Carissa Sevar: - giggle. “Fair. It’s a really really expensive spell but I guess I don’t know there aren’t half a dozen other secret places they can relocate us to, except that I think they might have done that rather than casting the Forbiddance here, if any of them would have done. I think probably the decision will be made once the site director is no longer dead, unless you tell people you want to be somewhere safer right now - which you should do, if you think it’ll be good for you.”
Keltham: "I'll think about it while you immediately swap headbands before anyone listening has a chance to pull their own substitution ahead of you. Should've thought of that faster."
Carissa Sevar: " - right." She goes back over to the other room, heads over to the pile of bodies and finds a +2 headband because Security would be furious at her if she swaps for a +4. Changes it out.
There are people gathered around for a heal. Of course they didn't interrupt her with Keltham even though he told them to. She tells someone to knock on the door and ask for the heal in five minutes, and then goes back to Keltham.
Keltham: Dath ilani - shouldn't be weak enough to need two weeks of recovery time after their first experience with somebody trying to kill them, should they? Though they certainly have a very, very different attitude towards violence than Cheliax. You learn defense in reality so that aggression stays confined to counterfactuals. Cheliax has public executions.
Dath ilan has executions too, in a certain sense; if you intentionally cause someone else's True Death, you don't get kicked to the Last Resort, you get forcibly and preemptively cryosuspended. Not as a deterrent, obviously, because ideal agents ignore those, and Civilization doesn't build structures that would stop working if people became more ideal. Because anybody that dangerous is more danger than Civilization wants to inflict on the non-true-murderers in the Last Resort. Civilization has a motive to preemptively suspend people that dangerous irrespective of its effect on incentives; it's not a threat.
Obviously if a Chronicler or a family member asked to be present at the preemptive suspension, and the murderer didn't veto it, Governance would hardly block them. You could probably do it as an ordinary concerned citizen and it's hard to see Governance stopping them without an overwhelmingly strong reason. Governance, which has way too much power to say 'no' to things, has to be very circumspect about what it actually says 'no' to, if it doesn't want the Annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival to suddenly turn real.
Keltham has a suspicion that Cheliax's 'public executions' are not 'public' in the sense of 'open to sufficiently concerned citizens wanting to make sure everything has been done correctly'. It rhymes with Carissa's earlier claim that the thing to do with rats is feed them to other rats in a frenzy of cannibalistic death and sell tickets. Public executions, Keltham suspects, have tickets; though it's the sort of thing he should check later, maybe by asking Carissa what the equilibrium price of the tickets are rather than if the tickets exist at all, if he's feeling paranoid that minute.
It's not like it's not consistent. It would pass muster as fiction. Low-tech society with poorer coordination, sustained by economicmagic, with healing, resurrections, and afterlives. Losing a finger isn't permanent until the distant Future can restore it; there are clerics. Not-true-death means you come back - well, you come back if you had enough money to buy insurance. Life in Golarion must be a pretty different experience for its relatively wealthy people and relatively poor ones! Like, qualitatively different, two worlds with different tech levels. But everyone gets the afterlife, it sounds like. Unless they betray an oath. Or Nethys touches them. Or how common is that statue business, he should check with somebody else, Carissa doesn't seem like the type to fret about Statistically Improbable Awful Fates.
And, sure, you can imagine a society like that, where they don't give a shit about violence because the injuries aren't permanent. Where they don't give a shit about death because resurrection and afterlives. A society where people getting near the end of their natural healthspan, when they're starting to feel sick enough and stupid enough that they're not having fun, would have violent fights to the death with one another like that's a sporting event - actually maybe public executions wouldn't sell tickets, those are probably much more boring compared to suicide sports. So why are executions public? He'll try to remember to ask later.
You could tell a consistent story where a dath ilani boy would be a fragile little flower by comparison to all that, and he'd take a long time to recover from somebody almost sticking him with a sword and instead sticking that sword into a girl he met two days ago.
Keltham doesn't like this story, and he's trying to decide if that's his real self talking, or just his gendertrope. Well, his gendertrope is him to no trivial degree, he's at 10.2 out of 12 on the gendertrope identification scale. And it's not like zero optimization ever went into making the masculine gendertrope be a useful target for males to try to live up to. But still.
But it's more that - Keltham has a sense that - there's something false about Cheliax's rejection of the idea that violence could be harmful. That it rhymes with Permanent Cheerfulness and Acting Like Sex Still Works Normally. The pain is still real, the suffering is still real, even if the injury and death are temporary and discarnation isn't the end. This is like - the sort of weird equilibria exhibited as stuff that might happen, if not for Civilization and not for mental training, hence why people have to go on playing strange games with children to let them be not that. A proving-things-to-people equilibrium like a duke's crazy son being challenged to prove his courage by racing a rhinoceros. Where people try to show off really hard how much injury and death don't matter to them, and end up dumping Asmodia's body in a corner without any respect shown to it while her soul's not in it.
If dath ilan had healing and resurrections, it would not be like that. He doesn't think the Kelthamverse would be like it either.
Or maybe he's wrong. He hasn't lived in the Kelthamverse plus healing, resurrection, and afterlives.
But the fact that Chelish people still end up in shock for two weeks after their first fight with demons - suggests that their forcing their minds to be disdainful of violence's impact - doesn't quite work. Is possibly making things worse for them.
"I want to be safe, not feel safer," is what Keltham says to Carissa when she gets back. "I don't think the foreseeable difference in the psychological impact of a semifamiliar place where an attack happened, versus a completely unfamiliar place somewhere else, is great enough to count against a 0.1% difference in actual securability. And - maybe this doesn't apply in this case, but - in dath ilan, if a mental shock isn't mostly better in the morning, and hasn't reached a new equilibrium after three days if it's not better in the morning, that would be the point at which you'd talk to somebody smarter or better-disciplined about mental errors you might be making that would cause internal conflicts to get stuck and not resolve. I won't push myself if it turns out I can't recover that fast, won't try to act outwardly normal if that's not true, but - it's the recovery timescale I would've guessed if you hadn't mentioned anything."
