Ione Sala: "Fresh as the sparkling morning dew, sir.  If it's not too forward of me, can I ask what kind of golems you have in your current collection?"

Keltham: "Well, that is a bit forward, I'm afraid.  We've hardly even met and here you're asking me about my previous golem history?"  Keltham slides an inch forward, leans slightly, and smiles flirtatiously at Ione.  It seems like a good idea to practice this particular skill at all, before the spell wears off.

Ione Sala: Ione smiles back.  "It does tend to help in providing a man with an additional golem perfectly to his taste," she says solemnly.

Carissa Sevar: Everyone seems incredibly entertained. Of course, Carissa herself seems incredibly entertained, while in reality this is occupying a tiny fraction of her attention, and who is she to say, really, that that isn't true of everyone else. Ione, who presumably isn't stupid enough to have told everyone she's a oracle of Nethys, is pretending - what, exactly? Something's up with an invisible assassin halfling who might or might not be watching this, and that sure is some distracting information to have. ...for that matter, maybe every single person here - except Keltham, who couldn't hide it - is having a day as interesting as Carissa's. The devil didn't promise the same offer wasn't being extended to everyone in the room. Here she's been thinking she did something special but maybe this is actually just the default outcome in a situation of as much interest to the gods as this one.

While Ione and Keltham are flirting she checks for illusions, which would be suggestive of whether anyone has been arrested and is being impersonated already. No one...seems to be? A promising sign, if they've all made it through the first day alive.

Carissa hopes she is not called on for Improv With Innueno and relatedly is not at all in the mood to go on a date tonight. An hour ago she was all delighted about it but now she does not want to beat Keltham at a challenge of sexual cleverness, she wants...what does she want.... to burn in the purified flames of Hell and emerge perfected. Well. That's kind of kinky.

Keltham: Keltham's very weirdly augmented social-presentation skills are telling him that he's screwing up, faster than they're telling him how to fix it; the problem isn't in his body's execution of the orders his mind is sending, it's that his mind is sending bad orders.  Ione may be acting interested for the sake of this skit, but in real life, well, he's not sure because everybody here is sort of hard to read, but in real life, Ione probably wouldn't be interested in the Roguish Gentleman Template he picked up from some of his own previous larping?  Even if that Roguish Gentleman Template was being perfectly executed, and even if it didn't come across as a weird dath ilani trope that may not even exist here?  Even if he's learning, he's probably learning the wrong thing right now.

Keltham is used to this feeling.  He knows that learning a new art often feels like screwing up, or even meta-screwing-up the process of learning.  It doesn't occur to him to be embarrassed about that happening in public, he clearly said that he was going into a learning and practice mode; like, how would people here even know how to read if they'd never learned and practiced anything in the presence of another human being.

He tries another couple of flirting exchanges, makes no headway on the problem of getting Ione to admit when she's getting off work and leaving her workshop open to robbery, and then gives up.

"This scenario isn't working for me, can we switch again?" Keltham says, with more calm and confidence than that statement even warranted.

lintamande: "I'm trying to hire some adventurers to clean the rats out of my garden," Asmodia says, "and you're all desperate to impress me with your qualifications."

Carissa Sevar: "I fought a dragon once," says Carissa instantly, "Well, I was there while some people fought a dragon - pseudoddragon, but still. They're really rats with wings, they are, and after that regular rats don't seem so frightening. Unless they've got the plague. Which would still be fine, I fought the plague once. Well, I was there while some people fought the plague -"

lintamande: "I once slew three dozen rats in single combat, when I was a gladiator slave in Katapesh," says Tonia. 

"I once did that barehanded," says Gregoria. "I used the corpse of the first rat to kill all the others."

Keltham: Reliable salesman, go.  "I've solved over five thousand garden rat problems exactly like yours over just the past 10 days," Keltham says.

(Gladiator slave in Kata-something sounds unpleasant and like one of those things that's hard to translate into Baseline, but you hear a lot of things like that when you're a dath ilani in Golarion; Keltham decides not to put it on his priority list of things to ask about after an instant of internally sighing hesitation.)

lintamande: "Five thousand?" says Asmodia. "How do you find the time?"

Keltham: "Subcontractors," Keltham says instantly.

lintamande: "And you can cut out the middleman and just hire the subcontractors - I'm one of them," says Pilar. "He's the guy you need if you need to hire a lot of contractors, but not if you need to kill a lot of rats."

Carissa Sevar: "Someone with that big of a rat-killing business has a lot of incentive to be going around releasing rats in everyone's gardens. How much do you trust him?"

lintamande: "I have solved a million rat problems just like yours in the last ten days," Meritxell says. "I battled the rat god  Lao Shu Po in Tian Xia, and by injuring her grievously decreased global rat problems by 1 percent. If I even walk near your garden, the rats will run scared."

Keltham: Good comprehension of perverse incentives, Carissa!  Keltham wasn't quite sure how much of that kind of knowledge would exist in a place like Cheliax.

"As a full-service company we also offer post-action reports on the root cause of your rat problems," Keltham says smoothly, sounding like a much more reliable and businesslike salesperson than all his wild-eyed competitors.  "If you're concerned about our ethics, we can offer full-service ethical investigations of rat-related companies.  Buy all three of our services and get 20% off."

Carissa Sevar: "For half his price," Carissa says, "I'll fight your rats, find whoever's spreading rats everywhere, and feed them to the rats."

lintamande: "What if it's the rats that are spreading rats everywhere?" Asmodia asks skeptically.

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I'll feed the rats to the other rats in a rat pit of cannibalistic death, and sell tickets, and split the profits with you."

Keltham: "My competitors talk a good game but have you considered that they might actually be rats wearing clever disguises."

Carissa Sevar: "For a rat extermination job, you want to hire a rat. We know how rats think. We know where rats live. And we know what rats fear more than death."

Keltham: "For a rat problem, you want the best experts on rats.  Most rats are too close to rats to see rats clearly.  Our highly trained rat experts -"

The Eagle's Splendour wears off.  Keltham decides in a split second to try to continue and see how much of a difference it makes and whether anyone says they've noticed.

"- live in distant, isolated microcities where they do nothing except think about rats and experiment on rats every day.  When rats have a rat question, they come to us."

lintamande: "You must be very busy, leading the world in rat extermination and rat research and ethics studies and rat infestation origin research," Meritxell says. "Unless you know the origins of all the rat infestations before you start, since you're releasing them, something your position as the world leader in rat research would easily enable you to do. You don't want a rat or a rat researcher. You want someone whose footsteps make rats tremble. And that's me."

Carissa Sevar: "Fight against the rat god must've gone pretty badly, if you're now reduced to begging for garden assignments."

lintamande: "I just hate rats so much I can't stop until they're all dead."

Keltham: "What say we all compromise?  We'll all do the job together so she has no other options, charge her twenty times the price, and split the revenue fairly among ourselves."

lintamande: There are nods all around. "FINE," Asmodia says, flinging her hands in the air hopelessly, and then there are cheers.

"Are you going to need that Haste," says the security wizard, tiredly. 

Keltham: "Yeah, let me swap to Owl's Wisdom and then we'll run through it.  Eagle's Splendour only wore off a quarter-minute ago, for what it's worth, I wanted to see if anyone noticed from outside."

lintamande: "Do you only have Wisdom and Splendour and not Cunning?" Meritxell asks. "I'd use Cunning, to try to learn spells...I guess Wisdom might be better for just trying to understand the basics of how magic moves."

Keltham: "Oh, right.  I was thinking it might be wiser to try only one mental augment at a time on my first day.  And no, my god didn't give me Cunning, I think Carissa thought it wasn't a cleric spell?  But if somebody else has it - you're the experts, tell me which one I should use."

lintamande: "In general wizardry goes more off cunning. Cunning is cleverness, math, working memory, visualization. Wisdom is - perceptiveness, wordless inference, noticing if your thought patterns are avoiding something. I have Cunning, if you want."

Keltham: "Key capability loading for catching a cantrip doesn't seem like cleverness and working memory, though, so much as perception and speed?  Not saying you're wrong, just voicing my noticed confusion."

lintamande: “Yeah, there’s honestly an argument that what you’re specifically doing wants Dexterity rather than any of the mental enhancements, and wisdom is probably fine, even though in general wizards trying to grasp a new concept are limited on Cunning.”

