Carissa Sevar: "It's on my to-do list. I'm going to leave, because Keltham said you should talk without me; someone can come get me in a few minutes and say you're done, if you think that's what happens in alterCheliax."
lintamande: "- in alter Cheliax do we all hate each other?" asks Gregoria. "Or is that, you know, an Asmodeanism thing."
Carissa Sevar: " - I'm not actually sure. I think most places people do more gestures of liking each other, and those cancel out some of the gestures of hating each other. Or make them sting more, depending."
Asmodia: "If that can genuinely go either way, you can pick what's best for reassuring Keltham or corrupting him... no, wait, if we make a lot of choices like that on the same principle - ugh."
"I need a Cunning and a Splendour to figure that out. I wouldn't have made that mistake if I'd had either of those up. I register my suggestion that tomorrow we spend a lot of that day figuring out exactly who we are in alterCheliax, and we do that with Cunning and Wisdom and Splendour up, and if that requires Cheliax to Teleport in another ten third-circle wizards to act as our personal enhancement service they should just do that for the next month or risk losing Keltham for want of it."
Carissa Sevar: "I take your point but I think a lot of my instincts for Keltham decay when I'm not actually talking to him, and I could've avoided some of the problems this morning if I'd been spending more time around him, and I don't really want to freeze him again as soon as tomorrow. Maybe if we have a good talk tonight. I'll put in the request for enhancement regardless.
- and the glibness! I'm just going to do it as swords if no one can get it to me soon."
Ione Sala: "I had been planning to try for a date with Keltham, tonight -"
Asmodia: "Ione, I understand better what you were trying to do, when you asked Keltham that question about whether the birds thing was Conspiracy-revealing, I think a bit better of it now, than I did right then. But I do not trust that you've got an alter-Ione - thing Taldane doesn't have a word for - that shows no traces or hints of the real Cheliax, and until we've had time to go over that with you on Cunning, Wisdom, and Splendour simultaneously, I think you wait to seduce Keltham a little later."
"I propose, and this is me being clever because I again don't think we have a choice, that we're all in shock about our salary increases, and a little more hesitant about our new boss than before, at least for today, and Carissa is the one who's just taking it all in stride and being around Keltham all the same. If that gives away a quarter of a 2 on Conspiracy, we just have to take that hit, because we can lose so much faster if anything complicated happens before we're readier than this."
Ione Sala: "Meritxell never tries anything clever, so she could be not-intimidated if Sevar doesn't want to spend the night with Keltham."
lintamande: "I'm smarter than you," says Meritxell, "which is why I'm not doing things that look clever but aren't what I would do in alter -"
Carissa Sevar: Carissa uses a minor illusion to make a thunderclap above their heads. "Testing whether that's as effective as lighting you on fire," she says. "Meritxell is indeed a good person to put in front of Keltham while we're all confused because alter Meritxell seems credibly pretty similar to real Meritxell. However, I want Keltham tonight, because my model of him suffers when I go this long interacting with peoples' Keltham-guesses and not the real Keltham. And furthermore I would actually like him to next pick up someone who can give him credible evidence on the masochism front since that's very entangled, for him, with Conspiracy."
Iarwain: Nobody wants to demonstrate to her that they need to be set on fire to be quieted.
Carissa Sevar: Great!
If that's settled, then, she'll slip out to Keltham.
Ione Sala: (After she's gone.)
"It actually was a compliment, Meritxell. You say clever things in class, you don't try stupid Nethysian plots. Just don't ask me to phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like an insult, because I can only lower myself so far given our relative pay levels."
lintamande: "You take the money, I'll take the lack of brain damage takaral."
Carissa Sevar: "Not sure they're going to take thirty minutes," she tells Keltham when she catches him. "I probably shouldn't report what was said?"
Keltham: "Yes and oopsie. I thought in the back of my mind that was obvious enough that everyone would get it, and even if I was right, I still should have said it out loud."
Carissa Sevar: "I guess Security can pass that along to the girls still in there in case it wasn't obvious to any of them."
Keltham: "Right," Keltham says to the clearly visible Security nearby. "Can you do that? Knock, tell them that Keltham apologizes if this part wasn't clear, but he won't ask them about any discussions they're doing while he's out and Carissa won't report earlier ones?"
Iarwain: It'll get done.
Keltham: Keltham almost asks Carissa if it's an okay time for a hug, before remembering, like, everything else about how their relationship is supposed to work. He just takes her and pulls her to him instead, leaning into her a bit.
"We need to spend time together today," Keltham says aloud. "I think my brain starts to slightly forget how our relationship works if we don't regularly... do stuff. It's still very new to this and learning."
Carissa Sevar: "I was actually just thinking the same thing. I have a bunch of - disorganized thoughts on Asmodia and myself and becoming dath ilani and, uh, staying Carissa, even the parts of me that don't hold up, and - I would like to spend time with you and be confused out loud instead of in my head.
....also, it kept nagging at me, the thing you said about - how in the Conspiracy world I was pretending, to want this - so I came up with a bunch of clever ways you could verify that I wasn't but I guess I shouldn't tell you them since they could just be the things the Conspiracy could fake. But I did come up with a bunch and you probably could too."