"Oh, and I register with my amateur Security posturing that it seems to me that bringing Pilar back or contacting her early in the afterlife - to see if she has any idea how or why she was put there - is a Security issue higher than her ordinary resurrection priority."
Carissa Sevar: "...yes, I should think that it is. I'll pass that along, and pass along that they should decide where to put us based on whatever's actually safest." What a convenient preference from Keltham. "It'd be great if you're all right in a couple of days, some people are, and you can definitely talk to a priest about it if you want - and some of the ways people aren't all right might be irrelevant to you, like, people get flinchy in similar situations and that's a big liability if you have to hang out on the same wall fighting demons but much less of one if you never have to encounter a Kuthonite again."
Keltham: "I have ever been through a trauma contingency class and am already forewarned against deciding to never talk to an archon again or wanting to spend the rest of my life staying inside Forbiddances. But positive reinforcement for double-checking."
Carissa Sevar: "You know, another thing that's conventional wisdom at the Worldwound is that after a big rush all the survivors should get laid, because it prevents trauma. No one really believes it prevents trauma but it's a good excuse."
Keltham: "Heh. Conventional wisdom in dath ilan would be wait for the next morning to not form weird associations. I suspect that, even for a tremendously resilient masculine male like myself, this is a next-morning thing."
Carissa Sevar: "As you like." She thinks the associations are the point, but that sounds like a losing argument.
Keltham: If they always follow violence with sex, that could, like, possibly be an important factor in understanding Chelish society. Still, he shouldn't rush to conclude that a previously unobserved social equilibrium can't have any useful functions for the people who equilibrated with it.
"I wouldn't stop you if -"
Wait what.
Brain probe.
"I... apparently would want to stop you if you wanted to run off and have sex with somebody else instead, unless it was with somebody I already knew and then I might have different opinions depending on my relationship to them? To be extremely super clear I remember the explicit conversation we had yesterday about that exact topic where it was explicitly said we were not committing to other stuff like that by deciding to have sex."
Carissa Sevar: Snuggle. "But it'd be nice, if it were your call who I had sex with. It'd be sexy. It feels right."
Keltham: And coincidentally, all of the other girls who marked down high scores on his romantic-interestingness scale, plus one who hid herself and is the traitor, will all have equally impossible and un-realistically-evolvable sexualities configured around the exact details of his unreasonable preferences.
Keltham doesn't say anything about 'how convenient', because this is not, on that hypothesis, Carissa's own fault in any way, nor would she have the ability to explain it. Unless it's the other path to the same end, Chelish Governance faking an elaborate ero-LARP around him.
Or on the less literary hypotheses of reality - maybe dath ilan has no masochists because nobody ever tried following up severe nonsimulated violence with sex? He wants to think it can't be that simple because somebody in Civilization really would have figured it out and then figured out a less costly way to get the same result. But if it's some weird brain thing you can't guess from parts of the model pinned down by other observations, maybe they really wouldn't have figured it out. Or maybe nobody would volunteer for the Wanting To Be Hurt Process even if it didn't take the nonsimulated violence, because, um.
"Aw crap," Keltham says. "That gets into serious sex stuff which in turn reminds me. I wrote down a list of my pending questions that I managed not to ask you during sex. It was in my bedroom. I wonder if it survived the invasion. Or I wonder if Security picked it up. I used a second-layer-of-naughtiness spoiler cipher to write it, which is the highest level of spoiler I can read reflexively. Is Comprehend Languages going to go right through that? It's legit kind of personal."
Carissa Sevar: "Comprehend Languages can't read ciphers. I could go and get -"
There's a knock on the door. "Uh," someone says, ducking their head, "we were told to get you for healing?"
Keltham: "On it."
Carissa Sevar: While he's doing that Carissa will clean her dress, and tell Security about Pilar and about Keltham's instructions for where to put him, and think at them some more details about the plan, which is approximately just to keep Keltham happy and wait for Maillol who she assumes they'll have just after dawn and who she expects will be really angry with her, though she's not sure about what. And can someone go to Keltham's bedroom and - possibly actually use Shrink Item to move his entire bed to the library, and grab ciphered notes -
Keltham: "Is this everyone?" Keltham says when he sees the next version of the room. "I may have two healing surges left, I doubt I have three."
lintamande: "This is everyone." The room is fairly packed, and nearly all male; most but not all of the new arrivals are uniformed.
Keltham: Keltham background-notices the gender disparity and background-updates that pseudoviolent professions, well, actually violent in this case, may have the same gendertrope association in Cheliax as in Civilization. This is too unsurprising to propagate much updateness elsewhere.
Heal. More? Heal.
"And that's it for the day."
(Actually, why aren't they already saturated on fourth-circle priests who would have teleported in and done this already? File it under things to maybe remember to ask later.)
Carissa Sevar: "Security's going to bring you your possessions from your bedroom. I suggested they also bring the bed, since this is the only secured part of the villa right now, we can set it up in that back room."
Keltham: "Where's everyone else sleeping? Not to amateur-argue-with-Security but if I'm the only one sleeping here overnight and everyone else is going back to Ostenso, that does seem like the point where it'd be cheaper to set me up in the palace instead of protecting the whole place just for me? To be clear I'm not expressing a preference, just a puzzlement."
Carissa Sevar: "I think everyone else is probably going to sleep on the library floor."
