Carissa Sevar: "I......I don't think you could have a contract with that many clauses, no. The Worldwound treaty has five. Wars are sometimes settled with lots of terms but generally only if one side gets to impose them and doesn't have to negotiate them."
Keltham: "Yeah, we go higher than five. And there's reasons we do that, because we're not fans of complexity that can be eliminated without cost; so it's not of zero economic importance to have contract negotiations that scale better. Subject of potential interest to Asmodeus specifically, or am I misreading the part where he's a god of contracts?"
lintamande: "Definitely of interest to Asmodeus," Meritxell says. Soul-contracts have a lot of terms and maybe Asmodeus is secretly annoyed that Chelish people don't negotiate them more but you know the standard works and devils can run rings around you, so it's stupid to, really.
Iarwain: You couldn't have covered this topic FUCKING YESTERDAY?
Asmodia realizes her hand is clenched into a white fist and quickly relaxes it before anybody sees, but with the connection to compacts finally spelled out, she can now see how, even if she wouldn't plausibly have suicided and gone to Hell directly, she could have sworn to do that with a probability, inconvenienced them with some probability, and had any negotiating leverage at all -
Too late. Why it is always, always, too late for everything.
Keltham: Keltham goes on to cheerfully describe how the dath ilani children, returned the next day and told of the solution to the Ultimatum bargaining game and the concept of fairness, now blitz through the previous emotional difficulties of the Uncertain-Labor-Difficulty Game.
No more anger and shouting! Yes, sometimes somebody says your offer isn't fair, and you say it is fair, and they generate a random number, and the random number says that neither of you get anything, and that is a little sad.
But you know that they didn't claim that unfairness in order to try and profit at your expense; you know the incentives weren't like that, for them.
And they know you didn't state your offer in order to try and profit at their expense; they know the incentives aren't like that, for you.
You know they know you don't have the incentive to cheat, so you know that when they state a higher price than you think is fair, and end up rejecting your offer, they weren't trying to punish you for trying to cheat with a lower price.
You can see how, if you kept on playing this game for a bit, pretty soon both sides would learn to converge on a similar concept of fairness, and fewer offers would get rejected.
lintamande: "....does this actually outperform continuing to split evenly, though? Since sometimes offers get rejected - I guess continuing to split evenly doesn't appropriately train skill in - having a shared concept of how labor translates to offer distribution? And it's good for people if the whole society has a shared notion of that? ....what goes wrong if the whole society's shared notion is in fact 'effort doesn't matter only outputs'?"
Keltham: "Well, there's two components, I think, to my answer to that."
"The first answer is that outputs aren't always legible, and then you have to appropriately incentivize people's fairness on valuing the outputs. In the version of the training game that the kids got, how much effort they had to put in wasn't fully legible, but the outcome of the game being won was visible and unmistakeable. But suppose somebody is making a shoe; how good of a shoe is it exactly? Maybe you could pay a trained third-party shoe-evaluator to come in and say exactly what they thought it would be worth, but measuring your output objectively like that is expensive. What we have instead is the partially legible output of a shoe, where the quality of shoeparts or the evenness of the make or whatever it is that people value in Golarion shoes, might not be clear and objective to the point where the shoemaker and shoebuyer couldn't possibly disagree on it. So then they need to both reason in a way that incentivizes fairness from the other, without everything shattering with probability 1 in the presence of a small disagreement."
lintamande: "- like they're already doing, when they barter over the shoe, but properly. That makes sense."
Keltham: "The second component - is something where I feel more like I know what my teachers would say, than like I really know the answer." (These, of course, are vastly different internal subjective sensations that no dath ilani would confuse.) "What I think they'd say is that the amount of human interaction and endeavor where we mutually benefit one another, in a way that we negotiate explicitly, where we could possibly pay to have a third party evaluate the outputs, is the tip of an ice floe... you don't have much ice here. Is the thin tip of a pyramid, whose much larger base is all the places where people cooperate with each other without explicitly negotiating a price in money. Can I arrive a little late to our meeting? Oh, sure, they say. Somewhere in the back of their mind, you expended a tiny bit of your social currency with them, and they now think you owe them a tiny bit of debt or cancel a tiny bit of debt they used to consider themselves to owe you. And you'll also keep track of how much you fairly owe one another in implicit favors like that, and if the two of you disagree on that a little, it should only cause a breakup with very small probability, but if the divergence gets wider, maybe the two of you don't want to deal with each other anymore. When you don't even stop to negotiate and no money changes hands, matters are in a much less legible place still, and you're relying to an accordingly greater degree on people being implicitly fair in how they reward effort or output, which means that the surrounding structure which incentivizes that implicit fairness matters even more."
"I'm sort of skeptical about to what degree you really need all those implicit exchanges, and couldn't maybe just pass small bits of money back and forth more often, like maybe in the world made of Kelthams they just do that. But also I've never tried it, so maybe my imaginary teachers are right in what I imagine them saying, that it wouldn't work, or it would just be more inconvenient without helping much."
Carissa Sevar: Maybe all of this is hacked together because you can't just light people on fire a bit when they deserve it? ....she should not discard any pieces until she's totally sure she understands how they function, though.
lintamande: "So in the example with your shirt," says Meritxell, "the other person just says out loud 'I can make 10million gold pieces with that shirt' and you just say out loud 'I value it one million gold pieces' and then they do some math and figure you'll accept a trade of 5.5million or trades of less with less probability. But what stops them from saying in the first place 'I can make five million gold pieces with that shirt' when they can make ten."
Keltham: "At this point we're just assuming that you have any guess about what it's worth to them. Ah, but before I move on along the path, it seems prudent to include any warnings about stuff they warned us hard about, so..."
Civilization emphasizes really hard to kids at this point that, when you reject a 7:5 split with probability <6/7, you're not trying to spitefully punish the person, just make sure that their incentive curve slopes slightly downward as it moves away from what you think is fair. If you were trying to spite them in accordance with base instinct, you'd reject with probability a bit greater than 5/7, so that they lost almost as much as they tried to gain at your expense (even spiteful entities, obviously, will still subtract epsilon from their spiteful punishments to avoid the possibility of infinite resonating spitefights that even they don't want).
Keltham has no particular reason to think Chelaxians are likely to make that particular error, but dath ilan emphasizes it hard to children, so it's probably important or a plausible error that somebody might otherwise make.
lintamande: "....because there's no benefit in spitefully punishing shoesellers or fellow-students for wanting to trade with you?"
Keltham: "What would the benefit be? I think the point of the warnings is that there's this thing built into human nature where our ancient ancestors mated and reproduced under conditions where people hitting each other and hitting back was much more of an equilibrium, and now we have instincts that are about that. But incentivizing fair strategies in the Ultimatum game is not about that, it is a different structure that reflects a different bit of math than the non-ideal pseudo-equilibrium bit of math that got incarnated into hitting people back when they hit you. But-but it involves somebody else doing something you think is unfair, and then you make sure you do something that causes them to lose some expected value, even if that thing is just not trading with them. So it's the sort of thing that could map onto the hitting-back instinct, if you weren't specifically warned not to map it onto the hitting-back instinct."