Keltham: "You know, I was thinking that I should maybe lay off that Conspiracy thing, except maybe with Asmodia and Ione, or something. Nobody else is commenting on it at all, where a class of dath ilani would have completely run away with it by now. Because in Civilization they would - well, they'd have trusted in the reality of their Ordinary world, that I'd come to the right answer so long as that was reality, and so wouldn't walk out on them and ruin their careers. In Golarion, they probably have no idea of all the obvious precautions I'd take about not jumping to that conclusion too quickly, not concluding for sure it was true when I was still in the maybe-faces-in-the-clouds stage..."
"Now that I say that out loud I'm suddenly worried that everyone in the classroom was paralyzed with terror the whole time I was talking. And wouldn't have dared to say anything about it, because, for all they know, that's what I think the Conspiracy would do."
Carissa Sevar: " - paralyzed in terror is a bit strong but I think they aren't sure they're safe as long as they're in fact not running an elaborate lie, yeah - like, if a person with a Chelish amount of law tried to decide if they were inside an elaborate conspiracy, using the kinds of evidence you use, what they ended up deciding would be almost completely unpredictable. I know you're not - reading entrails - but it's sometimes hard to see what makes it work."
Keltham: "...I would've sorta expected Ione to have warned me about that."
"Carissa, you need to warn me about that sort of thing."
Carissa Sevar: Oh, is that what Ione meant by her request. That's a genuine error; relayed through Security while Carissa tried to keep her bathroom break bathroom length, she understood Ione to be proposing that she take Keltham aside and say 'you know, if we were in a Conspiracy, that talk would have been very scary', which seemed like a terrible plan, but if in fact Ione was proposing pointing out that girls might wrongly think Keltham could get this wrong then Carissa owes her an apology. And maybe to be slightly less quick to shoot down the Excessively Clever Plans from team Excessively Clever Plans just because they're heretics and in love with their own self-concepts as geniuses.
" - yeah, that's fair. I'm sorry. I don't think the girls are very scared, they joke about it some when you're not around, but - but probably if you asked them probabilities they'd say they think there's at least a ten or twenty percent chance you'll decide Conspiracy even assuming there isn't one.
- and then the other part of this is that in Golarion if there were a conspiracy you'd demand the heads of everyone in it, right, but I don't think anyone thinks you'd do that, it just hovers as an association with 'conspiracy'."
Keltham: "The thought that I could possibly be interpreted as meaning that the women in my class had formed a dark conspiracy against me, without the consent of the Chelish government backing them, had literally never crossed my mind at all. The thought that you were all being held there against your will and figuring out an elaborate plot to get me out along with yourselves? Yes, though only because tropes. That other one? No."
Carissa Sevar: " - no, I mean, if there's a Conspiracy it's got to have at least one of the Queen or the Church. But - that doesn't mean they'd double down, if they were doing a conspiracy and got caught at it, rather than saying 'sorry, we'll kill everyone in the chain of command that authorized this, friends now?' - I mean. They wouldn't. Because hypothetically they've got to understand you reasonably well to have pulled off all of this, and so well enough to notice you wouldn't be impressed. But that's how a Conspiracy among Golarion people playing Golarion sorts of power games might shake out. Though again no one who has met you is plausibly worried about this, it's just kind of hovering as a - literary association."
Keltham: "I'll tell them I'm sorry when I get a chance. Remind me if I don't. It's not - easy for me to guess, still, what terrible associations people here might have."
Carissa Sevar: "I'll remind you. They might have less of them than me, honestly, they were younger when the Church took charge."
Keltham: "I am, for the first time in my life, having something like 'impostor-syndrome', I think... that's where you get a sense that you're trying to do something beyond your own competence and furthermore pretending to be better at it than you are instead of being honest about that, but not, like, consciously, just the sense that what you're doing is leading other people on... Sorry, that was a topic change, it's not about Conspiracy stuff, it's about my presuming to lay out equity distributions for a big important startup. That's not, like, going up against Zon-Kuthon the way that protagonists do in books, that's something people do in real life and Civilization would not have picked me to do that in real life."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, the equity distribution seemed pretty reasonable to me and Civilization's not here to have opinions or make horrified faces."
Keltham: "Yeah, I'll just go on being the incredibly impressive person that I am in virtue of nobody here having ever seen better. Sounds like a plan."
"If we ever figure out how to materialize the other Lost Dead into Golarion, please don't hate me for - pretending to be more than I was - because, I did warn you, right now and here, of how it would be, if it went like that."
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham -
If we do that at all it'll be because of you. And - I actually think I'll still like you better."
Keltham: "Well, if that's true, it could only possibly be because of me materializing into a world where that would be true. But we're pretty sure that was going on at least with dropping me on you at the Worldwound, even if nowhere else in all of this. So fine and fair enough, I guess."
Iarwain: Security notifies them that the girls say they're done.
Keltham: He'll head on back. While he does, he'll ask a question.
