Details

Yaisa is delighted, mostly too delighted to think in much detail about how much she's in trouble for having apparently quoted Keltham the wrong price. When she does happen to think about it she thinks determinedly that this is, in fact, worth five silver, that this is worth more than that, that once you decide you're willing to pay for sex this is obviously the thing you should pay for, the experience of endless pleasure and torment at the hands of an alien who is clearly realizing for the first time that this is something he can have. She does not complain that she's not getting what she paid for.

Explicit sexual content.

Eventually, of course, he flies too close to the sun and it's clear that Yaisa is starting to come, so Keltham hurts her harder and comes with her.

That was 

and also 

given how much focus it required.  It takes an actual if minor effort for Keltham to stay active long enough to touch Yaisa's cuffs and speak the release words, before he half-collapses onto the cuddleroom bed beside her.

Part of his brain suggests that Carissa is in the Conspiracy and steered him to Yaisa who was brought in because she's a much better faker than Carissa.  Keltham tells his brain to take a rest, if there's actually a Conspiracy he's not going to figure it out during sex where everybody appears to be having an uncomplicated good time.  It does remind Keltham to cast the Glimpse of Beyond spell he got for today, he'd

to do that just

coming inside her but he got distracted.

Yaisa has not been replaced by somebody else he could impregnate, who hadn't signed the contract; or, if she was, they replaced her really quickly after that, and Keltham

he maintained physical contact with her the whole time.

Just to be sure again, Keltham reaches out his hand and traces over Yaisa's cheeks, nose, eyebrows, making sure the facial features he sees are not illusionary, in case Glimpse of Beyond only catches transformations and not illusions.  It is also a lover's caress.  No reason you can't have both at once.

lintamande: "You're a lot of fun," Yaisa murmurs tiredly, and caresses him back. "Are you - looking for extradimensional invaders? Now? I guess it'd be smart of them to attack while we're tired?"

Keltham: He wasn't particularly trying to hide the Glimpse of Beyond cast from Yaisa, of course; that would be futile with her arcane sight.

"Checking you hadn't been replaced with a much more experienced actress, or the one-in-a-billion person on this planet of actually a trillion people who would enjoy that."

"On a totally different note, is this when I find out that you actually have some incredibly fascinating backstory or maybe that you've got some huge problem I need to solve?"

lintamande: "- because I was so perfect and sexy that it is hard to believe I'm just a student your own age?" asks Yaisa, sounding incredibly pleased about this. "Uh, I don't think I have any huge problems you need to solve? Or an interesting backstory? I do have this boyfriend who wants me to be able to figure out on the fly what a reasonable price for really great sex is as a share of my daily income which just quintupled, maybe you could go fight him or something."

Keltham: "Oh, good.  Because you matched one of my previously undiscovered sexual needs perfectly enough that, if you don't have anything at all unusual going on with you, it's ten-to-one evidence against the whole 'EroLARP' Hypothesis.  And I do not actually want to be inside one of those."

He feels a strong impulse to just buy Yaisa out from her current job, right there on the bed where she lies beside him, but that is not an impulse buying decision.

It totally has an impulsive-purchase subset though!  "Tomorrow morning while you're under the Fairness, if you're okay with it, I'd like to also ask you for a cheerful price on your next week for sex work.  Just buy it all out from you and have you do whatever I want during those days, if I get around to wanting anything, or ordering you to do anything fun, and otherwise you can study wizardry or do whatever else you would've done.  Because I am now rich, and can possibly afford nice things like hiring a full-time sex worker just to be around me being on call."

"To be clear, there's no rule saying you actually have to accept whatever price you name under the Fairness spell, you're allowed to try negotiating upwards from that, but I might make you a probabilistic final offer about it."

lintamande: "I don't think you're in an 'EroLARP'," Yaisa says. "I think you have a bunch of pretty girls trying to seduce you for totally normal reasons. And you'll have more once I tell everyone you're really good in bed." 

And then she wiggles happily. "I'll - think about my price for that."

