Keltham: "That's - incredibly impressive, we were not ready to go anywhere and come back, not for a while, it would have been insanely expensive even by our own standards.  We built hugely powerful beams of light and used that to launch probes toward the second-nearest sun, just to get started on practicing, but they won't get to their destinations for a long time.  We did it just because we could, in the end, and not for - not for reasons, really."

"We were pretty sure there was nobody else anywhere near our neighborhood, in any sun close enough for light to travel to us from there.  People did some clever calculations saying that the aliens were probably a few billion years out, in our - simultaneity - all with logic and calculations that don't apply here at all, if your wizards can teleport there and back in less than years.  Find any people around the other suns, or is it all just lifeless other planets the way we'd deduced in our own world?"

Carissa Sevar: "The other planets around our sun are all settled, but that's - happened at the same time as us, it wasn't an independent event. From farther than that, uh, I've heard it claimed the crashed ship that is quarantined in Numeria came from another sun but I don't know more about that. Aroden, when he was an epic hero, spent thousands of years looking, and came back with empty hands."

Keltham: "It feels so unreal to think of that as being something one person does.  We'd have millions of people investigating a question like that, if a possible alien invasion had happened, it would take millions of people.  One person becoming powerful enough to go to the stars on their own is - a story you write and only sell to adults, because if you told it to children you'd be setting them up for disappointment when they learned how economics worked in real life.  This place really is magic, just like we tell it in stories where I come from."

Carissa Sevar: - hand on his arm?

"I hope it doesn't seem - like an entirely horrible place to you. It needs some work, but - but it's work a person can do, if that's what you mean by 'magic', it doesn't take millions..."

Keltham: He leans gently in that direction, which is hopefully a signal that it's fine.  "Eh, frankly it's pretty horrible.  So lots of room for improvement, and unspendably vast riches if I can figure out how to collect a five percent fee on five percent of the improvements."

His brain takes this moment to wonder if Owl's Wisdom would have something else to say about this stereotypically Keltham response, and Keltham tells it to shut up and come back later.  Also no, because that is who Keltham is in another world, on a basic level, and even if he later decides he was wrong about some things that won't poof him into an random average dath ilani.

Carissa Sevar: It is much less horrible than dath ilan where people can die forever if their brains are destroyed - not having that argument because in her heart she suspects she'd lose it, probably a similar percentage of people manage to go to Abaddon and get eaten. And because having arguments isn't sexy. 

What to say, then, though. "Well, I've heard more unrealistic ambitions."

Keltham: "Who is it that has me beat on this metric and how?  I may have to adjust my aim upwards."

Carissa Sevar: "Some people are planning to run the Starstone as soon as they can fly and become a god or die trying!!"

Keltham: "Nah, I'm more ambitious than that.  Some people succeed at running the Starstone, right?  And yet your world's still an enormous messy mess of messiness.  So fixing the world is obviously harder.  Plus, I mean, if you're going to die and go to an afterlife anyways, why wouldn't you run the Starstone?  How does that even take ambition and not just plain old opportunism?"

Carissa Sevar: "The people who die running the Starstone don't always go to the afterlives. They usually do, but - every once in a while, one or two percent, they're just gone. No one knows what the difference is. It's not the chanciest chance you could take but - I'd just die, personally."

Keltham: "Yeah, I haven't really been thinking about it because I reflexively decided that it was a Keeper sort of question but - I had a thing happen to me that was supposed to obliterate my own consciousness, and here I am.  It kind of suggests that maybe - people are in enough different places that there's always some of them left, whatever happens to them.  By the end of my biological lifespan I'll probably have the most expensive intelligence headband and the most expensive Owl's Wisdom headband, and maybe then I'll be able to think about that sensibly even if there's no Keepers around.  And then decide whether I want to go to the afterlife here that I seem to be headed for, or if I want to optimize for Neutral Evil, so I can go on to whatever place comes next in the sequence whose zero is dath ilan and whose first successor is Golarion."

Carissa Sevar: "I - 

- that doesn't make any sense to me but I guess it wouldn't. I am - not very willing to trade off definitely not dying - against many other things."

Keltham: "Woulda said the same, before I died in a plane crash that couldn't possibly have failed to utterly obliterate my brain.  I'm pretty sure I remember my head being ripped off my neck in the crash, before I found myself in Golarion instead.  I'm sure that sounds like small potatoes to your own standards of what people come back from, but where I come from it was supposed to be permanent."

"And it wasn't."

"Dying in a plane crash is something that you'd expect to obliterate every brain of every copy of you, across all the branches of branching time inside the universe as conventionally understood.  If there was still some of me left after that -"

"Well, it's suggestive of some weird things being true.  That would then, by shaky extrapolation, go on being true if something else happened that would otherwise obliterate my presence within Golarion as conventionally understood."

"But I'm not actually going to try to figure it out without more intelligence and wisdom headbands after I'm older, if those are actual options here.  Handing that job to your future self seems like the equivalent of saying to wait and ask a Keeper."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. "My working theory has been that Asmodeus - grabbed a copy somehow or something - which would have been fantastically expensive but maybe still the best way to explain to us what we're doing wrong. I don't know if that changes any of your reasoning or if it's just true that some other god somewhere else might be grabbing people from Abaddon."

Keltham: "Well, the obvious thought is that your universe is my universe's physics plus magic, and can see my universe from here, and by mediocrity is probably part of a vast lattice containing lots of other universes that can see my universe, and then this universe is one that's visible from universes that look like this universe plus even more magic, and maybe mostly when somebody dies in Abaddon nothing happens, but there's a vast number of double magical universes and some tiny fraction of those have a god or a glitch or a whatever that materializes another copy of the person who just got eaten."

"Assuming they get eaten quickly, and not by their minds getting chewed up a bit at a time so that their consciousness turns into a small painful simple thing before it ends.  There's a disease like that in dath ilan, that slowly degrades your consciousness if you let it run until it kills you, taking away your memories year by year.  People usually go into cryonic suspension immediately if they find out they have it.  I also need to know more about Abaddon, besides solving metaphysics, before I start treating Abaddon as an exit route."

"Seems worth noting though that if the gods also think that's how Abaddon works, that the people who end there just wake up someplace else the same as I did, it could explain why the gods aren't treating it as more of an emergency."

Carissa Sevar: "I think Asmodeus has expended a fair number of resources to make sure everyone headed there is offered the choice of Hell instead? But I don't know if that's because He considers Abaddon-death an emergency or because He wants them in Hell instead. I ...have never heard it's slow but I haven't asked, either - if people die brain damaged in this world they're normal in the next one, the soul remembers more..."

Keltham: "Yeah, but just because there's somebody walking around who remembers being the person who got damaged and then got better, doesn't mean that, from a first-person perspective, if you get damaged enough to forget who you are, then that experiencer mostly experiences becoming you again.  That's why people go into cryonic suspension right away if they get Memory Degrading Disorder.  Sure, future tech might be enough to read back the memories you lost, but that doesn't mean that you experience turning back into you after you've simplified and shrunk to the point where you can't tell yourself apart from a lot of other people with Memory Degrading Disorder.  You might experience turning into somebody else instead."  This language is really not suited to discussing this subject matter, but then, it's not much suited to discussing anything else either.

Carissa Sevar: "- huh, I'm not sure that's what I care about? If I got slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences but a bunch of copies of me from before that were still around I don't think I'd be very upset about that? I haven't considered this very much, maybe to dath ilani people it's obvious why I should care about that more than about whether there's still a me."

Keltham: Blue and orange.  "I would in fact be quite upset about any Kelthams being slowly tortured out of having distinctly-me experiences, even if I was one of the ones who survived unharmed.  I may be selfish but not to the point of intertemporal conflicts with my own copies from a few minutes earlier!"

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa is not sure she understands that objection thoroughly enough to be sure her reasons for not minding aren't very Chelish! 

