Ione Sala: "We wouldn't know because we don't have magic items that connect us to all of the knowledge in the world. Wizard school, which I've been to, was better organized, but it wasn't, uh, it hadn't started existing less than a week ago?"
Thinking loudly: Dear Asmodeans, have you considered actually telling Keltham some things before he finds them out and asks why he hasn't been told them?
Carissa Sevar: Well they did tell Keltham that Pilar was held up in the capital by tons of very serious people trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with her, which is about as much setup for 'we're not keeping this secret on purpose' as you can manage. Probably the payoff to things like that needs to always be a couple hours later.
Security, pull him aside -
lintamande: "Keltham, can we talk privately for a minute?"
Keltham: "Of course, Security."
lintamande: Privacy spell. "All divine interventions on the project disclosed to us are as follows: Asmodeus, at the Worldwound the first day, communicating to His priest that the project should be established. The next is the intervention of Broom's god, Otolmens, the Lawful Neutral god of preventing catastrophes, empowering Broom.
We now believe that Cayden Cailean's manipulation of Pilar began on the third day, when she mysteriously ended up in the room with you before your excursion out of the villa, and that its primary aim at least was saving your life, but we haven't ruled out that it began on the second day, because Pilar didn't recall that incident as unusual until we asked about it, and anything where she mysteriously ended up somewhere other than in a secure operation she hadn't been invited to might've been hard to detect in retrospect. We think Pilar went to Elysium as a consequence of it, somehow. As I think was reported to you, she spent yesterday at the palace with people trying to get to the bottom of what's going on, but we are still a ways away from a satisfactory answer, though the snacks have been very conclusively demonstrated nonmagical, safe, and tasty.
Nidal's attack on you was almost certainly a divine intervention. Ione's warning was a divine intervention. A second divine intervention by Asmodeus directed us to restart the project here. That is the specific answer to your specific question, but it occurs to me that you might additionally want to receive the briefing we all receive daily, which is more extensive than that."
Carissa Sevar: (Carissa is giving these instructions.)
Keltham: "I would definitely like to receive at least one of those briefings and, if possible, review previous ones."
"I think I can already guess the answer to this, but if I asked the question, 'What official of Chelish Governance has responsibility for making sure Keltham learns things we know and that he'd obviously want to know', is there in fact no such identifiable official who gets pointed questions from their boss when something like this happens?"
Carissa Sevar: Split second decision: is it a good idea to make Governance sound that incompetent. Taldor would be.
Cheliax, obviously, isn't. What happened is that it was Carissa's call and Carissa who'll get - hah! - pointed questions from her superiors about it - and arguably also Maillol on the grounds that everyone knew Carissa wasn't at full capacity and it was his job to be handling communications with Keltham in the meantime.
Incompetence is an easier lie than most other lies to tell - and they are going to need to escape, later, they couldn't escape from the real Cheliax -
lintamande: "I don't know if that's anybody's specific job," Carissa has Security say. "It very well might be that there is, but they got pulled to the front with Nidal. This is - a really unusual situation for our procedures. If you want to ask that question of the site director, they'd definitely know exactly what went wrong."
Keltham: "Question one: Why wasn't I immediately told that Broom was from a goddess named Otolmens - why is that information secret and who here can I talk about it with?"
"Question two: I realize this wasn't your own decision, but for purposes of concretely understanding Chelish Governance, I file a request for, possibly later, an example trace of the process that led to my, apparently, being approved to know the name of Broom's goddess, and this approval being known to you, but nobody actually telling it to me. Was there a pending briefing or is it that - you have a process for approving me but not a process for actually telling me, what is going on, it sounds like I maybe have to acquire some domain expertise on what is going on, does this project in fact have a budget or are people in Governance just doing things -"
"Question three: Does anything else spring to mind that nobody specifically has the ball on telling me about, even though I ought to be allowed to know it? Because let me say right now, I've already noticed one thing like that, and have been quietly and in some bemusement and concern pretending not to notice, while I wait to see if it's being hidden on purpose for an interesting reason."
lintamande: "Otolmens's name is secret. You can talk about it with Broom, you can talk about it with Security, you can talk about it with the site manager. You can request clearance for specific students, if you want to be able to talk about it with them. The reason Otolmen's name is secret is secret and I do not know it, nor whether you're cleared to know it.
I don't know how you got cleared to learn Otolmens's name, but I can request an...example trace of the process. I learned that you were cleared to know that this morning, at our briefing, and not at our evening briefing last night, so the clearance almost certainly arrived in that timeframe.
I do not know the project budget.
I don't know which things you've been told, but I'm assuming you're more likely to not have been briefed on things that happened since the war started? Uh, since the war started.... they found some ancient skeletons in the villa, while they were searching it for Kuthite traps? The skeletons weren't Kuthite traps, to be clear, just, someone had died there some decades or centuries ago. We've withdrawn Teleport-capable casters from the Worldwound temporarily, with other nations filling in for us, and added a bunch of them here. There was a supply run to Absalom. We raised all of the project staff who died. We instituted a mandate that all project security carry scrolls of Teleport. The girls who hadn't made afterlife arrangements did so. There was discussion of finding some perfectly normal INT 10 peasants to be on cooking staff at the project in case you find it useful to talk to an average person."
Keltham: "Item I was thinking of wasn't on that list. I'll let it keep and see what happens."
"My apologies if I sounded a bit sharp in your personal presence. I am not under the impression that... whichever Security you are... is personally responsible for my travails here."
"I request Otolmens clearance for Carissa Sevar."
"We done for now?"
lintamande: "That's all I know, though I can ask the site director to immediately deliver whatever briefing they were planning to get around to this evening or whenever."
Keltham: "If a schedule exists then I am not perturbed by it happening in the evening. Provided that there are no pending items in it on the order of divine interventions."
"Actually, further item if it won't drop memory, and if it will, let's get paper. I request, rather urgently at this point, the nearest thing that can be found to a book which lists out all the known gods large enough or local enough or domain-relevant enough to be looking at my project, one which would include every mentioned god so far except Otolmens, and a book that will cover in it somewhere what is known about agreements between gods. This information is apparently highly relevant in practice to my project, on what has so far been a daily basis."
lintamande: "I'll pass that along as urgent."
Keltham: Keltham stalks back into his lecture room.
"I don't know why I expected Planetary Average Intelligence 10 management processes and bureaucratic design principles to successfully be only slightly beneath dath ilani standards, but, in fact, they're not," Keltham says. "I am restraining myself from interrupting the math we were in the middle of doing, for that digression. We should finish the math first. After that or shortly later, I am going to deliver a really pointed lecture on Lawful organizational principles whose pointedness is not, in fact, aimed at you, but is aimed at whoever ends up reading it."
Carissa Sevar: Sounds really interesting!
Keltham: Keltham takes a moment to compose himself.
Keltham: Keltham takes an additional moment to compose himself. If Chelish Governance is running some kind of massive effort to gaslight him, they sure are doing a good job of including the appearance of not being competent enough to pull that off, and making lots of weird errors about information that isn't really being concealed but nobody is bothering to tell him, serving as a cover for whatever it is that's actually being hidden. Which, you know, is what you'd expect from competent Governance running a competent gaslighting operation, right? No doubt the average thinkoomph on this planet is not really -3sd, that's ridiculous, how would people even survive. Look at how long it took them to find or train an actor who could convincingly pose as Intelligence 10 while doing kitchen work.
Keltham: Math. He was supposed to be teaching math.