Keltham: "Because of course you liking all of that is totally normal and several other girls here will like it too, they just won't be able to even try to name prices for anything going in either direction."

lintamande: "They'll probably try if you tell them they have to or they won't get to sleep with you at all," says Yaisa, ignoring the first part of that because alter Yaisa hasn't specifically picked up on Keltham's hypothesis that masochists are fake. (Why does he even have that hypothesis.)

Keltham: "It'll be fine.  I can do it with them, I think, now that I've done it with you first."

"My brain's a little tired from it, though.  Quiet snuggles?"

lintamande: "Mmmm," says Yaisa, and shuts up, and cuddles Keltham, and prepares her dissertation in defense of her not knowing how much to charge Keltham.

Keltham: Keltham snuggles quietly.  It's actually just dawning on him that this is a lot of evidence that - why doesn't his System 1 believe it's a lot of evidence that masochists are real?  Because his System 1 was expecting the Conspiracy to have faked this successfully, by the time he got around to actually checking it this much later?  Clearly so, which is why his System 1 doesn't want to update and claims this is just what was already predicted.

Keltham can't back his brain on this!  It didn't have to be that way, probabilistically speaking, there could've been some weird obstacle to Yaisa enjoying herself, Carissa could have said they needed to import a masochist from offsite instead of pointing to one of the existing students, Carissa could have claimed masochists were rarer, Carissa could have not suggested this particular evidence.

The Conspiracy world where masochists don't exist is now smaller and narrower, and has more of its probability mass concentrated into modes where the Conspiracy's capabilities are high enough that Yaisa doesn't really exist or was reprogrammed to actually be a masochist.  Either way she's not a threatened innocent whom Keltham is hurting.

This is just like the thing where he forgot why he originally started to suspect a hidden cleric, that the original evidence was that the attack's timing suggested eyes on Ione but not on Keltham, and he worried that the hidden cleric was Carissa.  There's the evolutionary logic that says masochists shouldn't particularly exist, sure, but probably a lot of the real reason his brain became worried was that Carissa wasn't able to go above low arousal with him.  Her having just come off seven years of emergency response fighting demons is a plausible reason for her having difficulty relaxing.  Fine, the Conspiracy had somewhat more ability to select Yaisa before bringing the twelve researcher-candidates to meet Keltham in the villa library, but if the Conspiracy can find masochists at all it means masochists exist, if the Conspiracy can make masochists they could have applied the same procedure to Carissa.  If they can find or produce Yaisa, why have Carissa merely pretend to be the same thing and then get caught.  They’re not pretending everyone is a masochist, Meritxell isn’t.

There are still stories where it's all fake and masochists don't exist but they're now less plausible and his brain needs to recognize that the flaming probability went down okay.  Literally update at all, here.  The probability of masochists being fake did not just go up, it did not just stay the same, therefore it went down.

If his System 1 wants to claim that it already mostly expected this result, then it should admit that it earlier narrowed down the set of possibilities to the Conspiracy either having the power to make Yaisas, in which case why not remake Carissa, or Yaisa was already real, in which case why have Carissa merely pretend to be the same way.  Keltham is repeating himself here, yes, but he's repeating himself because if his System 1 already expected this result, it needs to respect the probable reason why that result would be expected, or else reveal that it secretly suspects some different story.

...his brain yields.  A little.  Grudgingly.

...Keltham's deliberative process will take it, he guesses.

In time, feeling a little awkward about it because Civilization has protocols for dates ending and Yaisa knows none of them, Keltham tells Yaisa that he'll see her tomorrow.

Project Lawful: (Pilar's curse has already submitted an after-action report noting that Yaisa didn't follow her instructions exactly and offered an amount that Keltham thought was obviously too high, which nearly caused a disaster, but Keltham figured out a recovery before he got suspicious.  Today all the Asmodeans have learned a heartwarming lesson about the importance of precise obedience!  Which, for obvious reasons of Chaotic Goodness, is not going to involve Yaisa getting tortured.  Pilar's curse shouldn't even have needed to spell that out.  It'll turn out fine after Yaisa answers under Fairness.)