"I mean, I expect I would find being tortured aversive, it's in the definition, but the thing that makes torture-which-makes-me-no-longer-distinctly-me far far far worse than torture which doesn't have that effect is that then the things I think of as Carissa don't exist anymore at all. And if Carissa will keep existing no matter what but some threads of her end I ...don't understand why I'd mind. Maybe I'd mind if I understood."

Keltham: "Yeah, that - makes some sense -"

"Sorry.  It's just that the thing you said sounded a bit - similar to an argument my mother once tried on me - about how a further implication of selfishness was that I shouldn't care about what happened to the Keltham of tomorrow, because he was a slightly different person from me, so screw him - and I'm finally in the region that's supposed to be Evil, now, but then you said that you didn't care about - and it just sounded like - sorry."

"This all probably doesn't sound very romantic-escalatory, does it?  Sorry bout that, I was somewhat better at dates in dath ilan when I knew all the conventions.  My respect for you being the woman who decided to fling herself on the sharp kitchen knife of my early learning experiences."

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa's going to not touch that because once again she's not sure that the thing Keltham's pointing at is not a true thing about Cheliax she's supposed to be hiding. 

How to flirt back, though.

"I can flirt with people who have - magic items for it, can read your face so closely they might as well be able to read your mind, who have magic that does more than Splendour - I have done that, though not very much, because I tried not to get in over my head, at the Worldwound, there wasn't anything there worth getting in over my head for - but I want you, see, you think like no one in this universe and it feels - possible that I could think like that too, not after the centuries of perfecting it'll take me to be Contessa Lrilatha but, like, next year, sooner if I can squeeze a headband out of somebody, and - I want you, so you don't actually have to be good at flirting, unless you yourself get in the mood by flirting deftly at people, in which case I suppose you had better get good at it."

Keltham: Keltham leans in to her and grins, broadly, even if she maybe can't see it.  "Well, thanks for taking all the uncertainty and plot tension out of our flirting, then.  Where I come from there's enough distinct books on romantic theory to fill this house's library ten times over, and most of them would say that just giving away the ending makes it be less fun, but right now my experiences would seem to be falsifying that.  I don't think that cuddling you on a roof and looking up at the stars is even slightly less fun if I know I can't fail."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you could fail at the planet-sized ambitions, maybe we can get enough plot tension out of that. And there is still the question of who will win the sexual varieties contest, though I have to say I'm optimistic."

Keltham: "Not betting I'll win, but not giving up without any fight.  And by the way, things would be different if I had access to my own world's technology, just saying."

Carissa Sevar: "Is there sex technology? That's delightful, actually. We will have to fix things up enough that we too can have sex technology. - don't tell me what the sex technology does, I want to try to guess."

Keltham: "I don't even know what 1% of 0.1% of all the sex technology does, just the incredibly basic stuff that's in almost every cuddleroom and that everyone gets training in how to use.  But if you imagine something, I can probably take a pretty good guess as to whether it existed.  Using the simple rule that, if it sounds possible to our technology level, somebody somewhere has done it, and if it doesn't sound possible, there's still a 70% chance somebody has done it."

Carissa Sevar: "Sex in midair."

Keltham: "Probability 1.  Giant windpits, people going up very high in aeroplanes and jumping out and having sex on the way down, people getting into orbit around the planet and having sex there."

Carissa Sevar: " - wouldn't jumping out of airplanes kill you, without magic -"

Keltham: "Nah, somebody," in pre-Screened history but he's trying to call less attention to that, "just thought for another couple of minutes and figured out how to survive it without magic.  I'm pretty sure we do a lot of stuff you imagine takes magic.  For jumping out of airplanes, you fold up a giant cloth into a backpack and when you're getting near the ground, you unfold it and it catches the air and slows your fall.  I've been trying to figure out whether some people's home cuddlerooms have midair sex equipment, like, just 2%-rich people, not 0.1%-rich people who can put whole wind pits in their cuddlerooms.  Maybe a possible method there would be to wear metal bands and put lightning-magnets in the ceiling that hovered you by pulling on the metal, but I don't know if the math works on that without doing more math."

Carissa Sevar: The cloth thing does not at all sound like it would work. "Cuddlerooms are - sex dungeons, except named adorably because no one is a sadist?"

Keltham: "Like, the room of your house where you have sex?  Dungeon sounds sort of like whip but as a spatial place, so I don't think dath ilani would have sex wherever that is."

Carissa Sevar: "Normal peoples' houses have one room. Rich peoples' houses have several rooms but still, you have sex in your bedroom usually, unless you're into weird things like sex on tables. Rich people who like tying people up and hitting them in ways beds do not natively enable might have a sex dungeon. I have never heard of a cuddle room and it translates as - indulgent in a bizarre direction -"

Keltham: "Yeah, well, if you have an economy that can make more stuff per person, they also buy larger houses to contain all that stuff.  This place we're currently staying is larger than my parents' house by a factor of 10, but only because they were work-focused people who didn't have enough different hobbies that they'd want that many separate rooms.  My parents could in fact have afforded a house this size, though they couldn't have afforded to fill it all up with things we'd consider expensive."

"So yes, separate rooms for sex, because you own stuff that optimizes sleep and stuff that optimizes sex and they are almost entirely not the same stuff for anything larger-scale than a small pillow."

"I have been trying to figure out where in a bedroom you'd have sex, because the bedrooms here do not have anything that looks to me like a good surface for having sex on.  It is now occurring to me that people here probably have sex on the things you call beds, and then change the cloth outer surfaces of the bed, and then go to sleep there."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes? - magicking the sheets rather than changing them, but yes. Is there some reason not to do that?"

Keltham: "It's - kind of icky from a dath ilani perspective.  But maybe that's just because we wouldn't have magic for - clearing the room's air afterwards and so on?  It's just odd to think of doing something that is intrinsically and rightfully messy in the nice clean place where you sleep.  If this place has spare bedrooms not being used, I might ask to have one of those for my cuddleroom.  Kind of a group resource, really, under the circumstances."

Carissa Sevar: "I am sure you can request a cuddle room if you want one. Tragically we will not be able to see the confused face of whoever authorizes resources for this project."

Keltham: "Magic doesn't do capture of still and moving images?"

Carissa Sevar: "They won't make the face if we might be watching!!!!"

Keltham: "Chelish version of dignity, like being cheerful in a classroom setting?"

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah. More centrally this than the cheerfulness in class thing, I think. Not - communicating with your emotions or expressions anything you wouldn't consciously decide to communicate with your words. If they wouldn't send you a reply saying "sure, but I think that's extremely weird of you", and they wouldn't, then they also won't make a "that's extremely weird" face where you can see it."

Keltham: "There is some really basic thing here about social equilibria which I'm missing, and under other circumstances I'd delay it for later but I'm worried that I will somehow do something that Cheliax considers not just undignified but a catastrophic negative indicator, if I don't figure it out."

"Meanwhile in dath ilan, there is famous motion-capture of, like, the head Keeper for the entire planet looking surprised on being told experimental results, because it's way, way, way beneath her dignity to pretend that she's not surprised when in fact she is surprised."

"But, I mean, if everybody here knows that people are - faking things, as we'd see it - then it's not even a failed attempt at deception because everybody knows what's actually happening so it's not even deceptive and there is some very odd equilibrium here that I am not getting at all."

Carissa Sevar: "I think that if someone was very emotionally expressive in a situation where Chelish people generally don't do emotional communication then we might think they were - immature, or not fully in control of themselves, or - trying to make a demand via the emotional expressiveness, the way you might do exaggerated emotions to make fun of someone or make a point to a very small child or to make it impossible for people to engage with anything else... people are capable of adjusting for other people being from other places, though, and you're not emotionally expressive to a degree where it has come up already..."