Keltham: "Okay, you know what, I am not actually going to be able to focus on math until I get this out of my system. We're just going to put everything about logarithms and bags of factors of 2 and prediction-scoring rules on hold, to be resumed later."
"Instead I'm going to deliver a talk that had better be transcribed and delivered accurately to everyone who is trying to manage Project Lawful."
"Project Lawful is a terrible name, by the way. The moment I heard it, I knew that the decision-making processes behind it were going to be correspondingly terrible. I wasn't going to say this until after I'd covered the concepts of probabilistic updating, probabilistic entanglement, and mutual information - those being the Law which would allow me to explain exactly why this was a terrible idea -"
"But absent that Law, consider an adversary pondering two alternative hypotheses based on evidence they've managed to collect. One theory is that a certain Chelish project is investigating a mysterious source of knowledge not previously existent in Golarion. One theory is that Cheliax is making a massive effort to scale up metalworking because they expect to be invaded. If you give your projects cool names, one of these possibilities will sound much more than the other like something that someone might've called Project Lawful, even if they can't deduce the true answer just from the name. You should call your amazing top-secret project Project Doorknob, or something else chosen completely at random by a true randomness source, which carries no information whatsoever about what the project actually does. Except, of course, that if all your other top-secret projects also have cool names, the one with a sane name will stand out as being the only one with any sane thinker in it, meaning, someone not from Golarion, if anybody like Lrilatha knows what that should look like. So this should be Project Dragon, maybe."
"The password to the Forbiddance on the previous project site is also terrible and completely insecure and whoever set it should never be allowed to invent any passwords again, and if you're thinking that I'm an idiot for not thinking to mention that before they set the password here, you're right. For the record, a slightly better password for a Forbiddance might be, for example, 'escape copper shore'. It's not hard to remember, but difficult for an adversary to guess unless they get a quite large number of tries."
"But I digress."
"Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one: How to have anybody having responsibility for anything."
Carissa Sevar: Frustrated but not suspicious is a good thing. Possibly the best outcome aside from Carissa having been good at her job, and that ship has left the harbor, so to speak.
NONETHELESS THIS IS POSSIBLY WORSE THAN BEING LIT ON FIRE.
lintamande: Meritxell does not look over at Carissa at all because she remembers being told by Security that she can have Sevar's job if she's better at it but that if she achieves that by sabotaging Sevar then she can't. Well actually she was threatened with a horrible death, to be specific.
Keltham: Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something. If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for it. This is the proverb of dath ilani management. Are three people responsible for something? Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.
Dath ilani tend to try to invent clever new organizational forms, if not otherwise cautioned out of it, so among the things that you get warned about is that you never form a group of three people to be responsible for something. One person with two advisors can be responsible for something, if more expertise is required than one person has. A majority vote of three people? No. You might think it works, but it doesn't. When is it time for them to stop arguing and vote? Whose job is it to say that the time has come to vote? Well, gosh, now nobody knows who's responsible for that meta-decision either. Maybe all three of them think it's somebody else's job to decide when it's time to vote.
The closest thing that dath ilan has to an effective organization which defies this principle is the Nine Legislators who stand at the peak of Governance, voting with power proportional to what they receive from the layers of delegation beneath them. This is in no small part because dath ilan doesn't want Governance to be overly effective, and no private corporations or smaller elements of Governance do that. The Nine Legislators, importantly, do not try to run projects or be at the top of the bureaucracy, there's a Chief Executive of Governance who does that. They just debate and pass laws, which is not the same as needing to make realtime decisions in response to current events. Same with the Court of Final Settlement of which all lower courts are theoretically a hierarchical prediction market, they rule on issues in slowtime, they don't run projects.
Even then, every single Governance-level planetwide law in dath ilan has some particular Legislator sponsoring it. If anything goes wrong with that law, if it is producing stupid effects, there is a particular Legislator to point to, whose job it was to be the person who owned that law, and was supposed to be making sure it didn't have any stupid effects. If you can't find a single particular Legislator to sign off on ownership of a law, it doesn't get to be a law anymore. When a majority court produces an opinion, one person on the court takes responsibility for authoring that opinion.
Every decision made by the Executive branch of government, or the executive structure of a standardly organized corporation, is made by a single identifiable person. If the decision is a significant one, it is logged into a logging system and reviewed by that person's superior or manager. If you ask a question like 'Who hired this terrible person?' there's one person who made the decision to hire them. If you ask 'Why wasn't this person fired?' there's either an identifiable manager whose job it was to monitor this person and fire them if necessary, or your corporation simply doesn't have that functionality.
Keltham is informed, though he doesn't think he's ever been tempted to make that mistake himself, that overthinky people setting up corporations sometimes ask themselves 'But wait, what if this person here can't be trusted to make decisions all by themselves, what if they make the wrong decision?' and then try to set up more complicated structures than that. This basically never works. If you don't trust a power, make that power legible, make it localizable to a single person, make sure every use of it gets logged and reviewed by somebody whose job it is to review it. If you make power complicated, it stops being legible and visible and recordable and accountable and then you actually are in trouble.
Keltham: The basic sanity check on organizational structure is whether, once you've identified the person supposedly responsible for something, they then have the eyes and the fingers, the sensory inputs and motor outputs, to carry out their supposed function and optimize over this thing they are supposedly responsible for.
Any time you have an event that should've been optimized, such as, for example, notifying Keltham that yet another god has been determined to have been messing with his project, there should be one person who is obviously responsible for that happening. That person needs to successfully be notified by the rest of the organization that Cayden Cailean has been identified as meddling. That person needs the ability to send a message to Keltham.
Carissa Sevar: Good job, real Cheliax, bad job, fake Cheliax.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa's own fault analysis here, insofar as she's making herself think about it, which isn't all that much because she's still not back at 100%, is that obviously it was her job, once the decision was made to bring Pilar back and once Pilar's authorized lies were settled on, to get those authorized lies conveyed to Keltham at the speed it would happen in alterCheliax. It's really obvious why she didn't do this - it's because, as literally every authority she has talked to in the last twenty-four hours told her, she's not in fact fully recovered, not tracking everything - but it was still her job. Cheliax knows who has responsibility for figuring out what Keltham learns and when, and it's her.
And in her absence it's Maillol, and if he criticizes her for this she'll criticize him right back, but the entire reason (well, most of the reason) she took his job was that she expected he'd miss things she wouldn't, so.
This is a thing Carissa likes about Cheliax: it is not a place that hesitates to assign responsibility. Right now it's going to assign it to her, and that's going to suck, but, that's how we get stronger. (Unless punishment doesn't work) Asmodeus specifically instructed on Carissa's punishment and can be assumed to have had an aim in mind.
Keltham: In companies large enough that they need regulations, every regulation has an owner. There is one person who is responsible for that regulation and who supposedly thinks it is a good idea and who could nope the regulation if it stopped making sense. If there's somebody who says, 'Well, I couldn't do the obviously correct thing there, the regulation said otherwise', then, if that's actually true, you can identify the one single person who owned that regulation and they are responsible for the output.
Sane people writing rules like those, for whose effects they can be held accountable, write the ability for the person being regulated to throw an exception which gets caught by an exception handler if a regulation's output seems to obviously not make sane sense over a particular event. Any time somebody has to literally break the rules to do a saner thing, that represents an absolute failure of organizational design. There should be explicit exceptions built in and procedures for them.