Aspexia Rugatonn: Also in other business, Rugatonn's brief commentary on Asmodia's analysis of tropes has now arrived with the return-Teleported evening mail.  Rugatonn notes that this general scenario seems to her to imply that it would be possible to bargain with the tropes by trying to bring about events that they would favor, but Asmodia is correct that this should be left to the Most High, who in turn is probably going to leave it up to Asmodeus, who is a lot better placed to do this sort of thing than Rugatonn.

They should, indeed, be wary of disrupting tropes, but this wariness should be restricted to the realm of not deliberately trying to do that for the sake of doing that; rather than treading carefully around anything that might be a trope, and foregoing their own interests from fear of that.  The tropes so far seem to have had little trouble manifesting themselves without any such caution, and indeed, often manifested in the face of efforts to avert them.  Keltham didn't seem to think it was dangerous to try to avert tropes out of his own interest; if anything he seemed to behave like the tropes expected it of him.

Rugatonn is pleased that Asmodia stopped when she could go no further, instead of making up a wrong answer; that she tried to simplify her thoughts sometimes, and not just complicate them; that she knew when it was time to leave the remaining decision to the Most High, but reasoned as far as she could herself before deciding so.

(Aspexia is starting to feel a strange feeling of hope that Asmodia is real.)

Carissa Sevar: "You're still on the low-punishment regime though I cannot in your case say it's been salutary."

           "I think you're jealous," says Yaisa.

"See, that's the sort of thing that makes me say I don't think the low-punishment regime has been salutary. I am not jealous. I am concerned that your inability to follow orders was nearly very dangerous to us, and I hope that in the future you will follow orders, precisely."

           "I still don't have the slightest idea what number I should have named. I don't even know how to think about it. I have a ton of money, sure, I'd in fact give him a gold to have an incredible evening, why not? I'm not going around comparison shopping because I don't want to try that with random losers who'll be bad at it!"

"Yaisa, do you have the capacity to conduct yourself as a Worldwound-cleared soldier which you're choosing not to exercise for your own reasons, or do you in fact not possess it but you got cleared anyway by fucking somebody."

         "I can display no personality and obey orders, sir."

"It's appreciated. So, you don't have a felt sense of how much money really good sex is worth to you, since you don't buy sex, and would tend to find the fact you had to pay for it to be a negative indicator about how good it'd be. Yes?"

        "Yes."

"How much of a discount would you be inclined to give Keltham, on his price to have you for a week or a year, if you knew he'd do that."

        " - depends what I could get away with? The entire concept of a fair price is just - I'm glad it's not Asmodean. I don't like it."

"So you'd quote Keltham the exact same number as you'd quote alt-Keltham who won't do that specific thing?"

      "In both cases I'd be trying to come up with the highest number they wouldn't turn down, not the - number that's fairest."

"Say that you could either have sex like that with Keltham, or have normal sex with him and also get a gold piece."

      "Sex like that."

"Say that you could either have sex like that with Keltham, or have normal sex with him and also get ten gold pieces."

      "Sex like that."

" - really?"

      "It was really great sex! And I have a lot of money right now."

"Aren't you saving for - magic items, fancy clothes, beauty treatments -"

     " - yeah but I'm not in a hurry about saving for those things. If the project doesn't turn into a disaster I'll get them all sooner or later and if it does I'll get executed."

Asmodia: "I think I'm genuinely fascinated by how much her thought processes just do not want to be guided into Lawful patterns.  My mind is trying to convince me that alterYaisa will claim all of this stuff out loud to Keltham tomorrow morning, where Keltham can try to argue her out of it, and we can overhear how he does.  I'm not even sure my mind is wrong about that."

Carissa Sevar: "We do have Cayden Cailean's assurance that it'll turn out fine," says Carissa in the tone of one who puts little weight on Cayden Cailean's assurance that it'll turn out fine. 

     "Alter Yaisa would absolutely be confused about this too," says Yaisa. 

"Silence for two minutes while I try to think of a better option."