Keltham: "But then your -"  Taldane, of course, does not contain the word for signaling-equilibrium.  "I mean, I get how it's often advantageous to conceal information, there's all kinds of -"  Taldane does not contain a word meaning 'zero-sum interaction'.  "There's situations where you do worse if the other person does better, like, negotiating prices, you wouldn't want somebody bargaining with you to know your -"  Taldane doesn't have the word true-reserve-price.  "The lowest price you'd actually accept, if it's lower than they'd expect for some reason.  So concealment, sure, in cases where the other person knows you might be hiding something but what matters is that they don't know exactly what you're hiding.  But when it comes to uniformly faking false signals - I mean, if everyone, like all the students in the classroom, is always wearing a cheerful expression even when they're not cheerful, that's not a -"  Taldane lacks every single component word of the compound term meaning 'an equilibrium where signals preserve their overt semantics given the incentives for both signal-senders and signal-receivers'.  Keltham hates this language, and he'd ask how anybody ever thinks in it, but the answer, of course, is that they don't.

"If everyone has incentives to fool people by smiling when they're sad and frowning when they're happy, pretty soon a smile means sadness and a frown means happiness and nobody gets fooled anymore.  If everybody acts cheerful when they're not actually cheerful, people will figure that out.  It fooled me but only on literally the first day after I arrived here from another dimension without that custom, and this cannot reasonably be the -"  Taldane doesn't have the word average-use-case.  "Normal way that events happen every day.  So you have some incredibly weird equilibrium going, of a form where everyone is acting cheerful even though they know nobody will actually think they are cheerful.  Students are behaving in a way we'd interpret as being about an... adversarial... information-hiding... interaction, with their teachers, they're sending a constant first-order-misleading cheerfulness signal that everybody knows is misleading.  And I don't understand why or how you got there.  In dath ilan, well before that point, a thousand Very Serious People would show up and start arguing that Civilization was doing something silly and needed to wake up and snap out of it."

"And I know that the answer is probably weird and alien and unLawful by my standards, and complicated, and is going to take a while to explain, and not be particularly sexy, so when it comes to that whole general issue we should maybe just pick it up tomorrow.  Except that there's this one upcoming special case that seems important, which is that if I hug you in some way that makes you feel horribly uncomfortable, and Chelish dignity calls for you to send a first-order-misleading constant signal that you're having a great time, and I'm supposed to already know that's exactly what you'd do if something was wrong, and then I'm meant to act in some complicated way that makes that whole equilibrium not suck for you and that incentivizes people in your position to keep sending the first-order-misleading signal, well, in reality, I just got here from another plane, and I do not, in fact, have the faintest inkling of - do you see why I'm trying to ask about this even though we were in the middle of being romantically escalatory?"

Carissa Sevar: " - because you're adorable. - sorry, that's not - I do understand what you're saying, I think. It is not the case that you're supposed to read my signals and assume my acting happy means I am actually sad and need something different. I think you're - right, that this is an extremely complicated conversation that's going to take us half a day, in the general case, and -

- and there is a person who could've arrived here instead of Keltham who'd run into that problem tonight, if, say, he said "I want to sleep with Carissa or I'll go somewhere else with the Lawfulness Revolution", and this was obviously worth it to me but not because it was going to be good for me, just because I was going to get rich by more than it was going to be bad for me. That person would get smiled at and the smile wouldn't be any information actually. But - but you're going to tell me that a dath ilani, even an Evil one, wouldn't do that, aren't you, I don't know why they wouldn't do that but you wouldn't do that -"

Keltham: "I'd tell her that I'd trade sexual favors for getting equity in the revolutionary startup, if she honestly wanted to make that trade, but I wouldn't - expect her to ask for a false signal from me, and then be fooled by it?  Like, if she handed me a script for scripted sex work, I'd run her script if she paid me enough, but I'd expect her to know.  Or if it came to lying to somebody and telling her that I'm attracted to her, in hopes that she'll give me more equity, not that I'd expect she would, but - if that works at all - it works because the world is mostly full of people who don't lie about that, and those people laid the groundwork for me to fool her successfully, so those people built something and I'm stomping on it and breaking it and profiting from that, and that is something I find genuinely repellent.  I want to build my own things and profit from them.  And in this world I don't see how it works at all, because if it's the expected practice you just know I'm probably lying."

Carissa Sevar: " - okay I have - some idea of how I would bridge this but it will take at least an hour and make you very sad. But also you - might actually prefer to have gotten it all before you try having sex with people here? Not - because you're going to hurt me - if you're just worried that you'll hurt me tonight I can just give you my word that I'll tell you in unambiguous words if I need anything - but because -"

Because her own brain is now screaming with confusion, about what the Asmodean version of that is, and she's getting ahead of herself trying to figure that out but also it's her job which Asmodeus gave her, how can she think about anything else -

"I can't predict you very well. I wish I could. I want to understand you as badly as I've wanted anything in my life. But I ...think I predict...that you'd want to know first. Even if it means we spend the whole night being sad. But I'm not - I don't like giving advice as confused as I am right now -"

Keltham: Keltham leans back into her, hoping it's the right thing to do.  "A dath ilani in your position asks for time to think, gathers her thoughts, probably asks more questions to narrow things down about my own state of mind.  She thinks of questions to ask me, privately makes her predictions about how I'll answer, and then asks.  She isn't in a rush to arrive at answers, even short-term answers about whether or not to give a piece of advice, if she's not right in the middle of trying to - operate dangerous machinery with a time limit."

"We don't need to rush on larger timescales either.  You told me how this subplot ends, I can survive if it takes a little longer."

Carissa Sevar: - what if she wants to be Lawful Neutral because Keltham is -

Well, then she'll die and go to Hell and not get to do anything cool, so she should pick a less stupid want that isn't based on a crush on a teenager. 

It doesn't feel like it's because of the crush on the teenager, it feels like the other way around.

"I'd like some time to think," she says quietly. 

Keltham: "Hence the rooftop with the pretty stars."  Keltham will fall quiet after that.

Carissa Sevar: They're very pretty stars. 

She will die horribly if she turns Keltham against Cheliax. Anything that's true of all Golarion isn't that, and she's pretty sure that nowhere in Golarion do powerful men want the women they're sleeping with to communicate needing things to happen differently. 

She will die horribly and worse afterwards if she ends up wholly persuaded of Keltham's worldview and not suitable as an instrument of Hell anymore. But her first foolish foray into Keltham's worldview was, Asmodeus thought, worthwhile, so - maybe she has a bit of slack there, presumably he wouldn't have expended those resources for someone who couldn't find the right path even when she was trying. And she hasn't gone and asked the cleric her questions yet. Maybe it's okay to try to understand the dath ilan way of thinking and separately try to understand the Asmodean one and then integrate them. If she can't understand dath ilan she won't be able to do her job. 

Keltham will at some point figure stuff out - not all the stuff, but some stuff. He's already figured some things out just from the fact Chelish students conceal distress during class. The ideas that look right next to each other, to him, are different; they won't be able to predict which things are right next to other things unless they get really good at dath ilan-ness themselves. To him, 'people smile during class' was right next to 'you might not actually want to be here', not that he has the imagination to have realized the ways she might be here if she didn't want to be.

It feels like there are walls closing in from all sides, and -

"Might someone consult a Keeper?" she says. "If they were dath ilani and very stuck and very confused even about the origins of their own confusion."

Keltham: Keltham has likewise been staring up at the stars, pondering whether or not he regrets his life choices.  He thinks not?  He's still going to have sex with Carissa later and this way he also got to act cool and all-wise in front of her.

"I was about to say that most dath ilani have options short of paying to talk to a Keeper, like, they have some regular friends who are older than them and smarter than them.  Then I remembered you are in fact already one of the smartest people on this planet, and also you've been talking to an alien.  So yeah, in dath ilan, Governance would make Keeper assistance available to anyone in a position like that, and the dath ilani would probably escalate directly to them instead of messing around, because there's no point in... there's no point in tapping a nail with a tiny hammer when you can hit it with an enormous hammer instead."  That's not the original proverb and it doesn't make any sense as he tried to culturally translate it, but, eh, hopefully the idea came across.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. I think I need to go ask a cleric of Asmodeus for help. There's one on site and I was, in fact, told to talk to them if I wanted to, and I was going to in the morning, but I might be sufficiently stuck right now that I ought not to wait."

Keltham: "Makes sense.  If they say something that doesn't make any sense in Lawful terms, you could come back and ask me about that, and then I could say something else that makes you confused again, and you could go back and forth three times and then stop."

