Jacint Subirachs: She laughs, and it's genuine. "Perhaps ask Keltham how far dath ilan itself has come there, before you set your eyes on that as your first goal rather than your last."
dath ilan: You'd be surprised at how far, actually, especially if you'd only ever met Keltham.
Jacint Subirachs: "I am not going to punish that stray thought just now, about your own cleverness. It would disturb the Queen's work if I did. The only reason I am not saying a similar thing about your thought of escape is that you know it was a transgression and you are, I think, beginning to become concerned not simply about the fearful fantasy of what must be done to drive it out of your mind forever, but about what you must do to feel right with your faith."
"Or perhaps not. It is important not to rush that aspect of your spiritual growth. But when, however, somebody can be corrected through torment by which they know what is made right or wrong, and not torment so fearful to them that they dare not do the like again, they are then less damaged by that correction."
"I will continue to observe your spiritual health and place the judgment of that disloyal thought in abeyance for now; the Queen's work is still solidifying into its new shape, and to punish unspoken thoughts, I suspect, might be especially dangerous to it. Perhaps in a few more days we shall revisit the issue, especially if you find then that you are ashamed or feel that you have not been set right and made clean." Or sooner, if Sevar's thoughts show her to be dwelling on it in fear fantasy, but this of course Subirachs does not say out loud.
Carissa Sevar: "I understand. Can you reassure me - I know it is true and obvious, but I think it would help to hear it - that I couldn't, actually, betray the project and run off with Keltham, that I belong to this and cannot escape -"
Jacint Subirachs: "You could not," she lies. "You do not know all that Security has done. I do not know all that Security has done. I doubt the Queen or the Grand High Priestess know all that Security has done separately rather than collectively. And more importantly, Hell owns your soul already, whether or not any particular devil does. Do not be mistaken about where the value of those three Wishes or your ability to bargain for them comes from; they are not the value of your more certainly coming to Lord Asmodeus, but your value to some high devil of Dis who gains you against their rivals."
"Your actual value to Lord Asmodeus I would not even dare guess, Chosen."
Carissa Sevar: "I have been assuming it will depend on whether I can pull this off or whether I fail and make myself useless in the failing. But that - I can live with that."
Jacint Subirachs: How about if somebody actually TELLS HER how she's supposed to keep this woman out of Irori's clutches or ensure that Keltham can't love her without becoming Asmodean.
Jacint Subirachs: Well, there is that.
"If we may move on, Chosen, I have a thorough report on Meritxell and a preliminary report on many of the others, in regards to what I might be able or unable to accomplish for each with brief slave training."
Carissa Sevar: " - yes. Go ahead."
Jacint Subirachs: "Meritxell sincerely desires to impress people. This is unfortunately as close as she comes to having any innate aptitude for submission. She is all pride and no slavery. If Keltham expects submission of Meritxell and the expectation is clear to her, she is apt to show him what he expects, to impress him. She could play a clear role we give her, to impress us. But I am not sure what his reading-skills will make of that... it is such a ridiculous inconvenience, that! I keep wondering if it might just be a matter of enhancing Splendour high enough to fool him, but, the trouble is, I can think of no safe way to trial any such method, what if it fails! I cannot, without great efforts, even try to make Meritxell be in actuality what Keltham would want to see, in regards to being aroused by pain or domination. Meritxell would have no trouble performing in every aspect and would even delight in that performance, as she delights in succeeding at anything, but I cannot see a clear and sure road to having Keltham perceive that she is aroused by it."
"I am also somewhat concerned that if Meritxell is constantly around Keltham, her pride will bite at her if Keltham desires her to be things she is not in truth - that if he visibly desires her to be a 'real' submissive and not just the outer shell of one, then, even if she fools him, she will still feel that she is not doing well enough. Not that her unhappiness would ordinarily be a problem, of course, but if it starts to interfere with her arousal in ways that Keltham can read, it becomes a problem."
Carissa Sevar: " - yeah. I will - think on what to tell Keltham, given that. I suspect it's not worth risking a lie, he's going to eventually get suspicious if everyone seems to have my Worldwound problem - we have presumably got some girls who have a reasonable normal amount of masochism?"
Jacint Subirachs: If that weren't true, she would suspect divine interference! Jacint readily lists several girls all of whom, if they caught Keltham's eye, would require hardly any work to make into most reasonable things Carissa would want them to be; and more girls that could be managed with more work.
Asmodia isn't one of them, Ione is in a strange Nethysian limbo with respect to what can be asked of her, and, if you add Meritxell to that set, those are all of the girls after Carissa Sevar who would be the most obvious bets to catch Keltham's eye in terms of demonstrated talent.
Does Asmodeus's Chosen Keltham Expert think it's possible to line up Keltham with a next girl in virtue of her being, say, slutty? Subirachs can easily turn Yaisa or Peranza slutty, and others could be managed with only slightly more work.
Carissa Sevar: Probably, especially if they set it up and then have Carissa indisposed for some reason that evening. He is a teenage boy and in Carissa's assessment vulnerable to cornering him to tell him how badly you want him, and so on.
Asmodia is a bad idea until Keltham's actually Evil, unless they hear otherwise from her custodians in Hell who might've had something in mind about this. Jacint has authorization to get started on encouraging some girls who seem like a good fit. "Though mind whether you think it's affecting them in a way that'll affect their performance in class; I need to keep track of that, and it might be a higher priority than arranging romances for Keltham."
Jacint Subirachs: "I suppose that if I pointed out how much easier this would be if we could select new students for him on the basis of their prior sexualities, you would say that it... won't work for him, if we rebuild the current party? If we dismiss all the less-achieving students to Egorian's 'Project Lawful', and replace them with equally intelligent but more submissive wizards taken from all Cheliax? How much is Ostenso of all our wizard academies, I confess I do not know."
Carissa Sevar: "....he might agree to adding some new students now that we know who the top performers are, but they'd have to genuinely be the caliber of Ione and Meritxell and Asmodia. I think he'll have vague Good objections to dismissing the worse performers."