Keltham: "I've never actually wanted to sleep in the same bed as other people so I haven't found out if I actually can, but I will at the very least note that I would be okay sleeping in a smaller bed and letting others use my large one. Even if I picked tonight to be the moment when I find out whether I can fall asleep next to you, which doesn't sound like a terrible thing to try at least once, that still only requires a significantly smaller bed."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know if the villa of the Archduke of Sirmium has any normal-sized beds but I can suggest that they look. But also, we'll be fine, the girls were about to enlist and there's a lot of sleeping on the ground on the trip up to the Worldwound."
lintamande: "Keltham?" a tired Security man says from the doorway.
Keltham: "Question mark?"
lintamande: "I'm so sorry, but your room appears to have been - targeted as an early priority during the attack. With a lot of Fireballs. We have some people casting Mending now but we don't expect your possessions to be salvageable." His head remains ducked.
Carissa Sevar: Something feels off about his presentation, to Carissa's mental model of Keltham, but she's not sure if it's a Cheliax versus Taldor off or a Golarion versus dath ilan off.
Keltham: "...didn't have anything important in there except some nonvital notes."
It's - not fun, though, to find out that he can't leave important stuff in his room because it might get destroyed.
Or that Nidal, or Zon-Kuthon directly, was watching him closely enough to know where he sleeps - wait.
"Belief inconsistency. If the attack was timed to the moment I tried to step outside, why were they specially targeting my bedroom, they wouldn't expect me to be there."
lintamande: He looks up at Keltham. " - that's a very good question. I have no idea. Would they have thought you'd left something important there? Something they'd have wanted to steal or destroy?"
Carissa Sevar: "...for that matter why fight their way through the villa at all, if they knew he was on the perimeter of the grounds? Did it seem from Security in the villa's perspective like most of the attackers were going for the villa?"
lintamande: " - that was indicated in the first communications we got but communications stopped pretty quickly, if they changed targets twenty seconds in I wouldn't know. ...no survivors in the villa who didn't make it to the library, though, and apparently there were some survivors outdoors -" gesture at the two of them -
Keltham: "Yeah. All right. That makes no sense to me at all."
"There's a saying out of dath ilan, backed by a Law I might otherwise have been teaching tomorrow - maybe still will, if I'm in shape for it. Your strength in the Law is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you're equally good at explaining anything you could possibly see, you have zero knowledge, because your degrees of surprise don't distinguish any possible event from any other possible event."
"I notice that we are confused. Therefore, something we believe is fiction."
...could his god have timed it that exactly? Keltham's bedroom being full of fire is not happy news about what would have happened if his god hadn't done that.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure this guy isn't lying but if he is she is going to show him a lot of Fireballs. She can only cast a few per day but presumably someone will courteously leave him chained to something for as many days as it takes.
"What do we believe about what happened. That someone caused Pilar to be with us and our departure not to be the secret it was intended to be. That Nidal detected you leaving the Forbiddance and attacked. That - despite knowing where you were - they went through the villa and killed most of its defenders. That they Fireballed your room - how many rooms are similarly destroyed -"
"I haven't done a full inventory but an explosion took out half the west wing, that's how they entered, and the banquet hall and the four rooms adjacent to it are burned as thoroughly. Of course, if you were guessing which room an important guest was in, you'd probably guess Keltham's - it's the suite styled for House Thrune when they're in Ostenso -"
Keltham: "I am not a domain expert on Golarion, but. If I try to come at this from a dath ilani angle. We can probably premise, more strongly than we can premise almost any other part of this, that the timing between my stepping outside, and the attack, was not coincidental. It's to within - something like one in five hundred parts of the day, or less, for it to be a coincidence that tight is something we'd see once in five hundred times."
"We then have a classic probability-theoretic-detective-story, that of accounting for coincidence: in particular, a coincidence of timing."
"Suppose that, prophecy being broken, we don't believe that any god managed to time it in advance by sheer prediction. We furthermore believe Nidal didn't see me stepping outside, because they didn't know where I'd be."
"Then some other element of the sequence of events that led to me being outside, must have triggered the attack, or been timed with the attack."
"Furthermore, though more tentatively, at least one element in this sequence of events was chosen by an adversary of Nidal, because they plausibly would've gotten me inside my bedroom otherwise."
"This causal sequence started with my asking to cast my cleric spells - no, it started with Carissa returning from her shopping trip at the exact time she did. It ended when I summoned the archon. But I doubt Carissa should be looking for anything that timed the end of her shopping trip, because she had dinner after that, and with prophecy broken, you won't get two-minute timing at the end of a causal sequence like that."
"Something in that causal sequence either triggered the attack, or was triggered by it."
Carissa Sevar: "When did Ione get her vision."
lintamande: "Maybe eighteen, maybe twenty-four seconds before the attack."
Keltham: "Why not send her a vision earlier? Cheliax could have been better prepared. An obvious possibility is that the assault was not legible until the last minute, maybe because it was successfully obscured from whoever sent Ione the vision. But the assault was legible enough for my own god to send me a spell-vision of Zon-Kuthon's afterlife the previous day."
"If Nidal were otherwise planning an attack in an hour, say, but had eyes on Ione, but not me, they might have concluded they needed to attack as fast as possible after she gave her warning, in order to preserve as much surprise as they could. So Ione got the vision as soon as I was outside of the primary-targeted zone inside the villa. I want to say that, if that's the case, whoever sent her the vision had a grimdark sense of humor, but it could have just been the best solution to an optimization problem."
lintamande: "We could have handled it without casualties if we'd had five minutes of warning. ....maybe Zon-Kuthon's people had some way to know we'd been tipped off, and reacted to the Security alert that went out immediately after the vision -"
Keltham: "I want to emphasize that this entire mode of thinking is almost definitely completely illegitimate, but since somebody just happened to mention to me this morning that gods get clearer vision when they have clerics around, is there any not-incredibly-expensive way to check for sure whether one of the other girls in the library with Ione was a first-circle cleric of Zon-Kuthon who therefore looks just like a second-circle Lawful Evil wizard to Aura Sight."
dath ilan: (It is sometimes said in dath ilan: If you put your reasoning into overdrive, you will often get somewhere, and the trouble is, you will often also get somewhere else.)
lintamande: “The screening involved asking them under a truth spell after other magic on them had been dispelled, about affiliations and commitments to other gods. There are a couple non-Asmodeans, but no one who was secretly Kuthonite.”