"Imagine that room full of children if you told them that, any time somebody made them an unfair offer and tried to cheat them, they ought to hit back in a way that made sure the person lost even more value than they tried to steal, to teach them a lesson, no matter how much more that cost their own position in expected value. Those kids wouldn't grow up to be dath ilan's Civilization. Possibly they wouldn't grow up to be any civilization at all."
lintamande: The room full of Chelish students nods seriously. The children would try to hit someone and that someone would cave their skulls in and that'd be a waste of a lot of state resources educating those children.
Carissa Sevar: This is only true if you have a very limited conception of hitting back, Carissa thinks. She isn't sure, not yet, but - it really does feel like there's a way to lock an additional piece on, a way that you can get even cleaner and higher-performing results with fewer deals walked-away-from, less value left on the table. If you're not Good and unwilling to do anything that's punishment, if you think you have some duty to keep people in the game when in reality they were born into the game and the only way out of it is their utter destruction. The whole point of pain - possibly not the whole point of pain, but a lot of it - is that it's a deterrent that can be delivered without destroying any value at all. Dath ilan doesn't have one of those, so all the rules have to assume that there isn't one...
Keltham: Onward in the sequence. On the next day the children are introduced to their first sophisticated trading-game with tokens that produce varying quantities of jellychips in the presence of other tokens, and which, brought together in sufficient quantity, can even produce more tokens.
Despite everything the kids have learned, the game collapses quickly and with an escalating level of shouting. What do you guess the kids do wrong?
lintamande: " - tried to do central planning without a command structure?"
Keltham: "...you know, I think that thought never occurred to a single one of us. To be fair, we weren't paying very much attention at that age to how the Legislative or Executive branches of Governance were set up, but I guess we knew enough to elect a leader with some simple ranked voting system? It would have made sense to try that, not knowing any better solutions, but we didn't."
"What actually goes wrong is that children with rare tokens decide that rarity is the key determinant of fair cost, children with tokens that directly produce a lot of jellychips decide that direct jellychip production should be the starting anchor on price, and children with tokens that can help produce more tokens think their tokens are way more valuable than anything else around."
lintamande: It is good to hear dath ilani children described doing normal things like rationalizing their getting more stuff than other people.
Keltham: "Now, this is a problem mainly of the kids not having full power in their forward reflectors - that's the part of the brain that implements Wisdom, sort of, obviously it's more complicated than that. Adults could just notice that internal self-favoring influence and switch it off. When we get to the point of being able to run experiments like this in Cheliax with 18 Intelligence 7-year-old kids who've otherwise had an optimized upbringing, I predict that tapping them all with an Owl's Wisdom and telling them to try to avoid self-favoring biased estimates will be enough to get trade restarted."
"But that just leaves the obvious question - a biased estimate of what? What defines the fair amount for each child to get, based on the tokens they hold, if we assume in-game that it's fair for them to start out holding those tokens? There's no object-level effort, in this game, it's just about putting tokens down next to each other. Nobody can be said to be trying any harder, nobody can be said to be trying any more efficiently. The outcomes are perfectly predictable and perfectly measurable. So what's fair? How would Cheliax solve that problem? - or how would you do it, if you think you know a way better than Cheliax's standard."
lintamande: "You could - try to calculate what can be accomplished by all the tokens together, and then all the tokens minus any specific one, and that's that person's - share - though there's no reason to pay everyone that much - you could normalize it -"
Keltham: "Not bad! Especially for a first suggestion! Now suppose I arrange matters such that every token's marginal contribution, defined exactly as you defined it, is zero. Each of 12 people gets a token. Any number of tokens from 0 to 10 will produce 0 jellychips, any group of 11 or 12 tokens produces 12 jellychips. What now?"
lintamande: "...well if you were a god you could calculate the token's marginal value in all possible subsets of all of the tokens and do something with that. Which I mention only because sometimes apparently if gods can do it dath ilan can too," Gregoria says. She's pretty sure once you've sold your soul you can just say things like that.
"If all the tokens are identical like that you probably just want to split evenly - I know that was just for the example but it'd simplify the math you have to do in the version Gregoria just proposed, if you treat interchangeable tokens as having the same payout -"
Keltham: That was a faster progression to the Law-inspired answer than Keltham was expecting. Maybe something about the exact way Keltham asked the question managed to prompt that answer? Or maybe it really is the sort of thing where most arbitrary aliens will arrive at the same answer, which is a small piece of good news about the general cooperativity of Reality.
"Yes indeed; sometimes you can take an ideal-agent calculation whose naked specification is too large for even gods to compute, and either simplify it to an exact answer, or get a good and fast approximation of it."
Keltham whiteboards a sum over every possible permutation of 12 tokens, pausing to explain dath ilani math symbols like 'all permutations' and 'initial string up to first appearance of this symbol'. For every possible order in which the tokens could be arranged, consider the marginal production that token adds, on the step it's added. (0-10 produces 0, 11-12 produces 12.) Then, divide that sum by the number of permutations.
"This sum has 479 million, 1 thousand, 6 hundred terms," Keltham says. "I've already finished adding them up. How are you doing on that?"
lintamande: See if he'd said that yesterday no one would've bet against him being a sadist.
Iarwain: "The sum is also 479 million, 1 thousand, and whatever it was," Asmodia says. People who aren't Keltham can tell that she's not saying it as triumphantly as she should be; to Keltham she is liable to sound exactly like the same cheerful person as always.
Keltham: "Mm. And you got that by?"
Iarwain: "Dividing 479 million, which is what you said, by twelve, and then multiplying by twelve." If the others can't figure anything out from that it's their own damn problem.
lintamande: - that'd work if every term is one? But they just agreed it wasn't?? But it - averages out to one? But how would you prove that?
No one voices any confusion, because they're too Chelish for that.
Carissa Sevar: (Summary of what the fuck is up with Asmodia, from whoever is mindreading her, please.)
Iarwain: The poor dear really didn't want to go to Hell, tried praying to a nonspecific Good god to get her out of it in case Cheliax was lying about Good gods not doing that, and had an accordingly unpleasant evening afterwards. If they'd known this group was going to be anything more than a welcoming gift for Keltham, they would have done better screening on her.
Does Sevar want to pull the trigger on replacing Asmodia? There were over-one-half responses to Keltham that could allow one of the girls to later reveal she's a shapechanged adult.
Carissa Sevar: She's considering it.
It's more lying.
(and - a thing Keltham'll be mad about even if she manages to bring him around on Evil generally, someone directly ending up worse off, if he ever does find out)
(probably that doesn't matter because they're not going to be able to bring Keltham around anyway)
On the other hand you really, really don't want bitter children with nothing to lose around your highly sensitive research project.