Jacint Subirachs: "It would be easier than solving some of our other problems the hard way. Though they would need to be caught up on Keltham's earlier lectures, and would be behind on... whatever strange cumulative exposure it is that turns people into Project Lawful girls, if you'll forgive the phrase."
"I'll inquire of the other wizard academies to see what they have in the way of attractive female easily moldable submissive masochists who are talented mathematicians."
Cheliax: This will start some additional rumors among wizard academy administrators, even if the request is highly classified and carefully disguised not to come from Project Lawful.
These rumors, to be clear, will not be true. But somebody, somewhere, at some point, is going to use the phrase "math pets".
Carissa Sevar: "It's worthwhile just to learn whether they can in fact catch up, I think. Let me know how training the more promising girls goes. I'll think what to tell Keltham about Meritxell. - and whether to tell Meritxell to back off."
Jacint Subirachs: It would probably be good to clear up precisely how Sevar wants the girls trained, if she can tarry a few more minutes.
Carissa Sevar: Yeah, sure. She doesn't really know what she's doing at all here, but she knows what would be ideal for Keltham.
Keltham: Keltham has been running around blessing random girls with his wisdom while Carissa is busy.
Literally; he prayed for 6 Owl's Wisdoms this morning, using all of his 3rds on that too. That's enough to get half of them today, and the rest can hopefully endure whatever cumulative personality-structural stresses they've got going plus another day of latent dath ilani exposure. People get deprioritized if they've otherwise had an Owl's Wisdom not too long ago, including before joining the project. Oddly enough, few of them ever have. Oh, and after being tapped you're supposed to go to your bedroom to contemplate and maybe write notes to yourself, on Keltham's theory.
Security is a little unhappy about how this requires lots of Detect Thoughts being used up to monitor the girls separately, but they haven't ordered all the girls to get this done in a single place where they can all be monitored together, because for all they know the part where Keltham thinks they need to be in a quiet separate bedroom is actually important.
Ione Sala: Ione is already pretty wise takaral! Apparently being even wiser causes her to complete her sentences with takaral much more often takaral. It's possible that she's actually working through something faster takaral. She hopes so takaral.
Apart from that she doesn't experience any startling revelations about herself or her relation to the universe takaral. She's a Nethysian now rather than Asmodean, and that has relieved all the stresses she can see in herself even with +4 Wisdom takaral. She reviews her notes from Keltham's lectures to see if anything shakes loose with more Owl's Wisdom, but it doesn't particularly takaral; if there's dath ilani special abilities that cast from Wisdom, the way Keltham warned, Ione apparently hasn't absorbed those yet. Takaral.
Oh, hey, that wasn't a natural takaral takaral. It was actually Ione's mind completing it because it thought it was supposed to be there takaral. She'll have to watch out for that takaral. But she shouldn't be distracted by thoughts like that; she should be reviewing her notes on dath ilani thinking instead. Takaral.
Iarwain: Paxti rethinks what she learned in Keltham's lectures, hoping that some of it will soak deeper into her and let her say the sort of things that Meritxell or Asmodia sometimes say. She does not, for the moment, experience any startling insights about it.
Iarwain: Peranza is well aware that her thoughts are likely being read right now. She reviews her notes on Keltham's lectures in hopes of being less likely to think anything heretical, and learn something more useful to Lord Asmodeus instead. She wants to be useful to Lord Asmodeus.
Asmodia: Asmodia gets in on it, barely on time, and manages to give Keltham an inquiring look about whether it's her turn that hopefully didn't come across as being pleading or requesting, which might look suspicious to anyone considering the course of events later.
Once she's been tapped, she diligently goes off to her room to think, planning to review Keltham-lecture notes so that her thoughts won't look too suspiciously empty.
The Wisdom isn't there to provide realizations, it's there to provide an excuse for having had them.
Her plans end up becoming a whole lot more refined anyways as she thinks of them. She puts most of the thoughts outside of her barrier, it is fine and good for Security to see those, and starts writing.
lintamande: Gregoria is pretty sure that you're not supposed to get an Owl's Wisdom and then try to think yourself into a devil, or into someone who has some idea no one's ever had before. She's pretty sure that doesn't work. It's like how you're not supposed to take a theology concept introduced in church and go running off inventing lots of things with it; you don't actually understand it that well, it's just the illusion of such deep insight.
Instead of that she'll pray. Wisdom is how clerics cast so it probably makes you better at praying.
lintamande: Yaisa tries to think deep thoughts but doesn't particularly come up with any. She is aware she's not a very deep person. Sharp but not deep, her mother used to say, which is the best kind of person, a good wizard who doesn't get out of their lane. Yaisa hopes that it's also the right kind of person for Project Lawful.
Keltham: So, up to 8 minutes for his Wisdom to wear off, at up to 2 minutes per caster circle, and then some more time to think after that if necessary, and then they should reconvene for another run on Probability... Keltham probably should have thought to set that schedule before sending people off to their bedrooms to think. Well, he'll send somebody around to knock on doors for a 5-minute warning in about 20 minutes, say.
Iarwain: Note from Asmodia to Sevar, delivered by Security after Sevar leaves Subirachs's office:
Keltham tapped six girls with Owl's Wisdom and told them to go off to their bedrooms to think afterwards. Asmodia was one of them. This report was written in haste under the Owl's Wisdom but completed after it ended.
Asmodia has now realized that when she responded to Keltham's inquiry about her superpowers by asking 'Why is everyone asking me that?' this was a potentially catastrophic error, if Keltham had not believed that the Crown was supposed to be aware of his speculation. Asmodia had not been briefed on that aspect one way or another, so the correct decision for Asmodia would have been to take the lesser risk of not mentioning that anyone else had asked her; even though this would have also been a risk because, if Keltham did expect others to know, real-Asmodia would have behaved differently from alter-Asmodia. Asmodia notes in her defense that she had very little time to think when Keltham sprung that question on her, and that she erred on the side of not lying, even though concealment was the correct course given what she didn't know.
Asmodia notes that she believes the fault for this narrowly averted event lies not only with herself, but also that nobody briefed her on Keltham's expectations about the Crown order to check her for superpowers, in particular, whether Keltham was supposed to know that this event had happened.