”I can give him dexterity too,” says the security wizard slightly impatiently.

Keltham: Keltham doesn't need arguments, he's too ignorant for those, he needs somebody more informed to give him the correct decision!  "Snap poll, dath ilani version.  Put your hand in front of your face, then move it up if you think I should use Wisdom, move it down if you think I should use Cunning, how far you move your hand away from face level indicates the strength of your opinion.  If you think I'm asking the wrong question, close your hand into a fist to signal defiance of the question itself, but answer anyways.  Again, that's up for Wisdom, down for Cunning, fist to complain about the question."  Keltham demonstrates by moving his hand in both directions as he speaks, and briefly closing it into a fist.

lintamande: The girls watch each other nervously and settle on a moderately strong recommendation for Wisdom which all hands then converge towards. An optimist might conclude this was because they're familiar with the theorems governing rational agents persisting in disagreements they have mutual knowledge of. A Chelish person would likely interpret their uniform recommendation in the same spirit as their uniform smiles.

Keltham: ...okay those people just looked at each other and adjusted their votes.  Later he will explain some important concepts about presenting unadjusted first impressions to avoid info cascades - or better yet, just closing your eyes until you've moved your hand into place, that seems like it would be a simpler and more robust rule for non-dath-ilani.  But security guy seems impatient, so for now he'll quietly hope that that resolution procedure had any kind of shard of Law within it for aggregating their knowledge.  At least Carissa picked an opinion (Wisdom) and stuck with it, and she's probably the most expert.

Keltham casts Owl's Wisdom on himself.

Keltham: And Keltham-the-object snaps into focus to Keltham-the-perceiver.

His first thought is that Keepers would trade out-of-preference sexual favors or do crimes for this spell.

His second thought is that there's so many thoughts he hasn't been thinking in the last day.

His third thought is that this is a mind-affecting drug, one making him think that he can think better and promising epiphanies, even if the rest of his mental processing isn't degraded.  There are protocols trained for being hit by mind-affecting drugs like that, which you're supposed to follow even if it seems like you have better ideas for things to do while you're on the mind-affecting drug.

It takes an additional effort and self-surety for Keltham to override that very trained and solemnly advised protocol, even temporarily.  But he can see, even more clearly than he could at other times, that it would be stupid to follow standard protocol and run out of this room immediately.  He knows he's more awake right now, and it doesn't matter how many people think they're becoming super awake as they fall asleep and into madness, he can tell the difference.

He still needs to cast his spells and then leave this room of untrusted others.  These are rules that derive strength from their unconditionality; there is some real sense in which even an extremely well-justified exception to them is breaking or bending a piece of the Algorithm that would work better for other people the more unconditional it is, and those people should remember the same thing about that Algorithm.  That's even leaving aside where part of his reason for violating these hard-and-fast rules about behaving under conditions of mental oddity, is that he died in a plane crash and has been in a magical world for the last day, which isn't the sort of epistemic state that - he's wasting time.

"It's up.  Dexterity, Haste?"

lintamande: The wizard casts those: Dexterity first, and then Haste.

Keltham: Keltham casts Guidance on himself.  He tries to catch that cantrip too, just in case he can.

lintamande: - yep. Then it's kind of sitting in his hand, a little fragile -

Carissa Sevar: "Now you kind of tuck it away like you're - spinning it so it's all in some other dimension -" Carissa says quickly -

Keltham: Aided by Owl's Wisdom, Keltham is already over the shock of getting that far, and trying to finish what he saw others doing earlier with his Greater Detect Magic.

lintamande: The spell folds tidily away, intact.

Keltham: Practice until the boosts run out, so he can catch cantrips in the future, or until he fails enough to be out of cantrips, or he needs to take the last of the Owl's Wisdom to truly think - is the obvious course here - so Keltham tries his Read Magic, using the boost from Guidance -

lintamande: And catches it. His harem is cheering, though mostly silently so as not to be distracting.

Keltham: Guidance again!

lintamande: He catches the spell the next four times, and by then can feel that it's starting to enter muscle memory, no longer something that without a bunch of reflex-enhancement he'd be desperately struggling to do.

Keltham: He'll start trying to cast Detect Magic using the Guidance boosts.  Detect Magic and Guidance are the two cantrips he's plausibly going to need over and over and over.

lintamande: He manages it three times in a row before, on the fourth, the window slams, security guy steps between it and Keltham casting something, and Detect Magic slips away in Keltham's instant of distraction. 

Keltham: Keltham looks at the window to see if this is a room-evacuating issue, some of what his students said about Corn Failure Modes leaping awfully to mind.  He'll also try to hold his concentration on Detect Magic, if possible.

lintamande: There are a bunch of overlapping spells on the window, but nothing observably entering through it; there is a dead bird on the ground outside the window. 

"Most likely," security guy says without moving, "it's just a regular dead bird that the Forbiddance picked off, of which there've been dozens in the last half-hour. We have a team checking it out, though."

Keltham: Keltham goes back to practicing at once.  He will continue casting Guidance and using it to boost its own next cast until Haste runs out or catching fails, then practice more Read Magic without Guidance until another minute of that passes or catching Read Magic fails.

lintamande: He doesn't fail at Guidance before Haste runs out. He manages six of Read Magic without Guidance before losing it.

Keltham: "This was a great success, everyone, and with any luck I can start looking more at how magic works tomorrow, once I can watch magic happening.  Right now, though, I think I should quickly go off by myself and think for a few remaining minutes before the Owl's Wisdom runs out, and do that right away, see you possibly at dinner -"

Keltham is grabbing a couple of sheets of paper and a writing implement even as he speaks.

lintamande: No one interferes with him.

Keltham: Keltham moves out of the room even faster than he usually would, thanks to Cat's Grace, also still in effect.

Carissa Sevar: "See you later," says Carissa, who is officially the person with the rights to that line tonight, as he reaches the door.

Keltham: Heh.  "Indeed!"  And then he's out of the library and speeds up again, on the lookout for an apparently quiet and deserted unoccupied room on the way to his assigned bedroom - he'd rather not spend remaining spelltime to reach his assigned bedroom.  But he'll go all the way to his bedroom if he doesn't see anywhere that looks appropriate for meditation.

And also he's already started thinking.

dath ilan: (Standard procedure for dealing with a mind-affecting drug that claims to produce useful insights is to write down the insights, and see how much sense they still make after the drug wears off.

While that's going on, you don't let people who aren't Keeper-trained and Keeper-oathbound talk to you.  You especially don't talk to people you don't trust an awful lot.  You double-especially don't talk to whoever talked you into using the drug or maybe subtly guided you down a path that ended with that decision.  There are known drugs that seem to have an effect of permanently relaxing your priors about whatever somebody says to you while you're on drugs, which in dath ilani terms is something like a date rape of the soul.  Keltham has had drugs that mimic the more innocuous effects that go along with those, and Owl's Wisdom is absolutely nothing like them, but still.

All of this is, in any case, advice you'd only need in the first place if you went to a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Or if a criminal dosed you.  Dath ilan does not recognize any uses of lysergic acid diethylamide, dimethyltryptamine, or psilocybin, within the mainstream of Well-Advised Consumer Goods.  They don't do anything useful that can't be done by a high-ranking Keeper just talking at you.)

lintamande: The room right across from the library appears to be some kind of administrative staging area but the room after that, some kind of antechamber, is empty.

Keltham: Keltham ducks in and starts writing.  Translation spells are a thing, and he's not sure how that interacts with cracking the kiddie's substitution cipher he has memorized, for writing non-readable notes to himself in RPGs and so on.  Instead he's going to write down some cultural references from his homeworld, and hope that there's no version of a cultural translation spell that reads through those; Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, as it were.

He doesn't have time to think through very much, the first priority is just to write out all the things he hasn't been thinking, notes to himself to hang the thoughts upon, to be followed up later.

Blue and orange, is the first thing he scratches out.  There's a constant drumbeat of hints that the people around him operate on a very alien and possibly inhumane morality, and he's been saying things to himself like Carissa was probably making a joke he failed to get, when she talked about tossing the rats into a pit to cannibalize each other and selling tickets to that like people would pay to see it.  There's a whole history of little pings like that and his brain pushing back at the dissonance with 'Maybe it was a joke I didn't get?' and he can see that, now, while he's got Owl's Wisdom running.