Exceptions, being explicit, get logged. They get reviewed. If all your bureaucrats are repeatedly marking that a particular rule seems to be producing nonsensical decisions, it gets noticed. The one single identifiable person who has ownership for that rule gets notified, because they have eyes on that, and then they have the ability to optimize over it, like by modifying that rule. If they can't modify the rule, they don't have ownership of it and somebody else is the real owner and this person is one of their subordinates whose job it is to serve as the other person's eyes on the rule.
'Nobody seems to have responsibility for this important thing I'm looking at' is another form of throwable exception, besides a regulation turning out to make no sense. A Security watching Keltham wander around obviously not knowing things he's been cleared to know, but with nobody actually responsible for telling him, should throw a 'this bureaucratic situation about Keltham makes no sense' exception. There should then be one identifiable person in the organization who is obviously responsible for that exception, who that exception is guaranteed to reach by previously designed aspects of the organization, and that person has the power to tell Keltham things or send a message to somebody who does. If the organizational design fails at doing that, this incident should be logged and visible to the single one identifiable sole person who has ownership of the 'actually why is this part of the corporation structured like this anyways' question.
Keltham: Yes, most of the command structure is at the Nidal front because of Golarion's stupid-ass correlation between management rank and combat potential. Keltham gets that. There are ways to design organizations to be robust to exceptional structural events like that. Dath ilani corporations consider how to operate in earthquakes, or if communications get cut by a massive solar weather event. Everything like that gets rehearsed at least a little, once a year during the Annual Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival. The central principle is that so long as the ability to identify who's now responsible for something can still function, the organization can still function.
Cheliax's problem is not that the person whose job was to tell Keltham about Cayden Cailean is fighting Nidal. Cheliax's problem is not that this person's failover was also on the Nidal front. Cheliax's problem is that the question 'Well who's responsible then?' stopped without producing any answer at all.
This literally never happens in a correctly designed organization. If you have absolutely no other idea of who is responsible, then the answer is that it is the job of Abrogail Thrune. If you do not want to take the issue to Abrogail Thrune, that means it gets taken to somebody else, who then has the authority to make that decision, the knowledge to make that decision, the eyes to see the information necessary for it, and the power to carry out that decision.
Cheliax should have rehearsed this sort of thing by holding an Annual Nidal Invasion Rehearsal Festival, even if only Governance can afford to celebrate that festival and most tiny villages can't. During this Festival, the number of uncaught messages getting routed to Abrogail Thrune, would then have informed the Queen that there would be a predictable failure of organizational design in the event of large-scale catastrophe, in advance of that catastrophe actually occurring.
If literally everybody with the knowledge to make a decision is dead, it gets routed to somebody who has to make a decision using insufficient knowledge.
If a decision can be delayed - which class of decisions, by the way, does not include delaying telling the guy who started the last god-war about the latest set of divine interventions targeting him, that bit could actually be important for all somebody knows - then that decision can be routed to some smarter or more knowledgeable person who will make the decision later, after they get resurrected. But, like, even in a case like that, there should be one single identifiable person whose job it would be to notice if the decision suddenly turned urgent and grab it out of the delay queue.
Carissa Sevar: It all sounds obvious and practically impossible to do at the same time.
Keltham: Keltham gets that Golarion doesn't have the incredibly convenient universally connected devices that Civilization uses to run all of its corporations and government. He gets that. But the fact that people were walking around knowing that Cayden Cailean had intervened on his project, authorized to tell Keltham this if he asked, and the thing ended up waiting until he asked, seems like the symptom of some deeper organizational mis-structuring whose details Keltham cannot guess. It means that Cheliax is underperforming what should be possible to do even with the technology that it has.
It is plausible that Keltham should look at the administrative structure above himself, rip it apart, and put it back together the way it would be put together in Civilization.
But the general mode of operation in which he still has never been invited to meet the site manager on this project, been told a budget for it, shown the names on the chain of command leading up to Abrogail, et cetera, all seem suggestive of some kind of motivated illegibility in which somebody somewhere thinks something bad will happen if Keltham can access all that info or they are incentivized against it by flaming farts know what kind of bizarre payoff function.
He does not think this is because Cheliax is plotting dark plots against him, to be clear, because if they were plotting, they would show him a fake organization above himself, rather than leaving him in a bizarre limbo where he does not know who is actually managing this project, and his only actual conversation with anybody he knows to have any authority over it, was that time he spent half an hour sitting next to the Queen of Cheliax watching her feed tiny crumbs of food to fish, and this is not a scalable solution.
lintamande: The Queen did WHAT.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa could tell him who is in charge (to Keltham, it's Maillol) but she thinks this might disrupt the momentum of his rant.
Keltham: And in fact, now that Keltham thinks of it, an obvious guess is that nobody is managing this project, because Asmodeus said to set it up, so people in Governance did that, but Asmodeus didn't say who should manage it, so nobody is, and everything going on here is actually being routed into a completely ad-hoc system of random people in Governance grabbing bits of authority and responding to his requests as he makes them, and there is apparently a site manager because this person has been mentioned to him, but there's nobody above that site manager and so the site manager is hiding because he knows he won't be able to answer any of Keltham's questions.
Which is, Keltham supposes, what project management and governance might very well end up looking like, after subtracting 6 Intelligence points from everyone and everything.
Is he wrong? Is anyone allowed to tell him if he's wrong? Is the person who would need to sign off on that on the Nidal front, is their failover replacement dead, and is there now a long awkward silence while everybody in this room knows the correct answer to his question but the person who needs to sign off on answering it is discarnate?
Carissa Sevar: "- should we volunteer answers to questions or are the questions meant to be illustrative."
Keltham: "If you actually know and are allowed to tell me, please do."
Carissa Sevar: "The site manager is Ferrar Maillol; his office is labelled on the maps they put up in the cafeteria; he's the person I go to when you want mice or something. I....think he reports to someone in the Church? Probably a higher circle cleric? And probably someone at the front right now. They probably report to the Queen and the Grand High Priestess."
Keltham: "If they're reporting to the Queen and the Grand High Priestess then they're not reporting to anybody. Pick one."
"To be clear, that advice was not directed at you personally."
"I will note, however, Carissa, that you do not, in fact, have any idea of who is above Ferrer, except that somewhere up there is the Queen and Grand High Priestess. It's actually pretty rare where I come from to not know who is your boss's boss. Maybe this is because you don't have the universally interconnected machines but I really wouldn't think so. You have not actually disconfirmed the fallback hypothesis that what you do not know about, does not exist, and there is nothing above Ferrer but an amorphous cloud of individuals in Governance whom Ferrer individually contacts each time he tries to make something happen on the site."
"Anyways, I think I am done with the main part of my rant that I needed to get out of myself. Any questions you expect the actual readers of this lecture will want answered? After that, by the way, and on reflection, maybe more urgently than resuming the math parts, I need to know WHO THE ASS IS CAYDEN CAILEAN IN VASTLY GREATER DETAIL."
lintamande: No one else talks; this is obviously in authorized lies only territory.
Carissa Sevar: Go on, Pilar.
Carissa Sevar: Claims that have been authorized about Cayden Cailean, all true:
He is a former human adventurer. History has it that he ascended on a drunken dare, which isn't the kind of thing that should be possible. His areas of concern are competition, exploration, sex, mind-altering substances, and revelry; his herald is a prostitute and former travelling companion; he tends not to seek out conflict with other gods, but is allied with Desna, Milani, Sarenrae, Shelyn, and Torag; he has chillier relationships with the Lawful gods, and it's generally understood that He and Asmodeus don't get along, being diametrically opposed in alignment. He doesn't have a holy book, having never seen fit to inspire the writing of one. There are rumors that He personally attends drunken festivities in the River Kingdoms in His honor.
