Keltham: Keltham heard an estimate on 100gp for a fourth-circle wizard's per-seven-days earning potential; from there to 500gp for fifth-circle wizards seems like quite a jump.
Ferrer Maillol: Why he jumps on that part... well, it's a true-in-Taldor fact so perfectly safe so far as Maillol knows.
"5th-circle is when you become able to Teleport, which is massively more in demand than most things someone can do at 4th-circle. Also, I'm guessing it was Sevar who told you the figure of 100gp/week for her own earnings; she's right, but most 4th-circle wizards wouldn't make that. Not every 5th-circle wizard is qualified to be Security either."
Keltham: Right then.
Does it happen to be true at all, that Cheliax has a concept of the standard cost of a high-potential young researcher exceptionally good at math?
Ferrer Maillol: Nope.
Keltham: Also right then. Keltham is thinking of retaining eight out of the current twelve job candidates past their first contracted week. He'll need to talk options for the remaining four compatible with Governance security considerations, and make sure those options are good enough.
Keltham is pretty sure that Asmodia, Meritxell, and Ione all now have expected value to Chelish Governance exceeding that of a 5th-circle Security wizard, but for purposes of aligning incentives, Keltham intends to offer them most of their real compensation in the form of small shares of future Project Lawful income, which is considered the very standard best practice of Civilization. His plan is 200gp/week for the three, plus a 10,000gp bonus for Ione in respect for her special, hazardous, possibly long-term damaging, and highly useful service in delivering advance warning on the Nidal assault and maybe actually timing that assault so Keltham would be safer. Carissa gets 300gp/week in respect of her status as being something like Keltham's de facto ops officer or second-in-command.
Pilar, Peranza, Tonia, and Gregoria aren't obviously going to end up irreplaceably valuable, but are still in the running for being less brilliant researchers, or maybe brilliant ones if the intelligence headbands ever come through and are any good. 100gp/week for each of them except Pilar. Pilar gets 150gp/week in token of her higher-than-obvious expected value and a future promotion if it turns out that Cayden Cailean has more in mind than snacks, and Pilar should also get 1000gp for taking a sword in place of Keltham, which would not obviously have been a terrible thing if it had happened, but key word 'obviously'.
Keltham realizes that no actual agreement has been reached on how Chelish funding of the Project will be compensated. Keltham will compose a suggested interim compact on what counts as Project revenue, pending some more difficult working-out of the basic question of how to measure the Project's benefit to Cheliax (including the counterfactual on Keltham having started elsewhere instead), and fire that back as a suggestion. But people do need their nonvolatile portion of their salaries in the meanwhile; possibly they wouldn't starve if unpaid, but it is considered a core good practice in Civilization that if you can't pay basic salaries it's time to shut down the company.
Keltham's current plan is to request 500gp/week nominal salary for now, but with the understanding that Keltham might come back and ask for an increase if it turns out that there are magic items he can't get on a Governance budget and that would substantially increase his own effectiveness. If it's a better look if Keltham gets 100gp/week instead, he's potentially open to that for now or to start, since he doesn't currently know how he'd actually spend the money on much.
No other project members have particularly expressed agreement with any of these offers, and the four core members, in Keltham's view, would have considerable leverage over him to demand higher nonvolatile incomes, though Keltham would in that case reduce their share of future Project income. Keltham is nonetheless interested in hearing if these budget quantities sound feasible.
Carissa Sevar: She wishes she weren't lying to him.
It's a stupid thing to wish; if he were actually just Evil this project would be going much better but much worse for Carissa in particular.
But it'd be nice, to be standing here in Maillol's room on the same side.
Also, that's a lot of money! She'll be able to make so many magic items with which to corrupt and ensnare Keltham which she can credibly claim is within the budget he negotiated for her.
Ferrer Maillol: Sevar, orders? It's within our actual budget capacity but maybe you want him less capable or the researchers hungrier or just to not have it look like he gets everything without negotiating.
Carissa Sevar: She thinks they should go ahead. The researchers now know that they were forced to sell their souls for much less than they're selling for in Dis; a lot of gold is the right start towards convincing them they're still coming out ahead. And Keltham's more sensitive to being cheated about money than to being cheated in other ways. Probably it should be a strain for alter Cheliax, though, so future requests can be denied.
She does not want Sala to have that much money to play with. Perhaps such a large sum can't be gotten all at once.
They can discuss the other girls later.
Ferrer Maillol: "I'll look into available options for the four leaving the Project, and get back to you shortly."
"10,000gp to Ione would be politically difficult to swing, for now. Yes, she saved us more than two Raise Deads, it's still politically difficult. Easier to give her a higher salary for the moment."
"For the rest, it'll burn some political capital and reduce our future room for maneuver, but I can make it happen. You okay with that?"
Keltham: "I'll ask Ione if she's okay with being at 400gp/week to reflect her special services, though with the understanding that she's still below Carissa on the organizational chart."
"I don't suppose that there'd possibly be any legible answer, if I asked for a quantitative estimate of how much political capital it burns, as a fraction of all we've got? Or how fast I can regenerate that political capital by teaching more useful things similar to those already taught? Or how much better it is if the salaries all go down by 25%?"
Ferrer Maillol: "Sorry. Best I can give you is that knocking 25% off all the salaries would probably not really help much."
"Not saying it's the wrong decision, I think it's the right decision if you want my opinion on it, just letting you know the costs. And that a similar recurring expense getting added next week, wouldn't be a good look absent something exciting to show along the way."
Keltham: "Well, let's do it then. And to return to a previous question, your own boss and the line of reporting from there?"
Ferrer Maillol: "In principle, my current boss is High Priestess Jacint Subirachs, who is not usually a manager and is more of a 7th-circle cleric with a peacetime specialty in... actually, you just ask her if you want to know what she usually does. Subirachs can be the 7th-circle firepower on the premises, but without her belonging to the military or any of the other factions that would love to absorb us even though they scarcely have any idea what we do; meaning that none of those factions were offended by another faction getting the prize when it was announced I would temporarily be reporting to her after the Nidal attack. Subirachs reports directly to the Grand High Priestess. She is not, in fact, managing anyone or anything besides me, except as directed in cases like her monitoring Sevar for the last few days."