Carissa Sevar: "Or drag them up here and make them talk to you themself while I hide in a corner and listen."

Keltham: "That would be cheating!  And cheating is technique!"

Carissa Sevar: "Maybe the way to straighten everything up is for you to march off directly to Hell and find a door to knock on and invite Asmodeus to debate you Himself." (Almost definitely heretical???? Will accept appropriate punishments.)

Keltham: "Think that's a joke but I'm not entirely sure?  I wouldn't expect to win a debate about any facts where I disagreed with a god.  Also I thought the running hypothesis was that Asmodeus can't just tell you or even his clerics all the key truths, and has no better options than pointing you at an alien who has no idea of the local non-necessary facts, but who at least has a lock on some universal validities... you know, I feel a small sense of progress about being able to say that, and having it make sense to you, where it wouldn't have made sense to you yesterday."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, sorry, that was a joke. Asmodeus can only sort of talk to the most powerful devils who can only sort of convey things to the lesser devils who can only sort of convey them to us. People do go march into Hell seeking help or advice or something sometimes but this just means bothering people like Contessa Lrilatha, there's no Asmodeus to march up to no matter how many doors you knock on. I ....think I understand a lot of things a lot better than yesterday, and I'm delighted about it, but also it means there are all these new confusions in places I was accustomed to relying on."

Keltham: "Yeah, I'm not sure I can say that I've been there, but I suspect that I've recently been nearby.  If that's already happening to you, then we really need enough Owl's Wisdom cleric spells to touch everyone else in the research group once per week, or a Wisdom headband to pass around.  I suspect it's a bad idea to let people learn a ton of dath ilani technique and only then hit them with their first Owl's Wisdom."

Carissa Sevar: "Seems like it might be, yeah. And if you can schedule your heretical realizations then you can also schedule your time with a cleric for right after."

Keltham: "I don't think 'heretical' translated at all, it sounded like - false, only actually it's some different property a proposition can have than falsity, but still a bad one - maybe information-with-negative-value flavored?"  Because of course Taldane doesn't have 'infohazard' either... also, 'heretical' doesn't mean 'infohazardous' or it would've translated, but if it's neither false nor an infohazard then what could possibly make a proposition be a bad one... maybe it harms society but not the bearer?  But that should've translated as collective-infohazard, if the info has local benefit but negative externalities.  This pathway of communications difficulties may be finite but it sure is a long-ass one.

Carissa Sevar: "It's, uh, there are a bunch of known ways that human brains misbehave when trying to understand Asmodeanism, and if you find yourself convinced of one of them you're supposed to go get it straightened out, they're false but not false like they say different things about how Hell works than normal Asmodeanism does, more false like....they use a bunch of invalid steps to get to the conclusion, which only happens to be correct because society, which is using a different reasoning process, handed it to them, and if they get too attached to their invalid stepping and run off to do further derivations those'll be just straightforwardly false."

Keltham: "Particular flavor of invalidity, then."  The word 'heresy' doesn't really sound like that, though?  Well, Keltham can just avoid using the word until he actually understands it.  "I create a polite social affordance for you to run off now to the cleric, in hopes of getting everything sorted out in time to do something else with your day," such as Keltham, "or to stay and look up at the stars for longer.  Just say which."

Carissa Sevar: "I will run off. And try not to take too long about it."

Keltham: "Don't rush enough that you might end up with the wrong answer.  I'm not a runaway machine that's going to chew through eight houses if you take an extra minute to think."

"I'd offer to stay up here for a set period of time, but I don't have my small wearable time-telling device.  Maybe I'll just look up and think for a bit, then head on down if I notice myself not wanting to be on the roof."

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds good." Why is he so adorable.

And she scurries down the stairs and - where is the cleric in charge here going to be - in the temple, presumably -

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": That was a very interesting and very confusing conversation and Broom is not quite sure what to make of it.  He hesitates between continuing to watch 'Keltham', or trying to overhear the woman's conversation with an Asmodean cleric...

...Broom is not entirely sure what he can get away with around here, just yet.  Broom is curious about the conversation that will happen with the cleric; it is not clear that Broom needs to know in order to do his new job.  Broom imagines trying to explain to Aspexia Rugatonn why he thought he needed to listen to the conversation with the cleric, if he gets caught doing that.  Broom thinks he would rather not have that conversation.  Broom shall, on reflection, continue to watch the human boy who somehow managed to talk himself out of scoring with the older human girl, after being told it was a sure thing, and who doesn't look particularly regretful about the fact.

Is this boy the person who ends the world?  He doesn't look it, but he also seems very very very alien and very hard to understand, and might do unexpected things because of that.

Carissa Sevar: She slows down from a run before she enters the temple because personally of interest to Asmodeus or not third-circle wizards do not go running into His temples like their time is the most important thing around. 

Suddenly she is terrified but that's only because she's in line for some correction that is very sorely needed and will help her achieve her goals. 

Iarwain: Cheliax, for all that it is less Lawful than some other very distant realms of existence, does not make a habit of missing ploys that are obvious even to Cheliax.

Compared to instructions relayed by way of Hell, a cleric who receives a direct divine revelation from Asmodeus will have received instruction that is more accurate, more precise, and much less able to be put into words for other mortals to hear.  The project to extract extraplanar knowledge from 'Keltham' was established based in part upon a vision from Asmodeus.  The priest who received the vision from Asmodeus reported his best guess that there was a sense that Asmodeus thought their visitor was potentially valuable and not just being given unexplained protections.  What else was in the message from Asmodeus?  Was there anything else important, not yet done?  This tends to be very hard for recipients of visions to convey, if it is not blindingly obvious.

The priest in question also headed up a Worldwound installation, was fifth-circle, and had proven himself on lesser commands.  Placing him in command of the villa project was another obvious bet.

Ferrer Maillol himself, fifth-circle cleric of Asmodeus, is not currently enjoying himself quite so much as when he was fighting an endless horde of demons at the Worldwound.  The Worldwound did not have alien teenagers being insane, direct orders from Hell that are incredibly inexplicable, random wizard students getting oracled by Nethys, and way too many complications he is not allowed to set on fire until they shape up.  Ferrer Maillol had not, until just today, appreciated the degree to which it is easier to fight an endless horde of demons compared to sending out a new top-priority message to Aspexia Rugatonn every hour.  He had quietly resolved to himself that he was very seriously going to consider whether the next such message should be batched, in part to conserve his remaining supply of communication spells, and in part because he was worried about how Aspexia Rugatonn was going to take his hourly interruptions.

Of course the next piece of news he got was about a fucking Otolmens event.

When Ferrer Maillol is notified that Carissa Sevar wants to see the head priest, there is only one first thought which goes through his mind, which is not again.

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol instructs that Carissa Sevar is to be shown to him at once, and fixes a very bland expression on his face.

"What is it?"

Carissa Sevar: "I - understand it to be the will of Asmodeus that I get a better theological education, as if I were the inheriting daughter of a Count. I have just spent an evening with Keltham in which he kept asking questions that were extremely difficult to answer from within my present understanding of Asmodean theology, which I know to be deficient. He wants me to figure out my internal confusions promptly because he - might not want to have sex with internally confused people - and suggested I seek you out now."

Which is important because it means that this will all have to be very time-bounded, and Keltham's expecting her back, except he wouldn't be that surprised really if straightening herself out took longer than expected, but it still wouldn't be ideal -

Carissa needs to be smarter and not for the first time in the last three hours is really terrified she will not live to acquire the headband that'll do it.

Ferrer Maillol: At least Sevar doesn't have any more brilliant ideas, such as her last one, which was that Ferrer Maillol's life wasn't going to be complicated enough unless he added an additional number of teenage girls to it.

"Prioritized for theological instruction as if you were a fourth-circle cleric," Maillol corrects sharply, and then pauses to reflect on whether he has violated Aspexia Rugatonn's instructions for the gentle handling of Carissa Sevar... no, she's seeking this of her own accord... actually he should check that, if she's having trouble remembering Hell's instructions.  "Would you say you are not seeking this instruction of your own accord?  Keltham is not a member of the Church, but him suggesting you into it is - ambiguous."  Maillol is unsure what he should make of Hell's instructions in that case.  He really does not want to bother Aspexia Rugatonn about it already.