Carissa Sevar: “A couple non Asmodeans is a little high but not incredibly high,” she adds to Keltham, as Security’s not allowed to proffer that obvious lie. “The teen years are when kids experiment with religion and are likeliest to be followers of random gods.”
Keltham: "Probably a complete empty-set search but if we haven't figured out anything else, suppose you repeat that screen in case somebody got clericed shortly after she got here, doublecheck whoever does the second screening, and consider that, if something like that isn't impossible, she may not know her new god is Zon-Kuthon or may somehow not know she's a cleric. Zon-Kuthon could just not give her any spells. Or she could have a hot-swappable personality, one self who's a cleric and one self who's not... I should say, the same logic which suggests this whole bit also suggests that whatever test we come up with is not going to detect her."
lintamande: “We can do that,” he says, a bit skeptical but mostly just very tired.
And then another uniformed person, looking significantly sharper and ineffably more dangerous, steps in. “Her Imperial Majesty invites the traveler Keltham and any companionship he desires to the palace in Egorian while repairs are underway on his present residence.”
Carissa Sevar: Oh good, something for Carissa to do aside from quietly panicking about how Keltham is using a reasoning process that he thinks is… above the gods? Beyond the gods? and which therefore she has no idea how to feed the wrong information and which is therefore going to ruin everything.
The something to do is, of course, “accept a personal invitation from Her Imperial Majesty to her home”, but, you know, at least she understands where she stands with that.
Keltham: Governance at the Legislator or Chief Executive level in dath ilan does not have literally zero formality; Keltham can recognize a cue to go into Dealing With Very Serious People mode. He stands a little straighter.
"I accept at least for myself, and for a set of others to be determined momentarily if you'll give me that moment."
"Carissa, who am I supposed to invite with me, is that like you, the other researchers, the survivors of the villa, what."
Carissa Sevar: "Is Her Imperial Majesty's generous invitation aimed at the relocation of the project, or is her intent better understood as that Keltham relax and recover in greater comfort and safety while preparations for the project to restart are underway?"
"While I cannot speak for her, Keltham's comfort and safety are at this time the highest of our project-related priorities."
Carissa Sevar: "Me, and anyone else you'll want not-for-classes."
Keltham: Is Ione a not-for-classes? Definitely not in the Carissa sense yet. "I accept on behalf of myself and Carissa Sevar. When and if Ione recovers, she will be valuable for my learning, even if I am not teaching."
lintamande: "Do you have possessions you'll need to gather?"
Carissa Sevar: "I do."
Keltham: "I don't."
lintamande: Accompany her," he says to local Security, and to Keltham, "with your permission, I intend to cast a series of spells that will dispel external magical influences on you, detect any enchantment of your possessions or person, and guard against future such."
(Carissa and local Security head out.)
Keltham: "Understood. I currently have running a self-cast protective cleric spell on my person, and an external Share Language that will expire shortly; I would have both of those preserved if there is zero or nearly perfectly zero risk to Security thereby, but more so the protective spell as it is less replaceable. Regardless of rulings there, I consent to your described Security measures."
lintamande: "Enchantment Foil," he says. "We of course cannot cast it on you at all without the aid of extraordinarily powerful magic, as it is a spell that can affect the caster only; I will avoid dispelling it."
And he does magic, visibly intricate and high-powered to Detect Magic, mostly divinations but also some abjurations.
Keltham: Keltham won't remember he's a magicbearer until halfway through that, but once he does he'll cast Detect Magic and watch. He also notes that upper Cheliax Security isn't claiming not to know what Enchantment Foil is, which matches an earlier hypothesis about it being a Security-only spell that can be used to defeat Security measures.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa returns, with the products of her recent shopping trip in her shopping-trip Bag of Holding along with her notes and her presents from the Queen, just as this is wrapping up; Security finishes with Keltham and turns to cast the same set of spells on her and on the things in her Bag of Holding.
lintamande: "Let's go," he says when he's finished, and starts walking.
Keltham: Keltham follows.
Oh, he does have a tiny bit of trauma associated with Leaving The Villa Premises, what fun.
The sky above is still doing the thing that gets giant aliens to say 'Those above all mortals now battle' in a deep grumbly voice. It's pretty at night.
Carissa Sevar: It’s terrifying.
Asmodeus is going to win, but still.
lintamande: They reach the edge of the Forbiddance and the man takes their hands and without preamble Teleports.
lintamande: The palace in Egorian is new, built after House Thrune took Cheliax; the old capitol was in Westcrown. It makes the summer villa of the Archduke look shabby by comparison. It makes Versailles, its best historical analogue, look shabby though admittedly mostly only because of things King Louis the 14th could not have helped, like the fact his gargoyles cannot prowl and his fountains cannot start in midair and his orchards cannot grow seductively golden apples that drive men mad.
The sky is flickering here, too.
Keltham: Well, good on them for remembering to fake the skyshow here too, if it's fake. But Keltham is mostly paying attention to other sights, because they're worth it.
"This place is beautiful and aesthetic even by our standards, and on behalf of Civilization I compliment the architects and designers -"
"Wait. Is teleporting always that fast?" That sort of matches his experience at the Worldwound, in retrospect, but he had almost no experience with magic and spells back then, and didn't know he was looking at a spell and not a device that had charged up over the last three minutes. Though it wasn't so much that he had alternate hypotheses, back then, as that he hadn't really chunked spellcasting rules as a latent system in a way that would make it easy to update over modular facts inside it.
lintamande: "Teleportation is a fifth circle spell with the same casting time as the spells that you are familiar with," the wizard confirms.