"Project Lawful is in principle a Church-managed project because of the Asmodeus intervention, hence the ultimate report to the Grand High Priestess on paper. Its budget however is coming out of the Queen's side of things, and if the Queen gave me or Subirachs an order we'd obey. The Queen could in principle fund it from her privy purse but she'd rather not and I'd rather not ask. So your budget request for salaries is going to be submitted to a special projects office general enough that it could reasonably claim the credit - inside Governance internal politics, not with the Queen who knows better - for cheaper roads or hotter forges or several of the other things you've talked about, whose director knows me personally and who the Queen had a personal chat with and which will then be backed for a correspondingly higher budget within Governance."
"Anything relating to Security ignores all this and heads off into a bizarre tangle which, from your perspective, acts like a spun coin that is also insane. I do expect them to do a good job of not letting you get kidnapped."
"On the whole, this is a stunningly clear situation for a project like this one to end up in, and you should thank me for maneuvering to keep things so incredibly simple and straightforward. I hope we can keep it."
Keltham: "Thank you for your valuable work in keeping this situation so amazingly clear and straightforward. I was, in fact, able to understand all that, and that's better than I expected walking in."
Ferrer Maillol: "Low expectations are the key here. Keep 'em low and you'll stay happy."
Keltham: "Civilization has a similar proverb. It is however about accurate expectations. Our version of the proverb is objectively better and I'm not going to make like it's not."
Ferrer Maillol: Was that a threat? It doesn't seem like that should be a threat? If it's not a threat Maillol does not quite know what it is.
"Sorry for asking, but, I don't suppose we're done here? For now."
Keltham: "Done for now. I'll go back and talk to my researchers and send you a message when requested salaries finalize."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa leaves with him. She looks as disconcerted as alter-Carissa would be. "The Worldwound isn't run like that! There's a very clear command structure!"
Keltham: "I'm mostly guessing that reflects a decision to allocate more competent people to the Worldwound, thereby leaving fewer to run the rest of Cheliax, and not that people actually become more competent managers when fighting demons. But it's an important question because it determines whether the rest of Cheliax would get saner or crazier if we closed the Worldwound."
"Somebody should talk to me about whether hitting that place really hard, the way Civilization could hit it, would actually help or hurt anything. Since I last thought of that question, the new thought occurs to me that since there's apparently known Wish phrasings that definitely do create giant flaming craters, that it hasn't been considered to set one of those on a timer and get everyone away? Should I actually be talking to Ione about that sort of thing?"
Carissa Sevar: "Wouldn't solve the problem at all. Or, it'd kill the demons that are currently there, but as long as the rift is open, more will come through, and we don't know how to close it."
Keltham: "Guess it's the sort of thing that I probably can't solve easily, but I should talk about it with a more experienced wizard anyways. Just in case I'm like 'well have you tried observing the rift's resonating frequency so you can try driving it to collapse using a simple oscillator' and they're like 'what'."
Carissa Sevar: "It seems worth a shot, and I actually do expect Civilization will close the Worldwound, just by - being able to have lots of smart people think about it full time and being richer so we can move the wardstones in a bit at a time, give ourselves a smaller perimeter to defend, figuring out other clever stuff. But my bet is there's not a single clever solution. Partially because Iomedae is notably absent from this here god pileup."
Keltham: "You act like we know we have the complete god list."
"I don't quite see that reasoning squaring up, actually. Unless Iomedae has an impossibly high discount rate for a god, she should care similarly regardless of whether we close the Worldwound in fifty years or five, unless it's otherwise due to close anyways. I'd guess that, if she doesn't like Asmodeus, she's not happy enough to help with this project even if it ends up closing the Worldwound later..."
"I'd be more nervous about the conspicuous apparent absence of Lawful Good if Cayden Cailean wasn't in. Not that I understand what that implies, but, it's less of an unambiguous warning sign than all the altruists staying out of your project."
Carissa Sevar: Snort. "Agreed. But as it stands we've got - your god, Nethys, Cayden Cailean, Asmodeus - pretty much the whole god-spectrum."
Keltham: "Not counting Broom's god? I guess the catastrophe-prevention god posting an observer doesn't exactly count as an endorsement per se."
"My brain's still bugging me about the four who I decided didn't make the cut. Until Maillol gets back to me with their options, I don't feel like I can actually have that horribly unpleasant interview that's looming ever larger in my imagination, but it also feels increasingly awful that I haven't, like, let them know. Not a problem you're supposed to solve for me, the person who makes the decision is supposed to bear the unpleasant-interview consequences of it."
Carissa Sevar: "Waiting until you know their options makes sense to me. I bet they'll be much less freaked out if you can lay out exactly what happens next. Though, also, you don't have to feel bad, and I think I wouldn't feel bad, so maybe hiring is more my kind of task."
Keltham: "If we get to the point where you're working with me to decide who to hire, and making your own calls about who to let go, you can handle that part, yeah. I suppose for this occasion I could have asked you who to keep and see if your judgment matched mine, and if it did, I could tell you to handle the exit interview on the grounds that you apparently knew the full reasons for why they weren't staying."
Carissa Sevar: "They're weaker students? But I am not a fourth-rank keeper and can't say I'd have picked those four, not when I hadn't in fact picked them out in advance.
Should I let you go off on your date?"
Keltham: "Give me a long hug and then you can go."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa gives him a hug, and contemplates the exit interviews that she's in fact going to have to give, tonight, once they've figured out what to do next with the girls.
She is kind of dreading it, which is pathetic. Hurting and terrorizing people is fun and necessary and she hasn't been doing it enough lately.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 6 / Night
Keltham: Keltham enters into his date with Meritxell with only a slight sense of trepidation.