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham advised only that I - use dath ilani techniques for thinking about confusing things. I realized that I needed someone who understands the - thing Asmodeus communicated to me that I don't understand - and I told him I should talk to a cleric."

Ferrer Maillol: That is good behavior.  Ferrer Maillol gives her his least frightening smile, the smile that Asmodean priests give to the lesser people who do something Church-approved.  "You may be unfortunately optimistic if you think that I will be able to entirely clarify Hell's message.  Still, if you were given this affordance, it suggests that Asmodeus thinks some benefit may come of it.  Seek instruction, then, if it is of your own accord, and I will assist you as our Lord commanded us."

Carissa Sevar: - nod.

She is going to sound like an idiot. She's just going to - ignore that and try anyway, if her idiocy is revealed then it can be corrected. 

"I think dath ilani people - genuinely understand Law better than us. I think they're - mostly Lawful Good, and Keltham is Lawful Neutral, but their understanding of Law is correct in important ways we weren't going to derive ourselves, and so there is a Lawful Evil version of it. And in class, I was trying to come up with it. And then I got the communication -" she pulls out the scroll Aspexia Rugatonn gave her, reads it off so she can't be misremembering - ''Remember that you are not Irori.  Do not think yourself likely to succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid."

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis, and accept that your rightful place is in Hell."

And I think what was being - very generously - communicated by mentioning Irori, and Axis, was that I was - borrowing too much from Keltham, who is Lawful Neutral, and that I don't truly understand the nature of Evil, and so the thing I was building wouldn't have been of any value, it would've been - missing something Asmodeus wants. But presumably I am capable of learning it or he'd just have let me get it wrong and accidentally make myself worthless. Do you...have any idea what it might be."

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol's first thought is the obvious one, that he hopes this new brilliant idea of Sevar's works out better for him than her one about providing Keltham with lots of girls one of whom gets oracled by Nethys - though, of course, that wasn't her decision, and the Church of Asmodeus is not confused about who bears the real responsibility.

His second thought is about a distinction he was warned about, that they've been instructed to prioritize Sevar as if she were Asmodeus's own fourth-circle cleric, not to answer as if she were one.  It rules out the obvious answer he'd give to a fourth-circle Asmodean cleric standing nearby and asking what Sevar was missing.  Still, Asmodeus's language to Sevar - if it wasn't just poorly translated by Hell - suggests that Sevar has the kind of soul that Asmodeus actually wants, if He can win it in this contest with Irori, or whatever is actually going on here.  (He is not to try to guess and be helpful in a way that pushes the edges of Hell's orders; the Grand High Priestess was quite clear on that.)

He will, then, answer as he might answer somebody who was considered to have enough potential that Asmodeus might choose them to be a cleric, perhaps, though not yet chosen; or as he might answer a promising heiress of Chelish nobility.

"People in Cheliax register as Lawful and as Evil, and worship no Lawful Evil god other than Asmodeus or his subordinates.  This suffices for much of Asmodeus's purpose, as it brings those souls to Hell's standard gate, which Asmodeus has already conquered, and so into His ownership for further refinement.  We do not ask most people to understand what Lawful Evil really is, let alone what would distinguish Asmodeus from Zon-Kuthon within Lawful Evil.  Most people do not, in fact, need to understand this.  They do not possess the nature that marks them as potentially one of Asmodeus's own, instead of just the masses who must be coerced to Lawfulness out of fear and who end up registering as Evil because that is what the rules make of conducting yourself in ways not completely absurd."

"You, Sevar, might have the potential to become one of Asmodeus's own, not just Lawful and Evil.  Or so our Lord's instructions to you suggest.  You are, I think, being invited to join the inner circle.  And I am not expecting you to already understand what that truly means, because it is not something we bother trying to teach most third-circle wizards.  So the question I am about to ask is not a test of loyalty, but a test for whether you belong in the beginner classroom or the advanced one.  What have you already grasped, if anything, of the difference between Lawful Evil and Asmodeanism?  What makes Cheliax an Asmodean country and not just a Lawful Evil one?"

Carissa Sevar: AAH - 

- which is completely unreasonable because this is about as gentle an introduction as she could possibly have hoped for. 

She has never considered the question before but she is a day of dath ilan better at thinking than anyone else in Cheliax and would like to show it, ideally. "The part of that which sounds easiest is the difference between Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon," she says. "Zon Kuthon - intrinsically values suffering more, I think? If everyone in the universe were, uh, constantly being creatively tortured, Zon Kuthon would be entirely pleased by that. And Hell ruled by Asmodeus isn't like that - there'd lots of torture, but there is - the opportunity to not be tortured, the opportunity to be such a high performer that you are satisfactory - the opportunity to be doing the torturing, the opportunity to be deciding who is tortured - Asmodeus wants.... some features of Hell other than the suffering - I mean, in addition to the suffering, I know the suffering's important - these are guesses, maybe Asmodeus values people having the experience of - their suffering being related to qualities they have - knowing you are suffering because of your own conduct and choices, not just at unlucky random - maybe Asmodeus values people striving to avoid further torture, or some of the things they do while they're trying to avoid further torture, or, uh, them becoming more like him in becoming more the kind of entity who'd run Hell the way he runs it - maybe he values people being rewarded when they've earned it, maybe he values - earning it feels like a natural category, here, if I had to guess I would guess that Asmodeus values people earning features of their situation through their actions or their fundamental nature... uh, the strongest counterargument I can think of to that is that it's too Lawful Neutral again? 'to each their just rewards' is not right, as a description of Asmodeus. But there are other ways for there to be a relationship between your actions and what happens to you."

Ferrer Maillol: "Satisfactory for someone who was never taught.  Beginner's classroom, but a thinking beginner."

"The primary domains of Asmodeus are tyranny, slavery, compacts, and pride.  Tyranny is not just rulership.  Slavery is not just obedience.  Compacts are not just deals.  Pride is not just having a high opinion of yourself."

"For Zon Kuthon, the object of torture is torture.  For Asmodeus, the object of torture is not only the benefit Asmodeus gains when people obey.  The object of torture is that Cheliax be a tyranny, not just a farm from which Asmodeus extracts a maximum yield of wheat.  Tyranny, as Asmodeus sees it, requires tyrants, not just a single decider at the top, but deciders all through the system who enforce obedience with whip and pain.  He is a Lawful Evil god, the tyrants are there to enforce rules and not just to do as they please, they are subject to rules themselves."

"We are taught - we, Asmodeus's own clerics, not the common people - that Asmodeus holds the key of Rovagug's prison, fitting a lock that Abadar made so that Asmodeus alone could open it.  Why Asmodeus?  Because Asmodeus alone can be trusted by Pharasma that, even after He conquers every plane and every part of reality, Asmodeus will never seek to displace Pharasma Herself.  Pharasma is the one who made the rules that send people to the Hell that Asmodeus governs.  Because Pharasma exists, Asmodeus is just enforcing the rules that She made, when He tortures a soul in Hell, He is being Lawful Evil and not just Evil, He is being tyrannical and not just sadistic.  Asmodeus is the one god who cannot exist as Himself without a Pharasma above Him to set Him in place and define the system He enforces, and that was why He alone is entrusted to hold Rovagug's key.  He, too, is only following His orders, each time He receives a new soul into Hell's embrace."

"The language we are speaking is ill-suited to such distinctions, because mortals are ill-suited to understanding them, and you should not read too much into how we mortals flail for one mortal concept or another.  To Asmodeus, to a greater devil, the shape of the meaning is precise.  There are many souls in Cheliax who would rather hold the whip themselves, than be the one whipped.  That does not make them Asmodean, it makes them selfish.  There are many souls in Cheliax who would enjoy holding the whip, because they are sadists, because they delight in causing others pain and crushing them below.  That doesn't make them Asmodeus's rather than Zon-Kuthon's.  But some souls in Cheliax enjoy holding the whip more when they are doing it to enforce the rules, you might even say that they need there to be rules and need there to be some higher tyrant above them so that they are being more than just sadists.  If those souls have enough potential to be worth empowering, Asmodeus chooses them for His own, to be His cleric, and grants to them His domain of tyranny."