Keltham: "Sorry, just trying to figure out an ongoing mystery about the attack. Carissa, am I missing something or should that Security have just teleported us out when the attack started? We were at the edge of the Forbiddance already."
Carissa Sevar: "If he had it prepared and hadn't yet used it today, yes - and was at least fifth circle but his Haste lasted ten count, so he was."
Keltham: "So maybe he couldn't teleport. Or maybe he could, but if you didn't think of that at the time, it's plausible he didn't think of it either. But if my god didn't predict my Security not having teleport or not thinking of it, that's an even stronger reason for my god to try to get me to the edge of the Forbiddance in a way that could be synchronized with the attack. It would have been a reliable plan for my safety, not the better-than-worst harm-reduction version where I still almost got killed several times. Though it's also worth asking where the obvious place to teleport would've been, and if there could've been an ambush there, or if there's any way to intercept a teleport and..."
"Well, later. Sorry for the interruption. Please lead on."
Otolmens: Otolmens is VERY BUSY. She is guarding the Vault containing ROVAGUG while Zon-Kuthon gets DEALT WITH not that His VOID-CONTAMINATED MIND shouldn't have been dealt with IMMEDIATELY but BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.
She is not SO BUSY that she is NEVER looking back at the anomaly AT ALL.
It is now NO LONGER within one hundred distance units of Ostenso's tallest thing. It is ELSEWHERE.
For some reason Otolmens had been thinking that, just since the anomaly had mostly stayed in the same place for a while, it was a kind of anomaly that did that.
She cannot go on revising Pharasma's-Name edicts once they're issued, for the obvious reason that this would correspond to an unbounded edict supply.
ASMODEUS.
TELL your MORTALS to put the anomaly BACK IN THE INTERDICTED REGION.
Transparently EVADING a Pharasma's-Name Edict is NOT AMUSING and PHARASMA will NOT BE AMUSED EITHER.
Asmodeus: ASMODEUS IS SORT OF BUSY WHILE PUTTING NEARLY AS MUCH EFFORT INTO SUBDUING THIS LONGSTANDING EXISTENTIAL THREAT AS THE REST OF THESE USELESS WEAKLING GODS COMBINED AND WILL GET BACK TO OTOLMENS LATER
lintamande: They go in through a side entrance, because the Queen has ordered that no one will come into contact with Keltham whose soul is not sold already, or who isn't a priest of Asmodeus. There's a dazzling hallway and then a room that is -
- well, exquisitely designed to some unapologetically Evil aesthetics. It has thick red velvet curtains around an enormous iron bed which has actual chains and shackles built into the headboard, and a thick red carpet, and an enormous fireplace against one wall.
Next to the fireplace is a rack of fire-stoking equipment which a person who knows a lot about fire-stoking, which Keltham hopefully does not, might identify as not even all that useful for that.
There's a cozy reading nook with an armchair and a tall bookshelves full of leather-bound books, and a little kneeling pillow next to the armchair.
There's an Asmodean shrine with incense and a stone ritual-seat that you obviously let blood into.
There are beautiful tapestries on the walls, depicting well-dressed people dancing, and there's a window opening on a courtyard full of blooming roses.
Carissa Sevar: - Carissa's life is so interesting (derogatory). ...what're the books. Oh, good, looks like they're Taldane poetry and a fourteen-volume history of Absalom dated from before the Age of Lost Omens began.
Keltham: Keltham mostly notices the chains on the bed. They don't parse instantly, but he can deduce their use after a few moments.
Keltham smiles slightly. "I want to say somebody's overestimated our relationship progress, but on second thought maybe not."
"I like the rest of the aesthetic. It's very close to a similar dath ilani aesthetic called doompunk which I do not totally fail to appreciate."
lintamande: "You can press this bell for staff," says their escort, and departs.
Carissa Sevar: "Doompunk, huh. I'm glad you like it. It parses as an Evil aesthetic, here."
Keltham: "...interesting, in dath ilani terms that's more associated with - a self-aware supervillain with a sense of humor, one who laughs maniacally while executing their cunning plans and also knows exactly how much of a cliche that is and does it anyways because that's them living their best life. I don't think we'd say it's associated with Evil supervillains rather than Good supervillains, though? If anything it leans slightly the opposite."
Carissa Sevar: "Supervillain parses as a kind of thing that'd only be Evil, a lich commanding enormous armies of the undead or a wizard who has concocted a mad scheme to end life or something."
Keltham: "Commanding armies of the undead is supervillainy, absolutely, extremely doompunk too, but I don't see why that would be Good or Evil in itself, aside from whatever you were trying to do with the undead armies? And a wizard with a mad scheme to end life is Good, as I understand that, because they're not doing it to benefit themselves, they're doing it because they think life should be ended for its own welfare... well, in dath ilani fiction that's why they'd be doing it, if that happens in real life here maybe it's very different, but then why would they."
dath ilan: (World-destroying supervillains in dath ilani fiction are, by default, and absent deliberate subversion or aversion of the trope, negative utilitarians. Dath ilani take for granted, in the background and without thinking much of it, that their literary characters make as much sense as everything else does on their planet; fictional antagonists are being animated by dath ilani authors who will grant those simulated minds at least the mental skills taught to children. There just aren't many things you can intelligently want to accomplish by destroying reality, except for preferring that stuff which exists not exist.)
Carissa Sevar: "...in stories in Golarion it'd mostly be for revenge because they feel the world wronged them. And the undead armies would be because the lich wants to be personally rich and powerful so he wants to conquer countries to do it. It...makes sense that since your society is so Good your supervillains would be too."
