Carissa Sevar: " - you know, even if you had a military you do everything differently enough maybe the intuition wouldn't transfer. So, at the Worldwound, the first thing you do with new recruits is seventy-hour weeks, of physical exercises and training and digging ditches and stuff, because the first thing you need to learn to serve in a military is how to do the thing that's been assigned to you, alongside other people you can similarly rely on to do the thing assigned to them. It's not about Good or Evil; the paladins have basically the same thing. Maybe in dath ilan you teach everyone enough Law, explicitly, that they have that expectation of common doing-the-job without having gone through a really long hard time of doing-the-job, but we don't, so that's how we build it.
And obviously in some situations you want your soldiers to exercise initiative and argue with their orders and point out problems they observe, but - 'that sounds hard' isn't generally a situation where you do? As long as you're sourcing your girls from ones who're cleared to take the Worldwound oath - and I think you probably should be sourcing from that, it's the only bar we've got for - for being at all ready to start on this path - then you're sourcing from people in training to spend the next decade of their lives in a brutal fight in the fucking tundra against an infinite horde of demons, and no, they're not going to complain that they've got more tasks assigned than hours in the day. ....I have no idea what Ione's life plans are but I have a weird suspicion that while she's cleared for the Worldwound she actually just wants to do Nethys things which involve no boot camp at all. ...that's what it's called, boot camp, I don't know how that'd translate."
Keltham: "I think I can guess it but, Ione, your response."
Ione Sala: ...you're not helping me, Keltham.
But still, she can guess Civilization's answer, that Keltham wants to hear from Nethys.
"Digging ditches isn't the same as figuring out Law."
Keltham: "Yeah. Mental performance degrades as you work longer hours in a day, and some things rely on peak mental performance. There are, though they are rarer, four-hour industries that pay higher than the ten-hour ones, and the people in those industries don't try to do more than four hours of work per day because they'd start making mistakes."
"I've been stupid, here. Even if you want to work long hours for great profit - which, I mean, we're all young, and it's not like I've been keeping myself down to ten hours - I should still be trying to schedule the peak-dependent hardest mental work that takes a Fox's Cunning earlier in the day. I have been doing that with myself and learning wizard spells, which is more straightforward, during the evening, but I wasn't properly optimizing that for everyone else."
"And you still need any time to think about things on your own or just catch your breath."
Carissa Sevar: "Yep, I agree with that. If the long hours weren't a deliberate move for dath ilan reasons then the hours should be considerably shorter, and there should be unscheduled downtime. But as a psychology fact you're using to predict the world -- it's not going to break down Good/Evil, it's going to break down Law/Chaos, or at least that's what I'd predict, because the Lawful countries take kids like us and raise them to close the hole in the planet. Which is the wrong set of habits for the situation we're now in. But the same set you'll find in Lastwall, when you go there, or Mendev."
Carissa is being completely truthful about this. Paladins are famously inclined to work themselves to death to the point where much of the labor of paladin orders is getting them to do that a little slower.
Keltham: "Ione, counterpoint?"
Ione Sala: "None particularly. She's got a lot more experience, and I'm more running around flailing at what look to me like fires than I am operating from any kind of theory or plan here."
Carissa Sevar: Ione has never left Cheliax and has assumed that this is something about Asmodeanism as opposed to something about Law-as-implemented-in-Golarion in a fit of heretical self-righteousness. Carissa shrugs. "I had a paladin tell me once that much of what paladin orders are for is that the kind of person who becomes a paladin will work themselves to death by 25 and you've got to make them eat and sleep and tend their injuries so they can at least die doing something important."
Keltham: "In dath ilan that would noticeably correlate with... um, being the sort of person who wants to release Rovagug, actually. Is that not the case here?"
Carissa Sevar: " - huh! Well, I haven't met anyone who wants to free Rovagug, but paladins definitely don't. They'd say, uh, that when you try to cause great harms to people for the greater good of people, then you end up just causing the harms and not getting the greater good, or that the world will be worth fighting for as long as there exist any innocents in it, or that murder is wrong, or just that that's not what Iomedae says they should do, depending which specific paladins you talked to." She is again not lying, though paladins generally don't talk to the Asmodeans directly; you can get it secondhand, or by joining a conversation out of uniform and not specifying where you're from.
Keltham: "...I guess there's an obvious thought here that's - in dath ilan, you need a particular kind of mentally broken Good to think there's anything wrong with the world that requires 16-hour workdays from you? And in Golarion the world just is in that much in trouble, so the Good people who believe it is aren't systematically broken as they'd be in dath ilan? Still, not a conclusion to jump to, I should think about it later."
"Regardless of Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, Asmodeus, Nethys, militaries, paladins, researchers, and Worldwound oaths -"
"One observes that Ione thought in a sufficiently different way from everyone else to be the first person to point out to me when I was making a particular kind of mistake, twice in a row."
"This is what Civilization would call" cognitive diversity "diversity of thought, and is much of the point of having more than one kind of person working on a project."