"To delight in tyranny is not mandatory to be one of Asmodeus's own.  The devil you met this day may have had no joy in tyranny, for all we know, he was not a devil who had other devils beneath him.  But when he was mortal he must have already delighted in the compacts that Asmodeus delights in, by which the wheels of Law turn to crush one party or another to the contract beneath them.  He was not just Lawful and Evil, but delighted in Law turned to the purposes of Evil.  And because of that, after his death and through his suffering he was elevated and raised to the status of a greater devil, and kept that part of himself which was pleasing to Asmodeus.  As he was one of us in his mortal life, so he is now part of the inner ring in Hell."

"Tyranny, not just rulership.  Slavery, not just obedience.  Compacts, not just deals.  Pride, not just self-value.  Maybe all of those will appeal to you, maybe only one, but you must have great potential for at least one - if I am not entirely mistaken about the meaning of Hell's translated will of Asmodeus, conveyed to you."

Carissa Sevar: It feels so - far, from something she could translate for Keltham, but all true things can be said in the same language, so there is a way, there is a version of this written in dath ilan's style of thought which she can understand and embody - "Should it be obvious to me, which one, just by thinking about it."

Ferrer Maillol: "Perhaps not.  I doubt that Asmodeus would have bothered to instruct you to seek out those elements of your own soul, or for us to assist you, if it was a ten-minute job."

"Competent natural tyrants are the most useful members of the inner circle, and we try to give every intelligent Chelish citizen a chance to enforce some rules with a whip to let them discover that tendency if they have it.  If you rise high within this world, you will discover very rapidly that the number of competent Asmodean managers you can find to help run your operations is an extreme check on your ambitions.  It is plausibly the limiting factor for the entire Chelish state.  Slavemasters and lawyers are not nearly so much in demand.  Pride tends to be expensive in multiple ways, and not just financially, so it is largely the domain of nobles or the very wealthy, who by their own nature cannot be too numerous relative to the general population.  Outside of tyranny, then, you may lack firsthand experience with other elements of Asmodeus's domain as experienced by the insiders."

"Do you wish to hear my guess about your Asmodean potentials?  It seems to me that there is a tension between Asmodeus's instructions to me that we are to assist you if you seek instruction, and Asmodeus's instructions to you that you are to find that part of yourself.  My own resolution of the tension would be that I should answer if you ask, because I am to concern myself with Asmodeus's instructions to myself, which say that I am to assist you, and not with weighing Asmodeus's instructions to you."

Carissa Sevar: "I do want to hear your guess. I think I would benefit from knowing where to look even if I am meant to find it on my own."

Ferrer Maillol: "Pride and slavery.  You asked to be prettier as the first element of your shopping list.  The part of Hell which your attention naturally focused upon was the slavery there, the precise structures of pain and obedience."

Carissa Sevar: "What is pride, if it's not just -" what had he said - "not just a high opinion of yourself." Does she have a high opinion of hers - yes, yes, she does.

Ferrer Maillol: Pride is the aspect of Asmodeus that Ferrer Maillol understands the least well, himself.  Which is unfortunate for him, because the greater devils all seem to possess pride in abundance; and it's a good guess that having that much feeling about yourself and your place, for Hell's tortures to perfect into precisely Asmodean pride, is part of what helps you stay yourself through Hell.  The way in which hereditary nobles seem to end up as higher devils after their death, despite what Ferrer Maillol would privately term some severe deficits of other competence, would seem to bear this out; unless it's just the sort of unfairness in which the Tyrant so delights.

He answers, then, from textbook and catechism.  "It is, obviously, a god-concept, and not one which mortal concepts are very apt to describe.  It may help to remember that this is a Lawful Evil domain, and many things that mortals think of with the usual word 'pride' are neither Lawful nor Evil, to say nothing of Law-that-does-Evil or Evil-that-upholds-Law.  The Lawful aspect of Asmodean pride is that it is bound up with having a place within Asmodeus's tyranny and which that tyranny has assigned to you.  The Evil aspect of it is that it is yours and you defend it and you will crush others to defend it.  By doing this, you enforce the structures of the tyranny and keep others in their place below you, it is Evil turned to the purposes of Law.  One seeks to climb the ranks of the tyranny, but within the tyranny, and by this the strong rise and the tyranny itself is strengthened."

"Those with deep Asmodean senses of pride have a felt sense of the order of the universe itself being disrupted, when somebody fails to give them their due, or when people weaker than themselves seem to be raised above them.  They are not simply defending themselves from insult, or seizing an opportunity to take somebody else's position.  They are restoring the order of the tyranny itself, in face of the disorder that is a weak unworthy person occupying a position of power or esteem."

"Do you just want to be prettier, Carissa?  Or do you have a sense that there is an order within the universe that is offended if people weaker than you, less deserving than you, get to be pretty and you don't?"

Carissa Sevar: "Thinking that people ought to - look at you and see how much you matter, that you matter more than them? Is that - the right sort of thing -"

Ferrer Maillol: "Yes.  Though do not omit the idea of grandeur."  Ferrer Maillol taps the robes he is wearing, of a fifth-circle cleric of Asmodeus; magical cloth of the highest quality, with gold and with rubies.  "These vestments do not simply inform others of my place.  They are grand, expensive, rare, enviable, difficult for others to obtain.  They embody what it means for me to have risen high in Cheliax; they do not simply inform others of the fact.  Do you just want people to know the truth that you matter more than them?  Or do you want to walk into a ballroom full of higher nobility, and watch the fearful ones slink away from you and the ambitious ones flock to court you and the ignorant wonder who you are to matter so much more than themselves?  Do you just want others to know you're important, or hammer the existence of Carissa Sevar into your lessers like striking them down with a mace?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa really, really, really wants to know how Keltham would answer that question. "I want that," she says, instead, dragging her thoughts away from Keltham and to imagining it. "I want people to be jealous of me, and to aspire to be me, and to despair at how they're not good enough to be me."

Ferrer Maillol: "Not, of itself, sufficient for our inner circle.  But I doubt, given Asmodeus's instructions, that He expected you to learn your place in Hell and join His most treasured possessions with only a moment's thought and a word of advice.  My duty to Asmodeus also bids me warn you, pride is the domain of Asmodeus where I hold the least expertise.  If a fourth-circle cleric had questions I could not answer there, while about Asmodeus's business, they might need to wait upon a visit from a higher-circle cleric to answer in my place."

That Ferrer is so quick to think of his duty to Asmodeus there may reflect his own lack of pride, though how that is a failure to enforce his own place within the tyranny or its laws is lost on him.  It doesn't seem exactly the thing that a devil in his position would do, though the devils wouldn't ignore their duty to Asmodeus either.  They would disclaim their own lack of expertise with more grandeur, somehow; and Ferrer Maillol is aware that in reality most of his grandeur comes from his vestments and his ability to kill people who annoy him.

Carissa Sevar: Does he...not want people to envy him? Or just have enough of the thing that's not sufficient as -

"Okay. I - think I can productively work on that one, alone, though I would be grateful for advice if you have it." she's going to have to be so proactive about seeking out their help, given the rule they can't just tell her when she obviously needs it. "And maybe on slavery? What are the signs of having potential at that one?"

Ferrer Maillol: "You are obviously interested in it, and I doubt you are interested in it for purposes of stamping it out like a paladin of Iomedae.  You skipped right over the question of how we raise mortal slaves in Cheliax and went straight to the more interesting tortures in Hell, wondering exactly how they were designed to suit which purposes of Asmodeus."  Ferrer Maillol gives her, now, the sort of conspiratorial smile that he'd give to an up-and-coming new member of the Inner Ring (an entire aspect of Asmodean theology whose details Sevar has not yet inquired into, and which she probably isn't ready for).  "I haven't any trouble imagining you, a thousand years hence, as a Baron of Hell overseeing the refinement of thousands of fresh mortals - or maybe even a Duke of Hell set to raise the highest of future devils from the most promising candidates."