If someone has to argue Yaisa out of this she'd really rather it be Keltham. Obviously she's going to need to learn, if Yaisa's going to be a devil eventually, but - it'd be interesting if it can in fact be done just through argument. 

Asmodia: Asmodia silently thinks that she is going to want to check that with Snack Service, before assuming that Snack Service meant "it'll turn out fine no matter what you do after trying to rely on this guarantee" as opposed to "it'll turn out fine if you don't do anything dumb".

Carissa Sevar: This has crossed Carissa's mind too. "Okay, someone ask Snack Service if it's okay for Yaisa to explain all her inability to produce a Lawful ordering of her preferences to Keltham and see what he does about it. If it is, then we go with that. If it's not, we need to know now so we can call in another petrification. I'd prefer not to, though, if it can be avoided."

Project Lawful: Things won't go wrong between Yaisa and Keltham that morning - from the standpoint of Asmodeus's interests, that is - so long as Yaisa is honest in everything she says, and doesn't pretend to feel differently about anything than she actually feels.  She'll leave things out, obviously; but if she says something at all, it shouldn't be a lie; if she shows an emotion at all, it should be what she really feels.

Carissa Sevar: "Are you sure that you can do that."

        "Yes."

"Fine. We'll go with that."

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Morning

Keltham: Keltham listens to Yaisa's presentation of how much she doesn't actually know any way to arrive at the fair value with the fascinated look of somebody who's suddenly, actually appreciating that huge amounts of childhood training he went through were there for an important reason and accomplished anything.

Keltham says that he will, if you ask him about any price that isn't a large fraction of his overall wealth and reliable expected future income, give the same answer to 'how much would you pay to get this extra' and 'how much additional payment would you forgo to get this extra' and 'how much would you pay to avoid losing this' and 'how much additional payment would you demand if you were losing this'.  Because, like, if you didn't, your trade patterns would go in exploitable circles, depending on how much money you had and how people asked you various questions.

It leads to really large differences that matter in everyday financial life, so everybody, not just Keepers, trains until the asymmetries between financial gains and financial losses mostly go away.  If you have time to think, you can just consider all four questions and average the result, for example, to guarantee that you'll give the same answer no matter the form of the question.

There's all sorts of mental exercises for figuring out where to start pricing things, if you don't know where to start!  Find something that seems about equally valuable to you, equally exciting or happiness-making to you, which already has a legible price, and ask, not how much you pay for that, but how much you would pay for that.

Some amount of words later, he'll get around to asking Yaisa her Fair price for Keltham doing what he did last night, and her Fair cheerful price to be his for a week, including his control of certain matters.  Well, Keltham will ask that after he's quickly, before the spell wears off, explained to Yaisa the notion of the least price that makes her feel positively cheerful about the transaction, and not just that the transaction was fair - hopefully this spell enables that part too, but if the spell-price doesn't sound cheerful to her, she should say so, obviously.

lintamande: Yaisa is worried that Cheliax is going to start teaching that rule and then, look, more math. She does not say that. She does say 'last night was great and I would pass up ten gold to be sure I got to experience it once, but if it were going to be a regular thing it'd probably be more like the difference between being happy with two gold per day and being happy with three gold per day to be yours full time. ...plus healing if it's needed and if it gets to the point where Regenerate is needed I might want to renegotiate prices."

Keltham: Keltham finds, rather to his surprise, that he's choked up and can't actually answer that in words.

Nobody's ever told him that they enjoyed sex from him that much.  Ever.  Not even close.  But it makes sense if he imagines that, first of all, everything you can in Civilization pay to learn how to do using careful biofeedback-based training would, in fact, be an elite sex worker service or maybe flatly not exist in Golarion.  And, second, that masochists do exist there, and people who don't want to be in control, who want things to happen to them without them having to be in control, who want others to be powerful over them in the way that Keltham enjoyed being powerful over Yaisa, that he is sent now by higher forces to an impossible world in which impossible complements to his own sexuality exist and are common enough to be unremarkable -

He can't talk, so he just folds Yaisa into a hug.

lintamande: - hug. "Is that - did the spell work right?"