Pilar : Pilar will repeat all that pretty flawlessly, since she's had time to rehearse it, including the part where she doesn't sound rehearsed.
Keltham: "...gods can just show up to places, looking human? That is a thing that ever happens?"
20% probability that one of his girls is exactly that, if so.
Pilar : Pilar has not been instructed in advance on how to answer that question!
"I'm... not sure? I didn't think to ask about how many chances in 100 that it would be true."
Ione Sala: Does anyone want to stop her from answering, think think? No?
"Gods can do most things but they usually don't, when they manifest looking like people it's usually inside their divine realm. There's stories about gods manifesting in Golarion, but only during huge crises, and it's not clear to me from my reading that any of it must have really happened, except that most books say that Aroden was doing that when" Asmodeus killed him "he died."
Ione didn't go out of her way to collect information like that, or at least, that's what she told herself, but in retrospect, maybe she happened to be hanging out in sections of library where there were books talking about how vast and how ancient Golarion and other planes were.
Keltham: "So gods are easier to kill when they're manifested looking like people, and they only do that in their highly protected home where it's safe, or after they build what they think is a large enough coalition to protect them from other gods, or in massive emergency-opportunities?"
Ione Sala: "If there was any book that had that kind of information it would be in the incredibly protected library of a five-hundred-year-old ninth-circle wizard, I think. Which I can't borrow from, to be clear."
Keltham: "Ione, what's Cayden Cailean doing messing with my project? Best guess?"
Ione Sala: Ione thinks about it, both for real and to give somebody else a chance to instruct her on that.
Carissa Sevar: Cheliax's best guesses that Keltham is allowed to know are that Cayden Cailean is trying to support the project in some way that may only be clear in retrospect, that Cayden Cailean lost a dare of some kind, that Cayden Cailean is subject to some preexisting agreement which manifests like this, or that He's just not acting in a goal oriented way, sometimes Chaotic gods don't. Ione can add her own speculation if it'd make sense in alterCheliax.
Ione Sala: Some of that doesn't sound like things a random Project Lawful researcher should be saying!
"It could be that he lost a dare, it could be that there's an old bargain, it could be that he's just being Chaotic Good and literally doesn't have a goal because Chaotic gods are sometimes like that. Or it could be that - somewhere at the end of everything that happens here is a lot of exploring, competing, and sex and revelry and drugs. Not necessarily for us personally, to be clear, I'm more the bookish type."
"Pilar, did they say anything more to you?"
Pilar : "The clerics who examined me said that everyone's current guess was that Cayden Cailean is being, uh, cooperative, not least because of the bit where I was there to step in front of a sword at the right time, which is why it seemed like a better idea to leave me here than pull me as a Security risk. Whatever gods think is supposed to happen as a result of this project, Asmodeus likes it, your god likes it, Nethys likes it. The current guess is that either Cayden Cailean likes it too, or Asmodeus bargained with him to help." The degree to which this itself is incredibly odd and alarming is not to be said out loud.
Keltham: "So Cayden Cailean is in favor of Civilization because people will be having more fun. Okay. That's better news than I was expecting, it sounds like he might be one of the gods that's just all the way on board."
"That makes sense of why Cayden Cailean but not why candy. Were there any speculations about why candy?"
Pilar : "I would guess that - if you're the kind of god that Cayden Cailean is, it's easiest to act on the world by giving out candy, even if that requires a weird complicated Chaotic plan instead of a simpler one?"
Wait a minute. Was that her guessing? That sounded like something Pilar shouldn't have known herself.
Keltham: "Lovely. Just wonderful."
Keltham: "Say, Pilar, I'd say that for putting up with this, I deserve, not just any cookie, but a big cookie with precisely printed frosting that happens to explain what's going on here and what Cayden Cailean wants from our project and what he's trying to do with it and also what's the name of my god."
Pilar : There is the weight of a cookie in her hand and somebody had better be ready to cast an illusion really fast -
Pilar : The frosting is just decorated, roughly, as a cheerful smiling face. Unless somebody already cast the illusion.
Pilar silently hands over the cookie.
Keltham: "Chaotic Good, huh."
Pilar : "YES."
Keltham: "Cookie of +4 Intelligence lasting 1 hour."
Pilar : "Nope."
Pilar contemplates how this thought occurred to Keltham within seconds, and to her not at all over days. It probably has something to do with dath ilanism, but, how would there be a Law for something like that?
Keltham: "Then I suppose 'Project Lawful' will continue on, with snacks catered by Cayden Cailean. Thank you, Cayden Cailean, the magnitude of your contribution there seems difficult to understate. Though I do appreciate the Pilar save during the attack, to be clear."
"I'm going to take a brief break and then get back to math. Fifteen minutes, say." He's got to use the washroom, for one thing.
Actually, he should take a bite of the cookie, just in case it contains edible knowledge? Nope. It's a good cookie, though.
(Keltham departs.)
lintamande: "Do you remember Elysium?" Meritxell asks Pilar. "Did they explain anything there?"
Pilar : "Mostly they - I thought at the time - tried really hard to talk me into staying. At the very end after I said no, they told me that the whole point was so that I'd be, certain of myself and my choices, I forget how they put it exactly. Said I was going to be used for Lord Asmodeus's interests, not against Him, because Good would mostly rather not use people against the ones they're truly loyal to. The Grand High Priestess thought that someone like them might maybe be telling the truth about that, to someone like me, but it doesn't mean Cayden is on Asmodeus's side, he could be plotting to destroy Cheliax and then I prevent a new Worldwound from opening in the center."
Some other things happened since then that do look more like Cayden Cailean cooperating. Is Pilar supposed to say anything about those?
Carissa Sevar: (These girls don't need to know the other things.)
lintamande: Safe topics of conversation are hard to find, so the girls mostly review their notes while they wait for Keltham to return.
Keltham: Keltham is now here! Perhaps he was really always with you all along.
So, math, yeah.
When we'd previously seen our plucky heroines, they had just realized that everything, or at least, all the positive real numbers, can be seen as being made out of continuous quantities of 2s being multiplied together. A 3 is a bit more than 19/12 of a 2, so 1/12 more than 1-and-a-half 2s. So diminishing something via multiplying by 8/9, is taking a bit more than 1/6 of a 2 out of its bag.
Predictions chain together by multiplication. If you spin a fair coin once, the probability of it coming up Abrogail is 1/2. Knowing whether it came up Abrogail or Text doesn't change the probability on the next spin, so the chance of two sequential Abrogails is 1/4, the chance of three such is 1/8.
Each time you say 1/2, and the event happens, that's like taking another 2 out of the bag containing your total prediction over all the events. Where, to be clear, your bag started with zero 2s in it, or probability 1. After guessing 50/100 three times at three fair coinflips, your bag would contain -3 2s or a probability of 1/8.
What if you predicted Abrogail with 2/3 probability instead, on one spin? Well, if the coin comes up Abrogail, good for you, you've only lost - how many 2s, roughly? Raise your hand once you've got an estimate.
lintamande: (Keltham may eventually notice that all his students assiduously say 'the Queen' even when repeating after him otherwise.)
Carissa Sevar: How many twos in 2 - one. How many 2s in 3 - 19/12ths, ish. So 1 - 19/12ths = -7/12th. You've lost seven twelfths of a two.