He's mostly worried about strange things his own brain might do to him. He's only a little worried about whether Meritxell will suddenly decide that she should stop seducing him and let herself be the one seduced during the rest of the date. Thereby revealing the true illusoriness of his apparently promised rise out of the ranks of the median male mate-value; which is not high enough to get much seduction-work put into you, compared to the amount expected by, say, a woman.
But primarily he is in fact expecting this date to go fine, and if not, he'll deal.
How's Meritxell dressed? Anything interesting, or does she not, per se, have anything except her uniform?
lintamande: She does not have anything except her uniform, though at her new salary that should change pretty fast. She has not apparently decided she should stop seducing Keltham now that she has him, though she's not actually entirely sure how seducing people works.
Keltham: The important thing is that she's trying, making any sort of visible effort. The new gendertrope in him seems like it would be sad, if she wasn't.
He'll ask if anyone has mentioned to Meritxell a certain contract that she'd have to sign if she wanted to preserve her options for the evening getting sufficiently interesting; signing this contract doesn't decide anything, to be clear, it just preserves possibilities in that undecided future.
lintamande: Yep, Carissa told her and showed her Carissa's, and if it's the same she's willing to sign it.
Keltham: This does leave the puzzling question of what they could possibly find to talk about during their date, a search that Keltham himself has always dreaded (he says). They haven't read any of the same books, written fanfictions set in the same universe, aren't obviously on opposite sides of any shared debate; and all of their previous life experiences are probably far too similar for their random childhood anecdotes to have any interest whatsoever for each other.
So, all those men far less worthy than Keltham, who proved unable to wear her in her true shirt-form - what sort of sex has she been having with them instead?
Carissa Sevar: "Some of these redactions are because we're not allowed to know that, but I think most of them are actually because what he was thinking was untranslatable. But I think the approximate picture is that the forces that put Keltham on top of me did that for a reason, and might have been the reason for subsequent interventions to make things more like a dath ilani romance. And we want Keltham to believe that's not true, but it probably is," Carissa concludes the briefing for Asmodia. "Questions."
Asmodia: Who is Sevar a hidden cleric of, then, Asmodia does not ask, because Sevar is apparently managing not to know this.
"I want so much for there to be some way to extract more information about dath ilani romance novels from Keltham, we need that information, it's just, so much not a priority in the Tropeless World where we don't actually care -"
"Wait. Paxti. We could brief her on the parts that Keltham knows we know, tell her on full Bluff that we absolutely don't believe it and think Keltham is right not to believe it either, and Paxti would absolutely fly off to pester Keltham about it given permission. That happens in the Tropeless World if Paxti gets briefed."
"But Keltham might not believe that - is it a disaster if he doesn't - yes it is because then he concludes not just that he's in the Trope World but also in the Conspiracy World because we hid the tropes from him and tried to conceal our inquiry about it -"
"Could Ione just be openly curious, she's visibly different from the rest of us -"
"I'll think about it."
"One thing does seem clear to me, the tropes are things of Probability. Understanding Keltham's Law of Probability is going to be just as much key to mastering them as knowing the particulars of dath ilani romance novels. If I had to guess, that's what the not-understandable terms were about."
Asmodia: She's feeling a lot more uncertain than before about tropes being unreal. Even if there were gods involved in faking it, there could also be tropes making the gods do that. There could be real tropes involved and gods faking other tropes.
Carissa Sevar: "That seems right to me. Probability and, uh, the thing he jokingly scolded Ione for bringing up. Anthropics."
Asmodia: "Making copies of people, which can produce probabilities of three hundred hundredths, three years after Probability gets taught to dath ilani which means it is still being taught to children."
"In the Tropeless World, would I be urgently interested enough to bother Keltham about 'anthropics'? No, but Ione might be... he could suspect us being behind Ione's question anyways, it'd be true and we can't stake everything on a dath ilani never imagining a thing that happens to be true. Ione asking about anthropics doesn't quite have all the same problems as asking Keltham about dath ilani romance novels, there's a real excuse about it being fascinatingly forbidden mathematics. But it has most of the problems."
"...I don't think I can actually do this without +4 to both Intelligence and Wisdom and maybe also solving some of the problems that Keltham posted. It feels like I'm just pretending to talk the way I think when I'm actually smart."
Carissa Sevar: "I know. I urgently put in for your headband. If they turn me down I'll go and argue some more about it."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "That will not be necessary," says Aspexia Rugatonn, taking off her Invisibility ring.
Carissa Sevar: Oh.
Carissa is going to end up with the mental habit of assuming the Grand High Priestess and the Queen are watching her at all times. Which is good for her moral development, probably.
"Grand High Priestess," she says on the off chance Asmodia wasn't sure, and inclines her head.
Asmodia: Asmodia has never met Aspexia Rugatonn before and it was, in fact, taking her a moment to identify that this is not just a high priestess of Asmodeus but one who's wearing the very distinct Crown of the Most High.
She's so shocked that it takes her too, too long to realize that she should be falling to her knees feeling more terrified than she has at any moment since she wept in the Gardens of Erecura no she needs to not think about that there must be no suspicious gaps in her thoughts what should she be thinking about -
They said that people on the project didn't get tortured she hopes that's true even with the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus she didn't mean, she didn't mean any temerity, she only hoped for the tool she needs to serve Asmodeus -
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I will be making use of this one's time for somewhat over two hours, Sevar. Perhaps two and a quarter. You may go about whatever other business you have."
Asmodia: Asmodia stays kneeling with new terror pouring through her. How many bad things can happen to you in two and a quarter hours? A lot, more than enough to break you forever before you can die.
Her life is very recently unfucked, and she has had a long long time of being terrified before that, and bad things happening to her, to remember.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa notices the absurd temptation to tell Asmodia it'll be all right, which it probably will but she doesn't know, and presumably the Grand High Priestess is as terrifying as is salutary anyway and shouldn't be undermined even if Carissa knew, and had a good reason to reassure Asmodia, which she does not. Asmodia will get what serves Asmodeus, as will we all.
She should go talk with Maillol about arrangements for the girls being fired from the project. She does that.