The thing she wants is to talk to Asmodia but this isn't a non-heresy work situation at the Worldwound where sometimes someone just needs a drink and the casual but almost generous observation that they aren't special (and that therefore there are people who've survived being like them), there's too much at stake to go off her gut.
Do we have a replacement candidate. Give them that math problem and see if they get it right.
Iarwain: Oh, Asmodia has plenty to lose now. She did sign away her soul, as wasteful as that was, and her Hell can always get worse.
They'll try the obvious replacement candidates on that math problem.
(That is a significant ask, though. Asmodia had the best scores in math, if not in wizardry generally, for this whole group. If Asmodia had graduated normally she'd have been tracked for spell research and ritual support after her Worldwound tour, not Security. Target-replacing Security operatives aren't usually tracked for mathematical talent; they're not usually replacing mathematicians.)
Ione Sala: "The result has to be that," Ione states, "because everybody got the same kind of token, there are 12 jellychips to divide, there are 12 tokens, and obviously everybody should get one jellychip. So if we're dividing by the number of permutations, the numerator has to be the number of permutations too."
lintamande: "Well, yes," says Meritxell, "but if the reason we're learning it this way at all instead of just coming up with 'one jellychip a piece', which three-year-olds could do, is the permutations approach then we should be solving the sum instead of just noticing it has to get us the three-year-old answer. It does, though, since eleven in twelve of them are 'zero' and the twelfth is 'twelve'. ...I'm not sure that even gods are doing the full math all the time but maybe it's usually nearly that symmetrical."
Keltham: Keltham is starting to suspect that Chelish wizards do not routinely memorize 12 factorial (479,001,600) and didn't recognize the number when he said it, which may make this problem harder to mentally chunk.
In which case they couldn't have studied a lot of combinatorics?? Keltham would really have guessed that 'this bit of spell with 12 elements has 479,001,600 possible conformations' would be an important chunk of spellcraft, unless things only work at all when there's only 1 possible conformation.
Maybe you don't get to that part at second circle.
Or maybe - this is a weird thought, but Keltham is starting to feel suspicious of a trend - Cheliax teaches combinatorics in some incredibly narrow way where they've only learned combinatorics for spells and not combinatorics for everyday life??
This probably isn't the most important thing right now, file it with the other 'Why are they so inconsistently X??'
"Correct, but I'm not sure everyone was following along with that, so let's try a smaller scale version. Suppose I took four of you, lined you up in a randomized order - you can imagine it being visibly randomized, if you like - and gave 8 jellychips to whoever was standing second in line. On average, how many jellychips should you expect to receive if I run this procedure on you?"
lintamande: "Two," they chorus cheerfully.
Keltham: "How could the answer possibly be two? There's four times three times two times one ways to pick the first person in the line from four people, the second person in the line from the three remaining people, the third person in the line from two remaining people, and one way to tack on the last person in the line. Four times three times two times one is 24. You get 8 jellychips at the end, if you get any at all. So the answer is going to be something divided by 24 different possibilities, maybe 8 divided by 24 or something like that, so the answer should be one-third. Or something with thirds in it, anyways, because you're dividing by 24, which has a factor of 3 in there."
lintamande: They stare at him warily.
"You're second in line a quarter of the time," says Tonia. "So it's two." Probably dath ilan does this kind of thing because of it being illegal to light anyone on fire so they have no other outlets.
dath ilan: (Illegal isn't quite the same concept when you don't have threats; but lighting somebody on fire would get you barred from most cities, yes, since most cities contain people who prefer not to be lit on fire.)
Keltham: "But how... does one obtain... that result?"
lintamande: "You take the payout, which is eight, and you multiply it by how often you get the payout, which is a quarter of the time, and eight times a quarter is two."
Keltham: Keltham furthermore suspects that Chelish education may also possibly put more emphasis on guessing the right answer for spell problems than on proving the answer correct. Which there's obviously a place for! In fact, if he were to treat them as kids, an old dath ilani rule implies that Keltham needs to find a problem that forces them to use a more rigorous method, rather than complaining that the correct answer was obtained too quickly. You are not allowed to tell a child 'That answer was correct but I want you to obtain it my way instead of your way,' that is not good for kids. And it's not actually clear to Keltham if that rule is supposed to hold relative to absolute age or to mathematical maturity.
"If there's twenty-four different ways to stand in line, how does it end up that you're getting a payout one quarter of the time?" Keltham tries instead. "Shouldn't it be more like 1/24 or something like that?"
lintamande: "There's not twenty-four different ways to stand in line! There are four places you can be in line and then you don't care what the other three kids are doing."
Keltham: "I am supposed at this point to find some actual problem which forces you to compute it out the long way, instead of complaining that you got the correct answer but you didn't get it the way I wanted, which I am not supposed to ever do. But I don't have a workbook full of carefully composed problems like I would if this were a real lesson, unfortunately."
"If we were trying to figure out your marginal contribution to a more complicated economic situation, though, the particular people ahead of you in line might be important -"
"You know, I should just give you a simpler problem that forces you to compute it the long way. Let's say there are three tokens with numbers that say 2, 3, and 5. Bringing a group of tokens together gives the group a number of jellychips equal to the product of every number in the group, so if you had the tokens for 2 and 5 together, the group would receive 10 jellychips."
"What does this method say is the fair distribution to the holder of the 5 token, if three token-holders pool 2 and 3 and 5 to get 30 jellychips for the group?"
lintamande: "So you sum up adding the five to nothing, adding the five to the two, adding the five to the three, and adding the five to the pool with the two and the three," says Meritxell, "and that's everything the five could possibly be worth in every world, and you divide by how many worlds there were."
Ione Sala: "Or if you actually bother to do the work, 5 plus 10 plus 15 plus 30 divided by four," says Ione. "So 15."
Iarwain: Asmodia rolls her eyes. "Really. What do the other two tokens get, then? The 2 and the 3?"
Ione Sala: Ione suspects a trap, and tries to rapidly work it out in her head. For the '2', it's 2 + 6 + 10 + 30, divided by 4, which is... damn it, this is harder to do in her head... 12? And for the '3', it's 3 + 6 + 15 + 30 = 54, divided by 4 is no it doesn't matter it's not all going to add up to 30. "Wait, I see my mistake -" Ione begins.
Iarwain: "Mistakes. Plural. The divisor is 6, not 4, and you're supposed to sum over the marginal productions rather than the total productions. If it's ordered 5-3-2, that's a marginal production of 5. If it's ordered 5-2-3, that's a marginal production of 5. If it's ordered 2-5-3, the product starts at 2, and goes to 10, which is a marginal production of 8. 3-5-2 goes from 3 to 15, marginal production 12. 2-3-5 and 3-2-5 go from 6 to 30, marginal production 24 repeated twice." Asmodia has been writing down these numbers, thank you, she is not trying to keep it all in her head without a Fox's Cunning. "5 + 5 + 8 + 12 + 24 + 24 = 78, divided by 6... 13."