"I'm confused about what losing twos corresponds to. You lose them when you're right!"
Keltham: "Hold that thought just a little longer."
"If you predict Queen with probability 2/3, then if you get Text instead, as happens half the time, you thereby predicted that with probability 1/3. Though actually we'd say that it's a tiny bit less than 2/3 and 1/3 because maybe the coin could land on its edge or just mysteriously vanish, but leaving that aside for now. If you predict Queen with 2/3 probability and the coin comes up Text, how many 2s do you lose?"
lintamande: "...nineteen twelfths?" says Tonia.
Keltham: "Yup. So if you lose seven-twelfths 50 out of 100 times, and nineteen-twelfths 50 out of 100 times, how many 2s do you lose on average each round?"
lintamande: "Thirteen twelfths."
Keltham: "Better or worse than if you'd just predicted 1/2 every round?"
lintamande: "That depends on whether losing twos is good or bad! But presumably it's meant to be bad since this is a dumber way to guess."
Ione Sala: "You lose 12/12ths of a 2 each time you predict 1/2, so you lose 1/12th of a 2 less that way. Which is better if losing 2s is bad."
Keltham: "So would you agree that this scoring function..."
"Gives you more points, or rather, has you lose fewer 2s, the more probability you assign to whatever happened?"
"Gives you the same final number of points, or 2s lost, whether you're predicting two coinspins at once, or predicting them separately in different rounds?"
"And, at least in this particular example we checked, it wasn't possible to expect to score more average points, or lose fewer 2s, by giving an answer other than reality's answer for how often something happens?"
lintamande: Yep! That does seem true!
Asmodia: Why does that still feel like a surprise even though she predicted it way earlier? "And it's the only scoring function like that which can possibly exist," Asmodia states.
Keltham: "Not exactly. Counting lost 3s will also work. Or counting lost 5s. But that just scales the number of points you win. There's around nineteen twelfths of a 2 in a 3, so if you know how many 3s you lost, you can convert to how many 2s you lost. It's not so much that there's only one function, as that all the functions like that, are basically doing the same thing and have outputs that are trivial to convert back and forth."
"The Law, in this case, is not an exact function or an exact number of points, it's a structure such that every solution shares that structure and does almost exactly the same thing. Like a simpler and clearer version of the way that lots of logics are ultimately equivalent to first-order logic in what they end up deriving."
Carissa Sevar: "And you can - use this to figure out who's the best at predicting things?"
Keltham: "If everyone is predicting the same questions using the same knowledge. If your sole goal is to end with as many 2s as possible, and you get to pick whether or not to play the game, the only winning move is not to play, so you can end up with the same zero 2s you started with."
"Otherwise you start with nothing, and then lose more every time you try to predict anything that isn't absolutely certain, and the best you can do is losing the least 2s possible, which will always still involve losing some, it's just that if you don't match reality you do even worse. So, yes, if that was a game with, like, actual penalties, and no other reward for playing it, nobody would play that game if they had a choice."
Pilar : "I would," Pilar says.
lintamande: "Kinky," says Yaisa.
Carissa Sevar: "I mean, presumably you have people do this for outcomes of decisions they're already making, for accountability, not as a game they play for fun."
Keltham: "Well," Keltham says, speaking less rapidly than usual, because some of his processing just got diverted to a subthread, "we can and do play it for fun, and do that our whole lives, in fact. It just involves a mindset where - you can try to do as well as possible, each time you confront a prediction challenge, without feeling like you're losing something in virtue of doing less than perfectly."
"The most obvious thing to match yourself against, there, is other people's predictions. Pilar predicts one number, Yaisa predicts another, we see who did better, just like if they were playing some other competitive game whose in-game rewards sum to zero across all sides, but whose positive extra is the fun people have from playing it, or their pride in showing their skills. There's a version of that game which dath ilani play, before they're ready to go all the way to prediction markets, where we put up a sheet of paper on the wall - or just use walls and Prestidigitation, I guess - and write down a question, and then people who think the current probability is wrong can write down a different probability underneath and be scored by how much they gained or lost relative to the previous guess."
"I'm not quite sure we're ready yet, but once we are, we'll probably just start doing that over all the place, whenever somebody comes up with an interesting question that will actually settle in a few days."
"But I think the most basic point - lost 2s aren't actually like sending out the merchant ships to the wrong place. They're a measure of how well you do, and you do better by losing fewer; but the fact that the numbers always look negative don't mean you're doing poorly. If you're losing few enough 2s, you can send your merchant ships where they need to go, and that's the reward for playing."
lintamande: The students are nodding.
Carissa Sevar: This feels like a really big part of Evil dath ilan. Accountability, true and perfect and impartial, handed down from reality itself, impossible to rebel against or lie to; competition for its own sake, to prove oneself worthy of the power to send ships -
- there's something there. Though also some heresies to navigate around.
Keltham: "The more mature version of this is where people are betting money against each other inside a common market, forming a prediction market, and the places where prices settle then become Civilization's way of knowing what Civilization knows."
"If this project were running inside Civilization, there would already be a prediction market over what its outcomes were, like whether we succeed in our technological revolution, or start another war, and every time something interesting happened, the prices would shift, and that would reflect Civilization knowing more about our project's prospects. Or, I mean, in this case, it would be a secret government prediction market, but then that's the government's way of knowing secret things. I wish we had one, actually, I'd have loved to see what happened to the prices when Pilar started handing out Cayden Cailean candy."
"People who make massive amounts of money on prediction markets by being righter than everyone are incredibly rare in Civilization, and they're respected about as much any other kind of person who exists. A Legislator is significantly less respectable than Nemamel, who beat the prediction markets her whole life to the point where she could only trade anonymously because nobody would knowingly bet against her. Nobody takes that name any more, she owns it now, it's hers forever. There's nine Legislators at any given time, and there were five people like Nemamel over the course of Civilization's remembered history."
Merenre: Merenre keeps working at his desk and doesn't sneeze at all because this isn't that kind of universe.
Carissa Sevar: "Is it - about intelligence or something else - is it hereditary - was she able to describe it -"
Keltham: "Every kind of skill Civilization knows how to describe is one that thousands or millions of people learn. Nemamel couldn't have been what she was, noticeably better than all her competitors, if she'd known how to describe all of what she was doing with no bits left over. She passed on some of her skills and made the markets themselves better, but Nemamel had no successor and no replacement in the domains she'd mastered most, when she went into" cryosuspension "the deep cold of suspended time, waiting on the Future to awaken her. It was one of her classic - your language doesn't have the word, an acerbic disclaimer of how far you fell short of your own standards in the course of impressing somebody else - that people who were actually competent and understood what they were doing could just teach their skills to others so everyone would have them. You only become Nemamel by failing to understand yourself that well, or by being born with good heritage that isn't anything you hold in your mind's own hands and can teach to others, so why be impressed by that - was her acerbic disclaimer."
Carissa Sevar: Can you steal dath ilanis with a Wish, Carissa wonders.
It wouldn't even be a good idea necessarily - one dath ilani is probably all that Cheliax can handle - but could you.
Iarwain: "Are the acerbic disclaimers important to what she was doing? Should we be making acerbic disclaimers like that?" (Peranza.)
Keltham: "Probably sort of? Suppose I put it this way: Clearly, I should be telling you more about dath ilani heroes - heroes? - people who are incredibly impressive - because dath ilani don't grow up to be skilled by trying to be Keltham, they grow up trying to be Nemamel."
"But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel? She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good. There are no gods in dath ilan. Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?"