Keltham: "I just don't see how being a supervillain* is an alignment-correlated thing at all. It's an aesthetic, not a," utility function, "specification of what goals people pursue. I wanted to be a supervillain when I grew up, and, while this was not a realistic life goal, nobody would have listed that as a reason why I was any more Evil than anyone else. The guy heading up our Moon colony is a supervillain, his bedroom probably looks basically like this one but with a real sleeping surface and minus the chains."
(*) The compound word 'super-villain' began as a fictional trope in dath ilan, but the corresponding real-life aesthetic and gender-trope and famous-person-behavior-pattern later took over as the primary meaning of 'supervillain' in Baseline, and the compound no longer means quite what its conjuncts say. This Baseline term is now translating oddly to Taldane's cognate for their real-world version of the old dath ilani fictional trope, based on a similar compound which in Taldane has preserved its original meaning. In Civilization 'supervillain' hasn't primarily referred to anything fictional since long before Keltham was born; and he's not particularly thinking about the underlying Baseline components 'super-villain', nor even that this well-worn formerly-compound-but-now-specialized term has components, let alone the etymology of the word.
Carissa Sevar: "...so, most powerful people are Evil. In Golarion. I think pretty much all of them who aren't part of some specific Good religious order. I imagine that's very different in dath ilan but wanting power except 'I want to study so much magic that lots of people come to my wizard tower to buy magic from me' is....you're almost definitely, if you actually pull it off, going to have - assassinated some people, ordered some children drowned so they won't be competition for your throne..." those are examples from a Taldane history she read this morning. "And I guess you could do that while still intending Good but the sorting doesn't just pay attention to your - self-serving narrative - and if you're killing lots of people to amass power it's almost definitely going to call you Evil. And you cannot become powerful without killing lots of people."
Keltham: "...because if you try Zon-Kuthon sends military squads after you and you won't survive unless you kill them first? I'm not having an easy time figuring out what killing people has to do with getting power. In my visualization it mostly gets you dead people, which, at least where I come from, you can't take a bunch of corpses to the neighborhood bartering-fair and say 'Would somebody like to trade me a lot of power for this bunch of corpses.'"
Carissa Sevar: "....well, what you do, is you kill the people who were in charge of a place, and then you kill anyone who says you're not in charge now. And that's how becoming in charge of places works, pretty much."
Keltham: "Assuming this works at all, why isn't the whole world ruled by the one most powerful person who can kill anybody else, who then declares that nobody else is allowed to kill anybody so that their world will operate in a quiet and orderly fashion and not go through a lot of annoying unprofitable chaos."
Carissa Sevar: "Because it's not actually all that much more fun to rule the entire world than to rule a country the size of Cheliax and because there are a bunch of gods trying to counterbalance each others' power and because there are random ninth circle wizards who can't be bothered to straighten out everywhere but who make it very clear that if you harass the peasants right on their doorstep then they'll dismantle you for parts, and because lots of parts of the world are too distant and rural and low-population and speak languages no one else speaks and it's not clear it's worth ruling them, and because empires don't generally grow past the distance limit of a Teleport, if it costs several it's incredibly costly to bring enough force over to keep your distant provinces in line."
Keltham: "I am willing to believe you about all of that but as a dath ilani I am used to knowing why equilibria balance where they do, and I am very far from understanding that here. I get the basic point that, if 0.1% of a country's population is 90% of its military power, they can form an internal coalition and not let anybody else vote," assuming the populace hasn't otherwise been trained in the decision theory of coordinating their refusal of an unfair bargain. "I could not then predict that this coalition adopts rules that look like 'if you kill the person at the top of us you now own our city'. Why don't the 0.1% of the people with 90% of the military power form their own government-of-revocable-delegations among themselves? If one person at the top has 51% of the military power it should work a way, which is them running everything. If #1 and #2 can gang up to beat #0 but get beaten in turn by #3, #4, and #5, it would work a different way. I need to play through some minigame for how this works with, like, six people before I try to visualize how it works for a planet. What is the simplest case, with the smallest number of people all of whom are on the gameboard not just in the background somewhere, where you'd kill somebody and get power."
Carissa Sevar: "Sure. Imagine a small village on a river somewhere, far north with poor farmland, maybe claimed by a distant King but he neither collects taxes nor enforces law so he doesn't feature in this story. In practice, the village is led by a priest of, I dunno, Pharasma, who is the only person in the village with magic; when villagers accuse each other of crimes, he hears them out and fines or punishes the one at fault. He collects a tax from them, for the church, of ten percent of their fields. Then someone's wayward son who went off to be an adventurer comes back, third-circle, capable of impressive things, rich with goods from out of town, and he is welcomed back by his family, until he drunkenly hits someone else in a quarrel over a girl, and kills them because he's an adventurer now and hits harder. And this is brought up before the old priest, and the priest says the adventurer must pay a fine and serve the family of the man he killed at harvest and planting time for ten years, in the place of the laborer he took from them, and the adventurer spits in his face, and then kills him too, and then says 'hey, from now on, I'm the one who will hear out accusations of crime in this village'."
Keltham: "Leaving aside the decorative horror and focusing on the underlying game theory. So. Even assuming the villagers have no way of killing the adventurer even by cooperatively sacrificing themselves - there's a saying in dath ilan 'Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't' and maybe that's just not true here, in which case fine - and even assuming they don't all go 'fuck this guy's unfair division of gains from trade, let's head to the afterlife and leave him with an empty village' - then, if nothing exists in the world outside this village, if there are no hidden players not on the gameboard, then it would seem to be in this person's best interests not to let anyone else kill anybody and run the whole village for his own profit, until somebody else comes along who's stronger and kills him. Which is the case I described before."