"Carissa. Am I right that 'girls' is not a particularly respectful form of address for Project Lawful's tier-1 and tier-2 researchers reporting to me?"
Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, a little out of line. Though I've been doing it too. They're just all girls, see, and it's very salient."
Keltham: "Civilization has, like, shorter respectful words to pluralize a flock of brilliant young researchers, female or otherwise. I'm not sure that I want to go around making people say 'researchers' all the time, that's a lot of syllables compared to 'girls'... I don't suppose you have any other title suggestions there?"
Carissa Sevar: Slaves. It's not what she'd suggest in alter Cheliax. "Not especially? You could ask everyone in case anyone thinks of something I haven't."
Keltham: "Going on the language patterns, I'm guessing 'Lawfies' doesn't sound great in Taldane, so, probably not that one. In Baseline you'd address them as 'raht', but that doesn't mesh well with Taldane either..."
Back they are to Breakout Room 4!
Iarwain: (Per a new directive, Security has been copying all the girls continuously on new facts about alterCheliax as Sevar has spoken them to Keltham.)
Ione Sala: Well, at least Ione doesn't need to frantically invent an excuse if Keltham asks why she didn't say anything, since Ione already figured out her excuse on that subject earlier, as soon as her request to warn Keltham got turned down, thereby making that excuse predictably necessary later.
If Ione was still an Asmodean, she'd be asking about whether she got to torture Sevar, still on her standard punishment regimen, about this, but she's not, so she isn't.
Keltham: "So actually even before I ask for your verdict, I should quickly mention, and apologize, for a social error: When I talked about the Conspiracy hypothesis, I was assuming in the back of my mind that you'd know Civilized dath ilani in an Ordinary world, even one like Golarion, would be pretty unlikely to screw up and suddenly decide they were in the Conspiracy world for wild reasons. In other words, I thought anyone in the Ordinary world would know they were safe, and could just say whatever they wanted about that, since, after all, anything they actually do is something that somebody in the Ordinary world would do, and I would figure that out in the limit."
"Carissa has observed to me that people in Golarion may not know and trust to this safety in the same way, and also mentioned that - albeit possibly less in the new Cheliax you grew up in, than the older Cheliax she remembers - accusing people of being in a conspiracy often goes along with demanding their heads. That is not the way that I think about things, though Carissa thought you'd probably seen enough of me to guess that."
"If I made anyone nervous for either reason, I apologize."
"I mention this swiftly and now, just in case you were thinking that I was thinking that only somebody in the Conspiracy would object to their equity allocations or salaries. I tell you now that this is not at all the case."
"Do you need any further time to reconsider given that update?"
Iarwain: There's a chorus of nos. A couple of researchers, the ones more confident in their own acting abilities, allow themselves to look slightly relieved.
Keltham: Anything 'slight' isn't going to make it across the expression-reading gap.
"Your verdict on the general proposal, then?"
lintamande: "It's great and we're going to be rich," Meritxell says. "I always wanted a pet pseudodragon so I might buy one, fair warning."
Keltham: "I'll say it again, don't assume that your slowly vesting share allocations are the same thing as wealth in hand. They're tokens of a plan to become wealthy, a cunning scheme we're hatching together which might not work; those shares are not, yet, wealth whose existence and continued existence you can trust in and make plans based upon. This is a standard and proverbial warning out of Civilization."
"If by rich you just meant your base salaries, that's fine."
lintamande: "Yep, the pseudodragon is three weeks of the pay that's definitely happening. I'm mostly not thinking about the rest."
Keltham: "Then great."
"I'm off to talk to Maillol."
Carissa Sevar: "I misunderstood your proposal for what to say to Keltham and the thing you actually wanted to do was fine and not stupid. I apologize." says Carissa flatly to Ione.
Ione Sala: "My excuse to Keltham will be that I thought maybe the rest of you would not want me to say that on your behalf, and I hadn't then been appointed Nethysian officer in charge of preventing Asmodeans from hurting themselves, so I agonized about it a bit and then didn't say anything."
"I accept your apology on behalf of Lord Nethys, Sevar. Good luck doing the same with Asmodeus."
Carissa Sevar: Heretics are really annoying. That's probably why they're illegal.
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol to Sevar: Keltham wants to know, since I thought a similar new recurring expense a week later wouldn't be a good look, about his advance-requesting capacity to hire up to another eight 200gp/week researchers at similar but nonbonus salaries, though he expects he might end up with 4 more 200/week people and 4 more 100/week people instead. He's also inquiring what if anything I know about Cheliax sending him more job candidates.
Jacint Subirachs: (Subirachs has previously mentioned that she expects to have candidate portfolios ready for Sevar to review with her, arriving with tomorrow morning's mail.)
Carissa Sevar: You should have applicants for him tomorrow; hiring eight would be a big lift for you politically, maybe he can teach us some metalworking or something with immediate self-demonstrating value, which would make it go over easier?
Ferrer Maillol: Keltham nodded along about early-application stuff, says that he needs to work out some sort of interim-contract-meant-to-be-replaced so he can get moving on that, and try to have that contract in place before anyone gets a permanent job offer.