Keltham: When he can speak again, Keltham will tell Yaisa that she gets twenty-five gold for the week, slightly more than three and a half gold per day; and how often Keltham feels like doing that to her, will be up to him.  But she won't have to miss any payments for it, when it happens, because it is also something he'd pay her for, if that was how it went.

He does still expect the five silver from her, of course.  (There is a ritual and a sacredness to these things, people should not be led astray into thinking that perhaps some offered price will be refused as payment later, and Yaisa is the one who offered to pay.)

...he's sorry for questioning her about the price, last night.  He, he just - it was hard for him to imagine that it was really something she wanted that much.  He's sorry.

lintamande: "A - difference I've noticed, between dath ilan and Cheliax, is that in Cheliax if someone offers what sounds like a good deal, you - take it. Maybe tell them later they should drive a harder bargain next time. And you could think that's because we're - not as Good - and that might be a bit of it - but - we're more different from one another, we've got more kinds of people, it's easier to be wrong, when you think you know better than someone else what's good for them.

Anyway." She hands him the five silver. 

Keltham: "Pleasure doing business with you."  He accepts the money.

...and then of course immediately thinks -

"Try to answer this one quickly, though, just let the Division of Gains spell do the work for you, if it can.  What would've been a fair price for the service you originally thought you were purchasing, that was just about me using my own focus to figure out how much pain was arousing you instead of making you describe it, not taking into account the thing I did after that?"

lintamande: " - I mean I thought you might do something like that? Like - the point of it being your job while I don't have to do any work is that things like that will get to happen? I'm still not good at this prices thing but - I was sort of paying to find out whether something really great like that would happen, because it'd be worth passing up 10 gold for the one off and a gold each time if it did?"

Keltham: "You are right and I was wrong, I wasn't thinking about the value-of-information there from your perspective."

"I still want to know, because I am curious and my mind will continue nagging me about it forever otherwise, what would've been the value of just that one service - the one I foolishly thought you were asking for in isolation."

"I'll pay you a silver for the answer."

lintamande: "Probably it'd change how much I wanted to charge you by a couple silver, if it was just that."

Keltham: "You're not getting any money back, because you're the one who priced the service and you knew what you were buying better than I did."

He hands her a silver.

"Are you okay with - occasional truthspells only about whether you really liked something and whether you're really doing okay, not so much because I don't trust you, as because part of my brain is living in terror of what might be true and I am trying to be gentle with that part of me?"  This, too, should be asked while the Fairness is still up.

lintamande: "I'm fine with that. If they get too often or if you can't resist asking weird tricky questions then I might eventually charge you extra."

Keltham: Keltham escorts Yaisa then to his bedroom, to get 25 gold if she's still amenable to that arrangement after Fairness wears off.

And to the cuddleroom shortly afterwards.

He is, in fact, feeling pretty darned happy about several things right now.  Being able to hire a full-time sex worker with 1/20 of his nonvolatile income is the least of it.

Brief NSFW content

Yaisa, on Keltham's plan, will be treated to her new favorite activity, involving pleasure and pain and her not coming for a while.  Except that, unless Keltham has an accident again, she's not going to get to come during, or afterwards, and not for a while.  During this trial arrangement he should obviously make Yaisa's life about as difficult as it might get during any longer arrangement than that.  Obviously.

Part of himself objects that this is too Evil.  The rest of Keltham is feeling pretty unified about ignoring this voice and proceeding anyways.  'Be capable of ever listening to what people claim is okay' is something he's been telling himself a lot lately.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Late Morning

Keltham: In his morning lecture, Keltham makes a further run at Utility, called also Probable Utility or Expected Utility because the notion of a quantitative utility is meaningless without probabilities to multiply those utilities by.  If you were working only with certainties, the ordering on your preferences would be all that existed; the notion of comparable intervals of wantingness is only useful when you can take fractions of outcomes and want about those.