"I agree that, assuming the villagers let the adventurer get away with that and don't just leave for the afterlife, if one is a fourth-circle cleric, one could perhaps come in and kill the adventurer and get a little sad bit of power. It doesn't - seem like something that scales. The reason it works is that it's isomorphic to a two-player game where one player has all power, and the other player has none but goes along with an unfair division of gains instead of leaving for the afterlife."
Carissa Sevar: "...your confusion is why the adventurer doesn't ban killing in the village? He probably does. He doesn't run the whole village for his own profit but mostly because that would be more likely to make people get fed up and leave, having to deal with one asshole who also maintains order is one thing but if he's also raising taxes a lot and picking fights and taking wives then at some point people leave, so he is limited in how much he fucks with them.
I don't think - I think the villagers could kill him by cooperatively sacrificing themselves. But why would they do that, individually, it just results in them being dead."
Keltham: "So I was going to say that maybe you didn't have enough Law to solve that problem, but it sounds like you have an artificial substitute which would be fine for something like this. Swear an oath that only binds you to action after you've heard every adult in the village swear the same oath. Publicly generate random numbers. Three people picked by the random numbers, or however many it takes, sacrifice themselves to kill the adventurer."
"Put up a sign outside your village saying this is how your village does stuff. The adventurer reads the sign and goes somewhere else, so the people never even have to sacrifice themselves. Other people hear about what a great adventurer-free village that was and say 'Hey why don't we put up a sign like that too.'"
Carissa Sevar: "...so, in Cheliax, where children grow up understanding that they are Lawful, and that means something, maybe you could make something like that work. But in most places - people won't actually go to their deaths because they swore they would, not all of them, not enough of them that that works I don't think, and more people would just decline to swear to it in the first place because it's not that bad having an adventurer be in charge of your village. And some people'd read the sign and take it as a challenge. And...it's weird, so people wouldn't do it."
Keltham: "I was going to say something about it sounds like you might have a problem that gods and ideal agents don't have, which is a key fact that I needed to hear in order to understand what is going on; but I am suddenly arrested by the possibly even more important notion of 'it's weird, so people wouldn't do it' which sounds like it would stabilize literally any possible behavior because if everyone does that then any other behavior is weird."
Carissa Sevar: " - I mean, yes? But - but most weird things that someone smarter than you came up with and that you don't fully understand aren't in your interests, so not doing weird things is better than doing weird things, if you're not very smart."
Keltham: "I may possibly need to think about that for a bit."
Carissa Sevar: "You do that. I'm going to figure out whether they gave us a key to the chains or whether they're supposed to be magically operated."
They have a big iron key. Very fancy. Wizards into bondage usually use Unseen Servants, which can only apply twenty pounds of force but are enough for if you're not expecting serious physical opposition; twenty pounds feels like a lot, shaped right.
Keltham: So.
Their world has people who are more smart or less smart, just like his world.
Lots of smarter people, however, are out to exploit less smarted people using adversarially selected arguments.
So the less smarted people have to freeze in place and only believe what they were told by - their parents, Keltham guesses, because even if somebody wandering into the village looks as dumb as you, they could be a smart person faking that.
Nobody has any Law-inspired concept of validity, or which arguments are admissible or inadmissible, or how to go about constructing a narrower class of arguments that could still contain important stuff while being harder for smarter adversaries to exploit. Their books are endless strings of non-sequiturs and impossible leaps and emotion-invocations, and when your contest of ideas is on that level, there is nothing you can do to stop a clever adversary from doing a search that Goodharts through any flaws or loopholes in the resistance of a dumber argument-considerer.
...or maybe dath ilan would also be like this, Law or no Law, if not for the Keepers and the fact that the Keepers are, so far as Keltham knows, Good. Just given what's publicly known about talk-control, most dath ilani can little more resist a high-ranked Keeper going all-out on exploiting their own flaws, than a villager of this world could resist the arguments of a wizard, if the villager was foolish enough to hear out a stranger.
But - what is he supposed to do about that, if that's the case? Even if he can mass-manufacture intelligence headbands they won't change the relative intelligence... well, no, because currently the smartest people get intelligence headbands and the less smart people don't so at the very minimum fixing that would have to shift the equilibrium relative to what it is now...
"Thanks for my evening update on how awful Golarion is," Keltham says out loud, and not without a certain irony.
Carissa Sevar: "More of an update than the Kuthites were?"
Keltham: "The Kuthites are a problem, and if they've penetrated your security they're much more of a problem, but they are a relatively shallow and understandable problem compared to average-intelligence people not being able to trust that all the arguments they hear aren't out to get them."
Carissa Sevar: " ...fair enough. Yeah, I don't know how you solve that without the resources of the Church. You do have the resources of the Church, though, and with that it's solvable though slowly - you open schools, and you feed the kids at school, and so parents send the kids to school even if they worry it'll teach things they can't trust, and then other people notice things that can't be faked, like that the kids are more prosperous, and over generations people come around..."
Keltham: "Orrrrr I could figure out how to mine spellsilver in the sort of volume that Civilization gets when Civilization wants lots of a rare metal, and make intelligence headbands for wizards who would then craft more headbands, and give all of the villagers intelligence headbands and do it not over generations. There's a place in life for doing things the slow way with diligent hard work, and that place is when there is in fact no shortcut whatsoever for doing things a faster way."
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, all right, certainly the 'give them all Intelligence headbands' plan is better though I'll note that the fanciest most expensive headband will enhance a slightly-duller-than-average peasant up to 14 which is still, you know, not smart enough Cheliax puts you on projects that require the ability to make decisions independently."
Keltham: "It's a start on half of a solution. -2 in dath ilan isn't too dumb to learn the sort of Law you've been learning in my lessons, you'd just learn it a couple of years later."