"Though I'm speaking very blindly myself, the very generic caution that jumps into my own mind is that it can be a mistake to try to attribute something like that to very particular attributes of Nethys, Asmodeus, Neutrality, Lawful Evil. Sometimes what happens is that - Ione had one number for her threshold about pointing out a problem, and everybody else here had the same different number. Even if the numbers had been generated at random, that might still happen, so it can be a mistake to explain it too much by pointing to specifics. Ione is an 'outlier' in a certain dimension, more different from the rest of you than you are different from each other, in that dimension. To the extent everyone with Asmodeus or with Nethys mostly thinks about something the same way, somewhere the Nethys-Asmodeus axis matters, it's not a contest among twelve people to see who comes in first, it's a contest of whether Ione comes in first or somebody else does, if you see what I'm saying."
"I mention all this because it is another thing that seems like it might be different for Worldwound militaries and research projects."
Carissa Sevar: It's a good opening for - "I've actually been thinking we should ask the site manager for more people, now that we know more. Notable mathematicians, more senior wizards, people who might have - additional diversity of thought, from several angles. And yeah, maybe we're overinterpreting, but it definitely seems like there's got to be some things we're missing because all of them just finished wizard school and I've spent my entire adult life in the tundra."
Keltham: "Civilization has an awful lot of ideas and best practices about starting up efforts like this one, all of them attuned to a very different world. If I took their conventional wisdom straight, the part of this project that masters the way of Law should be trying to obtain an even younger INT 19, and 18s with high Wisdom - to be clear, I won't try to date anyone a year younger than myself, for other best-practice reasons. On conventional wisdom, you might have an old knowledgeable ex-mathematician sit in, but they'd have to be careful about who they talked to besides me, and you'd be pleasantly surprised if they started wielding Law themselves."
"The applied side of the project would conventionally be the part where you bring in metallurgists while you work on metallurgy, or more senior wizards if you work on magic, or have extremely well-read people on staff who act as a kind of living library - that's probably even more important, when you can't search inside the texts of the books you actually have."
"In both cases, it is a proverb that no quantity of weird people can compensate for a corporate culture that doesn't know to use weirdness effectively."
"Carissa, Ione, Asmodia, Meritxell, I probably want to talk with all of you about that later today, if you can go onward a bit further without getting quite as much rest as everybody else."
Carissa Sevar: I won't try to date anyone a year younger than myself, for other best practice reasons.
How do you corrupt someone like that?
Carissa Sevar: "That makes sense. I think. No immediate questions about the bits that might not make sense, at least."
lintamande: "I think we should get a day of the week without lessons," Gregoria says boldly. "Some schools give Oathday off and you can sleep in and catch up on homework and things."
Keltham: "Thank you, Gregoria. Positive reinforcement for somebody other than Ione speaking out."
"In general, yes, obviously. In respect to tomorrow, say, I'd mostly been assuming that we managed to get some time off in the wake of the Nidal attack... well, no, I'd gotten some time off myself, and didn't think about checking on whether anyone else had. Did you?"
lintamande: "Yes, we had two mostly quiet days aside from soul arrangements."
Carissa Sevar: "Not an emergency but I didn't experience the aftermath of the Nidal attack as time off."
Keltham: "Noted. I'll chalk it up as a reason to check faster whether I can be romantic with more than one person at a time, now that I can be romantic with anyone at all. Even if the answer is 'no' you'll at least get some time off while I check."
"I apologize for having not previously set sensible schedules, and the solution to this, I do realize, is probably not to immediately call an all-hands meeting about it. My social reflexes assume people will spontaneously complain at me when I do things like this; I will try to recalibrate those reflexes toward asking people explicitly; this recalibration will be slow and imperfect. While anybody can complain at me while I'm learning, there should also be a single person who is commonly-known to be the one responsible for doing so. Ione, are you up for it?"
Ione Sala: "Let me think a moment about whether I can handle that responsibility..."
Orders, Sevar?
Carissa Sevar: Yep, plays to your strengths. This is only a bit sarcastic and she expects the sarcasm won't make it through the Security-relay.
Ione Sala: "All right, I'm up for it, I declare Sevar is the one person responsible for telling me if I'm screwing up."
Keltham: "You're learning."
"So I think what I should do right now is write down a problem set to think over for tomorrow under Fox's Cunning, later and after resting if you're mentally fatigued right now, so the staff's Fox's Cunnings for today don't go to waste due to my failure to frontload them. People who ended up in the Holding Cell are forbidden to discuss this problem set with each other but are free to talk to anyone not in the Holding Cell."
"And then I'll go off and give you all a break while I try to hang a first-circle wizard spell with just a Security helping me there."
"This problem set is a collection of Law-fragments of Probability, phrased in nonmathematical ways. The exercise is to see how far you can get, on how many, in translating them into proper Law."
1. Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you're equally good at explaining any outcome you can see, that's the same as not knowing anything.
2. Surprising claims require surprising evidence; unsurprising evidence suffices for unsurprising claims.
3. No empirical theory can prove itself except by risking its disproof.
4. To convince me of your theory, make a correct prediction that no other theory makes.
5. A precise true prediction is much more convincing than an imprecise true one.
6. It is impossible to coherently expect to convince yourself of anything.
7. You can't expect anyone else to convince you of something either, even if you think they're controlling everything you see.
