbols."
Keltham: "Acknowledged. I feel like I'm missing something blindingly obvious... clothing, laundry? Actually, these clothes contain an unmeasured amount of exemplar technology with respect to things like the metal alloys in the zippers, any plastic components, rare-element magnets, maybe even the weaving patterns in the cloth. They're my property, and indeed my only nonideational property at this point, but project-valuable to the point where your government actually needs to consider security to prevent them from being stolen. Any obvious solutions there?"
Carissa Sevar: At least they have the concept of theft, she was starting to be slightly worried they didn't! "Probably you should have personal security whenever you leave the house but they should be safe enough here. Probably have me launder them with magic instead of giving them to the housekeepers, lest they damage them."
Keltham: "Security, so checking explicitly: You've implied that this is a sufficiently high-security area to protect my property from whatever grade of criminal mastermind seems likely to target that property in hopes of obtaining a proprietary trade secret. Affirm?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes." She can go double check afterwards but it seems like probably 'direct word from Asmodeus' is enough justification for a lot of people parked outside keeping Keltham safe. And keeping him from leaving.
Keltham: "All right. I'll be troubling you to magically launder my clothes, and will add that to the rest of the informal debts I have piling up with you, which I assure you I am noticing. Can you think of anything else I should know or do before library... oh, we were waiting on dinner, weren't we. Any notion of the timescale there?"
Carissa Sevar: "I would expect it'll only be a couple more minutes. What is your plan for the library exactly, just to sit down with a history book and look up every reference until you've chased down everything?"
Keltham: The plan is that, unless there are entities here which think and write books extremely quickly compared to Keltham, they probably cannot fake an entire library in order to control Keltham's flow of information.
"Lots of random sampling, accompanied by trying to infer back the world that the pages were written in. I'm not trying to acquire thorough knowledge of anything, just orient myself to this whole universe."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, if you find the personal diaries of the Archduke you've got to copy a page down so we can mysteriously reference it at parties, later, and make him wonder how much we know." That feels like the right amount of aesthetically Evil while completely unobjectionable even to Good which Keltham seems comfortable in.
Dinner arrives. It is generous heaps of a dozen different things, since they didn't know what he'd like; fish and rice and bread and shellfish and vegetables and stuffed pheasant and seared meat and fruits and pastries.
Keltham: LADY WHAT - she must have been joking, even most criminals wouldn’t do that and no sensible Archduke would just leave his personal diaries in the library either.
Keltham samples everything, and will gravitate towards the more protein-heavy dishes accompanied by fruit, treating the pastries and bread as a dessert. He chews the first bites deliberately, experiencing and considering, and then eats much more rapidly after he has already Observed the New Experience.
Carissa Sevar: The food is much better than at the Worldwound and she's going to enjoy it while it lasts. She also suspects people are frantically making some arrangements in the library so it's better for Keltham not to be done too quickly, though she's also not going to observably stall him.
When they're done she'll ask which rooms are free and pick one out and demonstrate the symbol on the door. "See you in the morning?"
Keltham: "Suppose so. I check explicitly: you don't expect me to accidentally get lost on the way to the library, or lost on the way back, in a way that I can't recover from by running into somebody to talk to."
Carissa Sevar: "I expect not but if you want an escort I could make space in my schedule."
Keltham: "Eh, think I'm fine checking empirically how lost I get without you, before I assume it's bad enough you need to be always following me around. I'm just checking that it is, in fact, inside the disaster class where you can sensibly plan to see what actually goes wrong and then recover, instead of some plausible-seeming missteps being bad enough to require advance foresight." This language and the number of words it takes to say things oh his ass.
Carissa Sevar: "You will not wander off a cliff or through a portal to the Abyss if you get lost, and probably some of your security's following you, so it should be recoverable."
Keltham: Under other circumstances Keltham might ask about intelligence-amplification headbands that might prevent him from forgetting his path; but mind-amplification is also mind-alteration, so Keltham is not about to just yank one of those things onto his head, even if supplied, before he manages to run across some mentions of them in the library.
Keltham shall now attempt to explore yet another place where no dath ilani has ever been. How is he doing at Finding the Library?
lintamande: If he asks the staff they will show him down a flight of stairs and through a courtyard to a ....very modest library, really. Two rooms with high ceilings and shelves full of books.
Also it's full of teenage girls sitting three to an overstuffed armchair and giggling.
Keltham: Is there anything that looks like a section on gods, or a section on global-factional-politics?