Aspexia Rugatonn: The girl's thoughts are slightly strange, they cut out sometimes, as if she were suppressing some ill thought and doing quite a good job of that. Usually there are traces, the thought before the suppressed thought is revealing. If Rugatonn used one of her full-caster-level Detect Thoughts, she could probably go right past this Asmodia's defenses, but those she must save and hazard wisely.
The thoughts Rugatonn can detect are all entirely ordinary terror.
She lets Asmodia go on kneeling and scaring herself for a time, for this will also help teach a lesson, and finally Rugatonn speaks. "Rise, Asmodia. You can expect no harm if you conduct yourself with a modicum of prudence."
Asmodia: Asmodia scrambles to her feet, not entirely able to hide her tremors. Very very briefly the thought occurs to her to wonder why this could not have been said earlier, before she hammers it down with prudence.
"How may I serve, Most High?" she says, for the first lesson of Hell is to obey.
Aspexia Rugatonn: "You will have a little more than two hours in which to think about certain matters, during which Security will prevent you from leaving this room, but will bring you any notes you desire, or even assistance if you think that helpful to you. Foremost, use that time to consider those arts by which one would seek to deceive a dath ilani and weave about him an illusion he cannot distinguish from reality, even though, in the end, the two must be distinct."
"Secondarily I will set you a puzzle, or rather, a subject to consider. Spend a quarter-hour on it, at the end of your time, and report back to me on your thoughts after I return to you. Have you recovered from your terror enough that you are hearing and understanding these words?"
Asmodia: "Yes, Most High. What is the other puzzle I am to consider?" She briefly considers asking what happens if she fails, rejects the thought, she has been told once that she will not be harmed if she shows a little prudence and it is not prudent to make the Most High repeat herself.
Aspexia Rugatonn: "The way of diligent obedience to something greater than yourself, which cannot see you clearly, which can speak to you hardly at all, whose goals and purposes you understand but barely and often with wild errors on your own part, something which in some ways knows far better than you do the consequences of your acts and yet too often fails to know what any mortal could see in moments with their mortal eyes."
"One might consider an adult trying to guide a three-year-old through a dungeon, seen in flashes through foggy glass, and only every ten minutes may they call out to the child at all; I ask not what must be the way of that adult, but the way of that child."
"I would have you speak to me upon this topic as it might be spoken of by a dath ilani, or out of your own knowledge of such Law as Keltham has taught."
"Your project of deceiving Keltham will have fruits evaluated by Sevar. Your thoughts on obedience will be evaluated by me. The work that you do for Sevar is more urgent, and, unless your other work has entirely stalled out before then, you will not spend more than fifteen minutes considering the question I just posed you. If you cannot turn your thoughts from my interesting question and complete your more important work, you will fail your more important work and I do expect that to be the more severe cost to you than failing my own small test."
"These instructions will be copied to you in writing by the Security who has witnessed it. Do you have any questions?"
Asmodia: Her only thoughts are on how to serve more effectively, and she is terrified still, but this is her only chance to speak, she needs to find out the most vital information and ask for it. "Is it permitted that I know the purpose behind your question upon obedience?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I will not tell it to you. You could, I suppose, try to deduce the purpose behind my instructions; and then, with that understanding, you could do what you deemed best yourself to serve what you guessed to be my purpose, rather than being constrained by the chains of following instructions you do not really understand."
Aspexia Rugatonn smiles. It's not one of the pleasant smiles.
"But, even then, little child, you would not be punished. The habit of punishing that as much as I would wish, would be too expensive to Cheliax for me to follow all my impulses there. Sevar is running her experiment. I will not invalidate it. Not so long as you exercise a modicum of prudence. Any further questions?"
Asmodia: "About what is it most important that I exercise this modicum of prudence, Most High?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Invoke none of the active functions of my Crown, while I sleep the two hours I must sleep every day. Do not fear invoking them by accident, a deliberate will is required."
Aspexia lifts the Crown of the Most High from off her head, as she has not done in quite some time now, and diminishes.
You would not be able to tell, unless you knew her well, that who stands before Asmodia now is not the true Most High, but only a creature of habits and reflexes and plans already laid.
Asmodia: Asmodia is not particularly remembering to breathe, she is so shocked. She has never heard of such a thing, never.
Aspexia Rugatonn: A creature of habit and pre-laid plans lays the Crown on Asmodia's head. The artifact changes shape as well, to a form less recognizable if no less potent.
"There are not such things as headbands of +4 to Intelligence and Wisdom lying about without wearers," says the creature of habit and pre-laid plans. "This Crown is +6 to Wisdom and +4 to Intelligence. And +4 to Splendour, if that matters for anything. See well what you can do with it, because only very grand results will lead to there ever being a second opportunity like this. Manage anything decent and a headband of +4 Wisdom will be found for you, to be used with Fox's Cunnings."
"I go now to sleep; you have two hours or some tiny fraction more."
The flesh golem following the remembered instruction of the true Most High, who does not in this moment exist anywhere in Golarion, turns to depart.
Asmodia: Asmodia is calling to Security in all haste: she needs her notes, she needs the exact text of the questions that Keltham laid, she desires Ione brought to her even if she can but serve as sounding-board, and now she is already thinking while she awaits those resources. To waste time would not be wise, and Asmodia is nothing, in this moment, if not wise.
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham wants the other girls put up somewhere comfortable, maybe in this building, and taught some economically valuable skill," Carissa tells Maillol. "I don't think he suspects anything about Hell. Might be for the best anyway, for the girls remaining in the project to not be terrified of failing out, and so we don't have to micromanage the conversations where he fires them to prevent desperate outbursts of some kind or another."
Ferrer Maillol: "I hesitate to contradict you on a matter of Keltham psychology. But in this case, I would wager money," the wording is deliberate, "that our pet cleric of Abadar wants the girls to not be any worse off than if they'd never tried to trade with him."
"That's what he wants. What do we want? We want him to believe they're fine, we want to present him with the same visible appearances that alter-Cheliax would..."