"And the answer is - she looked up to an image that existed in her own imagination, better than all her competitors and also far better than herself, the person who would've executed all her own skills perfectly, been everything she was but better, not something like Nethys that knows the answers just because, but something less powerful than that which knows them for reasons and by being clever."
"If she'd ever stopped to congratulate herself on being better than everyone else, wouldn't she then have stopped? Or that's what I remember her being quoted as saying. Which frankly doesn't make that much sense to me? To me it seems you could reach the Better Than Everybody key milestone, celebrate that, and then keep going? But I am not Nemamel and maybe there's something in there that I haven't understood yet."
"It didn't seem like a kind of pride that was being offered to me then, in retrospect, looking back. It was the pride of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, that they look around themselves, and even if they aren't the best in the world yet, there's still nobody in it who seems worthy to be their competitor, even the people who are still better than them, aren't enough better. So they set their eyes somewhere on the far horizon where no people are, and walk towards it knowing they'll never reach it."
"But now we sort of are the very smart people now, aren't we, or trying to be that, and maybe I understand a little more, now that I think on it again. I mean, if I try to imagine myself - looking at Golarion, and being like, 'Ah yes, I have done better than Golarion, yay me' - that would just be stupid. No offense. Probably Nemamel was that, but for dath ilan. To her it was like Golarion is to me. And that's why when people congratulated her on being better than everybody, she was all, 'stop that, you only like me that much because you're thinking about it all wrong', compared to some greater vision of Civilization that was only in her own imagination."
Carissa Sevar: Keltham doesn't aspire to be like Contessa Lrilatha when he grows up; that would be aiming too low.
Maybe even trying to build Evil dath ilan is aiming too low.
She's not actually sure what would be aiming higher, though.
Or maybe the idea is not to aim high, the aim is just to imagine what you'd get if everybody was doing everything right all the time -
- if everybody was doing everything right all the time, Asmodeus's weaknesses could be taught in schools so smart children grew up thinking how to strengthen Him, and they would think thoughts that were actually a good idea, instead of in this world where Aspexia Rugatonn seemed to genuinely consider it plausible that it's better for most people to be stupid lest they trip over their own cleverness.
If everybody were doing everything right all the time, then when Keltham had arrived they would not have needed to lie to him; they'd have known how to explain themselves to him, because they'd have known how to explain themselves at all.
What if not everybody was doing everything right all the time, but Carissa personally was. Then she'd have noticed all the things she didn't understand sooner - (and gotten executed for heresy) - no, she'd be like Pilar, impossible to accuse of heresy because none of her thoughts twist away from other things - why did Asmodeus pick Carissa rather than Pilar -
- anyway by the time Keltham landed she'd understand the thirty-word explanation of Hell that makes it not upsetting to Good people and they wouldn't need to be running an elaborate deception. And if there was occasion for it, she'd be better at it, because of understanding how all the world is deeply interconnected.
No, no, that's not good enough either, aim higher -
Irori: Literally every person in this classroom is already somebody's oracle or cleric or has sold their soul, and He can't maneuver any (more) of the Way's followers here because of Otolmens's Edict. Why is His life like this?
Iarwain: "What was that about the deep cold and the future awakening her? It sounds like - things that happen with epic heroes, here. There's some way for Nemamel to come back if she's really needed?" (Still Peranza.)
Keltham: "Not epic heroes, no. There's no gods in dath ilan, and no afterlife, it doesn't mean that we just let everybody become, the equivalent of getting eaten by Abaddon. Food kept cold spoils more slowly... maybe you don't know that here, if there's no cold-making machines, but like ice freezes into a shape and keeps it, if you cool people down far enough, everything stops and nothing decays from there. And they can wait, for however long it takes, until Civilization has become powerful enough to bring them back. It's not as simple as I'm making it sound, you first need to cool people down to above the freezing point of water, cycle as much water as possible out of their body and add protectants to what's left. But to do this as well as they possibly can is something to which Civilization has bent all of its will and all of its eyes and all of its cleverness."
"About a hundred people every year die for real. The air-traveling machine I was on, when it crashed, is going to make that be around two hundred this year, probably."
"Everyone else goes into the cold where time stops, to wait it out, and awaken to whatever the Future brings, when Civilization becomes that powerful. There are far prediction markets that say it's going to happen eventually with - what I would think would be unreasonably high probability, for something that far out, except that those markets are flagged with Keepers being allowed to trade in them. Whatever secrets the Keepers keep, they would be turned to the purpose of protecting the Preserved, if they were turned to anything at all. So I guess that number reflects what the Keepers would do if they had to, that nobody but them knows they can do."
"So no, Nemamel can't be brought back in an emergency, we just don't have the tech to do that yet, and no magic. But it also wasn't because she was epic. It's just what happens to everyone in Civilization when the first part of their story finishes, and pauses for a time. Someday, the far prediction markets say, everyone will be reunited."
Everyone except Keltham. But cases like his are statistically improbable, and people shouldn't dwell on them.
Carissa Sevar: "How sure are they."
Keltham: "Ninety-seven percent, and without calibration training I expect you have no idea how flaming ridiculous that is for a prediction about the Future, but it's really superheated ridiculous. Apparently the Keepers think they could make thirty completely different statements like that and be wrong once, and, them being the Keepers, they've already thought of every single possible reason worth considering for why that might not be true. And that's not the probability of the tech working, it's not the probability of revival being possible in principle, it's not the probability that Civilization makes it that far, it's not the probability of the Preserved being kept safe that long, it's the final probability of the Preserved actually coming back."
Carissa Sevar: - nod. "Not as sure as Hell but - really good, for no magic. ....is it possible that what they secretly know is magic."
Keltham: Maybe, if there's something you can easily do with magic and +4sd thinkoomph that destroys dath ilan, and can't be opposed by more and smarter people wielding more magic.
Though there's really only one hint that there's been anything that weird in that whole universe, and it's the Screening of the Past... still, one such hint is noticeably more than zero... but one of the few things that is publicly known about the Screen is that it doesn't reflect anything weird and concealed about the true character of physical law... would that still be an honest statement if magic were ultimately made of math, which in some sense it does have to be?
"Haven't really thought it through. It seems more plausible now than a week ago, surely, but it wouldn't have seemed very plausible a week ago."
"I'd also expect something the size of magic to make the Keepers less certain, not more, because if there's magic around then somebody could blow up all of dath ilan with a misstated Wish spell, in which case the Preserved don't come back."
Carissa Sevar: - nod.
Maybe dath ilan has gods. ...she's not sure why you'd have secret gods. But she does think gods make worlds less likely to blow up.
Keltham: "Seems like a natural place to call it for lunchtime, and maybe break for some wizard-spells practice by me after that."
"This ended up not being the Law of Probability, as it has apparently turned out; this has just been the Law of Scoring Predictions, and the lesson wasn't complete. I haven't gone through the calculus to show you that, for every chance-in-reality, you get the best expected score by naming that chance as your estimate."
"But the Law of Scoring does get you far enough to know what a probability is, and to start practicing the skills of putting probabilities on things, and have some idea of how well you're doing at that."
Oh, and Keltham will write down all the log2 values for some landmark probabilities from 99% down to 0.0001%. You sure do lose a lot of bits by saying 0.0001% for something that goes and happens!
lintamande: A cheerful gaggle of girls get up and go to lunch.
Carissa Sevar: Message: Pilar, the High Priestess's office.
Pilar : Pilar will obey. (Of course.)