(Keltham is (a) bent on his mission and (b) processing teenage girls as extremely normal inhabitants of libraries. It may take him a bit of a delayed drop to ask what they're doing in a supposedly high-security area and why the gender ratio.)
lintamande: There's a section on theology, which looks rather sparse, and a section on world affairs which seems to have the global-factional-politics he might hope for.
The teenage girls observe him raptly but don't interrupt, he looks in-a-hurry and also (to Detect Magic) there's clearly several high-level invisible people shadowing him, which means it would be a bad idea to make sudden movements, even ones that are just accidentally dropping your pen on the floor so as to strategically pick it up.
Keltham: (Keltham rolls against his SED to notice the attention. Fails.)
Theology seems like the highest priority. Pull a random book and look at a random page.
lintamande: A series of mental exercises for Asmodeans, to practice submission to the will of their god blah blah blah, meditations for executing on their intentions successfully. Meditations to consider before making a promise. Meditations for raising Asmodean children. Meditations for blah blah blah anticipating Hell in a productive and confident fashion.
Keltham: Hm. Seems broadly consistent with the picture Carissa drew, so far. Different random page?
lintamande: The physical structure of Hell. It's not technically a plane, but nine of them; the only one accessible from the rest of the universe is Avernus, the first, where souls go when they die. The second is only accessible from the first (and third), the third from the second, etc.
Keltham: Let's try a different book. Do any of them look like they'd have information about the other gods?
lintamande: Nope! This library contains no books about gods other than Asmodeus. Those are illegal in Cheliax and could have been acquired on very short notice but spot-modification would be, well, hellish.
Keltham: Okay that's downright odd, given the extent to which negotiations between gods formed part of this world's Foundations of Order, in the mental picture Keltham was drawing; you shouldn't be able to understand current reality without knowing who had what utility function. Book on history of divine negotations?
lintamande: Also no!
(That's....not even a kind of book that can be found on short notice; it's probably in some private libraries but not Chelish private libraries.)
A book about Shelyn, goddess of art, love, and beauty, has turned up on a shelf in the corner; he must've missed it in his first scan.
Keltham: Great, let's flip to a random page in that one.
lintamande: Shelyn once had a brother, but then His utility function was inverted and He became a god of torture; it's very sad.
Keltham: SHIT WHAT okay let's temporarily forget breadth-first search and read the pages before and after that one.
lintamande: For a time, she and Dou-Bral shared the portfolios of beauty, love and the arts, and were worshiped by the early Taldans, until at some point they argued, and Dou-Bral abandoned Golarion for the far dark places between the planes.
When Dou-Bral returned to Golarion, he had become the god of mutilation, misery and torture: Zon-Kuthon. Believing that Dou-Bral still existed within Zon-Kuthon, Shelyn reached out him, but he pierced her hand with his black nails. When Thron, their father, tried to welcome him, Zon-Kuthon captured and tortured the wolf-spirit beyond recognition.
One myth speaks of how Zon-Kuthon first came into conflict with Abadar, the god of culture, wealth, and stability. Seeing the crimes Zon-Kuthon committed in Golarion, Abadar knew that he must be punished, and made a bargain with the evil god. Zon-Kuthon agreed to go into exile on the Plane of Shadow for as long as the sun hung in the sky in exchange for an item of his choosing from the First Vault. This imprisonment was not meant to be over as soon as it was, though, and when the sun stopped shining upon Golarion during the Age of Darkness, Abadar reluctantly honored the deal, giving Zon-Kuthon the first undead shadow, which the Midnight Lord has used to craft evil creatures in his realm of Xovaikain ever since.
Keltham: Okay, the utility-function-inverting thing does not sound like a thing that typically happens to humans walking around, but SHIT Golarion has issues. How do you even manage to negotiate to a multi-agent-optimal boundary with the god of mutilation, misery, and torture? Would it accept nonsentient things to torture if the nonsentient things were configured carefully enough to match its utility function, or is the utility function too precisely inverted to accept that? Does it have any interests in common with the unflipped gods besides the continued existence of the world despite Rovagug...
Let's put this book back for now, and go look at global politics.
lintamande: There's more here. Perhaps the Archduke found it more interesting. There are dozens of different countries with their own summary-books, and then books on The Ancient Tian Empires and Lessons From The Pharaohs and Great Heroes Of History and then books on trade routes and shipping and what plants grow in what places and what magical beasts roam which wildernesses.
Several of the books have maps, and the maps agree on nearby things and diverge on faraway things.