Carissa Sevar: "Yep. Which we could achieve with impersonators and lying to the girls remaining in the project, if you've got some compelling reason to?" Though the idea makes her uneasy; it feels like more of a betrayal of Keltham than all the rest, somehow.
Ferrer Maillol: "Impersonators are expensive. Keeping the failures around the fortress isn't cheap, but it's a lot less expensive than that."
"Other option that occurs to me is sending them to Egorian to keep up appearances about the fake Project Lawful and free up an impersonator there," and more importantly, get them out of Maillol's personal hair, "but you'd need to decide what alter-Cheliax would be doing with them in Egorian. Alter-Cheliax doesn't have to worry about somebody using Detect Thoughts on the girls, since that spell doesn't exist there, I think? Which means they have wider options than we have in reality."
Carissa Sevar: "I think alterCheliax doesn't send them to Egorian, since alterCheliax isn't running an elaborate con in Egorian. And I think it'll cross his mind that we're likelier to be lying about them being all right if he can't check than if he can. If we think alterCheliax should be running the thing we're running in Egorian... I need to think that through, probably with Asmodia. In alterCheliax Iomedae's not visibly expending tons of resources trying to see what's going on with our operations, and I don't think Osirion tried to kidnap Pilar either."
Ferrer Maillol: "Conventional theory of deception is that we'd love to have him get suspicious of how they're doing in Egorian, demand they be Teleported in right now for him to check up on, we promptly do, turns out they're fine."
"I'm still struggling with how the thing you do with dath ilani is... not that."
Carissa Sevar: "The reason that would normally work is that most people would be matching new evidence they got to there being a deception in Egorian, building steadily greater conviction that there was a deception in Egorian, and on being satisfied there was no deception in Egorian decide that maybe they were over pattern matching and aren't being deceived. We'd be using against them their own tendency to - make sense of the world by weighing a couple stories instead of all of them. Keltham will instead have a general probability he's being lied to about something important that will go up if we do suspicious things, and if he's later satisfied there's nothing up in Egorian he'll just consider the conspiracies not in Egorian. AlterCheliax needs to be one whole fabric that produces everything we do, or we'll lose. ....lose sooner. I don't think this is going to last forever. I'm hoping to get a year out of it.
Also, I might want him to hook up with Yaisa. Maybe he'll have an easier time being Evil with girls he doesn't need for his research project."
Ferrer Maillol: "I was going to say that alter-Maillol wants the failures out of his management work and more limited budget, and does look for excuses to put them somewhere like Egorian or Ostenso. But if he needs to create a new project section to host Yaisa regardless, it's not much more work for him to keep the others here too." (This also happens to be true of the real Maillol.)
"Our pet Abadar cleric is going to need a story for why alter-Yaisa is sleeping with him if he's no longer her boss - he'll want to know what she's getting out of that in return, if not better promotion prospects. Think you've already run into some of that."
Carissa Sevar: "I think he actually doesn't think we're sleeping with him for promotion prospects! Alter Yaisa is just very into him, and likes having his attention, and wants to be the one who gets him to stop being so Good all the time. If Yaisa can pull that off, which I'll ask Subirachs."
Ferrer Maillol: "...I don't understand alter-Cheliax teenaged girls, but hopefully that's not too much of my job and Asmodia can advise me on whatever is."
"Keltham talked about wanting to check over if their options were good enough, not their fates, he wants to offer them choices and see what they pick. What else would alter-Cheliax have offered them that they're turning down to stay in the fortress? Obviously not free run of Ostenso while they learn in an enchanter's workshop there, because that they'd just take. So even without Detect Thoughts existing, alter-Cheliax has to be too worried about security issues to let them do that, or any other jobs nicer than being stuck in a fortress. Am I doing this right?"
Carissa Sevar: "Slightly backwards. What does alter Cheliax offer them, just from what we established about it not from what we want it to offer? But in this case I think it gets the same answer - alter Cheliax is still paranoid about someone going after the former Project Lawful girls for intel and wants them somewhere safe. They could be offered a role on another secret project if there's one they'd be suited to, they could be offered powerful magic to untraceably change their identities and start new lives on the other side of the world if such magic is available to Cheliax, which I don't know it to be, they could be offered a role on the project doing support magic..."
dath ilan: Carissa Sevar, who was admittedly rushed, has neglected to include some critical advice and life experience with respect to dating dath ilani.
Meritxell has made the serious error of mentioning that she didn't fully grasp some of what Keltham said earlier about stock companies.
Keltham is currently explaining how a Lawful corporation has an internal prediction market, which forecasts the observable results on running various possible projects that company could be trying, which in turn is used to generate an estimate of marginal returns on marginal internal investment; this prevents a corporation from engaging in obvious madness like accepting an internal project with 6% returns while turning down another internal project with expected 10% returns.
The wider market, obviously, would also like to invest all its money where it'll get the highest returns; but it's usually not efficient to offer the broader market a specialized sub-ownership of particular corporate subprojects, since the ultimate usefulness of corporate subprojects is usually dependent on many other internal outputs of the company. It doesn't do any good to have a 'website' without something to sell from it. Sure, if everyone was an ideal agent, they'd be able to break things down in such a fine-grained way. But the friction costs and imperfect knowledge are such that it's not worth breaking companies into even smaller ownable pieces. So the wider stock market can only own shares of whole corporations, which combine the outputs and costs of all that company's projects.
Thus any corporation continuously buys or sells its own stock, or rather, has standing limit orders into the stock market to buy various quantities if the price goes low or sell various quantities if the price goes high, at prices that company sets depending on its internal belief about the returns from investing or not investing in the marginal subprojects being considered. If the company isn't considered credible by the wider market, its stock will go lower and the company will automatically buy that stock, which leaves them less money to invest in new projects internally, and means that they only invest in projects with relatively higher returns - doing less total investment, but getting higher returns on the internal investments that they do start. Conversely if the wider market thinks a company's promises to do a lot with money are credible, the stock price will go up and money will flow into that company until they no longer have internal investment prospects that credibly beat the broader market.