Asmodia: #7 is obviously some kind of incredible key to the game between true dath ilani, and Asmodia can already guess that she's not going to get it without #6, and probably not get #6 without some of the others, and a Fox's Cunning, and maybe Owl's Wisdom too.
Ione Sala: Security, urgent advisory to Sevar, you just got put on a time limit, I'm guessing that #6 and #7 blow things up when Keltham explains them.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa would find it really annoying how convinced Ione is that everyone will stop being Asmodean as soon as they think about it except Maillol seems to agree and you can't be annoyed with people for being right.
Acknowledged, she sends instead, and copies down the assignment.
Keltham: Off Keltham goes to try again to hang a Silent Image! Given the way that other people can create nice-looking illusions without presumably anything like the work of visualizing every detail into their visual cortex, it probably works by creating something that will look right to the caster, and if that's true Keltham has tons of important visual memories that might be extractible that way.
lintamande: Security is happy to help with a visual of his scaffold and advice as appreciated.
When he does get it, on something like the eighth try, it's oddly exhausting, like he's just been engaged in vigorous exercise for an hour instead of sitting here trying to make magic flow properly. But it hangs, and there it is, for him to cast if he'd like to.
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds like I have the evening off, can we arrange the Nap Stack," Carissa asks Security.
"Yep, can do. You'll all have to sleep in the temple, it's the only concealed from Keltham space that's large enough with no walls that'd block the spell emanation."
"Fine. Great. Everyone, tonight you get six extra hours. Half of that's your personal time, don't spend it on homework because in alterCheliax you wouldn't have had it to spend on homework. The other half is for a briefing so everyone knows everything that's going on. ...there's a lot."
lintamande: "He suspects us," says Gregoria.
Carissa Sevar: "Yep. So we're going to have to learn really fast and be cleverer than him. And we don't have to win forever, just long enough that we have the Law-fragments we need to rederive the rest, and the metallurgy and heredity-theory to make Cheliax rich and make the project look worthwhile while we set about the harder work of reinventing what we haven't got." She sounds substantially more confident than she feels. "Dis thinks we're on the right track."
lintamande: No one even makes a face at Carissa casually making claims about what Dis thinks, at this point.
Asmodia: "I'm still trying to grasp this at all, but I think we need to - be keeping track of the way everything must look to Keltham inside the world where everything is a Conspiracy, we need a list of things like Sevar going to the bathroom for a while right after Keltham mentioned the Conspiracy and that Yaisa and I were told to distract him. And Ione asking about the birds, where Keltham would then suspect the world is maybe much larger, and then I think maybe that exact part is actually a victory for us because - we have to make sure that the list never starts making too much sense to him? But we have to know what the list looks like because it's how Keltham is seeing things."
Carissa Sevar: "The fact that some girls enjoy pain during sex is on the list, for him, he thinks that doesn't make any sense from a heredity perspective but makes perfect sense if a conspiracy were trying to fool him."
lintamande: "....why doesn't it make any sense from a heredity perspective," says Tonia, "probably girls who bear up all right as slaves have more kids than those who don't."
Carissa Sevar: "I did actually say that to him and yet."
Asmodia: "Can we lean on that, put his attention there, send him mixed signals so that when that finally gets the answer we want, he won't have been paying attention to other things..."
"Actually I'm not sure it's the right move. I suspect Keltham's problem #7 is a key to the game between dath ilani, we're controlling what he sees and somehow that - won't be able to affect him, I think, because of whatever Law-fragment is in #7? If we're avoiding lies then I shouldn't work with anyone from the Holding Cell on it. But I request Ione, Pilar, Peranza, Gregoria, and Tonia all with me, and trying to figure out #7 as soon as possible so we can plan using it, and I request more Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom while we work on it."
Carissa Sevar: "Granted. And I'll see about your headband, though it'll probably require talking with the Grand High Priestess.
The Grand High Priestess - thinks there's a thing Keltham would understand at once, but which is dangerous to put to him, about what it is like for Asmodeus, to try to direct us mortals, about what kinds of actions that we take are easy for him to steer and which are hard. If you can figure out what she means by that she'll get you your headband, the only reason she doesn't give more people headbands I think is that there's something about mortals where being smarter doesn't reliably make us more useful and it's a Law-fragment, it's got to be."
Asmodia: "I request additional information on all of that. Also, I don't know prices for Wisdom headbands, if Wisdom is cheaper then maybe I can get by with a +4 Wisdom headband and a lot of Fox's Cunnings."
Ione Sala: Message: Sevar, do you actually want anyone besides myself and Pilar working with Asmodia on this? The others may explode. I'd worry about Asmodia exploding but she's obviously one of the Different Girls now.
Carissa Sevar: I'm going to talk to everyone about Hell tonight and then I'll have a better sense who is an explosion risk.
lintamande: "If we're allowed to know things now, why are you in charge," says Meritxell.