Nidal, a nearby country: ruled by Zon-Kuthon, the flipped utility function god. At the annual festivals of mutilation, people stab one eye out, or cut off some of their toes. Servants of other gods are barred from entering on pain of a slow and horrible death; some Good cults are suspected of operating there anyway, though it rarely ends well for them. A random flip reveals some sketches of Nidal's law enforcement, grotesquely scarred people with a bloody whip in one hand; a first-person account from a refugee who escaped to Cheliax and converted to the service of Asmodeus, an excerpt from Zon-Kuthon's holy book's writing about how best to keep people alive while you torture them.
Andoran, another nearby country: was part of Cheliax until it broke away blah blah blah. Andoran has now banned Evil and is trying to require everybody to be Good, with limited success. One of their major social problems is that all of their productive, intelligent Evil people left; another is that they keep aggravating their allies in the Inner Sea by refusing to contain piracy; another is that they abandoned Law when they banned Evil and there's been a corresponding breakdown of the social order. A random flip: Evil people forced to flee Andoran tell horror stories of the disarray caused by the country's ban on Evil; a ship captain killed by pirates and subsequently resurrected at great cost to his family accuses the government of Andoran of permitting the pirates to stalk the seas for their own benefit; a historian on how much more prosperous Andoran was when it was part of Cheliax.
Osirion is ruled by a god-king selected by Abadar, god of blah blah blah. It's a poor country but a populous one, fed by the generous grain crops of the Sphinx river, and has a wealth of ruins of the ancient Osirian empire that adventurers are now painstakingly extracting from their trapped tombs. A random flip: Osirion is a prospective ally for Cheliax due to their shared commitment to Law; Osirion's tombs contain relics of an ancient, more advanced civilization, the pharaohs of seven thousand years ago, and Cheliax is collecting and learning from many of those artifacts. Another flip is about how Osirion banned grain exporting.
Rahadoum, another neighbor, bans all the gods, and all their servants. On a random flip, a theologian argues that this is ineffectual, the exact way gods get information about the Material Plane isn't known and they certainly benefit from worshippers but banning their worship, even if people obeyed the ban, which they won't, just means the gods would rely more heavily on non-worshipper methods, which do exist; the gods, for instance, know of faraway worlds where they aren't worshipped at all. On another random flip the case is made that Rahadoum was more prosperous when it was part of Cheliax. Another one is about shipping lanes.
Keltham: Any fine subtleties of the Chelish authors are going to be completely wasted on Keltham due to his absolute incredulity at this whole library section.
On the first random page Keltham opened to, the author was saying what some 'Duke' (high-level Government official) was thinking while ordering the east gates to be sealed, which, like, what, how would the historian know what somebody was thinking, at best you get somebody else's autobiographical account of what they claim they were thinking, and then the writer is supposed to say that what was observed was the claim, and mark separately any inferences from the observation, because one distinguishes observations from inferences.
This. This is supposed to be an expository educational history book. This is supposedly in the nonfiction section. What did the author think they were doing. This isn't reasoning, this is ink somebody spilled on a page and it happened to come out looking like words and everybody was so amazed at the coincidence they decided to reprint it.
There are no probability distributions on this page. There are no numbers on this page. There are no distinct premises and conclusions anywhere on this page. This page contains more fallacies than it contains distinct words.
Keltham puts back the book. Maybe it was just written by a three-year-old. Yeah, Keltham already knows that it wasn't written by a three-year-old, it was written by somebody from a lower-intelligence world; but maybe the next book will have been written by a member of the cognitive elite wearing an intelligence headband.
The next random page in the next random book is written like a school parody of how you would critique somebody else's faction, if it had never occurred to the writer that anybody in the audience might think that the other faction would have a different story. Like. The author doesn't even try to explain what the other faction thought they were thinking. The other faction is just supposed to be running around being Wrong because they are the Wrong Faction.
Okay, so, Keltham is just going to adopt the rule of not believing anything that a Golarion author seems to explicitly be saying or even calling attention to, and is going to flip through random pages only trying to infer the world that gave birth to these parodies of argument and exposition. Just looking for things that the author seemed to assume away as politically nonvalent obvious uncontroversial truths, the equivalent of mentioning that the sky is blue when that's not a focus of political attention.
To the extent Keltham supposes that this class of inference is reliable, it does seem to be confirmed that a place called Cheliax exists.