This may sound complicated, and it is probably a relatively more complicated part of the machinery that is necessarily implied by the existence of distinct stock corporations in the first place. But the alternative, if you zoom out and look at the whole planet of dath ilan, is that a corporation in one place would be investing in a project with internally expected returns of 6%, and somebody on the other side of the planet would be turning down a project with market-credible returns of 10%, which means you could reorganize the whole planet and do better in a predictable way. So whatever does happen as a consequence of the existence of stock corporations, it has to be not that.
Some form of drastic action on Meritxell's part is obviously required if she wants to get back on track to having sex with this person. What does she do, if anything?
lintamande: "I have to admit, this is a new way for someone to fail to figure out how to wear me."
Keltham: ...right.
"Sorry. This is - more of a recognized problem in dath ilan, and the 'gendertropes', the male-female behavior options, do usually have the girl interrupting the boy before he gets to this point. Or the boy interrupting the girl, but that happens around a quarter as often."
"Well, if you didn't like current ongoing events, clearly, there must be something you'd rather be doing; and it is hardly thinkable that this activity would not involve me in any way. So what, do tell, is your greater preference?"
Asmodia: No dath ilani out of living memory would have seen the phenomenon that is occurring inside Asmodia now.
No, not even the oldest Rememberers staying alive half from machine assistance and half from willpower. It has been longer than that since Civilization trialed what happens if you take an adult as generally talented, reflective, and mathematically intelligent as Asmodia is now, and expose them for the first time in their lives to the idea of probability theory. Only those sleeping in the cold would have witnessed it; perhaps not even they.
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 has decided to wager on the prospect of solving all Keltham's seven problems within an hour, and then turning her attention to games of deception for the remaining forty-five minutes; because his #7 is the key, it has to be.
It might not have been a decision she'd have made before for any Wisdom, but the added Splendour is helping, even that is helping, for some element of that is lending Asmodia a driving will and force that she had only known before in the grips of exultation. Keltham thinks this problem set is possible to at least one of his students, and maybe he would've been wrong about that; but if Keltham can imagine that being possible, then this Asmodia could should will get it done within a single hour.
She hit his #1 and bounced, it is too poetic she does not know what it means so back off and try #2 that's just too obvious it says that the thing-that-is-a-likelihood-ratio has to be extreme to overcome an extreme thing-that-is-the-prior-odds, is there something she's missing, just assume not for now and continue, she tries #3 it doesn't solve immediately there's no obvious thing it means, so try #4 and see if solving all the fast problems helps and #4 isn't instantly obvious but Asmodia can feel in her mind the hint of a shape where it might be pointing so she starts scribbling down numbers.
Cheliax has fewer proverbs about mathematics than does dath ilan; it lacks in particular a proverb to the effect that quite often in mathematics, and with only rare exceptions, knowing what you need to prove is nine-tenths of the real work.
The lost people out of Civilization's lost beginnings who first invented these ideas took longer to get there, from the bones of probability theory. But they did not have informal statements of where they should be going; and also they were not quite as smart as Asmodia is now, along some dimensions of thinkoomph if not others.
So it doesn't take Asmodia much scribbling at all to see that if Conspiracy and Ordinary make the same predictions at the same strength then neither world can win out over the other one, to see the abstract point that if P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 1) = P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 2) then their ratio is 1:1 and the posterior odds are the same as the prior odds, while if P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 2) is 0 or just very tiny then as soon as you see the evidence you are convinced of hypothesis 1 no rather you're convinced that hypothesis 2 is false there could be other hypotheses even if Keltham only hinted at that it's clear how to adapt the math and she's doing it, she has enough of this Law to invent the rest, onward Asmodia goes to #5 and though she has no integral calculus with which to think in densities she imagines each of a thousand possible numbers between 0 and 10 down to a hundredth of fineness, and soon she has understood #5, or she thinks she's understood, no she has that's just the obvious thing it means mathematically, when you call it down to a hundredth part your prediction is ten times as strong there as if someone else called it down to a tenth, she is doing it she is inventing completing seeing the Law of Probability parsing the world with Keltham's own Sight, and the feeling that goes through her is glory.
Ione Sala: She's... probably not supposed to say anything and interrupt this? Just stick around and be a sounding-board if necessary? Most of what Asmodia's scribbling makes no sense, at least not to Ione, but Asmodia sure looks like she's having fun.
Ione wants that headband. It looks ordinary but she's guessing it's not.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa spends a few minutes meditating on the virtue of Evil. This seems like a straightforward place for it; Good would hesitate to fire the students who are slowing the project down, because it makes people sad and Good is in significant part built off the instinctive human flinch at achieving your goals in ways that make other people sad. Evil can do the thing that accomplishes the goal, not enslaved by guilt. If she were condemning these girls to Hell, she would be doing that because it advanced her goals, and she would have the strength to do things that advance her goals. As it happens she's doing an easier thing.
She asks to have them brought to her one by one; she'll have more control over the conversation that way.
Iarwain: Paxti comes in looking, to Chelish eyes, visibly more cheerful than she might've looked on Day 1. She's on the low-punishment regimen, her soul is worth some unreasonably vast quantity in Dis's markets, somebody in Egorian is building a reputation for her as Project Lawful's deadliest weapon, and she didn't win the last Keltham seduction contest but she's bound to win one eventually.
Carissa Sevar: The Grand High Priestess would lead with 'you're fired' and let Paxti simmer for a bit, but Carissa doesn't actually understand why, understand along what dimension that makes Paxti stronger.
Well, the only way to learn is to try it and see what happens.
"We told Keltham the girls were initially here on one week contracts, so tonight he decided whose contract he wants to renew as a researcher. He didn't pick you, because you're not really keeping up in math."
Iarwain: "What happens to me now?" Paxti says. She's not already dead, so it's not that, unless for some reason you're supposed to talk with the project leader before she kills you. She's mostly trying to hold back all her emotions, she might need her wits for something.