Keltham wants to know how Cheliax is likely to feel about sending him people on one-week tryouts while he's trying to find one thing in his memories that clearly adds value, on 300gp-for-a-week contracts like the last ones, and with probabilistic warnings about the fate of the last set of 11 applicants given their prior Intelligence and Wisdom scores.
Carissa Sevar: That is costly to us if he does it for lots of people since we may end up losing a significant share of our most promising wizards, in wartime, but not costly in a way that can't be compensated for; cheaper if we can tell them up front it's Hell if they don't make it instead of setting up the fortress to accommodate a growing share of people not on the project.
Ferrer Maillol: Looks weirded out. Wants to know how many people he can try out without either results or having to do the Hell thing.
Carissa Sevar: Probably another dozen, maybe two dozen.
Ferrer Maillol: Seems reassured, he expects to be fine with that. Says, something in his memories has got to look quick and impressive.
He's done with me and heading out now.
Ferrer Maillol: No wait, he's back.
Wants to know how he goes about actually buying anything using his salary, since he assumes, maybe wrongly, that it's basically just not safe for him to leave the fortress. Wants to know if his researchers get to leave the fortress, and if he can send along some sort of comms link to poke through magic item shops vicariously. Better yet would be some sort of book with lots of items for sale and prices, that he can order from somewhere, but he'll be pleasantly surprised if that exists here.
Carissa Sevar: Probably not safe for him to leave the fortress given what happened last time. He can scry people who are shopping for him and see everything they're doing, and if all the effort is being gone to to set that up, might as well do it for his girls too. There is not a book of items and prices.
Ferrer Maillol: Keltham is heading out again. Only Nethys knows if he'll actually get to you this time before he thinks of something else.
Keltham: Keltham's back! New salaries confirmed! Tomorrow is your first payday if nothing goes wrong on Maillol's end. Shopping can be done remotely via scries.
How do people feel about taking a break, versus just launching straight into Asmodia's attempt to replace Keltham in his next lecture? Followed shortly after by her deducing everything else Keltham knows about Law from an equally small set of hints, thus replacing his Law lectures entirely and reducing him to the role of a rememberer of particular technology tricks? Which to be clear is worth more than 2% equity if she can pull that off.
lintamande: "We've sort of had a break while you were negotiating," Gregoria says. "Do you need one?"
Keltham: "I'm young, in good health, and queued up a Lesser Restoration now that I actually have a book of cleric spells and know what that is. I'll be fine."
"Let's head to the library, Asmodia, you're up."
Ione Sala: "Wait! You first need to tap everybody with an Owl's Wisdom who hasn't already had one." Some of Ione's worry has been alleviated by Sevar trying to stay on top of things now, but that didn't happen in alterCheliax. "That's Tonia, Meritxell, and Sevar among the survivors, unless they've already had one recently. And Pilar."
lintamande: "I did one last night, no bizarre revelations," says Tonia. "I think it helped with the homework."
Carissa Sevar: "It has been three days for me though admittedly they were eventful days."
lintamande: "I'll do it later," Meritxell says. "There have been a lot of interruptions and I'd like to please learn probability. If I have an existential crisis I'll say 'you were right Ione' and you know how much I'd hate that so you know I think I won't."
Ione Sala: "And Pilar -"
Ione stops herself before saying that Pilar is by far the sanest person in this fortress, including herself and Keltham, and would be the one left alive to clean up the mess if everyone else was driven mad by Void-creatures. That may not be true in alterCheliax.
"Uh, Pilar has it pretty together, in my own opinion, which is why I almost forgot to list her, but if she wants to -"
Pilar : "I also expect I'll be fine waiting to try it slightly later."
Keltham: "To the library, then, where Asmodia will enlighten all here save myself." Keltham heads out first, what with him being the Leader and all that.
Okay Ione was going to say something there, and in a Tropes world, what she didn't say was important. Pilar has sanity powers? Pilar is actually three thousand years old? Pilar shouldn't have any additional weird property that doesn't stem from either her Cayden Cailean stuff or her obligate fetish, but then, on that tropes logic, Asmodia shouldn't have had experienced that event leading to her getting a +6 Wisdom headband. And on non-tropes logic, Ione stopped herself from saying some much more mundane private info like how she's seen Pilar survive a demon attack. Well, anyways.
Asmodia: All right, she's up. She could do this better if she asks for a Cunning and a Splendour first, but - it's not clear if they want Keltham to know the full breadth of what the most enhanced version of Asmodia can do -
No! Wrong question. What does alterAsmodia do here? She tries it the hard way first, before asking for more resources, because she doesn't think she can just plead for another 10 wizards to provide her more Cunning and Splendour as needed, and she's more impressive and valuable if she doesn't need it.
Her students file into the classroom, one true dath ilani among them taking what had been Asmodia's seat; and Asmodia, then, begins to hold forth upon the Law -
Keltham: "Asmodia, you want, and for that matter I want, to ask people how far they think they got on their own on the seven problems, before you tell them your own versions of the answers."
Asmodia: ...right. Um.