Some other points that Keltham is able to pick up on:
- People had higher tech seven thousand years ago. What? What happened? Some kind of infohazard thing that required all the tech to be buried? But if that was true, why are they digging it up again? When dath ilan ran into the Past Infohazard they went to a lot of trouble to mothball all the old cities, nobody sane would just wander in and start looking at them without knowing why they'd been hidden.
- You get to be a really powerful wizard by killing monsters rather than by deliberate practice. Why.
- Governance as Keltham knows it does not exist. Prediction markets do not exist. Delegates, Electors, Legislators, and Tribunes do not exist. Nobody seems to be talking about anything that looks like an obvious preference-aggregation mechanism. Choices get attributed to people and it is at no point obvious why anyone would listen to those people.
- People fight giant destructive battles, and it does not occur to any author to remark or explain on how multi-agent-optimal this is not. It doesn't seem to be a remarkable fact when it gets mentioned in passing.
- It looks sort of like... factions have sharp territorial boundaries, and there's a thing where you kill the person at the top of the faction and the people inside the faction all switch sides to the other faction that killed them; which, what why would anybody do that. Why, of all the things to successfully coordinate on, would people coordinate on that? Keltham is really missing something here about individual incentives.
- This entire planet is so on mind-altering drugs Keltham doesn't even just what what what
By the time Keltham reaches anything about Zon-Kuthon, he catches a glimpse of an infohazardous page, winces, and just shuts the book. He may eventually have to work out what is true and what is Drugs; but whatever that was, it is probably not the most important thing for him to deal with right now. In fact, maybe he should move on from the political history shelf entirely.
So is there a section of this library about "Magic: How Does It Even No Seriously What The Fuck Golarion"?
lintamande: There's a book on wizarding education and a book on dragon spellcasting and a book on famous sorcerer bloodlines and their achievements.
Keltham: And what occurs, do tell, if Keltham flips to the start of the wizarding education book, in hopes of finding a careful and reasoned exposition of background theory.
lintamande: There's a long essay by the author about the foolishness of other wizards who took the wrong approach to the craft and didn't approach it with the discipline Asmodeus requires. Then there's a long recounting of his achievements as a wizard and as a teacher of wizardry. After that there's a discussion of the simplest spells and meditations you should do in order to find them easier to hold in your head and cast properly, and tips for common errors, and some argumentation about which simple spell is the best to start with.
There's no mention of needing to fight monsters in the wizarding education book. There is a mention that you should inflict punishments at the end of the day because students are unlikely immediately after a punishment to be able to concentrate on their spellbooks, and if you're worried they'll run home and get it healed you can keep them late.
Keltham: Maybe there's some local custom about how written knowledge is supposed to be a record of all the things you shouldn't do, and from this, you can infer what you actually should do instead. Keltham genuinely has no idea if he's even supposed to believe all the bragging the author puts in front of the book about his achievements, as presented in a format that Keltham himself finds almost absolutely unconvincing. Maybe it's this huge string of blatantly false advertisements, and it's actually signaling cleverness at crafting false advertisements, or... Keltham doesn't get Golarion at all. Is he supposed to believe the thing about storing up punishments to be inflicted at the end of the day, in defiance of all behavioral shaping theory if you were even doing that in the first place; and the implicit claim that students are so admiring of this teacher and desirous to learn his knowledge, that they stick around even after being hurt? Keltham is guessing this is just a deliberately-unbelievable status brag claim in a very alien format? Whatever; it should mostly fall under the rule, for the moment, of not believing any fact which a Drugs Author seems to be actually trying to make him believe.
Mostly, Keltham is interested in the discussion of the simplest spells, the meditations, the tips for common errors. How does a very basic spellcast actually work, if Keltham tries taking what the author says at face value, when it hopefully maybe looks like the author isn't being political and would be discussing something that ought to be politically nonvalent ordinary common knowledge.
lintamande: Magic behaves sort of like a liquid, but it clings to itself. When you have a very little bit of it, the clings-to-itself effects dominate the behaves-like-a-liquid effects, and you can shape it, which is done through the will of the caster, on a complex scaffold that is itself magic (doing it without a scaffold is possible, magic got started in the first place after all, but much much harder). The simplest spells are those that need to be shaped as closed 2-manifolds, and you have to understand how magic behaves reasonably well to get it to the correct shape, and then you have to stabilize it and tie it off, after which it sits until you want to cast it. Casting it is much simpler - you untie it and flick it loose.