Value-of-information is an example of one concept that exists under Probable Utility, hopefully simple in an intuitive sense, but pretty important in practice.  Keltham ran into that not long ago when a slightly more Civilized person of Cheliax offered to pay him to do something, Keltham thought that price sounded much too high and didn't have any Fair Pricing spells left and wrongly questioned her choice, and Keltham had forgotten to take into account that what he was trying would be a new experiment whose outcome would give her information relevant to her future choices, and let her make those choices better.

Value-of-information isn't quite as trivial as it might sound, as a matter of Law, because what you're actually doing is calculating the effect of this decision on your own future decisions, not because it modifies what you want or forces your future self to make a particular decision, but because your future self will then have more information and that is something your present self knows.  It is a kind of extrinsic curiosity, you might call it, that would appear in the calculations of ideal-agents who never felt curious about anything.

Also in that interaction, Keltham asked her the next morning under Fairness what would have been the fair price for the service Keltham thought she was trying to buy, if it had existed in isolation and not been informative, because he wanted to know if he'd also been wrong to question even the price he'd thought she was offering.  Keltham paid her a silver for that information, not because he desperately needed that information or expected to make at least one silver from using it in the future, but just because his brain would've kept bugging him about it otherwise.

In reasoning like that, in feeling curious, in putting a value on information that you might not even vaguely expect to need as much as you offered to pay, in buying information where you predictably won't make a profit, is a person being unLawful?  Had Keltham aspired to be improving his coherence and Lawfulness, on this occasion, should he have tried to calculate the real-life importance of knowing this information?  Including, maybe, its value for Keltham calibrating his judgment of similar prices in Cheliax, or the prospect that some use for the info would come up that Keltham just hadn't foreseen - it doesn't have to be a shortsighted or blind calculation, when you ask about the value of learning.  But if that calculation would have shown the information's expected future profit at less than a silver, was Keltham acting unLawfully in buying it for a silver?

It won't be a terrible judgment on him, if they say yes.  Keltham knows he's not a Keeper.  The question he's posing is whether they think this is something a Keeper would ever do.  Close your eyes, come to a judgment about that, raise your hand to a corresponding height; then open your eyes, and argue.  Tier-2s speak first if more than one person wants to speak at a time.

lintamande: "I think the gods don't do it," Gregoria says. "Don't seek out information that they are committed to not acting on in any way, that is. Because you're expending resources to get something that can't bring about any of your goals. But if you just valued knowing things for its own sake - like Zon-Kuthon, but for knowledge not torture - then you're not wrong, like we talked about yesterday."

Keltham: "I guess that answer wasn't as much of a puzzle as I thought it would be, not that there's anything wrong about that.  Yep, I have both extrinsic curiosity from thinking about what I can do with information to achieve my other values, and also intrinsic curiosity from being human."

"There's no god of curiosity, or whose list of things includes curiosity?  Nethys - I guess could already have found out everything he's curious about that he can reasonably find out ever or by expending any further effort in the short term.  I would expect the ex-human gods to have retained their curiosity from having started out human, though?  Cayden Cailean, Nethys, Norgorber, Iomedae... I'm not recalling the full list but it had more."

lintamande: "They might but they haven't specifically told anyone so, I don't think?" says Gregoria. 

Carissa Sevar: "I suspect Iomedae hasn't, She went really hard on - becoming just Lawful Good without any distracting not-Lawful-Good things about Her. I would predict Norgorber is curious about things but I don't know how anyone would know."

Ione Sala: Does anyone want to stop Ione from voicing her guess about Nethys having curiosity and clericing curious people, pretending to speak out of the conventional Nethys theology that alterIone would obviously be thoroughly familiar with since those books wouldn't be banned in alterCheliax?

Before Keltham, like, asks her.

Carissa Sevar: Go ahead.

Ione Sala: "Nethys clerics curious people, and while He can't talk to us directly at all, it's conventional Nethysian theology that He possesses curiosity as an individual goal for himself and not just as a divine concern.  I'd be shocked if He wasn't curious about events here in particular takaral.  Just because He's seen everything that's already happened doesn't mean He can predict exactly how it will play out, and there are strange factors that hover at the edge even of His perception, far beyond what other gods have ever begun to ravel."