Asmodia registers her suspicion that too much information is being hidden from people who aren't Keltham. This isn't an ordinary project where people can know only what they need to know, it's a project built around an intricate fragile lie and everybody who isn't being lied-to needs to know what's going on with every part of the lie at every point.
Asmodia notes that she would probably have tried to deny this whole chain of thought to herself if she wasn't on the new only-Taldorian-punishment regime, shutting it down well before it got to the point of Asmodia thinking about having done something worthy of punishment somewhere Security could hear those thoughts and censure her if she didn't report them. Initially starting to look for and think about what you might have done wrong is dangerous, if you will need to report any new errors you find and get punished for those. Asmodia is also being more honest in reporting what she sees as potential flaws in what's going on around her, because she expects less to be punished for that risk if she questions her teacher and proves to be wrong.
Asmodia registers Prediction: Tonia will either fail wholly to master dath ilani thought, or will be tortured beyond the point of usefulness for heretical thoughts, or will have dath ilani thought successfully tortured out of her as something inside her realizes that she loses points each time she plays the game.
Asmodia means no insubordination by any of this and will obviously accept instruction and correction if she is mistaken.
Asmodia has also realized that she is acting very visibly different from her supposed alter-Cheliax self. Alter-Asmodia is incredibly curious what the Abyss Keltham was talking about, which real-Asmodia also is, but alter-Asmodia does not have any reason not to be talking to Keltham about this already, because alter-Asmodia isn't scared quiet by Security or Sevar or concerns that something huge is going on that she is not supposed to know about. Alter-Asmodia wants to know if Keltham has a way for her to get superpowers next time she's in Hell. Alter-Asmodia asked him about it at breakfast in front of all the other girls. Please advise.
Carissa Sevar: Well, the experiment is bearing fruit. Might be poisoned fruit, but that's how it goes, with experiments.
The big constraint on briefing all the girls more is that there's only so many excuses that can be manufactured to be having group meetings without Keltham. Carissa suggests (to Maillol) that they get all the girls Rings of Sustenance, and then can have briefings during those precious hours that will be unaccounted for to Keltham.
In the meantime she can talk to Asmodia about why the Crown thought she might have superpowers.
Asmodia: Asmodia is visibly looking a bit fearful here.
Carissa Sevar: "Hello again. You wanted to know why Keltham thought you'd have superpowers. This isn't a very satisfactory answer, but Keltham has a category of theories formed based on - reasoning from the fact he landed here, and not other places, and now and not other times, and for confusing reasons it makes predictions like 'he'll have a fight with the Queen over his girlfriend' and 'Pilar will mysteriously go to Elysium', and he predicted you'd have superpowers."
Asmodia: "I now have additional questions."
(This is something that people have occasionally heard Keltham say over the last few days.)
Carissa Sevar: "I bet. Go ahead."
Asmodia: "I'm - having trouble figuring out where to start. What did he say about Pilar going to Elysium? And he's not dead so he didn't fight the Queen over you, but what exactly did he think would happen?"
Carissa Sevar: "So to be clear we've been piecing things together from several different sources, he doesn't explain it much. But - it's like he thinks he's in a romance novel, only he's not accusing us of setting it up, just, uh, some entity, when he died, having put him in a romance novel instead of putting him in different contexts than that. And in a dath ilani romance novel, the different girls you date would all have fascinating secret backstories you had to sleep with them to understand, so a universe where we all have fascinating secret backstories is more like the kind of universe someone would stick him in. And in the dath ilani romance novel, all the girls fulfill different aspects of his sexuality, so, when I said that I'm kind of neutral on being raped he predicted that one of the other girls would be into that and have a fascinating secret backstory. And here Pilar is.
He, uh, ended up agreeing to rent me to the Queen so they wouldn't have to fight over me, is how that ended."
Asmodia: "I now have additional additional questions."
Carissa Sevar: "You can consider this an experiment in indulging you and seeing if that actually produces useful results."
Asmodia: In fact Asmodia's mind is repeatedly repeating "I now have additional questions" so loudly that she is having trouble figuring out what any of those Additional Questions are.
"So like - am I wrong that not a single one of us had any secret backstory before we started working on Project Lawful? We only started getting secret backstories once Keltham appeared? I'm not actually going anywhere with this question, just - I don't know what I should ask -"
"What's giving us those backstories, according to Keltham? In real life it's Nethys for Ione, Cayden Cailean for Pilar, Asmodeus maybe for you, we don't have backstories because we're in a romance novel, we're getting backstories because of things gods are doing to us - why are all those gods doing it to us, going along with setting up the romance novel for Keltham, you're the only one who might know, Asmodeus does things for reasons even if Nethys and Cayden Cailean don't -"
Asmodia realizes that she's not talking exactly like somebody who doesn't have anything special about herself, and stops talking and looks like she's waiting for an answer.
Carissa Sevar: "You're right; the group of girls that Cheliax gathered was not particularly remarkable, the reason it looks to Keltham like his girls have backstories is that the gods want us very badly, for some reason. I don't understand the reason, exactly. A devil said we are valued in Dis because it is thought we might be able to train better devils. But that can't be Cayden Cailean's reason or Nethys' reason."
Carissa Sevar: "Or the reason of whoever acted on your behalf. But it's because you're part of Project Lawful, and I do expect they want Project Lawful to continue and to at least by some definition of success succeed."
Asmodia: "...I can't even tell whether I'm supposed to say that I know you're just guessing that, or -"
"Maybe my special thing is now that everyone thinks I'm special and all the other special Project Lawful girls invite me to whatever special court sessions you have while everybody tries to figure out which superpowers I've really -"
"Or maybe I could go back to Hell and get superpowers if I asked for them -"
"Should I just ask a lot of questions to Keltham? Which parts of this is Keltham supposed to know we know, which parts is Asmodia supposed to know, I think that's the most important thing I'm supposed to ask right away."