Keltham: Does it say how to get a very little bit of magic and use your will on it in the first place? Sort of thing Keltham could try literally right now?
lintamande: You need a spellbook, and inks which anchor the scaffold (the kinds of ink appropriate for spellbooks are so appropriate because the ink binds to the magic well). Here's the spell diagram he personally uses for new students, though of course they'll develop their own diagrams over time as they optimize their scaffold for their personal needs.
Once you have a spellbook and inks anchoring the scaffold, you should be able to learn to feel the magic. The meditations help with that. Book author recommends preparing spells on the student's scaffold while they concentrate; it might be easier for them to feel the magic while it's in motion. Some students pick it up quickly, within an hour, mostly predicted by lots of childhood magic exposure; he doesn't know any promising student to have taken more than a week.
Keltham: ...okay, promising enough for trying later.
But really, it feels like there should be - much more knowledge available on what magic does, even if the natives have no clue why, some overview of what it can do? Fine, they didn't write their books for aliens. But Golarion seems to run on magic to an amazing extent. There really ought to be a book that gives him a better overview of magic than this, somewhere in this library.
Why is there no such thing as a subject-encyclopedia, on any of these shelves? Do subject-encyclopedias just not scale down to a much smaller Golarion book market? Shouldn't they be able to produce small subject-encyclopedias?
...maybe he's just not in the reference section, because the reference section is behind a secret door that looks like a bookcase, as any habitual user of Golarion libraries would surely know and take for granted.
(When you buy your houses separately from the land it's on, you can afford nice high-tech specialist-manufactured houses. For many, many dath ilani, the definition of 'nice' would very much include a library with hidden doors that look like bookcases. Why, what else would you spend money on?)
Keltham: Keltham turns around, with the intention of identifying some prior library inhabitant who might be able to explain if he's just doing library exploration Completely Wrong.
Keltham: Keltham very quickly turns around and looks back at the bookshelves again. It's not what you would call an optimal strategy but it is, at least, a strategy which can be implemented fast.
EMERGENCY INTERNAL KELTHAM MEETING RIGHT NOW
Keltham: That sure is a lot of girls his age.
Pretty ones.
In a high-security zone.
Keltham: He does not, in fact, have any right to be surprised by this.
Dath ilani civilization would likely try exactly the same thing, if somebody showed up from an alternate timeline, with +4SD intelligence, derived from a different selection history, yielding an entirely different set of intelligence-promoting alleles.
Keltham: What does his brain mean " ", there's got to be more to think than that.
Keltham: Could this have, like, happened in some way that would fit exactly into his prior life narrative, so he would already know exactly what to think of it. Is that too much to ask?
Keltham: Okay. Okay. Let's - just slowly back up - and start with most important question here.
Does he want to have sex with all the girls in this room?
Keltham: ...there's not enough girls in this room, if they want to make sure to grab a copy of each of his 46 chromosomes with say 99% probability.
Keltham: While an interesting point, this is not really the central point under consideration. Does he want to have sex with all of these girls plus a large further number of such, thus having enough kids to bring the dath ilani geneset to this world and - what, bump up the average central intelligence factor by half a standard deviation? How many generations would that take, and would it actually be all that useful compared to whatever heredity-optimization processes the locals are running already?
Keltham doesn't actually know offhand how to do those calculations. If Keltham had known this was how his life was going to go, he would have spent a lot more time studying population genetics, sexual technique, and flirting.
Keltham: It has been a while since Keltham's mind has ended up in this much internal disarray. It's going into loops and repeating the same facts, and occasionally the same blank stares, just rephrasing the same thoughts over and over. Like "that sure is a lot of pretty girls" and "they're probably also some of the smartest girls around locally even if that's not directly visible, at least if they want the next generation of wizards directly off this event, which I would in their shoes" and "I should have realized earlier that, rather than just showing up with my head stuffed full of valuable extraworldly information in my brain, I actually had a whole lot more highly valuable information inside my testicles".
Keltham: It is, in fact, this last thought that snaps him out of it. Sometimes, just rephrasing your existing thoughts in slightly different ways does knock something loose, as long as you're not repeating exactly the same thoughts.
The sum of his private property on arrival: valuable knowledge, slightly valuable clothing, and valuable genes.
Those sneaky sneaks. They thought that maybe if they threw enough girls at him fast enough, he'd be seduced into just going along with that, without first asking for any form of compensation for his valuable genetic information.
Keltham: Or possibly they were planning to offer him whatever's standard. Keltham has not observed them try to get away with his precious bodily fluids without paying; one must distinguish inference from observation, after all.