She quickly checks the other two numbers to make sure she's got it right.
2: 2 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 15 + 15 = 42 / 6 = 73: 3 + 3 + 4 + 10 + 20 + 20 = 60 / 6 = 10
13 + 7 + 10 = 30. Okay, she didn't just make a (tiny bit, unimportantly, bigger) fool of herself.
Carissa Sevar: (Is she playing at anything, by being prominently the best at math today?)
Iarwain: The other students are trying as hard as they can at math. They don't believe themselves to have been instructed by you to diminish their math efforts as such. Asmodia is just better at this problem.
(Unfortunately.)
Keltham: "Yeah, the thing I was trying to force you to do with the four students in twenty-four possible orders was sum over the 6 possible ways you could be standing second in line, to make the point about how the sum is defined as being over every permutation. In retrospect, clearly, I should've started with the case of tokens labeled 2, 3, and 5, but I'm sort of making this up as I go along because it's been a few years and I don't remember some of the exercises let alone their ordering. Sorry about that. Anyways -"
"When you're trying to see if there's a way to do what ideal agents would do - or gods, if you think gods are powerful enough to be ideal about that particular case - you want to distinguish the Law that defines what the solution is, and any clever ways you come up with to compute the Lawful solution faster."
"When you've got 12 identical tokens, such that any group of 11 or 12 of them will produce 12 jellychips, there's a symmetry argument which says that each token must get one jellychip. If you thought there ought to be a coherence constraint on the Law of fairness saying that holders of identical tokens should end up with identical payouts, you could use that to compute the answer even if you had no idea what the actual Law was. Often when you do see how the Law works, you can go back over a lot of your intuitions, and say, 'Oh, yes, that intuition I had previously was shadowing this coherence of the Law, even though I didn't know how the whole Law worked' and that's a kind of sanity check on whether you're reasoning correctly at all."
"But the Law of fairness that defines the target answer for the '11 tokens of 12' problem is in principle a sum over 479,001,600 marginal productions, of which all but 39,916,800 are zero, and 39,916,800 of which are 12, divided at the end by 479,001,600. Which means that we can say there's a single ideal fairness formula that governs both the '11 of 12' game, and the '2, 3, 5' game, even if shortcuts or approximations for the particular cases of the formula can be different, in cases where a shortcut exists."
lintamande: "Which does imply that identical tokens will get identical payouts," says Meritxell. "Right?"
Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not want the kids to be bad at math. Imitating being bad at math seems like another thing where the things Keltham would expect to be correlated won't be and he'll end up suspicious, which is almost definitely happening anyway but at least since it's the product of their real legitimate math education it'll make more sense to him as he learns more.
Carissa wanted to know whether Asmodia was being impressive on purpose because an Asmodia who is trying to get Keltham's attention, or an Asmodia who is trying to be hard for Cheliax to replace - an Asmodia who has started playing for her survival against the project's interests, more than everyone in Cheliax is doing all the time - is a different problem than an Asmodia who is doing her best but bitter because she had been consoling herself that Cheliax was lying about Good and they turned out not to be. She thinks a disillusioned angry-at-Good Asmodia is probably usable. She is open to learning from someone with more experience with this, though.
Iarwain: This is her being weak and reactive, not strategic. And she's quite pissed at the Good gods, yes.
(Security doesn't explain why.)
Carissa Sevar: It's not really the kind of thing that requires explanation! The Good gods suck.
Carissa tries to think what Maillol will think if she tells him that she wants to try to talk Asmodia around. It would be nice if she could predict what Maillol thought about things so she could stop bothering the real one so often, but he still surprises her as often as not, and she isn't sure if he'll think this is Carissa being inexperienced at having a real command and accordingly stupid, or Carissa having weirdly good instincts because Asmodeus dropped Keltham near her for a reason.
...she should focus on the lesson or she's going to get behind. And then Keltham will think she's kind of stupid, which ....might be good, if it means he thinks she's not a ringleader, but would interfere with attachment to her, she's pretty sure. Lesson it is.
Keltham: "Yup. Identical tokens getting identical payouts is one of several coherence properties that this solution has, called 'equal treatment of equals'. Another example of an obvious coherence property is that the sum over every agent's fair distribution equals the total distribution - we don't have any jellychips left over. Yet another coherence property is that combining two games into a single game will make the agent's fair reward be the sum of their fair rewards in the component games. Or another obvious-sounding one, if your marginal production is zero for every permutation, your fair reward is also zero."
"Would you say those four properties sound like properties that any fair formula for a game like this one ought to have? Again, that's identical agents being treated identically, distributing all of the gains, the reward for playing two games is the sum of the reward for playing the games separately, and agents who contribute nothing receive nothing."
lintamande: Those seem obviously true but there's still a suspicious pause while they try to think of counterexamples.
Carissa Sevar: "Did we get a technical definition of a fair formula such that 'split the rewards evenly', which does not have the last of those properties, gets disqualified?"
Keltham: "Oh, at the moment, we don't have any technical definition of what fairness is, really, just this one permutation-based formula I gave you which I claimed might have something to do with fairness, and four particular properties that might seem intuitively appealing for a fair solution. So at present, we could at best say that the supposedly fair permutation-based formula doesn't split rewards evenly; and that splitting rewards evenly violates the intuitively-appealing fair notion that zero marginal production should receive zero reward."
Carissa Sevar: - nod.
Keltham: "Buuut, it just so happens that this here permutation-based formula is the only possible formula that has those four properties. Which is why, if dath ilan ever runs into aliens, they'll be at least sort of hopeful that the aliens also think this is the fairness formula as specialized for crisp games like these."
"This is how humans, from their chaotic beginnings, come to know Law. There's a sort of - bootstrapping, reflection, seeing something inside yourself - where you recognize the higher pattern and coherence within your own intuitions - where you find four crisp requirements that seem obviously, intuitively like they should hold if there's any way to get them, that appeal to the pre-Lawful notions inside you - and those four crisp properties pinpoint and identify a single possible Law - and then you look back at the intuitions inside you, and say, 'Oh, so that's what it was reflecting, that's what it was a shadow of, all along.' You didn't know that Law when you first saw the Ultimatum Game, but you gave that Law's answer of 6:6."
Carissa Sevar: Imagine having that, having the true Law, and thinking you'd also better not hit the kids or they might decide it's not worth going to school. Chelish children will march through fire for that, and that's why Cheliax is going to win.
Keltham: "And so long as that gets transcripted and sent out soon enough, hopefully nobody from Chelish Governance gives me a completely baffled look if I say that my baseline fair share of an increase in Chelish production ought to be around roughly the amount that Chelish production would've increased by adding me in the alternate world where the country had randomly half of its current people, or gets confused and worried if I say that a proposed contract clause would be annoying enough in a final offer to make me visibly generate a random number between 0 and 999 and walk out on Cheliax if the number is 0."