How far do people think they got, and to what extent do they think they got - interesting meanings they could talk about, not just formulas?
lintamande: Most of them got the first five, and Gregoria thinks she got six. They... think they get what they mean but only if it's not anything that profound.
Meritxell only got three because she was occupied last night, which she is cheerfully unapologetic about.
Ione Sala: Keltham definitely looks surprised and pleased; Asmodia possibly looks surprised and disappointed not to be that far ahead of everyone else.
"I did have to get a Fox's Cunning to get that far," Ione says. "I'd have seen if anyone had an Owl's Wisdom left to use on top of Cunning if I still couldn't get it. And I think Asmodia was taking a run at hers unenhanced, at first, before, uh, stuff happened. If you're trying to figure out who's smarter than who, then you need to tell us to not use enhancements, or all use the same enhancements, I guess."
(Ione is the main one here who had to guess at her story instead of just living it; the interaction she had with Asmodia didn't occur in alterCheliax. Well, and Sevar, she supposes. And obviously Asmodia.)
Keltham: "Actually, that sounds like a good thing to me, if we can just apply enhancements as needed to stay in sync, instead of relying on Civilization having matched everyone here for expected learning speed on this exact topic. Noted about the effect that has on testing."
"Asmodia, when you're asking somebody else to describe their solution before you describe yours, or in general to give their own opinion before you tell them yours, the usual rule is that tier-2s speak before tier-1s and tier-1s speak before tier-0. I am not actually used to being a tier-0 anything, and people may need to spend a week calling me out on my errors there."
Asmodia: All right then. Terrifically anti-Asmodean, but obvious in its intended purpose; superior intellects can't properly test inferior ones and show them their place if they go around telling their inferiors the true answers.
"I kind of want to get to the profound parts, especially if everyone already got the nonprofound parts," Asmodia says, what with those parts being the ones that are properly impressive in terms of how much further she got than everyone else. "Let's just run through quickly to check nonprofound parts of the first five. Except for #2, surprising claims require surprising evidence, which doesn't even really have a nonprofound part -"
Keltham: "It would have a simple-math part, if I hadn't already shown you that simple-math part by calculating ratios between probabilities-before-evidence, let's call them 'prior probabilities' too long 'priors' for short in Taldane, and ratios between probabilities of observations. If I were making you figure out the whole Law of Probability for yourself, the way you should properly be doing with kids when they grow up, #2 would have been a harder problem than #1 and you probably would have gotten it only a few days later."
Asmodia: That made an unexpected amount of sense. Also, wow, Civilization goes hardcore on its kids. Maybe not in terms of how they get punished for failing, but in terms of how hard the things are that they're expected to do... could these two facts possibly be correlated in some way, Cheliax? Well, not the time.
"Tonia, what'd you get for #1?"
Keltham: Keltham will actually just go re-write the problems while that's going on, for convenience.
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.
lintamande: "Do you want my proof or my explaining what it means?"
Asmodia: "Both, why not."
lintamande: "What does it mean to not know anything. First I said 'not knowing anything is assigning equal weights to each possible future outcome', but that does mean you at least know what the possible outcomes are, so I don't think that's quite it. Then I said knowing things is your negative-two score, which also isn't right because not having any guesses is what not knowing anything is, and you do better in the negative-two game by not having any guesses. And you could say, okay, what does it mean to not have any guesses, can we put that into math. So I tried that.
And what I came up with - with a Fox's Cunning - was, uh, a definition of being surprised: you're surprised by however many twos you lose. So, imagine a predictor that no matter what happens is the same amount of surprised, loses the same amount of twos. The value of consulting that predictor is zero; being the same amount surprised by everything is the same as knowing nothing - and I think actually maybe that's the most satisfying definition of knowing nothing, that the value of consulting you is zero." She puts up an illusion with her notes as she talks; she is talking fast and seems a bit nervous.
(She is not on the light punishment regime, but she doesn't think that's why she's nervous, alter Tonia is just worried she'll get fired if she said something stupid.)
Asmodia: "Mm. Anyone else in tier-2 want to add or argue anything for that, else, anyone in tier-1? I'll save my interpretations for last, when we're through all the problems. And then Keltham goes after all of mine, I think."
Pilar : "I had the notion that - it's pointing at - a form of unLawfulness where people try to get out of being caught at being bad at predicting, by being clever at arguing about it. Let's say there's a guide who claims to be very good at unravelling dungeons, so you take them along on a delve, and you get to a splitting path that can go six different ways, with some clues. One person who's already been past that level knows which one of the six paths leads down to the next level and which five lead into trapped rooms. And they ask the person who claims to be a good guide, which path is correct? And the guide could, if you told them a path, come up with an argument for why it was obviously that path. But if you don't tell them which path, and they come up with six arguments for all six paths, then even if those arguments all sound tremendously intelligent and clever, they obviously don't know anything useful."
"If you ask them for probabilities on the six paths, instead of arguments, you can just score them and that's it, that's how well they did and how much, uh, reward they should get paid. So putting numbers and probabilities on things is Lawful and arguing about them isn't."
lintamande: Gregoria nods. "It's like, imagine everyone around you has thirty points more Splendour than you, how do you believe anything at all they say. And you'd just have to make them predict it in advance."