Jacint Subirachs: (Jacint is still in her inner office; Carissa and Pilar are making use of one of her antechambers.)
Carissa Sevar: "What happened to you yesterday. I got the Church's account of it."
Pilar : Well, it started with her curse warning her about a party of Osirian adventurers presumably dispatched by Osirion to kidnap the cake girl. In the sense of sending her to the key location with a cake to be delivered about fifty minutes later.
Then Pilar's curse told her she shouldn't just turn the kidnappers over to Security because that would make her curse sad, and her curse claimed that giving her the information was an act of trust in Pilar's Lawfulness and she needed to act like a god or her curse wouldn't be trusting her again.
So Pilar went to the Grand High Priestess's office to submit herself to the authority of somebody who understood deranged Chaotic Good curses invoking implied god-agreements. But the Grand High Priestess was not there. And when she was contacted by mirror, the person she put in charge of Pilar was Pilar.
Pilar had to run a meeting. It involved a lot of intelligence officers debating what to make Osirion believe. They were much older and more powerful than her and Pilar had to act like she was an invincible Project Lawful girl who was totally able to run meetings like that. There were lots of decisions about what was best for Project Lawful and Carissa Sevar was completely out of contact and the Grand High Priestess had put Pilar in charge and Pilar had to guess what Sevar would've wanted her to have done.
(Pilar doesn't actually sound this plaintive. It's just very very clear subtext for this perfectly professional report that Pilar is giving.)
Carissa Sevar: Relatable, thinks Carissa, and then she realizes that she isn't going to let that show on her face because she's in charge here and is supposed to know what she's doing, and then imagines Keltham sputtering about signaling equilibriums that shouldn't equilibrate, and then lets it show on her face just a tiny bit, as a reward for Pilar if Pilar has good Sense Motive.
"Optimistically," she says, "maybe Cayden Cailean has noticed we're going to win and is hoping he can buy the victory being smoother and less wasteful in exchange for it happening faster, which pleases Asmodeus. Or - hoping he can buy the world we'll build having more whorehouses and parties, I don't think those are inherently un-Asmodean.
But I expect that's not what Nemamel would say, could we wake her from her sleep and ask her."
Pilar : Pilar wasn't actually expecting that much approval. It makes her feel better, but only a little. Pilar feels like she has probably done a lot of things that call for her to be punished, and not in a matter-of-faith way where she could assign it herself. Submitting to High Priestess Subirachs for her cruel amusement isn't the same as that. Somebody who actually knows what Pilar did wrong has to tell her what that was. The closest she's gotten to that is one spy punching her in the face and he wasn't even on the right side.
Pilar continues her story. Somebody said that Project Lawful's cover had probably been blown as soon as dozens of uncleared emergency responders went to the villa and then a god-war started, because if you try to stonewall adversaries completely about a god-war they'll start using ninth-circle scrolls to get your people or get information out of them.
So Pilar personally made the irrevocable decision for all of Project Lawful that they were going to go deliberately high-profile to the other countries. But with everything resting on the power of Pilar's own weird curse, because that weird curse didn't seem very related to what Project Lawful was actually about, making it a good distraction.
They had a seventh-circle wizard go in looking like Pilar, to deliver the cake, and she made the Osirians actually eat it with her, and then sent them home.
That was how Pilar's adventure yesterday started.
Carissa Sevar: "One moment, I'm deciding whether you made the right call or not.
I think yes. The one thing we can't afford for them to learn about is Keltham; if they're desperately trying to learn about the other girls that's resources not dedicated to learning about Keltham. Unless you're scryable. This place has some anti-scrying, don't go outside until I think more about it. Do you have possessions or relations such that you'd be distracted if they were kidnapped..."
Pilar : Pilar has already been so instructed, on never leaving scry-shielded places without escorts. There are probably a lot of people looking for her by now.
Pilar has a mother and sister who cannot come before Lord Asmodeus in her heart, but even after she said that, they got moved by Security anyways, which must be the correct decision since Security knows best. She owns nothing of real importance to her, saving perhaps her spellbook.
After the cake incident ended Pilar asked her curse if she'd behaved like a proper god around this deranged god-agreement she'd never made, and Pilar's curse said yes and good job and offered to help her scare a paladin out of the palace.
So Pilar called the Grand High Priestess again and reported that, and what she'd already done, but it was only briefly, and the Grand High Priestess couldn't possibly review everything that Pilar no doubt did wrong, and anyways wouldn't have the time for assigning her punishments.
The Grand High Priestess said that this was beginning to become interesting and told her to go scare off the paladin.
Pilar's curse required her to feel an actual desire to let the paladin go home safely before she was able to find him.
She didn't think until afterwards about whether maybe her curse might have tricked her into sending a paladin away safely who was going to be Maledicted anyways. Her curse said that, if so, hypothetically speaking, the paladin would've completed his mission first, and Asmodeus wouldn't have considered that a good trade, and would've been well-served by scaring off the paladin instead, for Pilar will never be used against her Lord.
Pilar expressed some skepticism about Chaotic Good apparently being fine with the paladin not completing his mission. Her curse claimed that it was totally reasonable for Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good to team up against Lawful Good just like against Chaotic Evil because they both found paladins annoying for different reasons.
Pilar asked how her curse felt about throwing surprise parties for all the Lastwall spies targeting the palace so that they'd get to go home safely to their families.
Pilar's curse said sure, but there would have to be offsets from the standpoint of Chaotic Good, make it an offer. There was a MEETING with VERY SENIOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS asking Pilar whether Chaotic-Good-pleasing things they could do cheaply were good enough for her, like they thought it was her making the decisions and not her oracular curse. And in the middle of that the QUEEN came in and asked Pilar why nobody had thought of asking the Queen to be part of the Osirion-scaring operation, and Pilar felt like a tiny baby mouse too small for a huge hawk to be worth eating, being asked by the hawk why it hadn't been invited to the baby mouse's party.
Now there's some things Cheliax is doing for Chaotic Good in exchange for getting rid of as many spies as they did, mostly undoing some small things that Cayden Cailean would've really hated and that weren't actually helping Cheliax that much. Plus a compact that, so long as it looks like Lastwall still really doesn't have any eyes left on the palace, they're not going to try any plots more nefarious than they would've done if Lastwall had still been watching.
The compact was signed by the Queen in blood.
Pilar let her curse direct her, and what her curse did, was, her curse mushed a cupcake into the parchment so that the pink icing left behind would be her curse's signature.
Pilar doesn't actually know whether or not she would still be alive, if the Grand High Priestess hadn't been personally attending the meeting by then.
Carissa Sevar: She probably would be; Abrogail's perfectly capable of being professional when there are real stakes for Cheliax. Of course, Cheliax has lots of diamonds right now so maybe Pilar being dead isn't real stakes.
"But, let me guess, too busy to offer any detailed opinion on your conduct besides that you should go ahead and round up all the spies?"
Pilar : Carissa Sevar is RIGHT. How did Carissa Sevar KNOW.
So Pilar pointed out the people who would be invited to her surprise, and arranged a huge party in the palace's largest ballroom, and everybody was invited in such a way as to scare them as little as possible. Also one of the people who did the inviting was the QUEEN and Pilar had to go WITH the Queen to set that up and the Queen TALKED at her about THINGS and actually Pilar would rather not think about that entire conversation for the rest of her life.
Then there was a huge party for the spies who got to go home, with Pilar dressed as Meritxell, who Pilar hopes enjoys being very very famous to other countries' intelligence services. The Queen danced with a prostitute. Pilar comforted somebody who was sad about his country probably not wanting him back and explained that home can be anywhere that people care about you and doesn't have to be the country you were born in.