Carissa Sevar: "When I went to sell my soul, my devil conveyed that it was the will of Asmodeus, as translated down through Hell, that I not sell my soul this day, but be permitted to participate in the project and other matters as if I had, and that if I served well in this world I'd be raised high in it, and be among the most treasured possessions of Asmodeus in the next.
I tried again later to sell my soul for three Wishes and ten pounds of spellsilver and permanent Arcane Sight and Tongues and the devil said he'd have to ask his superiors, and then came back and said not yet, but was I willing to commit to selling at that price later.
So I don't know exactly what's up but I have a lot of license with Hell right now, and probably will right up until I fail. And I'm likelier to fail if I don't have all of you guys on board, so I will be doing my best to offer appropriately massive bribes for doing a good job here, which is one of the things we're going to talk about tonight. - also the outfits are because the devil also said I should be indulged as if I was the heiress to a county, though Abrogail says I can't actually have a county unless I succeed.
....we'll go over this all in more detail tonight."
lintamande: Meritxell is speechless.
Asmodia: She doesn't ask if Sevar knows the price on her own lost soul, in the markets of Dis.
Because Asmodia already knows. She can guess by now that a dath ilani would figure that out immediately, and therefore she knows the answer even though she hasn't finished thinking through why. That's why her first owner is dead. You can't just kill a contract devil and take their souls, obviously, they go by testaments. But with Asmodia's soul price running up past the Wish level - something happened to him, somebody challenged him over it, who knows what happens when prices get that high.
How strange.
How strange that she can still be this angry.
She's not planning to let them actually have and keep and use her soul. In reality, it's worthless, and somebody will pay a vast sum for her soul and gain nothing, you'd think that should be vengeance enough.
And yet, somehow, Asmodia is still seethingly angry on a level where keeping her face passive is taking everything she has.
Iarwain: "...do you know if our own souls are being traded around for prices like that now," Peranza says. She feels numb.
Carissa Sevar: "Not prices that high; there's no direct divine intervention over you all. But I suspect a lot more than you were paid, yes. If I were you I'd be mad about it; it's not how Keltham would've done it, he'd have split the gains from trade. But it's also - still very possible to leverage for your own benefit, because -
- do you think you'd be worth any more to Hell than an ordinary soul after being put through the ordinary course of Hell?"
Iarwain: "I don't know - very much about Hell, at all," Peranza says. "I mean, I'll get there when I get there."
Asmodia: Message to Sevar. Asmodia doesn't try to keep the seething hatred out of her whisper, if it's the sort of thing you can hear in a whisper.
I suggest that new members of the project should be informed of this, before they sell their souls, and in exchange for tipping them off, we should get half of the spellsilver they get, and that spellsilver should be distributed among project members who have already sold their souls.
Carissa Sevar: Acknowledged. I can't make Hell fair but I can and will make you rich, Asmodia.
"I think that Hell wants us badly, but wants us precisely for qualities that it doesn't know how to inculcate, probably because of some god-agreements that restrict what greater devils can tell lesser ones. Therefore, as long as we are succeeding we have affordance and leverage to figure out how the formation of evil dath ilanis ought to work in Hell. This is one of the things we're going to discuss tonight. You've spent your whole lives not allowed to think very hard about Hell, and now we find ourselves practically assigned to change it. You may think about that, this afternoon and evening, but if you notice yourself running into a blind wall of panic then wait for tonight, where I have some ideas for how we can approach this."
lintamande: "Why did Asmodeus pick you to not sell your soul," says Meritxell stubbornly.
Carissa Sevar: "No one knows that or has any way to find out! I'm hoping it's because He noticed that I'm the right amount of a heretic to stay loyal to Him while I figure out how to build space in it for dath ilanis and all the things they need and want."
Asmodia: They won't give you a fucking thing, Sevar, because you're not willing to go to Abaddon rather than let Hell fuck you over.
...she hadn't meant that as a message for Sevar. It is of course up to Security whether they will choose to pass it on anyways.
Ione Sala: "On a totally separate topic, if Keltham is looking to try romances with people who aren't Sevar, does Asmodia have possession, or Pilar, because if not I should do it and I imagine that Sevar wants to talk with me before then."
Carissa Sevar: "Not yet on Pilar, we're holding her out until he manages to be slightly less into consent. Asmodia, do you want to pursue Keltham?"
Asmodia: "He hasn't indicated yet that he wants to pursue me and said he needed time to think it over."
Should she be briefing the others present about any other aspects of things?
lintamande: "I want Keltham and am not a heretic," Meritxell says with a glare at Ione.
Carissa Sevar: "And I appreciate that about you, and it's possible that the outcome of the conversation with Ione is that I don't trust her enough, or that I think it'd be salutory for Keltham's next romantic interaction to be with someone who isn't faking anything. But if in alterCheliax Ione'd totally go after him then by default we do that. We have to adhere really closely to what we'd do in alterCheliax, if we're going to stand a chance."
Ione Sala: "Does Keltham actually want girls who don't have incredibly interesting backgrounds, I mean, I assume that's why he asked the question?"