But, yeah, no actual sex with these girls until Keltham is oriented enough to know how local money works and set up an explicit contract.
Keltham: ...snuggles?
Oral?
Keltham: Okay, so, given the sheer amount of internal disarray he has going on here, he is going to give himself time to think about this, absorb, and not come to a conclusion right away.
They do say not to rush into sex if you are feeling rushed, and that... probably extends unchanged even to very large quantities of sex? Why is his brain slightly reluctant to accept that obvious-seeming meta-conclusion.
lintamande: Invisibly, and also inaudibly, two high level wizards spent a truly heroic length of time trying to have straight faces at each other and it's not totally clear who failed first because it was basically simultaneous.
"I -" says one of them, the one who doesn't need to breathe because he has a necklace of adaptation - "- reject the explanation that this is what people are like without free will or with better training in not using it."
The other one doesn't have a necklace of adaptation and does need oxygen and so takes several minutes to catch his breath. "My theory is that, probably, if I can trust my premises here, Cheliax exists."
"We should add to the list of things that go wrong with a honeypot setup, 'he decides that the presence of girls implies that his ejaculate is very valuable and he should not give it away for free'."
"Should we, though. When it will absolutely never ever happen again."
"Well, if we commission thousands of him, maybe in a few generations it's a common problem."
"Gods forbid."
"From what I know, the gods seem supportive."
"You know if Nethys gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and destroy themselves. Maybe if Abadar gives people too much of Himself they're driven mad and end up like this."
"I have heard as many as several things about the pharaoh of Osirion and that seems probably wrong."
"But was it presented with the observations and inferences separated, with numbers for every sentence? No? I submit that you know nothing about Osirion except that a book-writer wanted you to believe that it exists."
"Observation: Osirian women can't own money. Inference: therefore, the pharaoh probably does not oblige them to pay him to fuck them."
"I didn't hear any numbers."
"Thirty seven. Point one five. Eight hundred ninety six."
"Ah. A credible claim, then."
Keltham: Keltham needs a Plan.
He needs to handle this attempted mass mating rush in a way that neither immediately escalates to cuddling, nor signals that he is opposed to the mass mating per se.
Can he just... be nice and smile at the girls, but pretend not to notice their flirting attempts, for now, possibly? Or be deliberately ambiguous, leaning negative, but with occasional positive signs thrown in? Would that work to correctly signal that he was delaying but leaving his options open, if the underlying strategy was successfully decoded by the other side? It's more of a classically feminine stratagem than a classically masculine one; but 'feminine' is here standing in for the sexuality in relatively greater demand, and the inversion for his own case should be as obvious to them as it is to him. And even if the stratagem isn't correctly decoded by the amorous horde, obscured by unknown subgaps of the cultural gap between he and they, it seems relatively failsafe? Given the common-knowledge-avoidance underlying theory of flirting, sending ambiguous signals should avoid either escalating or terminating -
Wait. That style of flirting exists in dath ilan, deployed by people who know what 'common knowledge' is. 'Common knowledge' is not a very advanced formalism, but it is very plausibly not something that is known here; or plausibly something that exists, but is beyond the lower quartile of a population with -3.2 average intelligence.
A lot of romantic complications seem like they would plausibly be beyond the lower quartile of a -3.2g world, if that world designed or just equilibrated to romantic norms that worked for almost-everyone.
...do amorous girls in Cheliax... even do subtlety... at all...?
Keltham: No, he might be panicking prematurely here. Carissa opened by saying that she'd be curious about what happened to him, but afterwards mentioned that Keltham might be tired and need to find a bedroom to sleep in, rather than suggesting that they immediately go to a cuddleroom. Romantic norms here probably call for some subtlety. Probably.
...how about if he smiles in a friendly way, looks appreciative of appearances, and pretends not to notice any overtures that aren't fully overt? He's from a very alien place, and it should be much more plausible than usual that he actually isn't picking up on flirting attempts.
Keltham: At the point where Keltham noticed that he'd been surrounded by pretty girls his own age, he'd been about to... ask around for library-help, in case he was looking in the wrong place to find subject-encyclopedias.
Keltham observes of himself that he is, in fact, scared, even armed with his new Plan.
The stereotypically wise question to ask when you're scared is, "Suppose you go on avoiding this forever, how well will that work out for you?"
And Keltham knows well that he does not, in fact, wish to avoid talking to amorous female hordes forever. Every man must, at some point, talk to the amorous female hordes bent on mating with him, and pretend not to notice. This is wisdom.