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham knows that he's aired his tropes theory to us and that we took it seriously, though he's currently leaning towards it not being true and I do not want him encouraged in thinking it's true, at all, zero. You can do things Asmodia who had an average time in alter-Hell would do on learning she should've come back with superpowers, though mind that I don't think you particularly want Keltham's personal attention. - not because he's cruel, I wish, but because he can tell whether people are enjoying themselves with him or not.
Asmodia has probably been told that the Crown asked if she had superpowers, and then been asked by Keltham, and then maybe asked a Security if the question from the Crown was classified or if she's allowed to say she was asked it, and now has further questions."
Asmodia: "Clarification - I'm to tell Keltham that I asked him 'why is everybody asking me that' and then realized I was actually supposed to have asked Security about the classification status of the Crown inquiry first and that's why I didn't follow up earlier...?"
"I also don't understand our mission goal in general. Do we believe his tropes theory, and are we trying to extract information about tropes theory from Keltham, while concealing anything from him that he could use to realize the tropes theory is actually true?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, if that's the kind of reason alter-Asmodia might've had; if you'd rather she have some other reason give it and I will probably authorize it.
Our mission goal is to, if there are tropes, know about the tropes so we can refer them to the Grand High Priestess and never think about them again, and for Keltham to think tropes are unlikely." Because when he thinks they're likely he has a nightmarish freakout about how everything is fake and it's very stressful for me, personally.
Asmodia: "Can tropes - I don't know how to ask this. Do we believe that they are things that negotiate with gods, did they bargain with Cayden Cailean, and if not, how are they getting Cayden Cailean let alone Lord Asmodeus to go along with constructing the romance novel?"
Carissa Sevar: "If tropes are real, then what they did, is look over all the possible starting conditions that would produce the romance novel they wanted, and put Keltham into those starting conditions, such that gods would decide of their own free will to sponsor girls in Keltham's harem. ...I think. Keltham says we don't know enough prerequisites to truly understand tropes."
Asmodia: "I request orders. My belief about what alter-Asmodia did at breakfast stands, but this whole situation is beyond what I know how to determine a best action for. I am not confident in my ability to extract useful information about tropes from Keltham, but can try if so ordered."
It's sounding like Keltham isn't her sponsor, not that it would've made any sense. And if someone somewhere cared about her, it's because that was something true in the universe before Keltham got there, somehow, and she doesn't have any obvious avenues for figuring who that is.
Carissa Sevar: "At this time my going assumption is that no one can, maybe unless or until we master dath ilanism. Your only orders are to not tell any new and innovative lies and not to suggest to him that you've got superpowers, or arguable superpowers, or things that Hell alone can say might or might not be superpowers; if you want to get close to him and ask questions, you may, and if you want to have no relationship with him outside class, you may do that too."
Asmodia: "If I am to be left to my own initiative in making those decisions, what are my goals? How may Hell's interests best be served? I am sorry if I am proving difficult to command. I am confused."
Carissa Sevar: "Your goal is to learn dath ilanism without making Keltham suspicious. Hell's goal, as far as we know it, is to keep Keltham here, corrupt him, and learn from him. You're not assigned to the corrupting him or keeping him; just learn from him."
Asmodia: "Learn dath ilanism, don't make Keltham suspicious, it seems to me that these goals are served by asking Keltham questions about superpowers as alter-Asmodia would do, maybe with - alter-Asmodia focusing more on asking on how all this strangeness interacts with dath ilani reasoning and Law? I will do that at some appropriate point, unless countermanded."
Carissa Sevar: "Go ahead.
Did you think on my question to you, before you died, about what bribes would motivate you to bring your full intelligence to our work?"
Asmodia: She's got it already, but that's not an acceptable answer. What is alter-Asmodia's answer... why hasn't she said it already...
"Keltham's ways of thought would not be balked by my - problem. He would see many solutions, some of them not disloyal ones, maybe even ones less severe than my ceasing to be. So it is to my benefit to either understand those ways of thought myself, or that you do, or that Keltham be successfully corrupted to where I may plainly ask that riddle of him in return for my loyalty to him under Cheliax. Though, I did clearly hear that I am not myself assigned to that corruption."
Carissa Sevar: It is in fact kind of notable to Carissa that Asmodia did not say it already, doesn't seem very motivated by it anymore.
Maybe it's because Hell wasn't as bad as she thought and she feels silly for having wanted to die rather than go there.
Maybe.
"That's all, dismissed, we're considering whether and how to brief the girls more."
Asmodia: Dismissed, she goes.
She got through the whole thing without having to take the Gorthoklek authorization out of the pocket where she is terribly aware of it resting. That's probably as close as she can come to victory here.
Well, and she has explicit permission to talk to Keltham.
She was testing something of a theory, there, in fact, which was that she could just behave like a very good Asmodean and somehow end up being assigned to talk to Keltham anyways, or given permission for that, even if she wasn't trying to steer there.
She's a Project Lawful girl with a mysterious background, after all.
She's got to end up involved with Keltham somehow.
Even if she's incredibly unlikely to be attracted to him, and Keltham can tell that about her, they will, somehow, end up doing something that would happen in a romance novel.
Since the gods are repeatedly intervening around them to suddenly set up a romance novel.
...A dath ilani romance novel. They might be very different. Asmodia has not read any Chelish romance novels, in fact, though she's heard their plots discussed. She is not sure whether this is a disadvantage or an advantage in this situation.
She's maybe going to have to think about this again sometime when she has Owl's Wisdom and Fox's Cunning. And maybe more lectures on Law.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 6 / Late Morning
Keltham: "Greetings, my esteemed co-researchers. If you're wondering why I didn't lecture you more yesterday, it's because I was being a complete idiot to the point where I don't actually want to talk about it. Is that dignified of me? No. Having established this point, let us now continue with exploring further into Probability."
Keltham: "So far we've talked about two of Probability's - let's call them Law-fragments, the 'Baseline' term won't translate easily if at all."