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham of course wants all the girls who have worked with him to be better off for it. He proposes that you be given a bunch of options including reassignment to some other project, hanging out in Hell for a couple years until you don't know anything secret, or staying here in a different wing of the fortress and getting lessons in some kind of advanced magic you wouldn't have had access to at your age otherwise - I was thinking maybe ring forging because then I can drop in in my abundant free time and pick it up myself. Keltham plans to tell you tomorrow about his decision and your options, and I recommend that after thinking it over you pick the option where you stay here, though of course you may go to Hell if you'd rather. Ask Asmodia what it was like; for Project Lawful girls it's quite different, I think."
Iarwain: "I'll stay here and learn ring forging," Paxti says almost immediately. She's not stupid enough to pick a choice other than the recommended one. She doesn't dare ask explicitly if she still gets to stay on a low-punishment regimen, but she's certain that's not on offer for projects elsewhere, or for that matter, in Hell.
Carissa Sevar: "Good. I want you to think very hard about alter Paxti, and what she'd believe about Hell and about her options, and how she'd react to getting this surprising news from Keltham tomorrow, and if you do a good job, you're already cleared to know about Project Lawful and there may be opportunities in it for you in the future."
Iarwain: "I will obey."
She wants so much to ask if she's still on the low-punishment regimen, but she has zero negotiating leverage for that and if she asks under that condition there's absolutely no reason Sevar wouldn't just say no.
Carissa Sevar: Well, that went fine. Not fun, exactly, but fine.
"Dismissed."
Iarwain: Paxti goes off to her room to think about what alter-Paxti would think. It's too hard, and she asks if Asmodia is available to tell her, but Asmodia isn't available and won't be for a while. She taps herself with a Fox's Cunning and the main thought that comes to her on Cunning is that Owl's Wisdom might let her get this right and not die, but when she leaves her room to ask, Security either doesn't have a Wisdom available, or doesn't think she's a priority anymore.
She goes back into her room and wonders if alter-Paxti would cry right there when Keltham tells her, if people in alter-Cheliax are more pathetic than those in true-Cheliax. Someone else will have to instruct her about that. It's not a decision she'd be authorized to make even if she was still a full member of Project Lawful.
She files a request with Security for an Asmodia alter-Cheliax consult as soon as Asmodia is available.
She files a request with Security to still be part of the Nap Stack so she has longer to think tonight.
She goes to look at Keltham's seven problems, which, if she was smarter, she should've done before the Cunning wore off. If she could solve them all, if she could solve any of them, maybe Keltham would want her to stay on.
After a while she thinks she understands #2. That's enough, right?
...she's pretty sure it's not. It's the simple one that Keltham included so even the dumber students wouldn't feel disappointed about getting zero right, because that's how Keltham thinks.
Paxti wonders if Keltham would have kept her if she'd been more proactive about having sex with him. Probably yes. It's not that he's firing her for reluctance, it's that, if she had slept with him faster, he'd feel too guilty now to do this to her. Her own stupidity for thinking she was safe to take her time. Sevar was smart. Asmodia was smart. Meritxell was smart. Ione was smart. Paxti should have paid more attention to what the smarter people around her were doing.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm keeping up," Pela says. "I'm just quiet."
"You're mostly keeping up. You wouldn't fail a class, if this were a class. But you'd be the slowest one remaining, if you stayed, and Keltham doesn't think that's worth it. Though you may argue with him tomorrow if and only if you are quite confident that alter Pela would argue with him; run your reasoning by me."
"He's going to get tired of you too, you know."
Carissa's Unseen Servant slaps her. "That was stupid and petty and unprofessional and you know it; you can still try to make your case to Keltham in the morning if I am persuaded you'd make it in alter Cheliax. My fate is no one's concern but mine, and yours no one's concern but you."
"Oh," Yaisa says.
"You thought he liked you."
She doesn't answer.
"He does, and you have permission to keep trying to seduce him. You might have a better angle on it, actually, since he doesn't have to work with you afterwards."
"What do you mean," Jacme says slowly, "that we might prefer Hell."
It means that Carissa really wants to eavesdrop on Asmodia advising other Project girls about Hell; it's information she desperately needs for her plan to make them resilient to mental breakdowns about it. She's convinced at this point that Hell did something. She's not allowed to know what. But maybe she's allowed to know the implications of whatever Hell did for whether Project Lawful girls ought to fear it. "Well," she says blandly, "we all desire Hell so that Asmodeus may have freer reign to improve and reform us. Asmodia seems improved, doesn't she?"
"....uh huh."
Pilar : Pilar already used her once-per-week Nap Stack opportunity, so she requested to be hit by a Sleep spell now, so that she could still accumulate enough sleep to hang spells tomorrow, even if she needs to be awake for the mid-night general briefing.
Project Lawful: Paxti needs cake. So do three other people, but Paxti is the one that Pilar cares about.
Pilar : And her curse woke her up from sleep to go deliver some?
Project Lawful: No. It's not something her curse is demanding. Pilar's curse isn't that hungry.
It's just something that Pilar can do if she wants.
Pilar : She notices the feeling of wanting to help Paxti and Pilar is not stupid, she knows how she's disappointing Asmodeus and Sevar said it's not okay even if she punishes herself afterwards.
Will it help Lord Asmodeus, if Pilar goes to deliver cake?
Project Lawful: No. It will only help Pilar. Chaotic Good would usually try to help someone like Pilar who was being used by them -
Pilar : Then her curse can fuck off and not bother her unless there's something that helps Lord Asmodeus.
Project Lawful: Pilar's curse will keep that predictable instruction in mind, in the past as in the future.
Pilar : What's that supposed to mean.
Project Lawful: Pilar can fall back asleep now.
Pilar : She does. She wasn't that awake anyways.
Ione Sala: "So what I think #6 has to be pointing at is, okay, I'm going to just say this and hope your mind doesn't collapse because you're one of the Special Girls, it's pointing at how Asmodeans sort of go around trying to convince themselves really hard that sure they want to go to Hell and actually they don't and this is not a way a dath ilani would ever think. Ever. #6 is going to be the fragment of Law that prohibits that."