Subverted True-man Show, he writes out next.  The girls all wore permanently cheerful expressions during class, Meritxell and Ione and everyone else didn't read as any less genuine to him than their usual selves read while they were acting out routines, like they were all experienced actresses, like they were all already acting.  But they're not running a well-designed full Immersive Reality TV Show trope on him either.  If they were really such good actresses, with smart people and smart scripts behind them, they wouldn't be giving that away by wearing permanently cheerful smiles during class, or by not acting awkward when they were called on to act out new weird scenarios.  They're not trying to prevent him from realizing that they all have and are using acting abilities like he got from his Charisma boost, which, if they were actually constructing a false reality around him, would be the first thing they'd try to avoid him knowing.

(Keltham also makes a note in the back of his mind, not for the first time today, that if they don't get adequate Governance support and don't end up with more urgent priorities, inventing ballpoint pens sure seems like it should be a moneymaker.)

Keltham: The next part is - hard for him to write.  It feels like it's a betrayal of the person that he'll be, when this temporary boost wears off, to think about this part, to write down the anchor for it.  But he can't unsee it, and it's already too late.

There is a commonly held wisdom, in dath ilan, about the way a human mind is put together, that it is a thing made of little subtle tensions and balances and internal compromises.  The human mind being the limited thing that it is, these balances form around your current level of ability to see into yourself and see the implications of what you already know - or not see them, as the case may be.  The reason why not everybody runs off to learn all they can from Keepers, the reason why not everyone asks a Keeper to tell them all the answers about themselves, is that this would bring parts of themselves into conflict that were previously living in a more agreeable truce of ignorance.  You might not survive as yourself, if you could see yourself.

Those who say "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" may continue to walk the Path from there.  But not uncommonly, even somebody who sets out along that Path, turns back at some point, and well short of becoming a Keeper.  It's not a trivial price, higher for some than others, and there is varying willingness to pay.  A lot of the reason why Keepers exist as what they are, is that the people who have large comparative advantages there - in how little they'll be hurt by knowing themselves, or how much they really internally want to keep going anyways - are conceived of by larger society as being paid to throw themselves on that grenade, so others don't have to.  And if, to some Keepers, it doesn't feel like much of a grenade at all, they understand that their case is not typical, and are grateful for winning the comparative-advantage lottery.

Going up by two local standard deviations, in whatever it is that Owl's Wisdom enhances, is something that the current structures of Keltham's personality were never built to withstand.  He knows, from up here, because he couldn't stop himself from glancing in that direction, that in dath ilan he would never have had his 144 children.  He would have tried to be special and failed and been sad and then maybe gotten an ordinary +0.8sd job and either paid for a child out of that or decided he was too strange and unhappy to have one.

It's not considered necessary for somebody Keltham's age to go and pay a Keeper to tell them exactly what the probabilities are, about something like that.  It's not so much that people are encouraged to lie to themselves, reality forbid, but that people are told it's okay for them not to shove themselves as hard as possible down the Pathway that will dissolve the mistakes their current personality is built out of.  That's what Keepers are for.  They do it so that not everybody else has to.  There are grownups around in Civilization, who can and will speak up if the people less mature are about to make some terrible mistake out of their blindness.  So you do not need to rush ahead to be a Keeper if you'd rather be a little less coherent, a little more yourself and your mistakes and your contradictions, a little more human, for a time.

But it's too late now, for Keltham to go back, because also in the common wisdom is that once you see what it is you weren't letting yourself see - once you know which mistakes your personality is founded upon - or even if you're trying hard not to know it, to the point where it's becoming a big internal battle - well, at that point, you're supposed to give it up.  It means that, well, sorry, you are that smart now, like it or not, you are that wise, you did grow up that much whether or not you wished to stay a child for longer; it's time to move on.

And the part where he was going to fail at his life's goals, in dath ilan, isn't even the important thing that he can't help but see now, about himself; realize now, at this level of wisdom.

dath ilan: There was a question asked once of some bright children, among whom Keltham was numbered; in a class where he had seemed to be among the oldest and worst performers; a class assembled of kids who were faster than Keltham.

And young Keltham had, by that time, already seen through some of the Lies Told To Children; he was past his experience with finding that lightly injured adult on his way home.  He had learned that children are sometimes put into contrived situations meant to teach them things.  Keltham was suspicious already, before the key moment; he had already guessed that he was meant to learn, in this class, something about what it feels like to be surrounded by others faster and more knowledgeable and even younger than you are.

But in this guess, Keltham proved to be wrong; he was not the one there who was to learn a lesson, that day.

The class was on self-integrity, and relatedly morals; a class taught directly by a Watcher-over-Children, not entrusted to older children at all.

And the Watcher told the class a parable about an adult, coming across a child who'd somehow bypassed the various safeguards around a wilderness area, and fallen into a muddy pond, and seemed to be showing signs of drowning (for they'd already been told, then, what drowning looked like).  The water, in this parable, didn't look like it would be over their own adult heads.  But - in the parable - they'd just bought some incredibly-expensive clothing, costing dozens of their own labor-hours, and less resilient than usual, that would be ruined by the muddy water.

And the Watcher asked the class if they thought it was right to save the child, at the cost of ruining their clothing.

Everyone in there moved their hand to the 'yes' position, of course.  Except Keltham, who by this point had already decided quite clearly who he was, and who simply closed his hand into a fist, otherwise saying neither 'yes' nor 'no' to the question, defying it entirely.

The Watcher asked him to explain, and Keltham said that it seemed to him that it was okay for an adult to take an extra quarter-minute to strip off all their super-expensive clothing and then jump in to save the child.

The Watcher invited the other children to argue with Keltham about that, which they did, though Keltham's first defense, that his utility function was what it was, had not been a friendly one, or inviting of further argument.  But they did eventually convince Keltham that, especially if you weren't sure you could call in other help or get attention or successfully drag the child's body towards help, if that child actually did drown - meaning the child's true life was at stake - then it would make sense to jump in right away, not take the extra risk of waiting another quarter-minute to strip off your clothes, and bill the child's parents' insurance for the cost.  Or at least, that was where Keltham shifted his position, in the face of that argumentative pressure.

Some kids, at that point, questioned the Watcher about this actually being a pretty good point, and why wouldn't anyone just bill the child's parents' insurance.

To which the Watcher asked them to consider hypothetically the case where insurance refused to pay out in cases like that, because it would be too easy for people to set up 'accidents' letting them bill insurances - not that this precaution had proven to be necessary in real life, of course.  But the Watcher asked them to consider the Least Convenient Possible World where insurance companies, and even parents, did need to reason like that; because there'd proven to be too many master criminals setting up 'children at risk of true death from drowning' accidents that they could apparently avert and claim bounties on.

Well, said Keltham, in that case, he was going right back to taking another fifteen seconds to strip off his super-expensive clothes, if the child didn't look like it was literally right about to drown.  And if society didn't like that, it was society's job to solve that thing with the master criminals.  Though he'd maybe modify that if they were in a possible-true-death situation, because a true life is worth a huge number of labor-hours, and that part did feel like some bit of decision theory would say that everyone would be wealthier if everyone would sacrifice small amounts of wealth to save huge amounts of somebody else's wealth, if that happened unpredictably to people, and if society was also that incompetent at setting up proper reimbursements.  Though if it was like that in real life instead of the Least Convenient Possible World, it would mean that Civilization was terrible at coordination and it was time to overthrow Governance and start over.

This time the smarter kids did not succeed in pushing Keltham away from his position, and after a few more minutes the Watcher called a halt to it, and told the assembled children that they had been brought here today to learn an important lesson from Keltham about self-integrity.

Keltham is being coherent, said the Watcher.

Keltham's decision is a valid one, given his own utility function (said the Watcher); you were wrong to try to talk him into thinking that he was making an objective error.