Keltham: Is anybody else going to ask Ione how she knows that last part, if Nethys has zero comms capacity?  No?  Keltham won't ask either, then.

...Keltham continues to try various angles on Probable Utility.

Suppose there's a switch which controls whether you get a cherry (for certain), or a banana with 10% probability.  Let's say the switch starts out set to Banana, and somebody says, "Well, I'd probably like a banana more than ten times as much as I like a single cherry, but also I really don't like uncertainty and would rather know for sure I get the cherry."  So they pay a hundredth of a copper to flip the switch from Banana to Cherry.

Now let's say that we first flip a coin, and if it comes up Queen, you get nothing no matter what the switch says.  Imagine that same person seeing a switch set to Cherry, who says, "Well, I'd probably like a banana more than ten times as much as I like a single cherry, and both outcomes are uncertain, so I'd rather have 5% probability of a banana than 50% probability of a cherry."  They pay a hundredth of a copper to flip from Cherry to Banana.  Then the coin is actually spun, and comes up Text.  Suddenly the person says, "Oh, wait, now I've changed my mind, I'd rather have 100% one cherry than 10% one banana," and they pay you another hundredth of a copper to flip the switch back.

Conversely, if the coin comes up Queen, so you get nothing either way, you don't particularly benefit from the switch being set to Banana.  So the person who pays to switch from Cherry to Banana is just making a pure mistake; either they won't care how the switch is set, later, or they'll predictably pay to switch it back.

You can even imagine - if you want to be a troll about it - offering an agent like that the ability to force and constrain their future self's decision.  When they first see the switch on Cherry, they pay a hundredth copper to send it from 50% of a cherry to 5% of a banana.  Then you point out that their future self will just throw it back, if the coin comes up Text, so you charge them another hundredth copper to weld the switch in place.  Then you spin the coin and it comes up Text, and the agent is all like 'Curse my past self for constraining me so!'

This, needless to say, is not Lawful, not a thing that is supposed to happen to ideal agents, or Keepers.  It is a fragment of Law indeed that an agent should never pay a thousandth of a copper to constrain the choices of its future self, or rather, the Law is derived in part from asking how agents could conduct themselves so that this never happened to them.

Now ordinary human beings even of Civilization do not come close to this kind of constancy over time.  But even regular dath ilani would be alarmed if you showed they were expending resources fighting their own future selves about anything large or important.  Such would be a good time to ask one of the most fundamental questions according to that proverb out of dath ilan:  "How about if I did Something-Else-Which-Was-Not-That?"

Carissa Sevar: "Does that count, like, 'for some reason I have to talk to the person with Splendour 40, I'm going to make sure that afterwards I am dragged over to a devil who can talk me out of anything bad they did to my head'?"

Keltham: "Our adversaries have Splendour 40 now.  Lovely."

"I'd say that doesn't reveal a defect of your present Lawfulness, it reflects - something that might forcibly mind-control you away from whatever coherence you currently have between past and future selves?  It's not something you can fix by an act of will, maybe there's something you could do if you're already a sixth-rank Keeper but you're not.  So the thing you do which is Not That is in fact to make sure you get involuntarily dragged over to the devil afterwards."

"Though there'd be ethical questions there, about whether the new person who's created as a result of talking to the 40-Splendour Brainwasher has their own right to live the way they now desire, that is violated if a devil brainwashes you back into existence again.  Some out of dath ilan would say that person is being wronged by you, because you set things up for them to be made so, and then unmade.  Yet many even of those would also say, well, if you gotta do it at all, that's still the way to do it, sorry."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn't know what Keltham means when he starts going on about rights and stuff but she isn't sure alter Carissa would be similarly uncertain. She nods.

Keltham: Suppose you have to choose between, on the one hand, a P1 probability of C happening vs. a (1 - P1) probability of some baseline B happening, like a 90% probability of getting a Cherry, say; or on the other hand, a P2 probability of D happening vs. (1 - P2) of B, like a 80% probability of getting a Date.  We could say that Preference(0.9, Cherry, Baseline) is how much you desire that gamble over those two outcomes; and Preference(0.8, Date, Baseline) is how much you want the other.  If a switch controls which of those two you get, then the gamble to which you attach the higher Preference is the one you'll want the switch to be thrown for.