Carissa Sevar: "It would be the most important thing that'd ever happened, we'll see what problems remain after that.
- I want some. If you invent a way to mine arbitrary spellsilver."
Keltham: "'How much do you want', he said, bearing in mind that he didn't have any grasp of units and would need those translated into least-expensive-headband and unskilled-labor-year units."
Carissa Sevar: "More than I know what to do with. More than I could use even if I spent every waking moment on fancy complicated enchanted projects. That would be twenty or so least-expensive-headbands a day and there is no sense giving you a value in unskilled labor years because I do not expect to get this wish of mine if spellsilver mining continues to cost unskilled labor years. ..but the current state is that a headband is 55 unskilled labor years."
Keltham: So, assuming unskilled laborers work four hours per day averaged over rest days -
Wait. Keltham suspects he may have made an important unit conversion error, throwing off several other calculations.
"And the number of unskilled labor hours in one unskilled labor year?"
Carissa Sevar: "4500ish, I suppose?"
Keltham: Blink blink.
"That's... around thirteen hours a day including rest days if those even exist, unless your year doesn't have 365.2422 days per year."
Carissa Sevar: "We have three hundred sixty exactly. There are two festivals."
Keltham: ...what that makes no sense at all. "In dath ilan, the time between spring equinox of one year and the spring equinox of the next year is 365.2422 days, the amount of time it takes dath ilan to complete exactly one orbit around the sun is 365.2596 days, and I have absolutely no idea how having two festivals could interact with either of those quantities."
Carissa Sevar: " - the number of days it takes for the sun to complete its orbit is 360, rather than 365, and as an answer to your separate question about rest days, there are two of them."
Keltham: "Welp, I'm going to chalk up those insane work hours and lack of rest as hopefully a problem merely of quantitative productivity rather than a Horrifying Golarion Structural Equilibrium that will persist even in the presence of infinite machinery, and then I'm going to only think about it insofar as that serves the purpose of doing something about it, sound like a plan."
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds great. I wanted to daydream about mountains of spellsilver, here, not be sad about global problems."
Keltham: "Among the many ways of viewing your global problems is that they are caused by some missing mountains of spellsilver, and if we're going to go looking for those anyways we might as well keep one mountain for ourselves. That's what being Evil is all about."
Carissa Sevar: "You're going to say things like that to me and then have some kind of societal norm of not having sex on days when bad things happened? Can I at least kiss you?"
Abrogail Thrune II: This is the most bizarrely fascinating bedroom talk that Abrogail has ever spied upon in possibly her entire life and she genuinely does not see how Sevar is going to pull this off. If Sevar manages to tempt and corrupt Keltham from this starting point she will get her County.
Keltham: "You miiiight have to explain first how 'kissing' works, the word sounds like the lip-touching thing and all I knew about that was to mirror what you did. Not that we couldn't just improvise so long as it's the sort of thing that goes well when improvised."
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail has things to do, and now she has to choose between doing those things and continuing to spy on this, which is unfortunate; having that never happen to her is something she should have thought to write into her compact with Asmodeus somehow.
Carissa Sevar: "You haven't invented kissing? Well I suppose, then, as Golarion's duly appointed representative to Keltham, it is my duty to try to explain it to you, though it's popular because it does in fact go well when improvised. See, you can do a little kiss like this," she repeats last night, "which just says, I like you and I want you, or you can do a little more than that."
Abrogail Thrune II: And he's kissing back in a very uninspired way. Well, this was a good time for things to get boring, she supposes. It is, apparently, time to end her brief break and actually attend her war council; Gorthoklek is almost finished breaking down her door.
Iarwain: Likewise mortal but longer-lived things, a hair closer to ideal agency though still far from it, now battle.
Their objective: to bring enough pressure to bear on 'Zon-Kuthon outside the vault' that He must choose between being inside that vault and significantly ceasing to be. Maybe not ceasing entirely, but becoming perhaps a fallen being, a mere demigod. He must choose between going into the vault, and that.
The assembled gods cannot reasonably endeavor to kill all of Zon-Kuthon, if He chooses the latter path. Gods encrypt their energies, arrange their potentials in lattices and arrays to which only they have keys. Like a box full of bouncing classical gas atoms that can be made to all end up on the box's left side, in apparent defiance of thermodynamics and ready to yield up their heat as a pressure, if you know the secret for how those atoms were originally set in motion to be able to end up like that with the right tweak. Anybody who doesn't know the secret just sees a box full of a useless uniform gas.
In likewise way, a being under such assault as Zon-Kuthon may scatter little shards of Himself here and there, too small and subtle for now to be noticed, but destined to collide and gather up at some future time - a time when His adversaries are paying less attention, no longer spending all Their own power and watchfulness to launch a coordinated assault on Him blanketing Golarion and the other planes where He extends.
Among the greatest of adventurers who yet do not quite understand, it is whispered that only by killing a great Power within Their own home plane is it possible to destroy that Power permanently; and also that a Power within its home plane is nearly invincible.
These whispers are not quite accurate. The key concept rather - and from mortals it is hidden - is that gods face a tradeoff between weakness and vulnerability. They can gather themselves up and become stronger, but only at the risk of their own true destruction. Any problem which requires you to become unified and powerful and localized, and therefore vulnerable to any still greater force, is a challenge you should face on your own home ground if you possibly can. On the very rare occasions when Powers are truly slain, therefore, they tend to fall within their home planes, after ascending to terrifying heights within it.
The assembled gods, then, know that they can only force so much of Zon-Kuthon into the vault prepared for Him. As He could survive as a demigod outside it, He can also go mostly into the vault but leave a demigod's worth of Himself outside. That demigod's worth of power will not be able to free Rovagug, though; and that is all the assembled gods are aiming for.
Most of them, that is.