Peranza: "I got as far as working out that if everything sounded equally appealing, that was the same as assigning equal probability to anything that might happen. I didn't realize we were supposed to keep working on anything once we got past that point."
Ione Sala: "Well, and the probabilities have to sum to 1 or less, is I think the key idea there. You can't say that everything is very probable the way that you can come up with really appealing justifications for each of them."
Asmodia: They'll run through #1, then interpretations of #2, then interpretations of #3...
(Asmodia is a little put out by other people being clever at all, but she's still reasonably sure of her ability to sound more impressive than the sum of all their reasoning, once it's her own turn.)
Carissa Sevar: "Three is, if you can't say what would prove you wrong, you aren't saying anything. If the Church couldn't say 'if in fact practically all people got sorted Good then Asmodeanism wouldn't be true' then it's not saying anything."
lintamande: Are we just. Making up heresies on the spot to win arguments in probability class now. Is that what we're doing.
Gregoria hates all these people.
Ione Sala: "So, I mean, for #4, I think for seeing the meaning, it helps to see how obvious it is? Like, sure the equations say that if P(path 2 ◁ fire level) = P(path 2 ◁ water level), then seeing it was path two that led downlevel doesn't give you any information about the next level's elemental orientation being fire or water. But also, if you didn't have to make a prediction no other theory makes, you could go around saying, 'I'm the best predictor in the world, I predict better than Nemamel, yesterday I put 99.9999% probability on the Sun still being on fire today and today it was.' And everybody else would go, incredible, such a prediction, so much probability on the correct outcome, wow!"
Project Lawful: Pilar.
Remember that time Ione had to deliver a prophecy about an incoming Nidal attack?
It wouldn't have been a good thing for Asmodeus's interests if the Asmodeans had spent a lot of time questioning how that might be a cunning Nethys plot, before acting on it, right?
Pilar : ...what is this about and what are you angling to get me to do without questioning it?
Project Lawful: Actually, Pilar's curse is just telling Pilar to signal Security to start reading her thoughts - they don't usually waste attention on Pilar, since she's loyal and doesn't usually have suggestions or orders for other people - and Pilar's curse doesn't want Pilar to argue about that.
Pilar : ...fine.
Pilar casts Mage Hand under her desk, and taps one of the two Security in class. No more signal than that should be necessary; they've got Arcane Sight and can see whose Hand it is.
Project Lawful: Security, relay the following to Sevar priority verbatim:
In a few minutes, Pilar's curse will make a request that Pilar might otherwise argue with or doubt or spend too much thought questioning, because she's lacking context. Pilar's curse requests that Sevar command Pilar to obey to the best of her ability, without questioning the request, or spending a lot of energy trying to figure out why her curse is asking this.
The suggestion, when it comes, will be that Pilar not hold back her opinions the way she almost always does, and that she tell Keltham very frankly everything that she actually actually feels about something Keltham will say. As Sevar has already seen, it's sometimes possible to make headway with Keltham by speaking truly from your heart, without trying to manipulate him. Nobody else needs to do anything special so long as that part works.
As it happens, this act will serve the interests of Asmodeus, and Cayden Cailean, and also Broom's god.
The context Pilar is missing is about Broom's god, and that you wouldn't expect Pilar's curse to lie about that part, because that would get Cayden Cailean in trouble. Don't try to actually explain about Broom's god right now, that would distract Pilar.
Order Security to stand by to tap Pilar with Eagle's Splendour when Pilar's curse gives the word. It's probably not necessary, Pilar can probably do it anyways, but it might help her a little. Or if nobody on staff has Eagle's Splendour, there's still enough time to emergency-Teleport one of the eighth-circle wizards in from the front lines so they can use a Limited Wish for that. Haha!
Pilar : Pilar's curse isn't actually funny. At all. If something is actually funny you don't need to add 'Haha!' at the end to let other people know it's supposed to be funny. Pilar's curse knows that, right?
Project Lawful: Pilar's curse is wounded. Pilar's curse is the essence of hilarity.
It's just that sometimes Pilar's curse is other things too.
Carissa Sevar: What would the Grand High Priestess do.
Pilar, do it.
Pilar : Acknowledged.
Pilar is incredibly fine with this. Pilar is not asking any further questions inside her own mind even. Her curse submitted the request to Sevar instead of herself, which is a proper and Asmodean way to do things, and her superior told her that it was fine to shut up and obey and not ask questions. Pilar wishes that situation would happen to her a lot more often these days. Pilar wishes her curse would do everything like this.
Project Lawful: Sevar does have anything else to do with her life besides run Pilar's life.
Pilar : Pilar knows that is true but Pilar doesn't have to like it.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa really hopes this is not Cayden Cailean betraying them all - no, she should make predictions. 20% Cayden Cailean betraying them all. ..;.30%.