It's easy for you to say you'd save the child (said the Watcher) when you're not really there, when you don't actually have to make the sacrifice of what you spent so many hours laboring to obtain, and would you all please note how none of you even considered about whether or not to spend a quarter-minute stripping off your clothes, or whether to try to bill the child's parents' insurance.  Because you were too busy showing off how Moral you were, and how willing to make Sacrifices.  Maybe you would decide not to do it, if the fifteen seconds were too costly; and then, any time you spent thinking about it, would also have been costly; and in that sense it might make more sense given your own utility functions (unlike Keltham's) to rush ahead without taking the time to think, let alone the time to strip off your expensive fragile clothes.  But labor does have value, along with a child's life; and it is not incoherent or stupid for Keltham to weigh that too, especially given his own utility function - so said the Watcher.

Keltham did have enough dignity, by that point in his life, not to rub it in or say 'told you so' to the other children, as this would have distracted them from the process of updating.

The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts - not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that.  Something with a utility function, if it values an apple 1% more than an orange, if offered a million apple-or-orange choices, will choose a million apples and zero oranges.  The division within most people into selfish and unselfish components is not like that, you cannot feed it all with unselfish choices whatever the ratio.  Not unless you are a Keeper, maybe, who has made yourself sharper and more coherent; or maybe not even then, who knows?  For (it was said in another place) it is hazardous to non-Keepers to know too much about exactly how Keepers think.

It is dangerous to believe, said the Watcher, that you get extra virtue points the more that you let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part.  If you were older, said the Watcher, if you were more able to dissect thoughts into their parts and catalogue their effects, you would have noticed at once how this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won, because, you're meant to think, people don't need expensive clothing - although somebody who's spent a lot on expensive clothing clearly has some use for it or some part of themselves that desires it quite strongly.

It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself (said the Watcher), and your flaw is not that you made the wrong choice between the two pieces, it was that you hammered one of those pieces down.  Even though with a bit more thought, you could have at least seen the options for being that piece of yourself too, and not too expensively.

And much more importantly (said the Watcher), you failed to understand and notice a kind of outside assault on your internal integrity, you did not notice how this parable was setting up two pieces of yourself at odds, so that you could not be both at once, and arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.

"If I'd actually wanted you to twist yourselves up and burn yourselves out around this," said the Watcher, "I could have designed an adversarial lecture that would have driven everybody in this room halfway crazy - except for Keltham.  He's not just immune because he's an agent with a slightly different utility function, he's immune because he instinctively doesn't switch off a kind of self-integrity that everyone else in this class needs to learn to not switch off so easily."

It was a proud day for Keltham and a formative one, that dath ilan had acknowledged that the alien in their midst might have his uses.  Like making it slightly easier to demonstrate a useful children's lesson for a class full of the smarter and more altruistic kids who would actually grow up to matter.  But even so, there's a difference between growing up in a world that has no place for you and no use for you and respects nothing about you, versus a world which has a place for you and some use for you and ever really actually admits you can get some things right a little faster.

Keltham: Keltham doesn't review all that in his mind.  There isn't enough time left on the Owl's Wisdom for that.

The other thing he sees, from up here, is the point that his mind was put together the way it is, including the part where he's a kid who doesn't have to rush down the Path to stare at things like the truth that he couldn't have made a difference in dath ilan, and including the part where his contribution to diversity is pursuing the Way of being selfish and the things that selfish people can see faster than others, his whole self was put together, based on the assumption that he's in dath ilan, where, if Keltham is like that, terrible things won't happen to him.

Or to other people.

Golarion isn't dath ilan.

His entire self and personality and emotional balance was assembled around beliefs that might not still be true.  Probably aren't true.

Keltham doesn't try to make any big decisions right now, he shouldn't, that's not what you do when you're on a new mind-affecting drug that is promising all kinds of startling revelations about yourself and what a foolish wrong person you've been.  But it's something that he needs to think about after the spell wears off.

Drowning child, Keltham writes on the paper.  Sorry.

Keltham: The spell doesn't wear off immediately after he writes it, because reality isn't dramatic like that.

He spends the remaining time looking around himself for other hidden thoughts instead, because that is the sensible thing to do, and when your Wisdom goes up by two local standard deviations, doing the sensible thing has a greater intuitive force because you can actually see how it is sensible and why.

Keltham: And then the spell wears off.

Keltham: He spends a while just breathing evenly, trying to absorb the full force of the blow he's taken, which is also a recommended procedure.

Flowers for mouse, he thinks, and doesn't bother to write it on the paper, because it's not a message from the Wiser Keltham, and he doesn't even really feel that way, it's just his brain completing a cliche.

Keltham: They - also say you're not supposed to throw away and revise your entire personality at once - and he is still himself, he is still Keltham, he is not an average dath ilani carrying out a LARP assignment of being more selfish than average, he is actually the person who didn't need to be taught self-integrity and who wanted to be paid for helping somebody else.  If he decides to change things, it will have to be built around who Keltham is, a person who is not an average dath ilani.  And an average dath ilani would have to make changes too, if they were here.  Only a Keeper is supposed to be built out of pure sharp coherent abstractions that could walk from one world to another and not need to change their clothes along the way.

The part of himself that's terrified he's going to suddenly admit that everything he holds dear was a factual mistake and turn himself into an average dath ilani in dath ilan, is - probably right to be terrified in some ways, because in many particular dimensions that's a kind of decision that his Wiser self left open as a possibility, and he can't unsee or unremember things he should have been too young and stupid to see.  But he is not supposed to turn into an average dath ilani in dath ilan.  He needs to be Keltham in Golarion.

Keltham: Why didn't they warn him?

Because people in Golarion get Owl's Wisdom cast on them once every six months, and they've never experienced what it's like to have gone your whole life without Owl's Wisdom?

Somehow Keltham doesn't think that's it.

It's a piece of - something wrong, something he doesn't know, something he believes that's false - about this entire situation, this entire world.  People not quite behaving like obvious models say they should.

...or they just have so little internal stuff that is actually powered by self-reflection that not very much happens to them when they suddenly get amplified reflection?

No, that also feels like one of those weird excuses that Keltham was coming up with inside, to dismiss puzzle pieces.

Keltham does feel - annoyed, on some level, injured even, that there weren't more warning signs.  He thought he was getting a perception boost or maybe the equivalent of +0.1sd at some innate mental quality, not this.  Or, well, no, he didn't have that much of a model, he didn't really think about it at all, he didn't ask, because he was still mentally living in a world where everything that can hit you really hard has a clearly attached warning sign that Civilization put there.

Keltham: But it's also not the sort of thing that you should just allow to happen, if you are running a massive complicated scam on the alien visitor.  Unless you figure that you can't really stop him from casting Owl's Wisdom on himself so you might as well just let it happen?  They could've told him it would only last ten seconds and then sneakily hit him with a Dispel Magic, he knows that's a standard magic, it was in the books.

Keltham: Keltham can feel that he's thinking little dissonant pieces of thoughts grinding against themselves, and he knows that if he had Owl's Wisdom back, he would be able to see how and why they were grinding against themselves and sort them out much more easily.

Maybe if he casts this spell on himself once per day, and practices thinking the way he practiced cantrips, he'll be able to - well, turn into a more Keeperlike version of himself.

If he wants that.

Well, no, he's pretty sure he doesn't want that.

If he chooses it anyways.

Keltham: There is - something dangerous, Keltham thinks, about having a sense of perspective, if too much of it comes on too quickly - there is seeing yourself, and the shadow of everything you've done, from the perspective where it is smaller and stupider - even the parts of you that provided all of your drive and your will and your sense of enjoyment in life, maybe not as ill things in themselves, but arranged stupidly - and with no better way to arrange them being obvious, as yet, because you were only wiser for something less than eight minutes.  Of which you spent half that time practicing spellcasting.

He is - not looking forwards as much, to his date with Carissa tonight, as he was an hour ago.  Because he's looked back and reflected on himself, and on the whole headlong rush forwards that is a defining quality of Mad Investor Chaos.  And now he is, in fact, thinking questioning thoughts about whether it is really in his own long-term self-interest - or yes the interest of a bunch of drowning children that he does care about literally at all even if he wants to be paid for saving them - for him to prioritize having sex with his research harem as one of his top goals on his second day in another universe.

Should he actually be hesitant about that?  It doesn't make sense, does it?  He should not, in the face of this shock, have suddenly turned into a standard dath ilani.  He is still himself, he should still have the parts of himself that are hyped for a date with Carissa.  Being hit with a temporary spell should not have changed those internal parts.  And if now his self is in a weird internal state of strife that prevents him from ever having any fun again - then he is pretty sure a Keeper would tell him that this is not the optimal way to get smashed and rearranged by a temporary reflectivity-increasing mind-affecting drug.