"The first Law-fragment was that, if you're rating how likely things are to happen or be true, even if it's just on a scale from 1 to 12 where nothing on the scale is labeled, it still seems pretty reasonable that you can't say it's more likely that strictly more" propositions "things are true. Even if the scale isn't labeled enough that we know where to put a chance that's half some other chance, it can't be less likely that we have beef for lunch, than that we have beef for lunch and a spun coin lands Queen." (Keltham has of course returned Carissa's gold coin to her by this point; you can tell, because he still has cleric powers. He has now exchanged some of his platinum for gold, silver, and copper, and has his own coins about him.)
"Even if you're Ione and can predict the coinflips, beef and Queen cannot be more likely than beef whether or not Queen. And you might think this Law-fragment so obvious and trivial as to be useless; but in fact, most of you collectively - perhaps not all individually, who can say - must have been thinking in a way that violated the principle."
"The second Law-fragment I taught you was incomplete, because I'm running through all of these things way too fast, to get to proof-of-concept profits as early as possible. We could say that this fragment is about comparing estimates of how likely things are, to what actually happens. It generalizes the way that, for example... actually I should just quickly run through this earlier part, because you wouldn't have heard it explicitly even if you understood implicitly, because Golarion."
Keltham: Keltham first writes on the wall-whiteboard, "Keltham is now holding a silver coin in his left hand."
He then obtains a silver coin to go alongside the copper one, showing both to the class; mixes them behind his back, selects one in his left hand, and holds that out as a fist.
"What is truth?" Keltham then asks the class. "And in particular, what is the... truth-value... of the sentence I just wrote? I'm not asking whether it's true or false, you don't know that right now, I'm asking what it means to say that the sentence is true or false."
lintamande: That seems like such an unfair question.
Carissa Sevar: When someone says, 'this is true', they mean, 'I want you to believe it'.
It seems like not a dath ilani answer.
Keltham: "Blank looks, check. It's okay, you're probably using this fragment of Law correctly, you just don't know it to yourself. I should probably be playing some sort of game to make this point, but all the ones I know are literally aimed at five-year-olds and would be excruciatingly slow soooo."
"You're maintaining, in your own mind - something like the scaffolding Carissa used to reach out to her spellsilver, between my hand, and the writing on this wall. Only much less complicated than Carissa's scaffold, and also the correspondence is something represented inside you, rather than out in the air where you can see it with Detect Magic. If there's a silver in my hand, right now, you'd say the writing on the wall is true. If there's a copper in my hand, or for that matter, nothing, you'd say the writing on the wall is false. Or if you wanted to be more precise about it yet, you'd say that the meaning of the writing or the claim the writing talks about in Taldane is false."
"When your mind maintains a correspondence of this type, it does a ton of intricate work in the background. For example..."
Keltham opens his hand, showing that in there is a copper coin, and then replaces it with a silver one.
"First you learned that the writing on the wall was false, and then, the writing suddenly turned true. How can this be? Is truth unstable? No, it's that the word 'now' in the phrase 'Keltham is now holding' is a powerful word in terms of the scaffolding your mind builds. Carissa decided while she was building her scaffold to move the spellsilver a little further away, and then stretched her scaffold to reach out to it. The scaffold of meaning between my hand and the wall-writing, as your mind maintains it, instructed by that word 'now', is something that constantly slides through time. In every moment of time, the wall-writing has a different meaning, there is a different fact-in-the-world that makes it be true or false, because it is talking about the contents of my hand in that moment of time - according to the scaffolding your mind is maintaining inside itself; it's not that the writing on the wall is so complicated and powerful, but that you are."
"To extent that meaning is fixed, it always has fixed truth or falsity; to the extent it seems like truth or falsity is unstable, we can always deduce that it's the meaning that's really unstable, that something is wrong in the scaffold we build in our minds, not that reality itself has anything being simultaneously so and not-so."
lintamande: Blink blink blink blink blink.
Carissa Sevar: This is going to be one of those lessons where everyone's scared to talk because heresy, aren't they.
"Is there something you're saying that isn't captured by - statements are true if they describe how the world actually is, and not otherwise?"
Keltham: "If it sounds like I'm saying something stupidly simple, you probably understood it right, yeah. The point is to be explicitly aware of the scaffolding your mind builds, which is something that other understandings build upon."
"For example..."
Keltham reaches behind his back, mixes coins, puts one into his left hand.
"If I now say there's a 50/100 probability that there's a silver coin in my left hand, is that true? Is it false?"
lintamande: " - I mean, to us there might be that, but Nethys knows," says Gregoria, "and it's one way or the other."
Keltham: "Hm, yes, and actually, let me close my eyes for a moment -"
Keltham closes his eyes, opens his hand to show the contents, closes his hand, opens his eyes again.
"If any of you now say that there's a 1/2 probability the coin in my hand is silver, you'd be wrong, actually in this case lying. But if I say the coin has 1/2 probability of being silver, I'm being honest. How can this be? It's the same hand in both cases. How can the same words be dishonest when spoken by one person, and honest when spoken by another?"
lintamande: "You're sort of saying 'as far as I know', when you say stuff about how likely something is," Gregoria keeps going carefully.
Keltham: "Being right is more than just being honest. If I said I was certain my left hand contained a gold coin, you could determine whether I was being honest just by examining my own brain, if you had magic for doing that, or if you're Nethys - it's so incredibly convenient for these lectures that your world has one of those, by the way. The point is that you don't have to look inside my hand at all, to determine whether I'm being honest. If I say there's a gold coin inside my hand, and I believe that because I suddenly went insane a few seconds ago, I'm being honest. You have to look inside my hand to determine whether I'm right."
"When I say that the coin in my hand is 1/2 likely to be silver, I'm honestly reporting my state of knowledge about what's in it. Other people can have different states of knowledge, that they could also report honestly. In the scaffolding we construct, my probability of this coin being silver, is not just a fact about the coin, it's a fact about me and what I know."
"If I don't know whether this coin is silver or copper, that's not a fact about the coin, it's a fact about me. The coin itself is just silver or copper. Only people, only minds, can ever be uncertain; reality just is. If I've got a map of a city - you've got maps here, right? - and part of the map is left blank, that just means I don't know what's there, it's not that I go into the city and find a huge emptiness where the blank section of map is."