Pilar's curse was very excited and happy! And said that Pilar got another week before her curse started feeling hungry again. Apparently even though Pilar got musicians and official Imperial snack catering and gave colorful hats to all the Security officers, it did not count as a real actual proper party to her curse, because the party didn't have enough true camaraderie, revelry, sex, and drugs. Or something. Pilar has not previously been really into Cayden Cailean theology.
Then she finally was allowed to go to her new quarters in the fortress, and High Priestess Subirachs was very mean to her. That, plus a Nap Stack, was the only reason Pilar was remotely functional today.
Carissa Sevar: Right. Okay. Carissa's day was not actually all that much better but she's not going to say that.
"It might be worth separating out trying-to-appease-your-curse and trying-to-leverage-your-curse-for-counterespionage," she says after a bit of thought. "I bet you could ask your curse for, I dunno, some girl in Ostenso in a predicament Chaotic Good would be sad about and that Asmodeus doesn't prefer either - blinded by a fever and starving to death, raised in a cellar by Urgathoa cultists, whatever - and throw her a 'we've restored you to health and to life' party, and maybe that keeps the curse sated, rather than trying to time the palace events to the curse's demands, which might leak information some way we're not thinking of.
'would this paladin otherwise have been Maledicted', and also 'would this paladin otherwise have learned something false that served Cheliax' are things you should have thought of before you talked to the paladin. It worked out fine, but it might not have. It's possible your curse is trying to get you in the habit of doing curse things without checking if they are also the best deal you can get Cheliax and our Lord. It is stupid, dangerous, and stupidly dangerous to operate in the palace without understanding the Queen and what she'll want to hear about and what to involve her in directly, but I am tempering my judgment over that because I'm not sure that the important people in the room would've known what to tell you.
It is very Asmodean to be able to make yourself believe useful things that you know on some level Nemamel, with your information, wouldn't believe. I don't - get why, actually, and I think it might be close to the secret of Evil dath ilan, and this might veer close towards instruction on faith, which I can't offer you, but I'm not going to punish believing that the paladins should get to go home because that'd be nice for them; your beliefs ought to serve Asmodeus, and that one did.
On the whole I don't hear major errors, in that. You are in the power of a really annoying enemy, which permits you very little of what it'd be healthy for you to enjoy; but getting rid of all Lastwall's spies is a huge achievement, and might let us root out their revolutionaries, too, if they have worse information. The myth of the Project Lawful girls exceeds our real capacities, but not for very long, maybe, if we keep learning.
You may try on my headband, and think for a minute about whether there's anything else you got wrong that Pilar who was smarter would've gotten right."
Pilar : Pilar's pretty honored by this! She will put on the headband.
The headband definitely feels like it is making Pilar be much smarter! Pilar can now be allowed to know things that she thinks only a smarter Pilar ought to know.
"It would've been really valuable for us to know what the Osirians would've asked the cake girl if they'd taken her prisoner. I could've ordered a Security to go ask for volunteers in the palace dungeons, somebody would've been genuinely cheerful about getting out to do that, even if there was a chance they might get Soul Bind cast on them for a while."
"I feel like I was being really stupid when I was talking to the paladin. Amateurish. I was making too much up as I went along. I'm afraid he's going to get home and somebody's going to figure out that he wasn't really talking to an agent of Milani. I should've given his cookie to a more experienced agent and let them talk to him."
"I should not have talked up Paxti as Project Lawful's deadliest agent. It should've been somebody who's just quietly reliable like Gregoria. I made that choice because I thought Paxti would like it, not to serve our Lord. That's severe."
"Most of the sin and transgression I'm feeling is because I talked sharply to people who were above me and better than me and ordered them around, and, even if I had to do that, I feel like that's something an Asmodean should still be punished for. I grabbed away your authority and made decisions for your project while you were out of contact. Even if that was my best effort at doing a job the Grand High Priestess ordered me to do, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't be punished for all the things I chose to do along the way. If I'd done it wrong or disobeyed, that would mean being punished even more, but I still - it's like Keltham's game, there's a best way to play but not a way where you don't lose any 2s."
"And I should've arranged for somebody to cast Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom on me before the meeting started, it was important."
Pilar takes off the headband, less reluctantly than some people would. Being the person who a smarter Pilar seems like she ought to be is not as comfortable as being regular Pilar.
Carissa Sevar: "The Grand High Priestess thinks you'll be the first success, if I do discover a way to produce Evil dath ilani. Maybe the only one. I understood her at the time just to be saying that it'll be very painful, and you can take it - and it will be - but I think maybe she was saying something that is also gestured at by Keltham's game. You'll play even if you only ever lose. There is a human weakness, a tendency to shy away from games we are sure to lose, that is attenuated in you, I think.
- I'm going to take a while to calculate these punishment codes, I haven't done this before. You're dismissed to lunch."
Pilar : Thank you, Pilar doesn't say, because Cheliax, but the thank you that she's not saying is very sincere.
"Acknowledged," Pilar says, and goes to lunch feeling a lot better and very glad that she has superiors like Carissa Sevar and Aspexia Rugatonn, who hopefully are not doing this at all because they feel any fondness for Pilar personally; it would be sad if Hell had to correct them for that.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa works out the codes and then heads to Maillol's office to make sure they're on the same page about plan: pretend that Cheliax is incompetently managed, to cover genuine incompetence and also permit the degree of illegibility they want.
Ferrer Maillol: Cheliax is incompetently managed, anywhere that somebody on the order of the Queen or Aspexia Rugatonn is not watching very closely. Sevar is unfamiliar with this because she went from her wizard school, managed by a wizard wearing probably a +6 intelligence headband, to the Worldwound, which is where a lot of the best managers are being expended, and then straight to Project Lawful. Sevar has never in her entire life tried to serve on, let alone manage, a temple project inside the capital of some random County in the Chelish boondocks, where there's three layers of higher management between you and Egorian, never mind King Infrexus.
Maillol's got this one.
He can be totally realistic about this.
lintamande: Carissa and Pilar are both gone, which Meritxell takes as an opportunity to sit next to Keltham and quiz him if he seems amenable to quizzing about what kinds of things there are prediction markets for in dath ilan. Are there prediction markets for who the next Legislators will be. Are there prediction markets for which of all the lunch places in a city will be ruled the tastiest. Are there prediction markets for who in your class is best in bed.
dath ilan: Prediction markets for the next Legislators: Of course! Everyone gets to look at them except for the Representatives who actually have to redelegate their delegated votes to Legislators, who are generally asked by their own constituents not to look at those prediction markets to avoid circularity.
Prediction markets for restaurants being tasty: You could subsidize a tiny market on a prediction on whether a restaurant will be tasty to you, as you'll rate the meal afterwards, and some... tiny golems possibly?? belonging to some kind of rich merchant entity that only buys and sells predictions?? will fight it out among themselves to predict your rating. It's not clear what it would mean for a restaurant to be tastiest in general.
Prediction markets for who in your class is best in the cuddleroom: It's much harder to guess how somebody will rate somebody else's cuddleroom skills, especially while you're young enough to be in classes and there's not much data on you. A restaurant has lots more customers and ratings that the prediction-trading merchants get to see. Most cuddleroom encounters aren't rated at all! You could obviously subsidize a personal rating prediction on a sex worker just like a restaurant, that's almost exactly analogous.