"Now it's time for a break, or it would be in dath ilan, anyways, and it so happens that I hailed from there. I'll take some questions, and then probably go off by myself for a bit to let my brain cool down from recomposing half-remembered lectures - metaphorically speaking, the brain doesn't actually overheat when you overthink unless something is going very wrong inside. Dath ilani best practices would provide you with a small snack and suggest that you stand up and walk around. Maybe a brief magic-practice session after this, to break things up? Anybody who doesn't want to teach me magic, which doesn't need to include all of you, could take a longer break, that way."
"Any questions?"
Iarwain: "I do have some snacks if we should all have snacks," Pilar says, taking a pouch of small Chelish sweets from her bookbag, wearing a cheerful smile. She starts going around and distributing them to everyone, Keltham first.
lintamande: But is she going to give them to the mysterious slave.
Iarwain: Yes, apparently.
Keltham: Keltham consumes his sweet. Not bad for this tech level!
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you, Pilar. I'm going to go get my headband," Carissa says. "Probably I'll come to magic lessons but don't wait on me, I might want to reread all my math textbooks first or something."
Keltham: No questions? Keltham doesn't know whether that lecture was much less exciting for them than it was for him, or if there's a cultural difference that makes Chelish students ask a lot fewer questions than dath ilani would.
Well, Keltham heads off to his bedroom.
Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom follows.
Keltham: Sighgreat.
Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Why did you say that you needed to destroy those papers before the universe noticed them?"
Keltham: "It was almost entirely a joke but in the unlikely event it's not then you wouldn't actually be helping by calling attention to -"
Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Apologies," Broom says, and immediately turns to go the other way.
Keltham: ...okay, maybe that guy is some sort of Keeper.
Keltham goes to his bed, lies down, and closes his eyes for a quick rest.
lintamande: Meritxell does not eat Pilar's sweet on general principle, and goes back to her room to put away somewhere where she can check it later for being weird in some way. Security wouldn't let Pilar poison them but it could totally be weird in some way.
Iarwain: "Anything you feel like reporting to Security?" says Rodez Balaguerre, who's leaning against the wall of a passage along the way.
lintamande: "Pilar's being weird, Asmodia's being weird, there's a slave attending classes, I don't understand why Sevar's in charge." She holds up the sweet, not quite offering it to him. "This is a very educational environment. Am I forgetting something?"
Iarwain: "Oh, Pilar's being weird? How so?"
lintamande: "She got Sever a cake. And offered everyone, including the slave who is attending classes, these." Neither of those things are heretical but they're absolutely weird. Meritxell isn't feeling particularly afraid. It is possible she forgot something, in which case she'll rightly be in a lot of trouble, but she doesn't think she did, because she has a very good memory, and one always might get in trouble anyway but there's no point being afraid of that, it'd be like being afraid of rain. One thing her mother always told her was that everyone is powerless but only some people are scared.
Iarwain: "Oh, I see. Good on you for informing Security about those anomalous, surprising events as soon as you reasonably could. When did those events happen, by the by?"
lintamande: There is also no point in trying to defend yourself against the unreasonable implications of things people are saying, any more than you would argue with the clouds about whether they ought to bring rain. "Pilar provided the cake at the start of the day, and the sweets at the conclusion of the lesson, about two minutes ago. The slave showed up at the start of lesson, with Keltham's knowledge. And Sevar's, I think. Asmodia's been weird, uh, more subtly than that, but it was most noticeable in the last half hour of the lecture."
Iarwain: "Take off your left shoe."
lintamande: It seems unlikely that Security wants them all running off to report at the start of lunch on things that Security already saw, which makes it correspondingly more likely that Security's just in a bad mood, but there's no point in being afraid either way. - though the second possibility does suggest more options. She keeps her eyes on him while she lifts her leg to remove her shoe. "I don't suppose Security's allowed to explain things to us."
Iarwain: Rodez Balaguerre breaks her little toe, not in a particularly unfriendly way.
"This is a mission for big girls," he informs her. "You are not adequately prepared for it. You were intended as a welcoming gift for Keltham. Somehow you've ended up with a great deal more responsibility than that. This will require rapid retraining."
"Pilar is now an oracle of Cayden Cailean. That's the Chaotic Good god of drunkenness, if you're too loyal to know. It happened moments before Pilar could sign her soul contract. Mindreading shows that Pilar didn't want that at all, and that her request to be Maledicted if she needs to be executed was completely sincere. This matches up with earlier records of Pilar's thoughts being read, and is not currently thought to be an oracular power for evading having her mind read. Orders are to consider her an Asmodean in good standing, for now."
"Her giving cake to Sevar was a manifestation of her oracular curse, as was her distribution of sweets."
"You failed to report the former event for the entire length of the morning. Had Security not known about this matter already, and had the Security officer present also failed to take explicit note of the anomaly as every one of you did, your failure to note Pilar's unusual behavior and report it to anyone, would have meant ignoring signs of a catastrophic underlying problem."
"You can have that toe healed at the end of the day, or earlier if Keltham suddenly wants to sleep with you for some reason. Meanwhile, it is expected to provide you with a recurring reminder of the new level of Security awareness that is now required from you."
"Broom is here by direct authorization of the Grand High Priestess and belongs to a Lawful Neutral god whose work conduces to Asmodeus's purposes. He is not authorized to give you orders and you should show him neither deference nor disrespect."
"Highpriest Maillol has decided that Sevar seems to have the best current understanding of Keltham of anyone present, including himself. In the unlikely event that you prove to understand Keltham even better, Maillol might put you in charge instead. Try sabotaging Sevar to make yourself look better by comparison and Maillol will hurt you enough to mildly improve your soul before sending it onward to Hell."
"Asmodia earned a punishment the previous evening but is not currently considered by Security to be an ongoing problem."
"You're done here. Put your shoe back on."
lintamande: - fair enough. "Thank you," she says sincerely, and puts her shoe back on, and determinedly walks without a limp down the hallway, though it takes a great deal of effort.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa notices herself feeling wary as she approaches the temple, which is probably that human flaw Keltham identified earlier where if bad things happen to you in a place your idiot brain will try to conclude the place is bad. She wouldn't have noticed before, but she's paying more attention to her flaws, lately.
However this is probably not the moment to try to fix them. She'll just go in and learn what ridiculous things have happened in the last three hours and get her headband and figure out what to do about Asmodia.
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol will have a chat with her that is a lot like the one that Rodez Balaguerre just had with Meritxell. It will involve Maillol taking hold of her arm, breaking her wrist, and shaking it for emphasis while he lectures her; but he'll heal her afterwards, unlike the other girls, because he does not want Sevar distracted on an ongoing basis or Keltham noticing anything if he suddenly drags her off for a quickie.