"Of which it is also said in dath ilan: All confusion and dismay exists in the mind, not in reality, for a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory."
lintamande: All of this seems like it is sort of coming in sideways to the main way truth is complicated in Cheliax which is that you shouldn't believe heretical things. Like, where do you put heresy in that framework. It's a thing in the territory that makes mortals be worse and stupider? It's a map error? It's a translation error between reality and your map?
(The class is silent.)
Carissa Sevar: "Do you have...an example of a way people get confused if they don't understand that?"
Keltham: "Well, you could take a class of high-disagreeability six-year-olds, and expose them to different information about the same play-mystery, and see if you could get them to shout at each other about how they were lying about the probabilities."
"Or actually - possibly there's a simple thing that I guess people in Golarion actually could be doing wrong, if they haven't had any training? Which is thinking you believe a bunch of sentences, where your scaffolding is broken to the point where you can't even take the sentence and figure out, what is it in the outer world, beyond the sentence itself, that would make them be true or false or righter or wronger? See what's the equivalent of Keltham's left hand and 'now' and the kind of coin that has to be inside it?"
"If you were six-year-olds, I could come in and very sincerely tell you about which animals were or weren't wakalixes, and test you on which animals were or weren't wakalixes to make sure you could repeat the answer correctly, and then mix you with a different class of six-year-olds who'd been told different animals were wakalixes, by a different teacher. And see how long we could manipulate you into fighting about whose teacher had probably been more trustworthy or honest, before anybody realized that they had no idea what it even meant for anything to be a wakalix - that their scaffolding wasn't reaching out to any fact in reality that could make the sentences be true or false - that they'd just memorized what the teacher had said, and repeated it back, without it having meant anything."
"This being one of the ways that kids are taught to notice explicitly and speak up when they haven't understood what the ass somebody was talking about, instead of trying to memorize the sentence and repeat it back. And then for the rest of your learning, you're going to be up against teachers who try to throw subtler and subtler meaningless or underspecified statements into your education to see if anyone calls them out on it."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure she hates this lesson already! "....I'm not immediately thinking of any wakalixes - I mean, there are lots of monsters where all I know about them is a page in a textbook, but someone put that page in because we might have to kill them -"
Keltham: "Actually, now that I think about it, I should maybe have delayed that lesson until after everyone has been tapped with Owl's Wisdom, in case it's the sort of thing where Owl's Wisdom lets you notice a bunch of stuff you thought you believed that was actually meaningless, and we want less cumulative personality impact from all the things like that which are allowed to build up between Wisdom boosts?"
"Though I wouldn't actually expect much impact from that, I mean, if it's meaningless, it's probably not built into the core of your personality or important to your motivations or anything."
Carissa Sevar: Why is she terrified. "I dunno, there are people who build their entire personality around....avenging the death of their wife at the hands of goblins, or something, and I could imagine tapping them with an Owl's being pretty soul-shocking? Because of realizing it's meaningless? But mostly that kind of thing happens in lawless places."
Keltham: "I don't see why it'd be meaningless? I mean, it might be not the wisest thing to do given costs and benefits, but it's not meaningless. You can look at the world and see whether or not it's true that somebody's wife actually got killed by goblins. You can look at the world and see whether those goblins are dead yet."
"If you're driven to make the goblins be dead because they killed your wife, then the content, the meaning, of that drive inside you, either isn't true or false in the first place, or we have to build a complicated scaffolding about it to see how it's true or false in a complicated way."
Ione Sala: Ione is worried if she's maybe the only person in this classroom who can think about this clearly enough to do something before all the Asmodeans have their minds explode, and the problem is, she can't actually figure out what she's supposed to do about it.
Though maybe as one of Lord Nethys's own, it's heresy for her to prevent things from exploding? But is this a kind of explosion that Lord Nethys finds pleasing to Him?
Carissa Sevar: "Okay, then yeah, I don't know any meaningless things people do, offhand - there are worshippers of Aroden, the dead god? But I think that's - wrong, rather than meaningless - like, I think they think he's not dead."
Keltham: "I mean, you're not six years old, I'd expect you to at least notice the wakalixes thing if somebody ran that on you. Even without knowing the Law-fragment of meaning-scaffolds explicitly to yourself, I think you'd notice if you were in a classroom and the teachers were getting you to repeat back things where you just had no idea what they even meant."
Ione Sala: "Uh, if this is a kind of thing where it maybe possibly makes people's minds explode harder if they go too long between Owl's Wisdoms, we should maybe go back to the probability stuff, and wait until everybody's had an Owl's Wisdom once before picking this up again?" says Ione.
It had better not also be her job to figure out what Asmodeus's priests need to tell everybody or do to them, in the window before this lesson resumes, so that they don't explode too hard later. Ione could already be treading perilously close to Nethysian heresy, for all she actually knows about Lord Nethys's laws, in trying to make something explode later or giving somebody else a chance to partially soften it.
Keltham: "Fair. Why rely on the thing's probable safety when you can just not do the thing, as the saying goes."
lintamande: Some tension leaves the room.
Keltham: "It probably goes in a more general lesson on how to notice wacky stuff inside you that took root somewhere, because you thought other people wanted you to believe it, and more generally the difference between what you think you believe and what you actually -"
Ione Sala: She interrupts their teacher.
"After everybody gets their first Owl's Wisdom, Keltham. And maybe then slowly if it's the sort of thing that even maybe possibly builds up between Owl's Wisdoms."
Keltham: "Right. Fair."
Ione Sala: Ione wants due credit for this; it's not actually in the terms of her agreement with the Asmodeans that she has to shield their sanity from Keltham.
lintamande: "Teaching in dath ilan sounds like it's a lot better than here, you end up spending lots of time memorizing meaningless stuff just because you didn't pay close enough attention to the part that made it meaningful," Gregoria says.
Keltham: "And the student assessment methods miss this as a problem because -"
Ione Sala: "Subject change back to Probability now," Ione interrupts their teacher a second time in the same lesson.
Keltham: "Right."
Ione Sala: Somehow this is deeply and strangely satisfying.