Asmodia: "Gregoria, you said you thought you got six problems, I assume the sixth one was #6?"
lintamande: "Yeah, and I'm not totally sure I got it right, but it's just, uh, if you can predict your future predictions you could just change to having those now."
Asmodia: "Yeah, that's not exactly right. If you could coherently predict your future predictions they would be your current predictions, would be more exact."
"But if I'm giving my own interpretations, I should probably go more in order..."
Asmodia starts by giving a less incoherent and rambly version of what she said to Sevar one-and-a-half days ago, about Keltham's problem #1.
Keltham: At the point where Asmodia describes how, with the full headband on, she could almost see the thoughts inside herself sort of warping and twisting to try to reach out to other things she believed or observed, and claim credit for having predicted them, even though they wouldn't really have predicted that, in order to hold themselves in place, Keltham starts to look a little worried.
Asmodia: "Did I get that part wrong?"
Keltham: "No, it's just - keep going."
Asmodia: On to #2, then!
"We all know already, because Keltham already showed us, how, if something's only a hundredth as likely as something else, you need to see something that's one hundred times more likely, given that thing, in order to believe it."
"So the thing is - I'm not sure how to say this, it's hard to convey, what I was seeing with the headband on - that's like - the equivalent of logic, but governing the things that people usually argue about. It's, the equivalent of which conclusions follow from which premises, for things that aren't true across all worlds. It's why Keltham complains that our books don't make any sense. The books say, this thing happened, that isn't all that unlikely, and they don't say how likely it is in other worlds or prove it's less likely there, and then the book says, well, therefore you must be in this world. The book he's reading doesn't even put a probability on that - just jumps there - even with the headband off, when I took out a book and tried to read it, I realized the way it must have read to Keltham -"
"You need, depending on how you look at it, two or three pieces of information, to feed into a Lawful reasoning step that goes from observing something, to a probable conclusion about it. You need to know how relatively likely two theories seemed to be, compared to each other, before the evidence - I'm not sure where the very first probabilities come from before there's any evidence at all, but don't tell me yet, Keltham, I want to see if I can get that on my own - and you need to know how much probability both of those theories put, on something you saw. In principle you just have to know, how much more likely the sight is, in one case, than in the other, but I don't see how you'd often end up knowing the ratio without knowing the pieces -"
"When I was hoping I could calm down after taking off the artifact headband, I took a random history book in our new library, and flipped through until I got somewhere interesting at all. It was about the assassination of the Prefect of Tandak fifty years ago. The author argued that the assassin probably came from Whitemarch because of which gate they'd used to enter the city, which is the gate you'd use if you arrived at a harbor that ships from Whitemarch use, and the author didn't say anything about whether any other prefectures also sent ships to that harbor or who else used that gate. It was like that thought hadn't occurred to them at all. Were they trying to fool the reader? Then that sure only works to fool very stupid and unLawful readers, doesn't it? Was it put out by a government office in Taldor telling people what they're supposed to think? Maybe, but even then, you'd think - they should at least bother to lie about that, about no other prefectures sending ships to that harbor - if you don't include the probabilities of other prefectures sending ships to that harbor, it's like - you're not even bothering to argue, you might as well print the whole chapter just saying 'Whitemarch did it' and it would say the same thing -"
"Nothing we've thought in Golarion up until this point has been remotely Lawful. We've been talking gibberish from the standpoint of any Lawful outsiders trying to listen to anything we say."
"And it's not just about the big things that are in history books, it's like - looking into the dining hall to see the food there - it would look and smell the same with a Major Illusion, the reason you believe you're actually going to find food there, is because how unlikely it is that anybody would bother to cast Major Illusion on the dining hall, how normal it is for there to be food there, it's not that the sight and smell of food is overpowering evidence that there's no illusion, it's no evidence at all against the illusion, it's just that the illusion was very unlikely to start and stays just as unlikely after you see the evidence."
"With the artifact headband on I could see it, there was like - I could see the structure of the Law overlaid on things, not always, not constantly, because I had no practice, but when I considered any one step of reasoning I could see it there - I could see how the Law was supposed to work, and that my own thoughts weren't fitting into the framework, and I didn't have enough time to correct them all, but I could see how everything I was thinking was completely wrong in the light of that -"
Keltham: "Asmodia. Stop."
Asmodia: "Um... I don't think I'm about to hurt myself any further, I'm not as smart now as I was when I had the artifact headband -"
Keltham: "What you're describing - the Law overlying everything, your own thoughts constantly being held up to that standard and being found wanting, bad, all wrong everywhere, not just on special important occasions when you need to figure out something that matters hugely, but constantly in everyday life - isn't the standard way dath ilani kids are advised to think about things. It's the start of a path that people are advised to think about very carefully, and warned about what potentially happens along it, before they decide to actually go there. The usual rule in dath ilan is that you don't do it because it seems like a vaguely good idea, you do it because you find that you just can't be any other way and still hold yourself together."
"What you're describing isn't - the form of the Law itself, of which there's only one - but a way that people can relate to that Law, of which there are several - and the relationship you're describing isn't one that works for everyone. It's famously one that only works well or healthily for relatively few people."