Iarwain: "I wasn't planning to not seduce Keltham ever at all," says Peranza.
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham asked that question to verify his tropes theory, which will be discussed at briefing tonight. He does want other girls, or at least he might."
Iarwain: "Is there any reason that we shouldn't just have everyone who's currently interested competing to seduce him at dinner tonight," says Paxti, who feels that she was originally promised this scenario when she 'agreed' to work on Project Lawful.
Carissa Sevar: "Take a step back and think very carefully if that is what would happen in alter Cheliax, and if it is, then yes, you may."
lintamande: "I'm pretty sure that's exactly what would happen in alter Cheliax," says Meritxell.
Asmodia: "I'm not. We were originally recruited to do that for reasons having to do with the real Cheliax. We have to figure this out step by step, what happened in the alter-Cheliax instead, when they recruited us here, what instructions we got in alter-Cheliax, and then we need to write it down so everybody is living in the same alter-Cheliax about it, and we have to put up a huge wall somewhere with all of this written down, Keltham asked me earlier what kind of screening questions we'd gotten before coming here and I had to make something up and that needs to be on there - I needed to make up an answer quickly, and I bet Security didn't copy everyone else as soon as I said it, which means that Keltham could have come up to Paxti and asked her to answer immediately what the screening questions were like and he could have caught us right there before Security had time to fill her in. Don't you get it, we're playing this game against a real dath ilani! The only reason we're not already out is that Keltham isn't oriented enough to start playing for real."
Carissa Sevar: "- ask the Grand High Priestess now about Asmodia's headband," says Carissa. "and yes, that's the answer I was about to give. AlterCheliax has to be complete, it has to have every detail, for the same reasons it had to be based on Taldor in the first place. Figure out your experience of every day up to this point and then figure out if you'd flirt with Keltham."
Ione Sala: "So, thinking back, I now suspect I significantly fucked up the original things I said to Keltham, back when I was trying to make sure Lord Nethys didn't destroy my soul for not even trying to carry out His mission. I need to figure out what alterIone was thinking in alterCheliax when she said everything she did, and what that implies about whether alterIone wants to make another try at Keltham and when. A Security transcript of that conversation might be helpful."
"Is Asmodia in charge of this now?"
Carissa Sevar: "You know what, for the time being, yes."
Asmodia: "I request transcripts of literally everything that's been said to Keltham or by him that I wasn't there for. I don't know if I'll be able to finish that before my Ring of Sustenance kicks in, but with your permission I plan on not taking any downtime today or tonight and telling Keltham I didn't feel like I needed downtime today if he asks... no, wait, would that be too much less likely in Ordinary... well, I'll figure it out."
"Pending headband, I'm going to try to work out answers unenhanced and then get enhanced at the end to review and correct everything. The Owl's Wisdom is important for this, not just the Fox's Cunning, I don't know why yet but it is. So the number of those available to me is the number of times per day I can figure out significant parts of the game or make complicated decisions in it."
"Unless otherwise instructed, I think my current priority is figuring out alterCheliax's seduction mission parameters before dinner. Sevar, you know what alterCheliax is supposed to be, and why, to make it acceptable to Keltham, that's not a part of this I understand, so I think you can't just go off and leave me to it. After that we can figure out what alterIone was thinking, I'm not looking forwards to that but accept it as my job. Then if alterIone is still making a run on Keltham Ione can talk to Sevar about that."
Message: Sevar, if we're also trying to not have Keltham end up believing in the patterns, I can't do any part of my job without your supervision until I know everything you do about them.
Carissa Sevar: "I'll be here with you advising. The place we want alterCheliax to be is the best place in Golarion for Keltham to start developing Civilization, a place that's not very far along the road to Law but is trying and has already improved on a decade ago when we were Taldor. And also Keltham's specifically paranoid of the girls being ordered into his bed so Cheliax has made particular strides in not doing that, insofar as it's compatible with things people have already said."
Message: I'll brief you on tropes when we're alone.
Keltham: Keltham is reasonably ecstatic about being a proper self-powered spellcaster instead of a divine surrogate spellcaster!
Keltham did not, of course, cast his Silent Image right away. Instead he deliberately arrives slightly late to dinner, hoping everyone will be there already and he won't have to await any stragglers. He doesn't want to delay between arriving and showing this off, nay, not even for food, this is going to be too awesome if it works.
Is everybody here in the dining hall yet? Are they, are they?
Carissa Sevar: Yep! They have worked out what flirting will occur in alterCheliax and are resolving informal bets on what'll be for dinner (it's fish).
Keltham: Betting is an encouraging sign too! Not literally all virtue begins from betting on things but yes quite a lot, as the proverb goes!
"Guess who's not just a laundry wizard anymore! Everyone get within a 20-foot radius of me, turn off all the lights if that helps, I'm going to show you a Silent Image of dath ilan for as long as I can maintain concentration. Unless of course this spell just completely fizzles, it's my first time."
Carissa Sevar: Why does she feel terrified.
They gather around.
Keltham: Behold WIZARDRY.
Keltham isn't sure if he'll be able to do things like animation, or changing between entirely different images while he holds concentration.