"Though you will be more immediately useful to our Lord if you can train valuable slaves for Him here - keeping in mind that we are all our Lord's slaves.  Don't only think of collared wretches dredging the streets, if training them for sale doesn't seem grand enough to suit you.  Do you find yourself inspired to teach a new generation of wizards, perhaps?  And if so - would you rather teach them in Lastwall, under whatever absurd restrictions hold there?  Or in Cheliax, where you are free to punish and reward as you please, where mortals are your raw material to be freely crafted so long as you deliver results?"

Carissa Sevar: "I want - I want to figure out what dath ilan but Asmodean is, and I want to prove that it makes better wizards, and better soldiers and better devils eventually."

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol chuckles in a way that is only 95% humorless, for infinity percent more humor than he uses on most occasions.  "Sevar, there are certainly a thousand subtle refinements of the notion of Asmodean slavery beyond that, but don't overlook that if you set out to produce better wizards, soldiers, and devils, by any useful means and without a hundred mad restrictions preventing you from doing it properly, paladins of Iomedae will call you a slaver and try to stop you.  If our Lord demanded that people comprehend the exact, full meaning of His domains before He would choose a cleric of the first circle, He would have no clerics in this world."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not tempted by Good," she says, which is more candid than she's ever even contemplated being with a superior but if she needs correcting she needs correcting, she's not trying to avoid that, at this point. "Good is stupid and if you try to do anything ambitious it'll be Evil, I know that, I acknowledge myself to being susceptible to ending up Neutral accidentally but it's not - squeamishness, or thinking that it's important people have a nice time while they're learning things, it's - modeling Keltham too closely, probably. My job right now is half trying to understand Keltham and half not to be a heretic while I'm doing it. I am sure I'm pointed in the wrong direction somewhere but I'm not pointed in - thinking children should decide whether they go to school or spend all day lounging around eating sweets, and I know we're all children."

Ferrer Maillol: "If it seems stupidly obvious to you that slavery is the way to go, Sevar, that is not unsuggestive of an aptitude for it.  Hell's relayed instructions seem to me to suggest that you are in danger of heresy primarily because you have not found within yourself the desires that would keep you out of Axis."

Ferrer Maillol taps his fingers on his thigh, so that Sevar knows he's thinking and doesn't try to interrupt him.  There were some interesting points in Sevar's file drawn from her mind being read.  He wouldn't ordinarily say this part, it has been sometimes known to confuse even first-circle clerics, but Sevar may need to know.  "There's a story not commonly told to Asmodean clerics before they reach second-circle, except in special cases, but you may possibly be one of those cases.  After I tell it to you, you are not to repeat it to anyone not at least a second-circle cleric of Asmodeus, including high nobility of Cheliax.  Security will know better than to repeat it if they read it from your thoughts, and it is already the case that nobody is allowed to read your mind unless they are at clearance levels far above the ones you used to have.  Clear?"

Carissa Sevar: " - yes."

Ferrer Maillol: "There was once a well-hushed scandal, concerning a certain ordinary Baroness, who was found to have been keeping, as a bed-slave, a man who'd been chosen as a first-circle cleric of Asmodeus.  She kept him after his choosing.  Tell me, what do you suppose happened after that?"

Carissa Sevar: "- I assume if the answer were' she was punished because that's presumably illegal' then you wouldn't be telling me this as an important story. Was she - promoted? So the arrangement wasn't a problem?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Illegal doesn't begin to cover it.  There was an immediate massive clampdown on the entire event as fast as word could be passed upward, as people saw the potential for conflict between Church and Queen over the details of how to handle it.  The Baroness in question, who was in my own personal opinion something of an absolute idiot, seemed to feel that she'd done nothing wrong, since the cleric himself had never said that Asmodeus didn't want her to go on keeping him."

"An ensuing investigation turned up the puzzling fact that this new cleric had no visible aptitude for tyrannizing others, nor for crafting slaves, nor for executing compacts, and he definitely had no visible pride.  This, of course, made our Lord's mysterious action all the more potentially important to understand, if it was not done for any of the usual reasons."

"The answer, in the end, was that the man had no aptitude for tyrannizing others - but that he felt on a truly deep level that it was right for him to be tyrannized.  He had no aptitude as a slavemaster - but felt that it was very right and proper for him to be a slave.  He had no aptitude for contracts - but felt that all was right with the world when his Baroness was forcing him into grossly unfair bargains in her bed-games.  He understood the order of society that underlies pride, and saw his own place was at the bottom of it.  This, we think, is why Asmodeus chose him, though Asmodeus made no revelations on that subject."

"It is not just a lie told to the masses, if you were ever wondering about that, that Asmodeus has been known to treasure some of His possessions as things beautiful to Him in themselves, and not just for the uses that we have to Him.  So far as we know, the man was not being very useful to Asmodeus, before or after he became His cleric.  He had simply earned Asmodeus's favor by having a rare nature pleasing to His sight."

"The bed-slave cleric was purchased for a high price, resold to a more trustworthy noble at a vastly higher price, and afterwards the Baroness in question seems to have been assassinated by no known party.  The entire matter stays swept firmly into the corners, because if it became known, idiots would derive the wrong lesson about what nobles are allowed to do to our Lord's clerics."

"I mention this in case any of your own desires lie in the opposite polarity from the vantage point that nobles usually take.  It also shows that Asmodeus's domains can be subtle things even in their largest directions.  You would not know all about them from hearing the four concepts listed out.  There should be desires in you that are pleasing to our Lord and will prevent you from falling into heresy.  You should not cast too narrow an eye when it comes to looking for those desires, I suggest.  Asmodeus would not have given such weighty instructions if the matter was going to be simple."

It is, in particular, obvious to him that Sevar may perhaps have the nature of a slave rather than a slaver, given some of the thoughts recorded in her file.  Ferrer Maillol is not certain he should spell this out directly.

Carissa Sevar: " - is it a problem, if I let Keltham hit me - I haven't, but should it come up -"

Ferrer Maillol: "Oh, there are quite a number of clerics and loyal nobles like that, in the hidden behind-the-scenes of Cheliax.  Though that nature is not, by itself, sufficient for full admission."

Carissa Sevar: "I would expect so because there's not that much of a gender discrepancy in the hierarchy and there is, in liking - sorry, never mind. I'll keep that in mind? I - obviously everyone is supposed to be grateful to be the possession of Asmodeus and I don't know how to tell if one is more grateful than average."

Ferrer Maillol: "If you have even once in your life sincerely thought that you wished to burn in the purifying flames of Hell and emerge perfected, I think you are a step ahead of the general peasantry," Ferrer Maillol says dryly.  "I am not looking forwards to it, in fact, though I would not say as much to anyone who didn't have a note in their file about having apparently sincerely thought what you did."

"At our level, in our inner fellowship, it is not demanded of us that we pretend that the fates Pharasma assigned us are the fates we would have chosen for ourselves.  We live inside an absolute and inescapable greater tyranny - all of us, from Cheliax to Lastwall, from slaves to the gods of Good.  Most people have no natural response to that except for endless whining and complaining, and living in denial until Lawful Evil inevitably conquers everything that isn't Lawful Evil.  Some of us are born with something that is native to the plane we live in, that can push along the tyranny rather than being swept away struggling.  That's why we get to wear pretty rubies on our robes, and burn in Hell for a shorter time and come out of it as higher devils."

"We're not just playing the game because we want a better score in it.  It's our game.  We'd play it even if Asmodeus wasn't there."

"It's that quality - not feeling grateful for Asmodeus having to force us into it - that makes us the favored of Asmodeus and recognized as His own."

Though that's all Inner Ring theology and part of his own favored concern of tyranny, which he should maybe not emphasize as much if Sevar hasn't a visible aptitude for it.