"The dath ilani call them Keepers."
lintamande: Meritxell is so murderously jealous.
Carissa Sevar: Probability that Asmodia betrays them. ....Five percent? She has a lot more to lose and less to gain by it than Cayden Cailean. But, well, a Keeper wouldn't participate in this. She's not sure what they'd do instead. Die, she guesses; that's the only real alternative. And Asmodia doesn't even mind dying, if she gets to stop existing after that.
If Asmodia saw an opportunity to sell Keltham to Osirion for the fanciest headband Nefreti Clepati could make, she would.
That's a depressing line of thought so instead she worries about Cayden Cailean. It seems appropriate to worry about something you've just assessed as having a 30 percent chance of causing you and everyone you know to die horribly. She's not even sure she made the call the Grand High Priestess would have; obviously the process the Grand High Priestess uses is something more complicated than 'when gods offer you trades that they claim are mutually beneficial, take them'. Cayden is opposed to them. He says this won't work against them, that He won't use Pilar against them, but he's Chaotic, he could lie.
She's so confused about what Cayden wants. It all seemed so clear, when she was trying to talk the girls into not being scared of Hell; that Asmodeus's victory was so obvious that unlikely gods were backing him. But it doesn't - she doesn't -
The alternative set of theories is that Cayden thinks that Asmodeus will lose and Chaotic Good will triumph. And it's kind of easy to think of ways that might be so.
This failed at cheering her up or distracting her from Asmodia's impending betrayal/surprisingly good lecture at all.
Carissa Sevar: "Do you think - is it just Wisdom, that makes people Keepers, would lots more of them be if they got high-end headbands?"
Keltham: "The problem is - I'm guessing, because this is something we all didn't spend a lot of time thinking about for obvious reasons - is that the Keeper structures and styles of thinking are maybe not that hard to invent, they are just hard to live with and survive."
"I'm now finding it a lot more plausible that yes, in fact, Asmodia did manage to rewire her brain using the artifact headband and now requires a +6 Wisdom headband in order to function, because that is basically roughly the sort of thing you might expect to be true, given the huge numbers of warning signs posted all over the Keepers and everything to do with them, not that we went around asking."
lintamande: "Should we - not be using Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom to do our homework," says Gregoria.
Asmodia: Maybe Gregoria was very sure that alterGregoria would say that but it's still fucking inconvenient what with Asmodia not actually having brain damage. Fuck her life, this is the other reason why you don't lie to Keltham.
...probably. She probably doesn't have brain damage. She thought she was fine after Security lit her hand on fire.
No, she definitely doesn't have brain damage. Keltham didn't predict this in advance or he would have warned people about it. Keltham believes this because he's acting on false information.
Keltham: "That'd be a very obvious precaution but if Asmodia spontaneously starts talking like a Keeper as soon as she's augmented far enough that has a lot of worrying implications, none of which I've thought through at this point."
Project Lawful: Pilar, speak out as soon as Keltham says something that really horrifies you, and remember, even if he's teacher in this classroom he doesn't know anything about Asmodeus and nobody except Aspexia is allowed to correct you in matters of faith. Don't literally tell him about Hell, but aside from that worry less about hiding your Conspiracy than you usually would.
This is going to take more force of will than anything you've done before, not so much to persuade Keltham, which cannot be done by being forceful at him, but for you to actually say what you feel, to be truthful at him.
Security, tap Pilar with Splendour now.
Asmodia: "What sort of worrying implications are we talking about here?" alterAsmodia says, sounding a bit nervous.
Real-Asmodia is trying to figure out exactly how inconvenient it is if they have to do their augmentations in secret, how much damage that potentially does to their illusion of the Ordinary, and is not liking the answer. She has to talk Keltham out of this, somehow, it's just why would alterAsmodia do that -
Keltham: "If you started generating Keeper thinking spontaneously - and if that wasn't true, now would be a great time to admit it and tell me you had some other good reason for not telling me earlier, which is a lot easier to say to dath ilani than I think Golarion people may realize - then the obvious thought is that trying-to-be-a-Keeper is in some sense the default thing, the natural way people end up relating to Law if not shaped otherwise, but one that makes most people who try it fall apart inside. In which case my dath ilani education was very carefully crafted not to turn me into a Keeper. And I got the education that's tuned to turn people only as smart as I am into not-a-Keeper. And when I amped up my Owl's Wisdom I started to see past it."
"I wouldn't even be saying this out loud except, first of all, basic containment on the dangerous-information has already been disrupted, second, I am not in fact competent to emit dath ilani education that doesn't turn people into damaged not-actually-Keepers and everyone here has already been exposed."
"But since in Golarion you also have no training in not thinking about things you'd rather not think about, I suggest, to whoever with authority is reading this transcript, putting all transcripts of today's lectures especially under high Security classification, and attach a warning especially to people with artifact-grade headbands that looking at today's transcripts comes with a risk of possible brain damage. If you don't have the authority to do that, immediately escalate this issue to somebody who does."
"All of this is literally my thinking in the first minute and pending my spending longer thinking on this. I'm being blindsided here."