So start out strong! How about if they're surrounded by full blackness, he won't try for stars yet, just the silent image of black walls around them to screen out light, and above them within the resulting darkness is -
dath ilan: Dath ilan! Nighttime, so soft traceries on the continents are glowing red, with a few spots of whiter light for cities that never sleep and have been allocated space far away from all telescopes!
lintamande: Oooohs and aaaaahs.
Carissa Sevar: What Golarion will be, if they succeed. If she succeeds, because they'll fail if she does.
Keltham: Can he possibly add the distant stars too, via imagining that the edges of his illusion are walls emitting appropriately incoming photons, as should look right to him from inside? That's simpler than a looming skyscraper will be, he doesn't need to worry about parallax.
lintamande: Yep!!
Carissa Sevar: It feels a little closer to how the gods see Golarion. Part of something much, much vaster.
Keltham: He's not sure he can get the parallax right on distant skyscrapers, just yet. He can try that after, if he can maintain concentration.
So now that the starfield apparently works, let's start zooming out.
dath ilan: Not all dath ilani, but more than half, know how to find their way back to dath ilan, if they get lost somewhere inside their galaxy with an extremely fast FTL spaceship, and they know how to find their way back to the Local Galaxy if they're stranded on a larger scale than that. It's just a cool thing to know how to do.
Keltham has seen enough Zoomout Videos for his illusion of it to be realistic, if the illusion makes it look realistic to him. He'll run it at a speed where it takes him about two minutes to get to the Local Visible Volume.
lintamande: "How do they know," Meritxell whispers, very very quietly, half to herself.
Carissa Sevar: Well obviously as soon as you could you'd send your civilization off into the stars, because you could, because there could be Civilization there too -
Otolmens: Otolmens does not recognize ANY of that and while PARTS of it have reasonable and consistent implied mechanics parts of it do NOT and how would a bunch of mortals get a view of things on THAT scale if they can't CATCH and BACK-INFER FROM incoming photons intercepted well above the atmosphere like She can?
Also that is extremely LARGE for a universe. It keeps ON zooming out. Otolmens is glad SHE is not the one who has to MAINTAIN all that.
...why is so much of it MISSING? That's not GOOD.
Wait. Is that supposed to be the COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND. The cosmic microwave background does NOT look like that. A universe would need to grow VERY ODDLY for a cosmic microwave background to end up looking like THAT.
This person comes from a VERY BROKEN UNIVERSE and its version of Otolmens is either DEAD or VERY SAD and none of this is making Otolmens any LESS WORRIED.
Iarwain: (Good enough to look realistic to Keltham is, perhaps, not quite realitistic.)
Keltham: "Those slices are missing," Keltham says once the image stops at the end, the famous hourglass shape of what's visible, good he's able to maintain concentration while talking, "because they're obscured by the 'galaxy' around dath ilan. Where a 'galaxy' is a spiral structure of stars. The 'galaxy' that dath ilan is inside blocks our view out. We can't see through our 'galaxy' to the side directions, only out of the top and bottom, if we're trying to see something very very far away."
"So this is all of the universe that we can see using 'telescopes' in 'orbit', high enough up to be far far out of the atmosphere that makes distant stars hard to see from the ground."
lintamande: "Are we one of those stars," Meritxell says, just as quietly, not sure at all if Keltham was answering her earlier or just talking.
Keltham: "Golarion's sun? Probably not. I'll explain later, don't want to lose concentration."
Keltham starts the zoom-in, now, going faster than on the zoom-out.
dath ilan: As the view goes past the Fourth Planet, Keltham says, "This is the furthest that people from Civilization have ever traveled and survived." Certain others will be picked up eventually; the odds on saving their True Lives are not ninety-seven percent, but they're over fifty percent, and in a planet of a billion people, somebody will think that's an acceptable risk.
The return journey past the Moon shows, in just a tiny glimpse, a lit section in darkness. "The Moon colony."
When the view reaches dath ilan, it shows the sun-side, and the view dives in, as the video usually does, to the City of Default.
You can see this particular city starting well above the atmosphere, though you wouldn't see much detail yet from that height even if this illusion was finer than a Silent Image can be.
Carissa Sevar: She doesn't know what Dis would look like from the air. Probably it'd be cool. Probably it wouldn't be that cool.
dath ilan: They're now closer to the ground, going slower. Things don't look far away, just small, and there's no sense of scale. There's an island of metal blocks in the center of the image, and then beyond that some kind of grid laid on the ground, but you can't see the fine details of what's inside the grid.
The image is zooming in on the metal blocks in the center.
Maybe those tiny reflective rectangles now visible on the huge metal blocks are glass windows? If that's true, these metal buildings are something like a hundred stories tall.
lintamande: Well, this makes sense, because wizards build tall towers, and Nefreti Clepati specifically made a point of building hers slightly taller than the Black Dome, never mind how impossible that was, and probably a richer Civilization would be full of individual people having a tower-measuring contest, and the results would be very tall.
dath ilan: The image seems to be favoring one particular huge metal building.
It goes to one of the windows.