Nothing horribly unexpected has happened in the last three hours. Nobody is to make any humorous comments about that because nobody is to tempt fate.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa would not even consider making comments about that. Fate is clearly already incredibly tempted around here, despite having as far as anyone knows been extinguished a century ago.
'
She puts her headband back on. It's nice how she's not going to have to take it off this time.
There's no arguing that the girls are all in over their heads. She's not...actually sure that Security and Maillol are less in over their heads. Contessa Lrilatha didn't seem in over her head and the Queen didn't seem in over her head and Aspexia Rugatonn didn't seem in over her head but everyone who isn't on that level ...might, in fact, be in over their heads.
Well, she always wanted to be that good.
It's pretty obvious with a headband on that having a headband on isn't anywhere sufficient to achieve that. She's not sure a +6 headband would be, and while Wisdom might be more useful than Cunning it doesn't solve the problem either. The fundamental thing is that they're trying to do something very hard with little margin for error and at least one god actively opposed to their efforts, and while obviously being smart is necessary for handling that.....
...Nefreti Clepati isn't dath ilani. Being smart doesn't even mean automatically deriving all the Law and becoming one with it, within the range that humans are capable of making themselves smart. What she knows now is what dath ilan taught seven year olds in a couple days of classes, and while she can feel that it has not only cleared up her confusion about what bargaining is, that it has lit a torch that casts some light on a dozen surrounding things, she can mostly only see everything she doesn't yet know.
But Keltham likes her. And if he gets bored in a week then the other girls will be a week more prepared for Keltham to like them. And while she tries to maintain realistic expectations about how long he's likely to take to get bored, her actual honest guess, now that she's smarter, now that it's a bit easier to split out which predictions are defensive-predictions so she won't be sad about whatever happens - what a flaw to have in your brain -
- her actual honest guess is that he won't get bored in a week. That he'll pick up additional girls at some point, because variety is highly motivating, but that she's already not interchangeable, to him.
For some reason this feeling makes her wish that she'd fixed the Queen's bag so it could hurt her again. However, not flirting with the Queen was the smartest call she made this morning and she's going to persist in it even if it would be really nice to be in a lot of pain. And she's not quite on terms with Keltham where she could run up to him and say 'for reasons I can't tell you, I want you to break all my knuckles with a hammer' - he's not even there yet, he wouldn't enjoy it -
She gives herself five minutes to spend staring out the window and daydreaming about things to tell Keltham to seduce him to Evil, and then tries to steer her mind back on to business. ...it's probably too late to pull Asmodia aside in a not-maximally-threatening way but she'll see if she happens to be able to catch her.
Asmodia: It's way too late to catch Asmodia without a broken toe that hasn't particularly improved her mood. It's been improved even less by being told in a smiling way that children will be children, but it might be unwise for Asmodia to fuck with Pilar like she was thinking about, considering that Pilar now has an extra two caster circles on Asmodia plus unknown Chaotic Good powers plus Security knows Pilar is more loyal than Asmodia is probably capable of.
She's not bothering trying to walk without a limp if Keltham's not around.
The food here is substantially better than in Ostenso academy. She's gone to get a small snack from the refectory area; they've got some out, probably in case Keltham - or, she supposes, maybe some of the other people here - want one. Nobody's told her she can't.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa comes up behind her and takes one too. "Hey," she says. "You're not in trouble, or you might be but I'm not it. Do you want to borrow my headband?"
Asmodia: That's a very good way to get a wizard's attention, even under Asmodia's circumstances. She tilts her head to look at Sevar, which is the Chelish equivalent of whirling around in shock. "That would seem very generous of you," she says, meaning, why would you do that and what's in it for you.
Maybe this is a test to see if she is capable of learning literally at all and will now report to Security after Sevar acts weird.
Carissa Sevar: "Wouldn't it just. I was really annoyed, when it occurred to me as the way to get what I want, here. Especially because it only occurred to me with the headband on and I think wouldn't have otherwise." Wizards more inclined to poetry than Carissa have described taking headbands off - not +2, generally they're talking about +4, but still - as like 30% of the way to being dead.
"You can have it for the duration of the conversation and then long enough to look at my third-circle spells, all I want is for you to approach the conversation like I'm doing you a favor and will keep doing that if it works this time."
Asmodia: "Accepted," Asmodia says unhesitatingly. She has no idea what it's about, but the offer is, she suspects, intended to be more-than-fair; if so it makes that point well enough.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa takes her headband off and tries not to make a face about it. Hands it over.
"I noticed you were in a bad mood today," she says. "Keltham didn't, or this would be a very different conversation, and perhaps you will get it together by the time he's competent to read us at all, but I noticed. And, you know, I'm not worried about whether your incentives are pointed in the right direction. You're not an idiot - you're very clever, actually, or this would also be a very different conversation - and we're the most carefully-corrected batch of wizards in all of Cheliax at present. But. We are working in adversarial conditions, here, Abadar is mad at us, and to succeed under those conditions our success needs to be assured from more than one direction. Cheliax is doing its Chelish best to teach you how to handle yourself here.
And dath ilan, if we were dath ilani students, would try to bribe you. On the utterly stupid assumption, if Keltham's telling it straight, that punishment doesn't work; or on the slightly less stupid assumption, if we figure the smart people in charge of dath ilan lie to their people as much as our smart people lie to us - and I don't think Keltham'd be very surprised, to learn that - that sometimes you hit a different corner of the motivational system, when you dangle a bribe in front of someone." She nods at the headband.
Asmodia: Asmodia puts on the headband. She's ever tapped herself with a Fox's Cunning, but there's said to be a subtle difference from the headband. That with spellsilver to anchor a more carefully refined enchantment than a hung spell, it can be smoother, more supportive, befitting something meant to be worn forever after.
...she can't really tell the difference, in the first rush of clarity, it feels half as intense as Fox's Cunning but otherwise mostly the same.
Mostly her newfound clarity is agreeing with her prior impression that, yes, her life is a complete loss in which nothing good has happened to her, nothing good is ever going to happen to her, and all of her goals now consist of being tortured less and staying out of Hell for slightly longer.
It's definitely possible that having any prospect of anything good ever happening to her would hit a different corner of her motivational system. Dath ilan could be on to something there. Asmodia chooses not to say this out loud, where it would be a pathetic plea for help; if Sevar is running Detect Thoughts, which would be sensible of her, then she's welcome to the inward thought that isn't a plea for anything.
"Or, alternatively, we only got the lectures for seven-year-olds so far and dath ilan's reasoning will seem much more understandable after a full week of lectures," Asmodia chooses to say instead. "Irresistibly compelling, even, which I assume is why they had us sell our souls first." Why not Sevar, though, that makes no sense. "And Abadar's mad at us? That sounds important."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, see, we keep lying to his cleric. Keltham has - a bunch of divination, today. Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires. What do you suppose he's gonna turn up, if he casts those and looks at you?"