Keltham: There's a lot to be said for trying to snap out of this and go back to his normal, and then only change one piece of himself at a time from there, in response to new facts about Golarion as he actually learns them, because Keltham has not precached any other sensibly configured ways to be.

That sounds to Keltham like the sort of standard advice that a Keeper would give you about what to do if you've had an overly large epiphany, especially one induced by a temporary state of perception you can't go back and access again.

Keltham continues to sit and think, for a time.

lintamande: The girls glare expectantly at Ione the instant Keltham leaves the room.

Ione Sala: Ione is now trying to think very fast.

So.  They obviously haven't been told.  Which, earlier, Ione thought in the back of her mind would happen as soon as the security wizard walked out after gouging her eye, because they'd tell her former classmates about the new security risk, because all of Cheliax would unite against her in hating her and hurting her as much as they could short of killing her.  Apparently the part where, by default, security doesn't tell anyone anything, takes higher precedence.

Also she is now visibly useful to the project and that casts a different shade on the whole thing where - she knows how she wishes this would go, but to make security go along with it, she needs to have something to offer security, something to bargain with security, something that Nethys wouldn't require her to just hand over anyways -

She also has to choose how to answer the expectant looks, now, even if it's silence she has to make it clearly deliberate -

Ione thinks of something she can offer security, and picks her strategy to try with the other girls, because she doesn't want to spend the rest of her life with Keltham's other women being as cruel to her as won't kill her, whenever Keltham isn't looking.

"So I'm not really sure," Ione says, using the glorious feeling of realizing her curse's real power to fuel a smile, "but I think Asmodeus cut a deal with Nethys, to go in on Keltham's project together, and I was the person here who was best suited to get the power from Nethys to summon temporary copies of books from other libraries plus whatever else it is I can do now.  Didn't do it on purpose, just happened to me."

lintamande: There is an astonished silence. But she's - not dead, which says that they're not supposed to kill her, which is something. 

"Security," says Paxti after a few seconds, "I'm obliged to report evidence of forbidden primary worship even if I think you have it already."

This makes everyone else tense nervously, because they didn't say that, but now obviously it's too late. 

Security is most visibly at the window, making sure the dead bird is just a dead bird. 

"You should walk to the Forbiddance boundary and back," Meritxell says. "To prove you're still loyal to Hell. The Forbiddance won't hurt you if you are."

Ione Sala: "Or they could just tell me to fail a Will save and read my mind.  Also Forbiddance goes by alignment, not loyalty to Asmodeus, and I wouldn't be here if they weren't sure about Lawful Evil."

"But, sure, if an expert says that getting touched by Nethys didn't change my alignment for Forbiddance purposes, I'll walk out and walk back if the actual security here tells me I should."

Ione Sala: Ione thinks, loudly, about her offer to security, if they don't shoot her down on this.  Keltham's going to want a book on cleric spells at some point, she's guessing, and if they make up their own version of a book or remove a few pages, and hide it in this library, Ione can summon a copy of that to give to Keltham.  Nethys, she thinks, wouldn't want her to withhold help from Keltham's project, so she knows she doesn't have her help to bargain with, she knows she has to give it anyways.  But the version of this where she's actively cooperating with security, giving them helpful suggestions like that, and going along with Cheliax's masquerades - if she's doing all that, she wants to be treated more like Nethys's oracle that got sent here by pact with Asmodeus to help with Cheliax's project, which is probably what she really is - and not be treated like a heretic and traitor she never asked to become or wanted to be.

lintamande: Elias Abarco pulls off his invisibility, looking greatly annoyed. He's mostly annoyed because Ione doesn't seem to care about anybody; they spent the last couple hours checking up on familial and nonfamilial relations they could murder or nearly murder to make a point, and her parents sold her to the school and she has an older brother who by all accounts hates her and she hates him back. This is healthy and encouraged in young wizards but it's damn inconvenient when one is irritated with Ione Sala and really wants to rip something she cares about to pieces before her eyes. 

He nods to Paxti, because she was right and should know it.

"She's still Lawful Evil," he says curtly. "Paxti, you should hit the rest of them, for being slow in reporting. Do you know the spell -"

    "Yes."

And he looks at Ione. Raises his eyebrows, slightly, nods even more slightly than that. And heads off to see why the damned bird is taking them so long, because it turns out that supervising a bunch of god-touched teenagers is the worst.

Ione Sala: Ione does not think thank you, obviously, there are so few occasions in Cheliax where it's ever appropriate to say that, she's surprised sometimes the word hasn't died out.  Deal, is what she thinks back, along with her very Lawful and Asmodean intention to keep her deals fully if the other party keeps theirs.

lintamande: Paxti is not actually delighted by this assignment at all, not that this shows on her face; they're very much playing an iterated game here, and that means that hitting people too hard is risky, and hitting people too lightly is risky, and while no one's outright glaring at her several of them look a bit contemptuous, even though she got this right and they got this wrong. The contemptuousness is a sign she should err on the side of 'too hard'. 

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would kind of like for less of her mental energy to be caught up in imagining there is an invisible halfling from Otolmens here ready to kill someone. It's really cramping her style. But there is a halfling, or at least there might be, unless Asmodeus told Aspexia Rugatonn to do something different, which is not less terrifying, and so she doesn't want to particularly confront Ione, even though she has some good material for it, or even ask Ione for a book, which is what she'd do if there were slightly less at stake here, because it seems likely that Nethys's intervention here is part of what Otolmens is objecting to...

Paxti's spell slaps her, harder than people usually bother with. Carissa wishes there were a way for Paxti to know that she's not just affecting being so absorbed in more important matters that she barely noticed, she actually is so absorbed in more important matters than she barely noticed, but there's not.

Ione Sala: "I never worshipped Nethys," Ione says while this is going on.  "I never deliberately read anything about any gods that weren't Asmodeus.  I passed my loyalty checks.  You report it because it's evidence, but while you're doing that, have your own sense about what must have actually happened.  Nethys has an obvious interest in working with Asmodeus on this, and I doubt there are any actual Nethys worshippers on site or who'd be allowed in.  I was just the one there who liked books."

Then Ione realizes what she has to say, and it also works for her own benefit that she says it - "Note, though.  Keltham thinks I'm a secret Nethys worshipper, and I've told him that probably most of you and most Chelish government officials wouldn't care, but that I wasn't sure.  Security thinks that, once Keltham learns the spells to verify that I'm Nethys-touched, I can be a secret worshipper of Nethys here who confirms our stories to him.  So don't treat me as anything except somebody with a weird book-fetching power, anywhere Keltham might see that.  You are not supposed to know anything about me other than that, and even if you did, Keltham doesn't think that worshipping Nethys is something that'd get most people after me."

It's a security advisory, it's clearly a correct security advisory, and if Ione gives it before anybody else does, it means Ione is somebody who sometimes says what the security advisories are.  Which, obviously she absolutely will never abuse for anything Chelish security would not in fact like, she is a very good and cooperative oracle of Nethys, she is only securing her own safety among the lesser mortals who aren't security.

lintamande: The lesser mortals who aren't security take the meaning and look variously impressed or annoyed or unreadable. 

"Can you get destroyed books?" says Meritxell after a moment. "Can you get books out of Abadar's vault?"

Ione Sala: "No, it seems pretty power-balanced so far," Ione says, hardly even thinking about the learned reflex that halts her instinct to start spilling the exact details of what she can do.  "At least at the current circle-equivalent of whatever it is."

lintamande: "Huh. Well, if you go mad I'll try to put you down while there's still something for Hell to salvage." And she heads off to dinner. 

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wonders absently what Meritxell would do if instructed by Asmodeus Himself to learn to be more Evil. 

Ione Sala: Ione will go back to her usual quiet self unless people ask her more questions or actively talk to her, while she goes on trying to rethink her life.  She clearly can't continue playing her game of being the quiet one and never attracting attention, but that was just a game, so it shouldn't be too hard for her to figure out a different one.  She could have levered her higher grades into a position of more dominance in the classroom, she could have played riskier games and ended up closer to the top; she just deliberately decided it wasn't worth the risk, before, and now she doesn't have that option anymore.