They're inside somebody's house.
In what seems like a very nice, very large, elegantly decorated office. It's lit by multiple brilliant sconces to something approaching the light of a sunny day.
Within, what's probably meant to be Keltham, seen from behind, is sitting in a chair - it's probably a chair? - and doing something weird with his fingers to something that isn't going to make much more sense if you've never seen a chording keyboard-mouse before.
In front of him is a... flat thingy?
Then the flat thingy shows dath ilan, seen from space, and starts zooming out.
"'Computer.' Connected to all the rest of Civilization, talk to somebody on the other side of the world, read most books in existence."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels like she is being seduced, but seduced to what? This is already what's she's trying to build. And betraying Cheliax wouldn't build it, just prove to Hell that it is not compatible with Asmodeus's ultimate victory.
dath ilan: The view shifts away from Keltham in his chair, goes through a doorway, down a hallway with other open doorways. They get a glimpse of Keltham's library, his random treasures room, his bathroom larger than many townsfolk's entire homes, complete with vast bathtub, his bedroom - that's probably a bed? - one rather incomprehensible and slightly disturbing glimpse of a dath ilani cuddleroom - a room clearly meant for receiving guests.
"My house module. It's relatively large for somebody my age, by dath ilani standards, but I spent less money on my hobbies than most people. It took sixty-seven days per year out of my labor to rent the module, plus twenty-one days per year for the location in Default. I considered it worth it to not have to figure out how to fit all my stuff and activities into anywhere smaller -"
Keltham loses it.
Just the image, to be clear. He's not breaking down in tears. His voice only slightly cracked there.
Carissa Sevar: "How long do you think it'll take from here."
Keltham: "Hundred years, two hundred? Or maybe fifty, if you go faster once you get going, because of all the things you can do with magic on top of everything we could do without it."
Ione Sala: Ione doesn't have any approved dialogue that matches what she's feeling right now, so she just quietly goes over to where Keltham is standing and sits down next to his feet. She'll get approval on some of her changed plans later.
No, there's one thing that alterIone absolutely says. If she doesn't say it, that's suspicious.
"When you leave Golarion, I want to go with you."
Keltham: "Noted."
"We can talk about that later, sometime."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa suppresses a flicker of annoyance with Ione, notices she's been doing that a lot lately, contemplates how much of that annoyance is jealousy, and decides to figure this out later, maybe with Owl's Wisdom up.
"Let's do it in forty," she says.
lintamande: "While taking Oathdays off at least once a month," says Gregoria, since apparently there's a deficit of people who'll say that sort of thing.
Keltham: "It's not like digging ditches. It doesn't necessarily go faster as you work longer hours or take fewer days off, any more than you can save time in the long run by not eating." (Spoken by someone who's had all info about Rings of Sustenance carefully removed from his environment.)
"Speaking of which, I should get some food," and if they can tell he's also taking a moment to recover, good on their inferential capacities.
Carissa Sevar: They get food themselves, and give him a minute.
Once he looks slightly recovered Carissa Messages him.
The girls took what you said earlier to mean they should all attempt to seduce you now. So if you don't like that, you should say so in words before they get to it. And if you do like it, well, good luck.
Keltham: Thank you for the warning, Keltham mouths back.
It now seems like much less of a panic situation than when he first realized he was trapped with a horde of amorous women in the villa library.
Partially it's that he's not in like some totally other dimension, well, he still is, but not quite so recently; and partially it's that he now knows any of them at all; and that he understands better what he might owe in return (not something unspoken that he won't be able to repay); and that the thought of his having that much mating value is no longer so shocking and unconsidered; and maybe it's even that he feels somehow a little more comfortable in his own skin, now that he's ever hurt Carissa in bed.
He'll get his food, then, and sit down among the amorous horde of women bent on mating with him. Every man has to face them eventually. This is wisdom.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa will flash him an amused smile that she has absolutely no idea about the sincerity level of, and sit across the room where she can watch the mess in peace.
Keltham: Well go ahead and flirt with him, then. He awaits their lures.
Abrogail Thrune II: The Queen of Cheliax stands in a high tower of her palace, one that lets her gaze over the city of Egorian surrounding it; a new city, but a thriving one. The sun is setting but there will yet be people in the streets when it is gone, taverns and whorehouses open at night, open always. There are enough souls about the palace with Rings of Sustenance to promote Egorian to the ranks of cities that know no rest.
"I see it," says Abrogail Thrune, letting the exultation that she feels fill her voice unhindered by concealment, only moderately enhanced by Splendour. "I see Asmodeus's plan."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Nothing good has ever happened to me after hearing those words."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I guessed you would say that, Most High. Indeed, that is why I spoke so. Did I manage to hit on anyone's exact wording?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: Yes. "I assume you have some purpose in bidding me here, other than amusing yourself wasting the time of your senior partner's more valuable slaves."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I think I do see it, though. Asmodeus's plan. But I will not work around the edges of my current instructions in order to fulfill it better."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Oh, good," Aspexia says dryly. "What are you going to start doing differently, then. Tell me of it, and how very predictable it would be to our Lord."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I would devote additional resources to one of our current operations in a not especially creative fashion. Would that suit you?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I feel a spark of hope that it will do less harm."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Somebody in all Cheliax must try to have any notion of the course of greater events; that person is, of course, me. Asmodeus would not have forged an Infernal Crown so mighty if it never served Him for its wearer to think."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "The time for such cleverness is when you are about plots and projects that you originated yourself; or else perhaps when events are happening that our Lord could not have predicted, when His plans are clearly beginning to go astray."