Carissa Sevar: She's going to need to - what is she even going to need to do - she's going to need to have the lesson in advance preemptively, that's what to do. Have a big heresy session where everyone says heretical things. Should be fun.
Before she does that she's going to need to try an Owl's Wisdom herself and get to the question of why she's so scared. ...maybe under supervision.
Message to Ione: Acknowledged.
Keltham: "Anyways, the Law-fragment you learned yesterday is about building a scaffold between probabilities and the thing that determines how right you were. If I say I put 1/2 probability on my hand holding silver, to determine whether I'm being honest, Nethys just has to examine my brain and see if I'm honestly saying what I think the chance is, or if I'd bet 50/100 under a Lawful scoring rule, and not look at my hand at all."
"To determine the equivalent of whether I'm right - to say how right I am - you have to build a scaffold in your mind, from my saying 1/2, to my hand, and then you don't say 'true' or 'false', 'right' or 'wrong'; if I actually am holding silver, you say that my loss was one factor of 2, or one 'bit' to use the Baseline term. And this does involve concepts that people aren't just born with, which is why you want to understand the scaffold consciously and explicitly, rather than taking it for granted as something you'll do instinctively correctly."
Keltham: "If instead we were just using scales from 1 to 12, with no common reference points, to understand what somebody else meant by their rating - well, it would still seem pretty plausible that strictly more complex events should not be rated as more likely. But there'd be no obvious way to take the scaffold from the probability assignment to my hand, and say how right I'd been exactly. That's one way of seeing why somebody sending out merchant ships might have trouble figuring out what to do with the claim, if you said the chance of a ship making it back was 9 on a scale from 1 to 12."
"And now that probabilities actually mean something to us, and aren't just wakalixes unto us - now that such thought is bound to reality in the explicit sight of meta-thought - we can consider more Law-fragments about what to do with probabilities once we have them."
Keltham: ...how does he actually bootstrap to the Inverse Probability Theorem? He learned that way too long ago for him to remember what he got taught before what else. It's kind of hard for him to remember what it's like to not know it.
Well, they're not getting any more enlightened by him not saying anything, so, he should just start saying things. Maybe start with the informal and state an informal Law-fragment before trying to formalize it; that's usually the order in which things are taught.
Keltham: Keltham Prestidigitates the wall clear. He then starts to sketch a dath ilani murder mystery game, aimed at sufficiently young children that going through the motions of guessing the key statistics and multiplying odds won't just seem trivial and boring to them.
The owner of a house far away from any other houses, a man named Bahdhi, has been discovered dead, the discoloration of his body suggesting poisoning. His head is missing, so this isn't a truly awful crime - the Surreptitious Head Removers were evidently notified duly in advance, and properly called in by the murderer - and in real life you're obviously supposed to ignore any information you get as a result about this crime having been premeditated, or the poisoning not just being accidental, but it's said for the sake of the game to obviously be a murder even before taking into account the missing head -
Iarwain: "I now have additional questions," says Peranza.
dath ilan: Well, if you commit a murder, not that you're supposed to, but if you do decide to defect from Civilization to that extent, you would obviously still want your murder victim to go into the deep cold so they don't get deprived of their Future. Most people, when they commit murder, want somebody out of the way for now, they don't want to destroy the person's soul.
So there's a Government service that murderers can call in to get the heads of their victims properly taken away for suspension, immediately after the victim dies. And since Civilization absolutely does not want to disincentivize murderers from calling in this service, they're trained to come in without leaving any clues for the police that might make life harder on the murderer; and if they accidentally leave a clue anyways, the police would obviously ignore it. These are the Surreptitious Head Removers, drawn from Civilization's reserve of law-abiding psychopaths* to be people who are emotionally well-suited to come in, possibly watch an innocent person die without helping them, immediately after remove their head in a way that doesn't create any additional mess for the murderer to clean up, not get drawn into any conversations with the murderer, and get out without anybody noticing them.
This does mean that Civilization's rare murder cases will often involve a fairly lengthy court case to prove that somebody found with their head missing was in fact murdered, but this is the price of otherwise optimal policy.
(*) Taldane of course does not have a precise term corresponding to Baseline's 'law-abiding psychopath', which is distinct by syllables from Baseline 'criminal psychopath' to emphasize how much these are importantly different kinds of people. Keltham says 'Lawful not-emotionally-caring people'.
Carissa Sevar: The thing that immediately comes to mind is that Civilization is obviously lying and obviously if you call in the Surreptitious Head Removers they arrest you.
Five days ago she would've been sure of it. Now - she's not sure. Maybe in dath ilan - maybe people really do have that much of the Law in them -
lintamande: "....how do you know they don't just lie to you about what happens if you call," says Yaisa.
Keltham: What, and not show up to take the person's head? Why would they do that?
lintamande: " - no, and arrest you for planning a murder."
Keltham: If anybody found out that had happened, Governance would be overthrown roughly thirty seconds later.
lintamande: " - because if the government isn't Lawful you - expect that everyone else - sorry, I'm confused -"
Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels like she's supposed to be confused but isn't. "They train everyone to overthrow the government if it ever does anything less than perfectly Lawful. And normally that would result in a population that rebels constantly and ends up like Galt but - but that's because Golarion can't make governments lawful like that, and dath ilan can, and their government knows those are the rules so they're always Lawful. Right?"
Keltham: "They're obviously not perfectly Lawful but people with the power to plausibly successfully remove Governance will hold Governance to some standard they think is reasonable. In dath ilan, everyone over thirteen or who passes a test earlier shares that power while the meta-level structure holds; and Governance being able to run a service like the Surreptitious Head Removers, which protects people from the equivalent of Abaddon, in an approximately Lawful fashion without gross violations endangering the dead of being lost, is one standard to which we hold them. You, I assume, as wizards with some combat potential, would at some point start to try to hold your Governance to account, say if they developed soul-destroying magical weapons and started permanently slaughtering everybody starting with Asmodeus's clerics, like if you thought they were doing badly even for Golarion."
lintamande: Frozen silence.