(Being the quiet one was just a game move, right?)

lintamande: Elias shoos the other kids out to dinner, after a few more minutes of them playing stupid teenager social games, so he can have another word with Ione. 

"You should strip," he says, once they've left. "I am considering lighting you on fire and it'd be inconvenient to replace your clothes."

Ione Sala: Ione Sala takes off her clothes immediately, without protest, old reflexes of fear overwhelming her and making it hard to think much further.  She manages not to tremble too much about it.

lintamande: "I am noticing a pattern," Elias says. "The pattern is, you decide that actually fucking submitting to the will of Asmodeus and promptly doing whatever He wants would be inconvenient for you personally, maybe get you killed, so instead you try to sell your obedience, to which we are already entitled, in bits and chunks, for things you want. Do you see how I might have observed this pattern."

Ione Sala: "Nethys has a grip on my soul now, I can feel it, and it doesn't matter whether or not I object to Asmodeus making that deal, but you wouldn't let Nethys keep up His end of whatever this is unless I made it hard for you to sweep me out of the way, which I know I have to do because otherwise Nethys will break me, and I wouldn't be surprised if Asmodeus predicted that when He gave me to Nethys because He also knew that security would try to -"

lintamande: Elias does light her on fire, at that point, just because the sentence runs on so long. He doesn't maintain the spell for longer than its natural one round, though; he regrettably actually should not kill her. 

"I'm not a theologian," he says, "but I'm slightly less stupid than you, and my read is, Asmodeus gave you to Nethys because Keltham's going to demand corroboration from other churches, which you can provide. And had security reached that conclusion, when you turned yourself in promptly like you should have, then we wouldn't have killed you - or would have raised you, if we didn't think of it in time. If it serves Asmodeus for you to live, then you don't have to fight like a rabid seagull to give us reason to keep you breathing, because the incentives were already there. If it serves Asmodeus for you to die, then none of these games will work. And if you're unpredictable enough, then at some point it will serve us for you to die, simply because corpses don't make sudden moves that wreck half a dozen plans they don't know about. Stop it. No more games, no more deals."

Ione Sala: This is about as painful as the most painful punishment she's been through.

"Don't care if I die," she coughs out, when she can speak.  She doesn't try to stop the trembles, the sobs that interrupt her, but she knows that this is probably the most important negotiation of her life, so she should spend everything she has on continuing it.  "Belong to - Nethys - have to work - for Him - I served Asmodeus from fear - because He would get my soul - and you know that's good enough - for Lord Asmodeus - but it's not true - anymore - don't tell me what Asmodeus wants - that's your side - mine is - what Nethys wants - so I want to make a deal - Asmodean - and then I'll be - predictable."

lintamande: "Sure. Here's your deal. Stop fucking with me. You live, you stay in your library, you get the books we tell you to get, you study magic very diligently and impress Nethys, he likes high-circle casters, and you never again screw us over for the sake of your bargaining position, or I'll see to it you never hit third circle, and I don't think Nethys cares at all about people who have barely started studying magic. Lots of people don't hit third. Keltham won't be suspicious. If you don't give me an easier way to do it, I will do it by making you stupider, and I know how Nethys would feel about you then. Got it?"

Ione Sala: There's a flare of hate in her then, now that she won't go to Hell for hating Asmodeus's servants.  And with that hate, flashes of contempt, starting to arrange themselves around her sudden new identity.  She is too scared, too shaking from being on fire for a minute, and too angry, not to think the thoughts that she is thinking now.

You can make Asmodeans into high-level wizards, if you give them enough intelligence boosts, but you can't make them think.  She's not particularly happy about having thought that, she doesn't actually want to insult the person in front of her if he's reading her mind, but the thought came to her anyways.

The security wizard hasn't realized that this entire conversation has been predicted out by Nethys and Asmodeus, he isn't curious about the divine, he isn't keeping his eyes open and because of that he doesn't see.  He's posturing about serving Asmodeus, and not realizing how this whole interaction they're having right now is something that Asmodeus no doubt had to work around and pay Nethys extra for in order to get a library oracle on His project.  She hopes somebody in Hell has a very very long talk with him about that after he dies.

Nethys has really gone to some lengths, in ways very visible to her, to make sure that Nethys can seriously threaten her and Chelish security can't.

She can't be maledicted, she can't be tortured for very long, if she's killed in the course of sincerely doing her duties that thought doesn't actually bother her at all if she gets to go to Nethys's afterlife and study magic forever instead of burning, and maybe Cheliax wouldn't dare kill her anyways because if she can't be maledicted somebody else might raise her and she'd talk all about Keltham.  Ione Sala doesn't know what Nethys has set up against somebody cursing her stupider, but maybe it'll be too obvious to Keltham by then, or she can pray to Nethys for divine aid, or she could simply go to Keltham and tell him it's time to find a university who can Heal her better.  Or maybe the higher-ups here are aware that cursing Nethys's oracle with stupidity would in fact constitute a serious slap in the face of a god, one who's very hard to keep out of things, on a site already subjected to extensive divine intervention.

And she is too scared, too shaking, and too angry, not to think what she thinks then.

That's not how compacts work, Asmodean.  They're negotiated, not dictated.  Nethys made very sure you wouldn't be able to escalate your threats against me to worse than what Nethys could do.  Maybe you should call in a more experienced security officer who knows how to negotiate with non-Asmodeans you can't just maledict.  Someone who understands what happens if you leave people scared of being set on fire and stupidified and your negotiating position does not, in fact, let you just keep escalating further until you send them to Hell.  Non-Asmodeans stay on the lookout for ways to improve their bargaining positions, if they're scared and you haven't made a real deal with them, that's what happens.  I wasn't ambitious and I'm still not ambitious and I don't want really very much at all, if you negotiated terms with me I'd be very predictable and wouldn't even ask for very much, but if Asmodeus's representative wants Nethys's representative to be predictable, he needs to bargain for that and not just dictate.

"I understand," Ione whispers out loud, meekly.  He's either reading her thoughts like a halfway intelligent person or he's not; she'll see.

lintamande: "You got your deal. And I don't notice you being reasonable and predictable at all."

Ione Sala: "I - didn't understand that -"  She genuinely didn't.  Is he saying he read her thoughts or does he think they've already done a deal or - she doesn't get it.

lintamande: Sure, he'll speak more slowly. "When Nethys chose you, you could have come to us. You went to Keltham instead, to try to position yourself better for a deal. We granted you that you would continue attending class with your little friends. When you realized you had book-summoning powers, you could have come to us. You showed them to Keltham instead, to try to make it more inconvenient to replace you. Then, you proposed your deal: that we don't set the other students against you, that despite all your behavior in the past two days we treat you like an Asmodean student and encourage them in the same. I agreed to that too. And then I told you: don't do that again. You want to stay here, falsely admired by your peers, trusted by Keltham? Great. That has been agreed to. You have that. But if you push us any farther, we will take you out of the picture. The deal is that there will not be further deals.

I don't know why you think Asmodeus bargained for Nethys's intervention here. The Grand High Priestess said nothing of that, when she came to read your mind, and she pays a great deal of attention to the question of how we accidentally make ourselves more costly for Asmodeus to steer. I think Nethys paid Asmodeus for whatever He's doing, and if it costs Nethys more, that serves my god; that's what I think. If you are a small obedient little girl who only wants a few small things, then, having attained those small things, I don't see why you'd hesitate to agree that you'll stop withholding things from us, stop presenting them to Keltham first to try to force a concession from us afterwards, and stop trying to condition your obedience on our further concessions. The game you have played twice today, you will not be able to play a third time, have I said it enough ways you comprehend it now?"

Ione Sala: The Grand High Priestess was -

(don't think things that make your bargaining position look worse think things that make your bargaining position look better)

The Grand High Priestess was here and didn't do anything to her.  That says a lot, really.  Nethys probably prepared in ways she can't even see.

Ione draws a shaky breath, and sits up straighter.  "Are we negotiating a deal?  Or is Asmodeus's representative telling Nethys's representative how it's going to be?"

lintamande: "Let's hear what the small obedient girl who only wants a few small things still wants."