"But tell the Most High of her Lord's brilliant plot, then, that you are brilliant enough to perceive yourself."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Plot? Hardly. It is a plan spanning thousands of years and perhaps implicit since the creation of the world."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Ah. One of those. Hell is the destruction of hope."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Consider, Aspexia. It is said in many places and many books that Abadar, god of wealth and trade, and Asmodeus, god of slavery and tyranny, are on friendly terms. Why? Because Asmodeus is a god of compacts? He does not promote compacts well-suited to trade, nor the increase of wealth; when we force a Chelish soul to sign with a devil, they are not thus enriched as Abadar sees it. Because Asmodeus is Prince of Law? Let Abadar be on much friendlier terms with Iomedae, then, whose Laws would seem more suited to her peasants accumulating gold."
"Consider. Asmodeus would have us build schools and roads, He has sent us resources out of Hell for it. Of course His slaves become more valuable thereby, more useful; but consider, is that usually Asmodeus's way with His slaves? We are resources to Him, yes; but the worshippers of other gods are equally resources to them, and yet among the never-mortal gods only Abadar also troubles Himself to see so much to their industry."
"Consider. Evil can force its people to work by whip, until in mortal lands they drop, or in Hell forever. A few elites of Good may strive, but the people of Good are lazy. Hell is more industrious than Heaven, and Axis can scarcely be bothered to spare a droplet of attention from their amusements. Then why has our Lord not already won?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Because there were balances of power set in the beginning of things. The game of gods is one that can hardly have any winner, perhaps a few losers at best; it is akin to a game where players all have heaps of stones and take turns removing one stone from some other player's heap. Should any player get ahead, the other players combine more against them. If from the beginning of things Asmodeus had seemed more set to win, more alliances would have been made against Him and more compromises forced."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Exactly. And one of those compromises is that the devils in Hell cannot be told what the outsiders of other Outer Planes are told by their own masters."
"It is a key compromise that partially negates the advantage of Hell's industriousness; and, if that compromise is itself compromised, in a world of shattered prophecy, Hell's road to victory then opens. Not only in Golarion, in all the realms Asmodeus contests, for devils are not limited to one realm as almost all mortals are."
"We didn't understand where His plan was going, before, because we had not seen Keltham, but seeing Keltham and hearing of his Civilization, it becomes clear. This is the common interest that Asmodeus has with Abadar, that in a world with enough schools and roads, there can be made devils who are not ignorant, who are instructed here in the Law that our Lord cannot tell them, working with industriousness and Lawful accord after death as in life, to transform petitioner after petitioner into higher devils. From Hell then shall pour out armies that no other realm can withstand."
"This is why our Lord slew Aroden, Aspexia. This is why it was worth it to Him to slay Aroden, when the cost was prophecy shattering; which, as you have observed to me, now advantages gods who were once-mortal in predicting the mortal realm. Asmodeus did not slay Aroden to save this one realm of Golarion from some little once-mortal's temporary dominion. Shattering prophecy in Golarion makes Hell's victory possible in all of the realms. For if prophecy still operated here, not only the gods of this realm but those of others might have combined their forces against Him, before it was too late."
"We are in the beginning of our Lord's endgame."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Or - even if all your other cleverness is not just dancing upon air - in the beginning of one more moderate victory that will mildly improve our Lord's position, after taking into account how other gods then react and league themselves more against Him, and yet not trouble themselves to cancel His new advantages perfectly."
"Among the many common failures of mortals thinking they can see our Lord's plans is that they tend to imagine plans much larger, and with more flattering roles for themselves, than our Lord essays to move His pawns for on almost any real occasion."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Perhaps, and yet also perhaps not. Consider the events around us; this is no ordinary occasion. Asmodeus is intervening over and over and over. Our Lord has finally moved against Zon-Kuthon, now sealed, and the other gods yielded to Him in the matter. Otolmens Herself makes bargains visibly to His favor. Asmodeus's triumph in Golarion is become predictable enough that Cayden Cailean has made common cause with Him, god of Good that Cayden Cailean may be in name, in exchange perhaps for more revels and fornication in the worlds of the new Lawful Evil, along with a little solicitousness towards children; turning openly against Iomedae along the way. Nethys is backing Project Lawful for the spread of knowledge, Irori for the perfecting of souls and Law. Abadar might prefer His cleric elsewhere, but He has not withdrawn His powers from Keltham."
"Hell's victory is at hand. We may even live to see it in Golarion."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I must have missed the clarifications from Hell notifying us of an alliance so momentous and so straightforward, when they troubled to instruct us regarding the children at all."