Asmodia: Asmodia doesn't laugh out loud. Even less so, considering how fucked she would be. And yet, somehow, it's still funny. What a lovely bed Hell has made for itself to lie in.
"Detect Anxiety might not turn up anything much, you can't be anxious about what's already happened to you. Detect Desires might pick up something Security doesn't want him to see." The desire to be somewhere else. The desire to not be herself. The desire not to go to Hell. Even with an intelligence headband on she can't think of a solution for that besides removing her, which isn't a good sign - no, wait, she's thought of one. "Should've written down on my paper that I'd have a more interesting background, some story that would explain why Keltham couldn't detect my own desires, if I'm about to get a blocking item for that."
Carissa Sevar: "Would've been a good idea. I haven't got Nondetection for you, but Security will. I'm not, actually, expecting him to try casting that one on a room full of students, given how some of his other spells have panned out - not today, when he doesn't recognize it - but maybe he'll surprise me." She smiles tiredly; it's not sincere, but the insincerity isn't really pointed at Asmodia. "Now, entertain me for a bit, pretend you're in dath ilan. What payment would you want, for this, such that you'd be glad on the whole that you were chosen for it, that you were born for it, such that if you thought of a way to make it go better you wouldn't just think 'they'll kill me if I don't'."
Asmodia: The thought is painful to glance in the direction of; Asmodia turns away from her first internal glance.
Her first thought is that she's being toyed with. That wouldn't be anything the least bit surprising, but right now it's running into a contradiction with something else.
"I could entertain you, if you hadn't exchanged a headband-borrowing for considering that you were doing me a favor," Asmodia says. "A little compact between us, probably a bad idea for me to break that." Can she, actually, if she's sold her soul to Lawful Evil?
Carissa Sevar: "Bore me, then, and give me a straight answer. Look, do I like you as a person? No, I'm not that impressed by mathematical ability I'll have myself once I have time to study with the headband on. Would I give you presents even if I liked you as a person? No. But this is either going to fail spectacularly, in which case we will all die very shortly, or succeed spectacularly, in which case I will be rich beyond my wildest dreams and powerful hopefully right up to and not beyond my ability to keep my feet under me. And if I can buy - with that future money that I only get if I win - the slightest sense, in your heart, that you want me to win, well, that might end up being worth quite a lot to me."
Asmodia: Asmodia's thinks that this is probably what it feels like to have somebody trying to buy your soul, before she remembers that already happened yesterday and didn't produce anything like this sensation.
It's pretty obvious to her what she wants, now that she stares in that direction.
It's the sort of thought that gets people killed, maybe even people who've sold their souls. Intelligence headbands are dangerous things; she doesn't feel like she'd have thought of this with the spell form of Fox's Cunning.
And having thought it, she's already fucked herself over yet again, and might as well say it to Sevar. "There's a story I once heard whispered about the Queen, that if you piss her off badly enough, she'll turn you into a statue and bury you far down enough that even the Hellknights can't get to you to free your trapped soul. I'd serve someone loyally if there was a realistic compact for that to happen to me, at the end of my life, if I served at some realistic level that's actually in reach for me."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa knows exactly what Keltham will see if he turns Detect Anxieties on her, because it hasn't left her mind since the Queen said it and she's pretty sure it never will, even if she succeeds beyond everyone's wildest dreams and gets a duchy out of it.
She doesn't say that. Obviously. But that leaves her - with absolutely nothing to say, nothing she can even really imagine herself saying. Her planned grateful exit was, 'I think I'll need the headband on to consider that', but she's not sure she can say that, about - about the desire not to be -
- also it's almost surely impossible, not threatening, or Security would have intervened.
"And here I was hoping you liked, you know, magic items, strangling puppies, that kind of thing. You know, if I had an aptitude for spell research and a terror of Hell, I'd work on permitted forms of immortality - powered by the hearts of babies or whatever. Figure out what the Starstone does to the people it eats."
Asmodia: Very few people ever pull off anything even close to immortality, and Asmodia is aware that she's not that good at math, to research something that very few wizards have ever figured out. A lot of people want immortality. Very few people get it.
Then again - the other form of the thing she wants - isn't something that a lot of people want. Maybe it's genuinely easier to figure out what the Starstone does to the people it eats, than to figure out immortality. Though you'd think, if it was easy to solve, that Galt would use that instead of their famous soul-trapping executioner's blade, which Asmodia isn't interested in because the Hellknights will get to it sooner or later.
"I suppose a slave's-bread version of that would be finding enough spells that destroy memories and rewrite personality that the person who goes to Hell isn't effectively me any more," Asmodia says, and feels a flare of awful hope as she does. "Remaking her to be a faithful Sarenrae worshipper might be funny, she'd be so surprised when she ends up in Hell." Because fuck Sarenrae, that's why.
Carissa Sevar: - giggle. "See, if you work out something like that, then you're not constantly constrained by who'll collaborate with you, because I don't think that's even slightly heretical. I know there's a ninth circle spell that lets you turn a person into a book, and edit it. I'm certainly not going to promise anything on the spot, but if you do a good job, and get us to pull this off, I would enjoy rewriting every page of your book."
Asmodia: Asmodia's wordless core pulls her thoughts back from a direction of looking, where if she actually thought of any way of doing the thing, Security would execute her possibly on the spot. She doesn't even think about where she didn't look.
(Fuck this! Fuck this again! The only consolation for selling her soul was supposed to be that she could finally think her own thoughts!)
"I'll think about it," Asmodia says after a lengthy pause. "I'd realistically - want to be rewritten as someone like Pilar who enjoys it and gets off on it and would do great in Hell, just in case it's still me in there no matter what. Going for contract devil when you grow up, are you?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'm going for getting to grow up. I can't say I can relate to not wanting that, but if you do a good job for me, I expect I'll arrange you any stupid thing that takes me less than a month of my time. That ball is in your court, though, presently. You'll have to go study dath ilani thought and convince me that an Asmodia who wants something is valuable enough for the no doubt unpleasant series of conversations it'll take to figure out a version of it I'm allowed to give you."
Asmodia: The subtlety of wording doesn't escape the notice of Asmodia wearing a headband. "Study dath ilani thought, not dath ilani knowledge? That sounds like a daring thought to think, for somebody who hasn't sold her soul." Who do you think you are, who are you in fact, to make promises like those? You don't talk like a Keltham expert that Maillol bestowed with a little more authority over the rest of us.
Carissa Sevar: "Asmodeus owns me, and owes me nothing in exchange, and I'll think whatever thoughts might serve Him, it being hard to know in advance of thinking them. Concern yourself with your fate, Asmodia, and if there's a promise it's worth making you then I'll tell you why I can promise it."
Asmodia: Asmodia gives a half-nod of acknowledgement; fair's fair, even if she couldn't say whatever Keltham would say about what exactly makes that be fair.