Ione Sala: Ione crawls over to where she left her clothes, and puts them back on, which is helpful for her to get some of her sudden seething hatred under control.  Whatever else comes, she's never passing a Chelish loyalty screen again, and she may as well think what she fucking wants now, which really leaves quite a lot of thoughts backed up, and this is not the time for them.

"Oracle of Nethys, Ione Sala, of the library's curse," she says, when her clothes are back on and she's sitting on the ground.  "My god has either joined with your god, or been paid by Him to assist, on a project to bring another plane's knowledge to Cheliax.  I require a bed either in the library, or in a room immediately adjacent to it.  Aside from this, I am content with ordinary student-level sustenance and living conditions, which you will not worsen or withhold.  You may either leave the other students here ignorant about my true nature, or tell them but then instruct them further not to mistreat me in any way whatsoever whether or not Keltham is watching.  I understand there may be some restrictions on me.  These restrictions need to mostly not prevent me from providing the services that Nethys intended me to offer this project.  Whatever pay or equity is negotiated by Keltham for the participants in his project, will be allowed to actually accrue to me if it actually accrues to any single one of the other girls, and Cheliax can't take it from me including by unexpected fees or cost increases.  You don't do anything clever to work around all that and make my life worse."

"In exchange, I will cooperate with Chelish security, on the understanding that they treat me as a friendly representative of the allied god Nethys and not an Asmodean traitor who gets set on fire at somebody's whim.  If we have disagreements, we work them out by negotiating as equals, not by a wizard who works for Cheliax showing up and gouging out my eye.  If at some point you come up with something extra that you want from me, don't threaten me into it, offer me an interesting book.  Or a magic item.  Or if you want me to do almost anything, you can offer me my brother as my slave.  Apart from that, I don't think I have any long-term goals besides pleasing Nethys enough to get a good Nethysian afterlife.  I'm not impatient to reach ninth circle here instead of there."

"If you manage to come up with a brilliant way to screw me on this deal, it's off, because I'm not an Asmodean and you're not a devil and this isn't a contract between two Asmodeans, it's a Nethysian-Asmodean deal.  I'm Lawful and I'll keep my deals that are actually sensible deals for sensible people being sensible about them.  I'm not an Asmodean any more, and I won't keep a contract that an Asmodean twisted around."

"What makes Ione Sala predictable is when she thinks she can be safe if she stays predictable, which mostly means that she needs to be safe from Nethys's displeasure.  The main thing that causes me to start looking for ways to improve my bargaining position with Cheliax, is if it looks to me like Cheliax might suddenly decide to do anything it wants to me at any time, especially things that might hinder my service to my god, unless my bargaining position is better.  I will remember your claim that security would have worked with me if I'd come directly to them, and if you keep your side of things, I will try coming straight to you at least the next time I think I see something Nethys would want me to do.  I hear your claim that my doing anything else unpredictable makes me too much of a liability and I will be killed no matter what after that, which I understand would make it hard to continue doing what Nethys wants me to do, and I understand Nethys would see that as a betrayal if I let it happen on purpose."

"Our gods have an obvious common interest.  We don't have to fight.  I respect what Asmodeus has to offer this project.  I hope Cheliax respects what Nethys has to offer."

Ione finishes talking.  She's trying to tense her entire body so it will stop fucking trembling and she knows she can't do this for much longer.

lintamande: "Oh, do you want your brother after all," says Elias with some satisfaction. "I spent a while trying to see if there was anyone in the world you liked. All right. Next time you have a bright idea, come to us; next time we have a demand, I'll bribe you."

Ione Sala: Ione found a wounded bird, when she was very young.  She hid it from her parents, and tried to nurse it back to health.  She hadn't even had it a full day before her brother found it, and killed it in front of her, slowly, by tearing off bits of it at a time.  It's the last instance Ione can recall of still having a heart to break, because afterwards it was very clear to her that anything she ever cared for would just become a weapon that somebody else could use to hurt her.

"Is it too late to pretend that I love my brother dearly?" Ione says, not quite believing that she's joking with him.  "And deal."

lintamande: He pulls together an arcane healing spell. Fixes the burns, when he shakes her hand. "If you loved that asshole I really would have to conclude Nethys had driven you mad. Stay out of trouble."

Ione Sala: "Yes, sir," Ione says without thinking at all, and then sighs at herself, but only internally.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has just seen a trembling human girl strip naked and then be set screaming on fire, which challenged his understanding of reality not in the slightest.  After that, other things were said which challenged his understanding of reality significantly more.  Did the girl just win?  That is frankly not where he was expecting this to go.

He wouldn't set somebody on fire, if they were implicated in the possible end of the world.  They might explode.  Broom thought about trying to do something, but before he was done hesitating, the girl wasn't on fire any more, and then she was still talking disrespectfully to the powerful wizard who had just set her on fire.

That does seem like the sort of person who might destroy the world, either by accident or on purpose?

The conversation afterwards didn't make it seem like Ione Sala was planning to do that right away, but Broom is still feeling somewhat worried.  He can imagine somebody carrying the sort of grudge, from being set on fire, where they decide to destroy the world about it.  Especially if it's been happening to them regularly.  He doesn't like being whipped and healed and whipped again.  He hated that one time of his life where it was happening to him a lot.  He just didn't have any options for doing anything about that, such as, for example, destroying the world.

It is not entirely clear to Broom that Chelish security quite understands how to avoid making giant messes or how to clean them up, which, he supposes, makes sense of why some god named "Otolmens" would randomly grab Broom in the hallway and tell him to do it.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": ...and yet despite that, Broom finds himself smiling.

Well, he thinks he knows why he's doing that.

She did win, after all.

Broom wipes the smile from his face once he realizes why it's there.  He watches Ione pull a book out of air, visibly trembling, and sit down to read the book, while she continues trembling, looking very much like she's trying to avoid having a breakdown in front of any invisible watchers.  He keeps watching until he's pretty sure she's not about to grab her wizard stuff and start destroying the world, and then leaves the library to check on his other person of interest.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa ducks out from the crowd headed to dinner and goes to her room.

She's pretty sure she can fake her way through a date with Keltham, but she doesn't want to? She can come up with several justifications and she's not sure she buys any of them but one is that - when they tell him more, which they're going to have to, eventually, she'd like to tell him that she wasn't lying about this. Another one is that - she is trying to become bigger, more capable, more Evil, in the sense of wanting Evil things for her own reasons rather than the sense of being willing to do what it takes to survive, and so it seems like practice in the wrong direction, to go on a date while not wanting to. Another one is that at lunchtime she was so happy, full of ideas and satisfaction and cleverness and the conviction that there was something big and beautiful and perfect out there and Keltham was leading her towards it, and she wants that back.

She doesn't, objectively speaking, have any reason to have lost it. She has basically earned confirmation that she was right, that there is something big and beautiful and perfect out there and that Keltham is leading her towards it, her and not anybody else, or at least her first. She didn't have the details nailed down but if you'd asked her to bet at lunchtime she wouldn't have bet she had the details right already. The main reason she now feels sick and small and scared isn't that she was wrong at lunchtime, it's that she realized since then that the path to big and beautiful and perfect requires skills she doesn't have and doesn't have long to acquire - 

- not a useful line of thought -

- why does she want to go on a date with Keltham? Other than because there's a competition with that as a win condition and she's very competitive. Other than because if they have children they'll be very smart and Cheliax will objectively owe her lots of money for them whether or not it pays up. Other than because he's attractive, when he's trying to be that instead of trying to be a hundred other things.

Well, because there's something he is getting right. There is something no one in Cheliax is getting right except maybe Aspexia Rugatonn, and Aspexia Rugatonn can't teach it, even if she knows it, because if she could then everything would be different. There's a kind of way of living in the world that Keltham has, and they don't, and he saw immediately what a tragedy that was and wanted to teach it to literally everyone because - not because he's Good, he's not, he's a lot more Good than people here because his surroundings were but she can actually tell the difference and he's not -

But you don't have to be Good to see a - mess, a Lawless mess if you'd like, and to wish that the beings in it stood taller, smarter, clarified and free, not as good as when they had no free will maybe but at least out of the local equilibrium where they have it but are not competent to use it -

He's also a teenager in way over his head and missing half the information he needs and depending which skills he grows in which order he's very possibly going to demand, when Cheliax comes clean with him, that everyone involved in the decision to deceive him be tortured to death, which would be reasonable, but -

- she wants to sleep with Keltham because she wants everything he has, and she wants to see more pieces of him, and she wants it very, very badly. And she sits with that, and lets it fill her up, the longing to see the end of the path, the longing to tell him things and watch him think about them - to check the little Keltham she is building in her head against the real thing and see if she gets it yet -

There. That's better. She goes to dinner. 

