1.1 - mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus

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

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

lintamande: He has the rapt attention of the horde.

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

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

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

" - he might not say -"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Probably someone could fetch it for you."

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

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

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

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

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

"I know I saw Serrano's Abjuration -"

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

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

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

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

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

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

lintamande: Mage's Faithful Hound

5th Circle, Conjuration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facts that are likely to become clear to his audience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

"Negotiated with who?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Who'd he like best?"

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

"What'd he like best."

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

"He's not subtle."

"Well, he's insane."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abadar: - drops seven levels on the squirrel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: ...wait a minute.

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

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

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

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

Keltham: First spell, heck yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

There's a knock on the door.

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

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

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

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

"He what? Of who?"

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

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

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

"There's a god of that?"

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

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

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

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

"We don't think so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hmm. Even Keltham's?"

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

"What argument do you think he would make?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you worried about that?"

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

"Are you worried for yourself?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey, uh -"

Right.

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

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

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

Carissa Sevar: "You -

- what -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abadar: It most certainly is a good time to -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

lintamande: He has

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

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

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

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

(most complex) Spell Immunity, Glimpse of Truth

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

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

Keltham: Oh that's just wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carissa Sevar: "Sure thing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minor illusion: second circle spell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: Oh that's not even slightly good.

Keltham keeps his face neutral through all presented spells.

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

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

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

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

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

Sanctuary is unambiguously a huge fucking warning.

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

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

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

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

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

"Also breakfast."

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

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

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

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

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

Carissa Sevar: "His god gave him Sanctuary."

lintamande: "I see."

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

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

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

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

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

Keltham: Keltham will try gainfully to distinguish these two faces from all other Chelians! He also tries to figure out how to avoid revealing whether he has Detect Magic right now, without lying of course.

"Don't rely on my correctly using Detect Magic soon, it's questionable how well I'll be able to cast or hold onto anything in my first days. In a few days that might be a secure assumption though."

lintamande: "All right. There's a wizard spell called Arcane Mark which wizards can use to create a distinctive magical signature for themselves or various objects. It's imitable, but they'd have to get very near us to see what to imitate. Once you can Detect Magic, you'll want to get a look at us and learn those, which would make it very hard for anyone to impersonate us to you."

Carissa Sevar: "Have you got something for reflexes, to help him catch cantrips -"