With a fraction of preliminary agreement to agree on something behind them, it's time to speak a little more frankly.
"What exactly are you looking for, from me? I thought we were here to coax useful information out of Keltham to get transcribed for the real experts. That requires us to look harmless to a dath ilani, to be pretty girls that men enjoy thinking they can teach, and to make fast progress and show it to him so he'll move on to more advanced lessons. If you've got priorities that aren't the project priorities, and involve dath ilani thinking that we were told on day one was insane, I need to hear spelled out what kind of merchandise you want me to have on offer. And then I need to hear confirmation that's okay from Security, with whom I'm not interested in being in trouble, though I'd agree to keep it secret from the other students if you wanted."
Carissa Sevar: Maybe it's not obvious, if the thing you want most is to stop existing. Why is that even a way humans can be insane. "I suppose I don't need to tell you this, Asmodia, but most people run into five kinds of heresy the first time they try having an original thought, and we presently have a problem that we can't solve without a fair bit of original thought. I'm not, of course, an exception, but I suspect that the five kinds of heresy I end up at are entirely different from yours.
I want you to think anyway. You can end all your thoughts in 'and this is why I want my soul expended for magical power by the darkest of sorcerers', if you want, I don't care, though do mind that your only route to that is to impress me. I want you to try to understand the math underlying Law well enough that if we end up sticking more headbands on you you can derive things dath ilan didn't get around to teaching Keltham. I want you to do well enough at that Keltham notices, ideally, but I actually think I care more about the math than the Keltham noticing, and if you hate the idea of him noticing you in particular you can feed all your clever mathematical insights to Meritxell." Who will absolutely hate not having come up with them herself.
Asmodia: Asmodia thinks the same thing, and doesn't suppress her small vicious smile. "Security, if you're there, I request confirmation that Sevar's sudden interest in Lawful Neutral thinking doesn't mean she got oracled by Irori, and that the Queen, the Grand High Priestess, and Asmodeus would be fine with this private trade."
Asmodia: A wizard remains invisible, but the spell hiding them and their Arcane Mark appear, as plain as sight to Asmodia without need of Detect Magic, which she prepared on sheer reflex this morning before realizing that she was being dumb.
Iarwain: "Confirmed," says Security. And, just to fuck with Sevar in an allowable sort of way, "If the Queen wasn't fine with it, she probably would've mentioned it when she visited Sevar's bedroom this morning."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa several weeks ago cared if her subordinates thought she was sleeping her way to the top but that ship has sailed, and circumnavigated the globe, and soared off to become an airship, at this point. Besides, sleeping your way that much to the top isn't even shameful. "So, I think I offered a look at my spellbook," she says instead.
Asmodia: "Yes. It was, in fact, very generous of you."
Asmodia follows Sevar to her bedroom - not the first person to do that, apparently! But at the point where someone can nab Abrogail Thrune II while not looking any prettier than Carissa does, she is no longer a slut, she is a shapechanged ancient dragon slut with nine slut caster circles, and only a fool would anger someone who's as much of a slut as that.
And along the way, while she's still wearing the intelligence headband, Asmodia asks herself what she understands about dath ilani thinking. There's obvious notions like, they've developed some inner thing like arcane sight that pierces through the Prime Material like a realm of shadows and sees Mathematics underneath it, but Keltham already knows that and isn't being shy about teaching it to them. Figuring out what they lied to Keltham about, filling in the holes of his knowledge - there's some parts that are obvious if you were raised Evil, what a perfected Lawful Good society carefully hides from children and citizens of questionable loyalty: sadism, the possibility that you can hit people to get them to do what you want, that you can force people to go on playing games they aren't being bribed to play. If Asmodia has an advantage in figuring out something like that, it will be the math that they censored from him.
Is there any part of this that she has an elemental affinity for? The first day - wasn't an unhappy one, was as happy as any day in Cheliax ever gets, between the moments of anxiety and being sure that Keltham was fucking with them. They found out that it's possible to glance at a country of half men and half women, and pierce through the obscuring veil of matter to the Law behind.
And the thought occurs to Asmodia, then - if she is, for some reason, allowed to think about dath ilani thinking - that there's something about Keltham's dath ilani attitude in the face of difficult problems that's - indomitable? Wrong word, and maybe Taldane doesn't have a right one. Something that isn't expecting that students only get problems that they've been trained to solve. Keltham does ask if Golarion has already tried and failed to solve problems, but only to know how difficult they'd be for him to solve, not to consider whether they might be impossible. You never get the impression for a fraction of a second that dath ilan itself would respect all of Golarion's past hard work as meaning anything. Why should they, when Golarion could stare at a country of half men and half women for millennia, bargain over shoes for millennia, and never see the towering structure of Law barely a step out of vision, that dath ilani seven-year-olds learn about from older boys?
A lot of people in Golarion have tried to get immortality -
(or get out of soul contracts)
- but they weren't dath ilani.
If nothing else, destroying a soul - if Abaddon, or the Starstone, can do that at all - or just putting a statue somewhere it will never, ever be reachable again even by the Hellknights or Hell - really doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a class of dath ilani children would give up on, if a teacher gave it to them as a puzzle they didn't know how to solve.
(Though it sure would serve them right if there was also some way like that to destroy everything.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa gives Asmodia ten minutes with her spellbook and then requires her headband back. And perhaps they've missed Keltham's magic lessons, by now, but perhaps they haven't?
Asmodia: Asmodia would rather think by herself than be around Keltham right now, if that wasn't an order.
(she's having way too many disloyal pre-thoughts and should stay further from Security's focus until they go away)
Keltham: Keltham is trying to prepare Prestidigitation, this time, just in case he has more luck with other cantrips than Read Magic. It looks more complex, that doesn't mean it's actually harder to set up.
Ione Sala: Ione is in the library as always, running Detect Magic and trying to describe in words what she sees happening over the spellbook scaffold in response to Keltham's attempted motions. She hopes one of the people with actual arcane sight can stop pretending not to have it, so they can cast an illusion of what Keltham is doing for Keltham to see.
lintamande: Meritxell is present, trying to show it with thread, but an illusion would be a lot better.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa has her headband back and likes it! Security having Arcane Sight won't be surprising to Keltham and leaves the option of claiming it's a ritual that takes a year or something; maybe one of them can cast an illusion?
Iarwain: Why would Security need to explain how Security's abilities work? It's probably just all magic to the weird ignorant kid. But sure, Security can do a realtime illusion of what's happening over the scaffold.
Keltham: "Wait, so that was possible for more experienced wizards, and people didn't think to ask Security then because they were being invisible all the time? I'd complain about all the time I expended with suboptimal efficiency yesterday, but that's actually kind of a hilarious Paranoia Cost and you get those when you're trying to be sufficiently paranoid."
Is Keltham having any more luck at spelling now that he can see what he's doing?