Carissa Sevar: " - yes, but describing under what conditions you'd overthrow the government makes cooperating to overthrow the government easier so it's - not illegal," because I say so right this minute, "but looked at like ...asking your friends under what conditions they'd agree to help you poison your wife and make it look like an accident? We have - a lot of overthrown governments - so peoples' expectations are different than they'd be somewhere where it's just a hypothetical. Also - it wouldn't be not-allowed, by Golarion rules, for someone to note down who said "yeah absolutely I'd overthrow the government if I thought they were any worse than I think they are now" and not put them in charge of any amassing an independent power base."
Keltham: "Why wouldn't you ask your friends under what conditions they'd agree to help you poison your wife and make it look like - oh, because your friends might think you were actually planning that as opposed to running thought experiments on them?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, correct, that is why." KELTHAM
Her thought transcript is going to be nothing but KELTHAM and thoughts cut off before they become heresies and thoughts not cut off fast enough -
Ione Sala: "I don't think you actually realize how bad it can get when governments are overthrown not by carefully executed pacts planned with the Church of Asmodeus," Ione says, because it's going to look weird if just Sevar is holding up this whole conversation and the Asmodeans are all too terrified to think through what they'd be saying in alter-Cheliax. "People are careful talking about it the same way you maybe wouldn't want to go around suggesting that Surreptitious Head Removers arrest people who call them."
"And I think we were also supposed to learn something about probability at some point."
Keltham: "I have additional questions myself about what kind of Horrible Golarion Equilibrium is causing people to, I'm guessing, systematically vastly overestimate how much of a better outcome they can get by overthrowing their current governments, and how the solution to this is, apparently, nobody ever talking about those hypotheticals. But, yes, we were supposed to do probability."
"I'm actually kind of flailing here in the back of my mind, because I'm realizing that when dath ilani kids play the murder mystery game, there's known objective numbers for things like how many professional chemists versus non-chemists have particular poison ingredients in their possession, so when the kids guess that, you can tell them afterwards how well they objectively did at estimating statistics like that. And you can't possibly guess those statistics for dath ilan, and I won't know the correct answers relative to any statistics you guess about Golarion..."
Keltham: "Okay, you know, simpler Golarion murder mystery. You'll just make up the key numbers, and we won't have any idea afterwards who was right. If two of you disagree, oh well."
"Meritxell is found dead in her bedroom tomorrow. And for some reason, Governance wants to know who did it immediately, instead of waiting to raise her. Also she didn't make afterlife arrangements so they can't just call her in Hell immediately. Wow murder mysteries around here must be a lot less interesting a lot of the time."
"Anyways, the two suspects are Keltham and Carissa, the only two people who had Security clearances that could have enabled them to access Meritxell's bedroom during the time in question."
"Meritxell, obviously, was murdered by a lantern archon. Keltham is known to have Summon Monster III among his accessible cleric spells; when it comes to Carissa, we'd have to ask how likely a recently-fourth-circle wizard was to have that exact spell in her spellbook... uh, unless there's obvious other ways to cast it, like, from a scroll, but this was obviously a spellbook lantern archon rather than a scroll lantern archon and also nobody's allowed to just look in her spellbook. Bear with me here, I haven't constructed Golarion murder mysteries before."
"Neither Keltham nor Carissa have any known motive to slay Meritxell. However, Carissa was observed by Ione, assumed honest for these purposes, to have gotten into some sort of angry-looking argument with Meritxell the previous day, though Ione wasn't able to overhear the details."
"What can we say about who likely did it, and how would we say that?"
lintamande: "...we're assuming here you can both beat a Truth Spell somehow and are denying it?"
Keltham: "Yes. Yes we are assuming that."
lintamande: "And the Forbiddance wasn't a thing which is why lantern archons are summonable -"
"I think it was Keltham," says Tonia.
Ione Sala: "I mean, realistically, Sevar, but sure, I'll ask. Why Keltham?"
lintamande: "Because murdering Meritxell is a really weird thing to do, and Keltham does a lot of really weird things, while Carissa doesn't do really weird things."
Carissa Sevar: "I think it's Keltham because having a summoned outsider kill someone is the kind of thing you do if you have an instinctive aversion to killing them face to face yourself. which Keltham probably does because he's from dath ilan and which I don't because demons can wear human faces if they care to."
Keltham: (Keltham doesn't particularly notice that it's Carissa, the other suspect, arguing that Keltham did it; this is obviously meta-Carissa not suspect-Carissa talking.)
"Everyone's normal from their own perspective, and in Civilization, I do rather get the impression, killing people is considered much less normal than it is in Golarion."
"On the other hand, yes, my thought processes are relatively alien to you, so if a weird thing happens, you might assume I was the one more likely to do it."
"And when it comes to murders, if you can avoid killing somebody face-to-face who, you know, is getting resurrected a day later, you'd probably do it that way whether you were Keltham or Carissa, so you're less likely to get caught."
"Let's say for purposes of thought experiment that all those considerations exactly cancel out. In fact, if we didn't know anything about the argument Ione saw, or know that the murderer could summon a lantern archon, and we just knew that Meritxell was killed by somebody not face-to-face, we would've thought that Keltham and Carissa were exactly equally likely to be the murderer."
"Where do we go from there?"
lintamande: "....try to get them to confess," says Gregoria after a pause to consider whether they do this in Taldor.
Keltham: "Surprisingly, whichever of Keltham and Carissa is the murderer does not seem to find it to be the optimal course of action given their own self-interests to politely tell you that they did it."
Carissa Sevar: "I think the criminal justice process in dath ilan must be really different."
Keltham: "On the one hand, yes, on the other hand, I would've if anything guessed it would be different in the opposite direction. Is this an Intelligence 10 thing where actually lots of murderers will just say 'Yes' if the police ask them whether they committed the murder?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'm not trained in interrogations but at least in the popular understanding, you tie them to a chair and shake them around a little and tell them you've already got it figured out but it'll go easier for them if they admit it than if they keep denying it, and ask them questions from slightly different angles, and point out contradictions in what they said, and maybe hit them, and they have a hard time thinking about their long term self-interest."