Keltham: Keltham heads to dinner, still feeling shaky.  It does not occur to him to hide this; he is distracted, and by default he is not an actor posing.

He grabs his food and sits down next to Carissa, who seems to have gotten there before him, not sure what he wants to say to her.  Cancel the date?  There's a presumption there about Carissa wanting to date him only under narrow conditions that have not actually been specified.

"Hey," says Keltham.

Carissa Sevar: "Hey." Noticing that something is troubling Keltham is well within Carissa's baseline perceptiveness about things that might determine whether she lives or dies even when she is extremely distracted. " - you okay?"

Keltham: "Nope," Keltham says, because in dath ilan there are no pleasantries that you are meant to respond to with lies, and if there were, the people there would revolt against their language and start over.  "What does your own model of reality say that Owl's Wisdom is predicted to do to somebody?"

Carissa Sevar: "...some adventurers use it pretty much daily so it can't have, like, particularly noticeable long-term effects from regular use. Clerics tend to get its equivalent in a headband, like wizards get headbands for cunning, and it makes them better servants of their god. I have ...heard of people saying it gave them a profound religious experience?" From the look on Keltham's face that's not quite it, but closer. "It sort of is a religious experience, in a way, touching the state of being - a little more like a god..."

Keltham: "Yes.  Being a little more like a god.  You know somebody asked in class, what makes someone have the potential to become a Keeper?  It's that.  It's the thing Owl's Wisdom boosts."  Taldane doesn't actually have a word that means cognitive reflectivity.  "If you don't have people screaming about that and giant warning labels on the spell, then maybe my first angry thought afterwards was right and, yes, in fact, almost nobody here has much inside them that actually draws on the thing that Owl's Wisdom boosts, so nothing much happens to y'all when you use it."

Carissa Sevar: " - oh. Gods, I'm sorry. No, I've never heard of anything that'd make people - warn - there are people with 22 Wisdom and they're not even close to Keepers, they don't have the rest - but I guess if you stuck a headband on you would be."

Keltham: "It's - not your fault.  But I realized - how I was put together - in a way that probably, no, let's be frank, in a way that can't possibly make sense, and then it wore off and now I'm not smart enough to fix what I remember seeing, and I'm not even sure that's what I want to do."

"Ha.  My brain's totally thinking that this may not be a bad thing in the long run, and it sure wouldn't have been thinking that an hour ago."

Carissa Sevar: She thinks she understands, though, and it sounds like a very bad thing, if you don't have time to put yourself back together afterwards. "Not a bad thing?" she murmurs rather than think of something she can actually say.

Keltham: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.  It's a proverb that's - remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people.  There's a whole philosophy around that saying.  One of the key points is that maybe sometimes it makes sense to not push a truth on others, if you think it'll hurt them, it can make sense to not walk up to Keepers and ask them to tell you everything you're not seeing.  But if you saw it yourself, it's too late, you can't unsee it, and there's no way out but forwards."

"So, plus side, the way I was put together was not-too-bad for dath ilan and almost certainly all-wrong for Golarion, and being stuck like that while refusing to look at exactly what I was doing wrong probably wouldn't have turned out great for me.  On the minus side, before the Owl's Wisdom wore off, my brain went and fully admitted to itself that I had no hope of ever succeeding in my life goals back in dath ilan, and I did not really need that much personality update being shoved at me all at the same time, you know, it would have been nicer to spread it out over a few more weeks."

"So that's what my day was like.  How was your day?"

Carissa Sevar: What a question. 

"I had an existential crisis but it was much more minor than that. Then I met a person even more important than Contessa Lrilatha, who was already lots more important than anyone I intended to ever meet, and she was perfectly nice but I still feel vaguely like a toddler wandering around a live-fire military training exercise going "wow, such bright lights!!" Then -" Shrug. "The duck's tasty."

Keltham: "Your food technology is maybe something like three hundred years behind ours, I don't even know, but I admit it's surprisingly good duck given that."

"My brain is still trying to question all of its life choices and that includes the degree to which I'm prioritizing certain forms of personal happiness while working on my very important project.  I don't - I'm not sure if I can be the Keltham I was at lunchtime, tonight.  The Keltham who's just running straight ahead and doing the thing, because that has different results in dath ilan than in Golarion and I saw that but I also don't know yet what other kind of person I can possibly be.  I don't know how much you wanted that Keltham you saw before, instead of a more - unsettled one."

"I could also just find my brain shaking out if you gave it another hour or starting undressing me.  I genuinely don't know.  I've never been hit by an Owl's Wisdom before.  If I had been, this case wouldn't have had such an effect."

Carissa Sevar: "So, not in the mood for winning a kinkiness competition, maybe in the mood to climb up to the rooftop and stare at the stars and worry about the fate of the world being on our shoulders?"

Keltham: He feels a flash of the old Keltham's enthusiasm at that, something that he instinctively cups his hands around, like he's protecting a flame from the wind.  "Sounds nice.  Could do it wearing fewer clothes too, if you were also in the mood for that.  If it escalates on both sides into a perversion competition I sure won't complain.  I'll also understand if even a relatively minor existential crisis turned out to be a pretty large one in an absolute sense and you just want to stare at the stars."

"Also, what's an existential crisis?  It doesn't actually translate."

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, it's the thing where you think too much about some question humans aren't good at thinking about - or at least, some question no one has taught Golarion humans to be good at thinking about - like what you're for or who you want to be or what death will be like - and end up having the mental equivalent of the thing where you bite your lip and then have to avoid, every time you swallow, biting that exact spot again while it's swollen. 

I'll pick out an outfit for stargazing and we'll see where it takes us, how about that."

Keltham: "Works for me."

"You know, the way people think in dath ilan, which probably isn't how they should think here, it's the conventional wisdom that when you can see what you're trying not to think, and it's gotten to anywhere near the point of a bitten lip you're trying not to bite again, you're supposed to just go ahead and think it."

"This probably assumes there's no rogue corn strains that eat you if you think about them.  And also that you know how to think about such things and can think about them productively.  And also that you know people older and more experienced and 4 Intelligence points smarter than you, who you can ask for help if you get in trouble.  And that you can call in a Keeper if that doesn't work."

Carissa Sevar: "I think in Golarion people trying really hard to think the thoughts they're at the edges of would just end up going mad or, you know, not functional enough to do their job at which point they starve - what does dath ilan do about it if you are busy having an existential crisis and can't do your job for a month, does everyone just have a month of savings?"

Keltham: "That doesn't sound like something that badly configured thoughts are supposed to do to a person.  You'd call in a Keeper before then.  What you're for, who you want to be, and what the Future makes of you after they bring you back from the dead - I wouldn't have thought those were dangerous things to think about, either.  To be clear, I am not at all under the impression that means you could tell me your problems and I'd see nondangerous things to think about them, I've been in Golarion for longer than an hour at this point."

"Somebody my age is supposed to save at least a year's expenses in investments, more if they don't have a support network or the investments are very volatile.   I was at eighteen months of runway when I boarded my fateful aeroplane, but a lot of it was in some pretty volatile investments."

Carissa Sevar: "Wizards are that rich. Most people, if they unexpectedly can't earn any money for a year, die."

Keltham: "Because they can't cut their expenses below what they are, to save up more of their income, without dying?  Or because they're Intelligence 10 and they can't - imagine multiple possible futures and plan for them?"

Carissa Sevar: "Mostly the second thing but also it wouldn't obviously be worth it for them to cut their expenses more? Cutting their expenses more would increase their odds of dying of other things, like living in a worse apartment makes you catch malaria and cholera and so on more often and if you eat worse food then you're weaker and can't fight off illness as well. And also living on the bare minimum is kind of miserable and one might reasonably trade off some misery against some chance of dying sooner, if they don't think the misery is the useful kind that you learn from and makes you stronger."