Asmodia: "It's going to mean a lot more than that, unless we've already lost our game to Keltham completely. And if he was planning to convince everyone around him to turn traitor, if he was directly playing against the real Cheliax, then he wouldn't give us advance warning, he'd just hit everyone in the class with the full lecture."
"How does the Law of Probability tell people not to do what you just said? It doesn't seem connected to any of the quantities we've been using before now. If you understand the meaning of the words, tell me about the math, connect it to anything and I'll be able to unravel everything else from there and maybe in less than a minute."
Ione Sala: Apparently 'Asmodeans are lying to themselves about wanting to go to Hell' is just a fine thing to say to Asmodia and she doesn't argue with it.
Ione really wishes she knew what was going on here.
"I think problems #6 and #7 are meant to be harder than the first five, probably require the first five to get. I only got #2 on my own and I've been too distracted by watching you figure out the others. I'm guessing you don't want me to take the time to figure them out on my own -"
Asmodia: "#1 is about how there's all the different things a hypothesis could predict, and all the probabilities it puts on them have to sum to 1, if there's like five different things that could happen, you can't say 40% for each, even if you come up with a really clever explanation for each of them, if all the explanations sound equally clever they get the same probability which is 20% each and that's just the same as going 'I don't know' about each of them."
"#2 you got, it sounds like, it just says that if something is half as likely as something else, you need evidence twice as likely as if not to start believing it, and if it's a thousandth the evidence has to be a thousand times as likely -"
Ione Sala: "Write it down so I can think about it. Include the formulas so my brain can connect this to the math."
Asmodia: "That's going to take me five fucking minutes! I've only got twenty left on the hour!"
Ione Sala: "I'm not going to be able to tell you how #6 is about the probability of anything conditional on anything until you spend those five minutes. Maybe you want to go it alone."
Asmodia: "#6 is about - the probability of something, conditional on your trying to convince yourself of it. It has to be zero."
Ione Sala: "I'm trying to convince myself that I lack a million gold pieces. Oh look, now I have a million -"
Asmodia: "Yes I know it's stupid I just thought if I said it maybe you'd correct me and your correction would actually be helpful."
Ione Sala: "Gonna have to be less stupid first."
Asmodia: "If you see yourself trying to convince yourself of something, it can't be evidence, because you'd see that with the same probability in, the Ordinary world, the Conspiracy world, any world you're inside, you can still try to convince yourself of things."
Ione Sala: "So just wanting to convince yourself of something isn't evidence by itself, sure, good job not getting smitten by Asmodeus there and aren't we all glad Security isn't torturing us for saying it. What if you come up with, like, actual arguments?"
Asmodia: "You can come up with arguments in any world, so coming up with arguments for anything isn't evidence for it."
Ione Sala: "I want to believe you about that, but unfortunately, it sounds like neither my wanting to believe you, nor the fact that you came up with any arguments for it, should ever convince me of anything. By the way, can I have all your money? And before you try to convince yourself otherwise, keep in mind that you should never be able to convince yourself of anything."
Asmodia: "No! You can never expect to convince yourself of anything. You can convince yourself of something, you just can't expect to. The word 'expect' has to be the key because if we take it out the claim is wrong."
Ione Sala: "Well, in the context of the Law of Probability, expect should mean predict, right? You can't predict yourself convincing yourself of something?"
Asmodia: "So you can't predict seeing evidence that - where after you see it, you believe - good work Ione, shut up Ione, I think that's enough and I can take it from there -"
Ione Sala: Asmodia is now completely ignoring Ione and scribbling something about P(observation1 ◁ hypothesis1) and P(hypothesis1 ◁ observation1) and P(observation1) and P(hypothesis1) and P(~observation1) and what appears, roughly, to be every possible combination of the symbols in Keltham's language, which, once exhausted, she starts multiplying and adding together in quantities like P(hypothesis1 ◁ observation1) * P(observation1) + P(hypothesis1 ◁ ~observation1) * P(~observation1) and now she's expanding the definitions and trying to prove things.
Right. Ione will just try to work out some of the other problems on her own, then.
Asmodia: It does, in fact, take her only a minute.
(P(hypothesis1 ◁ observation1) * P(observation1)) + (P(hypothesis1 ◁ ~observation1) * P(~observation1)) = P(hypothesis1).
If you add up how much you'd believe in something, given a piece of evidence, times your chance of seeing that evidence, with how much you'd believe something, if you saw not that evidence, times the chance of seeing not that evidence, it's just the same probability you started with. You can end up convinced of things, you just can't expect to be convinced of them. Any time you go look for something, that you're hoping will convince you of something, there's a counterbalancing chance you won't find it and then the math requires you to end up believing less. On net it all balances out.
"I've got #6, no time to explain it though, tell me about #7, not in math I have the math now just what it does it mean."
Ione Sala: "I want that headband."
Asmodia: "Even I won't have it for very much longer at all so shut up and talk."
Ione Sala: It couldn't literally be the Crown of Infernal Majesty, could it? That's just flatly impossible even on Project Lawful.
"Well, if we're going full-out on heresy - and hoping that, for some reason, you and not just I survive that experience - then, the same way #6 is about how you shouldn't be able to convince yourself of things - #7 is about how you shouldn't believe the Church when they try to convince you about it."
Asmodia: "We've already been through this you can end up convinced of things you just can't expect to be convinced of them. Why can't you expect the Church to convince you of anything? They're allowed to know all sorts of things you don't, they could have all sorts of properly convincing evidence you haven't seen."
Ione Sala: Most Asmodeans would have told her to pick a different example.
"Because they could be lying, and, let's be frank here, they are."
Asmodia: "That's not the dath ilani answer, I'm sure of it, it's not what Keltham would say - what if they swear to everything in Asmodeus's name, what if they're under truthspell and you're powerful enough to make it stick, if this is math that holds across all the imaginable realities then whatever #7 means will still be true even then."
Ione Sala: "If they're under truthspell and can't evade it, they'll still tell you only the things that help their case, and hide everything that doesn't, and if you just took that at face value you'd always end up convinced every time by whatever Church you talked to, and I bet dath ilani don't work like that."