Carissa Sevar: She indeed is slightly confused by that. " - may I take notes?"

Ferrer Maillol: "I'll get you a secure notebook.  Bide."  He opens the door of his office, and takes a few rapid strides until he finds someone who can be ordered to get an unbound secure notebook from the military inventory.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is trying to commit all that to memory so she can think about it in more detail later. Most people don't want to burn in the purifying flames of Hell - what does that mean? They would prefer it if they didn't in fact need much purifying? Sure, Carissa would prefer that too, that'd be awfully convenient, though she'd trade more purifying for coming out better on the other end - would most people not take that trade? Are most clerics of Asmodeus not able to notice that it is good to suffer if you come out of the suffering improved? But it's very obvious!! She thinks she could even phrase it so Keltham agreed? We are all slaves of this world the way Pharasma made it - seems true -  presumably not heretical, to think of Pharasma as having made it - but also we would make it ourselves - but would we? Maybe we would make dath ilan, instead? 

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol waits on the notebook - it takes longer than it would have before, with the Forbiddance up.  Apparently some fool failed to immediately issue Sevar with a secure notebook after she was made privy to secrets.  After this, he should probably check in on the military side and see what kind of mess they've made of Sevar's status inside the system.

Carissa Sevar: We live inside an absolute and unescapable greater tyranny. Seems true. Some of us can be more than - grist for it. Seems true. Most people who are devout servants of Asmodeus are not grateful to belong to Asmodeus but they are  -

- but they are like Asmodeus. That's a frame that fits. Asmodeus wants people who are like him, and people who'd build Hell, rather than dath ilan, are more like Asmodeus. And Carissa is going to have to - well, either she's going to have to shape up at that or she's going to have to demonstrate that a Lawful Evil dath ilan is just better.

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol returns and hands Carissa her new secure notebook, along with a pamphlet on the regulations for secure notebooks, which he forgot to ask for and which some abnormally competent officer had delivered to him anyways.  "Do you require further theological instruction?  Have you resolved whatever issue with Keltham first brought you here?  You have not asked much explicitly about that, whatever it was - a matter lying entirely within your own discretion, but I am checking that it is your discretion."

Carissa Sevar: "No, I do want help on that too. Keltham noticed that no one in Cheliax indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed, and inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed, and that bothered him on some kind of principle that - so I think it did not in fact occur to him that one could simply not really care if people are secretly distressed, he instead concluded that we've got some extremely clever way to notice secret distress despite everyone hiding it, and was worried that not knowing this himself he'd fail to notice I was distressed, if I was, and I swear I didn't give him any reason to think I would be, he's just like this. And the problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, I'm genuinely worried that if I'd just said 'oh, normally people are really good at reading lip twitches, but I'll just tell you', then something else would've gone horribly wrong because he made a bunch of inferences from our presumed use of lip twitches - he was really confused about the fact people don't look distressed at each other on purpose, he felt like it was broken, a norm that shouldn't be able to persist in existing. And I have no idea what I'm allowed to tell him about anything and I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I haven't gotten any guidance on which things, specifically, I should lie about, besides Hell and I'm separately worried that if I just sleep with him, which I'd really really like to, and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing, then he'll be - he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that. 

That's the thing I was stuck on, what to tell him that - only relies on facts about human nature that are true in other countries too, and not on anything about Cheliax."

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol may need to go get his own notebook for this one.  He taps his fingers, again, to show that he's thinking.

"I'm afraid," Ferrer Maillol says, not bothering to keep the dryness out of his voice, "that after hearing your analysis of Keltham, I have some absolutely terrible news for you about my opinion of your competence to handle this issue."

Carissa Sevar: "I know I've in over my head. If you think you have someone who can impersonate me and do better, I'll obviously assist them however I can. Or get me a headband, which is what I asked for in the first place."

Ferrer Maillol: "Oh, it's much worse than that, Sevar.  My opinion is that, even after reading the transcripts of everything Keltham said in his lessons, I have no fucking idea what you're talking about.  If you understand what the fuck you just said to me, then you are, in fact, the most qualified person inside this villa to make the call as to what to tell Keltham and when.  Unless there's some better analysis from the security officers who've been monitoring him, but maybe not paying quite as much attention to learning from the man.  Which means that we are going to go off right now and have that conversation with the security officers, the one where you get authorized to make that call.  If you fuck up it'll be your head on the chopping block, followed immediately after by mine for choosing you.  And since I do value my head, I'll get you your fucking intelligence headband."

Carissa Sevar: "Oh."

Carissa Sevar: "Great!"

Ferrer Maillol: If there's an Asmodean subdomain for obsession with intelligence headband obtainment verging on suicidal lemminghood, Sevar is truly His prophet already.  Ferrer Maillol keeps this observation to himself.

He stands up.  "Follow me, Sevar, and we'll have that conversation.  Asmodeus help us all."

Carissa Sevar: All Carissa's slaves are going to get intelligence headbands. It will make them more useful. 

She follows.

lintamande: Security for an operation like this is typically within an extradimensional space, so they can't be affected by spells targetting the installation; the Forbiddance makes that impossible, so they're doing their best with having draped a parlor in lead, which blocks most spells, and having a miserable captive air elemental providing ventilation. There's one bed, since even though there's ten of them they only need two hour sleep shifts. 

Rodez Balaguerre is on duty handling emergency requests right now. He looks tired.

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol doesn't even slightly care.  "Call in whichever wizard or wizards would be most likely able to handle a question about Keltham's psychology and our strategy for what to reveal to him when."

The fact that Maillol doesn't already know who that is, that there isn't someone already known to be in charge of decisions like that, with individual judgments instead being rendered by individual Security officers, is a very bad sign now that Maillol thinks on it explicitly.  That needs to end now, one way or another.

lintamande: That's Elias Abarco, who shows up a couple of minutes later. He looks tired too. 

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol doesn't care about that either, since Elias Abarco hasn't yet been added to the worryingly rapidly expanding list of people that he's no longer allowed to set on fire.  "Abarco.  There's a judgment call about what to reveal to Keltham and which lies to tell him.  Sevar.  Ask Abarco what you asked me."

Carissa Sevar: Deep breath. 

She's going to try to explain it better this time in case maybe Maillol would understand it if she explained better. 

"Keltham noticed that no one indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed when they don't understand what's going on. That is not what happens in dath ilan. He inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed if they did not like what was being done to them. He - automatically assumed that we wouldn't want that, and concluded instead that we must have some more complicated way of communicating that information. I was uncertain whether to make one up or to try to explain to him that normally people just don't worry very much if their sex partners are invisibly distressed. The problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, and I don't think I could accurately track all the inferences he'd make from something I made up. 

I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I need guidance on which things it's most important to keep secret even at some cost in our overall plausibility and coherence as he experiences it. And I need to solve this right away because I think if I just sleep with him and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that."

lintamande: "The problem," Abarco says to Maillol, "is that Keltham is insane and predicting how he'll take anything is, as she points out, next to impossible. The library's not filtered for pretending rape doesn't exist -"

Carissa Sevar: "I've told him that rape exists! He knows that! He just thinks that since I have assented to be there in the first place we're executing a procedure where I should also be having a nice time the whole time and it'd be a problem if he failed to notice a Chelish signal that I wasn't!"

lintamande: " ...she's describing him mostly accurately as far as I can tell," Abarco says.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol raises his eyebrows, not approvingly.  Hell doesn't refer to someone as a teacher if they're just insane.  "Do you have an analysis for me, Abarco?  Do you have a strategy for handling this?"

lintamande: "I think there's no point in trying to conceal anything on this plane except the internal workings of the Church and government from Keltham; he'll expect those to be concealed, dath ilan keeps its secrets. I think we don't have the resources to convince him that Cheliax is the kind of place in which he won't encounter adversarial conduct, we just don't know how to pretend at that and it's already too late, so we mostly just want him thinking that this place needs lots of fixing up, which he currently believes. Sevar can explain how sex works to him though she should mind her tendency towards female-victimization-flavored heresies."