Now suppose that, in the composition of Events as pathways through Time, there is interposed some new event with probability P3 that determines whether the switch is run at all; if not, the outcome is Baseline.

The condition for not throwing the switch and then throwing it back, is that if Preference(0.9, Cherry, Baseline) > Preference(0.8, Date, Baseline), then Preference(0.9*P3, Cherry, Baseline) > Preference(0.8*P3, Date, Baseline), likewise if the value is equal, or lesser.  Combine this with simpler ideas like "If you prefer 100% of one thing to 100% of another, you should prefer higher probabilities of getting that thing rather than the other, in gambles between them" and you can pretty thoroughly spotlight the Law of Probable Utility showing that Preference() must compound probabilities with utilities the same way that probabilities compound with each other.  So, yes, multiplication.

Keltham: All this of Probable Utility or Expected Utility, is the Law of navigating paths through time, events, and probability, to the destinations of desire.  It combines with, and in a sense subsumes, the Law of Probability, which is the Law of learning of observation, of guessing and refining your guesses, of knowing the world around you at all, of predicting the future and making better predictions next time, of knowing how confident to be and what you don't know.

The Law of Probability, seen from one perspective, subsumes all of Validity as the small special case where probabilities are 0 or 1, and things are known with certainty.

From another perspective, of course, Validity subsumes Mathematics, and Mathematics is the thing that all the other Laws including Probable Utility are made of.

Keltham: And on that note, lunchtime!

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Afternoon

Keltham: Keltham informs Asmodia at lunchtime that today would happen to be a good day if she wants to try spending the night together with him; he's planning to spend all his ero energy today on other activities before then.  This is a conventional thing to do before a first date with an asexual if you want to be sure of not sending them any accidental ero signals.  Obviously Asmodia should tell him if she's got different concepts about how to do that sort of thing; Keltham was just guessing that since Taldane didn't have a word for 'asexual', it probably didn't have standard gendertrope advice about courting asexuals either.

Asmodia: ...okay.

Um.

Okay?

(Asmodia has calculated that alter-Asmodia sure would say those things, yep.)

Keltham: Great!

Keltham eats relatively quickly, and then drags off Yaisa to his cuddleroom again.

When done, Keltham taps himself with a Lesser Restoration, and spends the first half of the afternoon working on actual contract language with a Chelish representative who is So. Much. Slower. at contract-writing than Lrilatha.  Keltham is not sure why they are trying to do it this way.

So he asks and is told, roughly, that Lrilatha wouldn't be able to sign off on this contract as something Hell could back, because it contains a lot of terms that Keltham made up for relatively inscrutable Keltham-reasons, plus more terms that somebody in Chelish governance made up for inscrutable human-Governance reasons.  When a contract contains any significant amount of stuff like that, it becomes a human thing that the humans have to do themselves.  Lrilatha is not in the business of checking contract terms that somebody else made up, to see if they could possibly do nasty things, based on some clever trick that could rely on facts Lrilatha doesn't know.  If you want a contract from Lrilatha, you tell her what the contract is supposed to do and why, and Lrilatha writes you the entire contract, and can then give you Lawful assurance of what she expected the terms to do when she invented them.

...that's fair.

The Chelish central bank allegedly doesn't know what their exchange rates would have been for backable commodities the day before Keltham showed up.  There's a note attached that says that the officer who runs the Chelish bank seems to be philosophically anti-weird-projects, not in a personally anti-Keltham way, just in the way of believing that central banks ought to do exactly what they've always done and Governance should not be allowed to bother them while they're working.

So Cheliax is just taking out all contract language having to do with their central bank in any way, and replacing it with a list of six commodities such that Cheliax anticipates being able to pay off any reasonable debt up to 20,000,000 gold in some combination of those, according to this fixed valuation which they can swear to have been the market trading price in Westcrown on the day before Keltham arrived, according to merchant records.  If the Project ends up being owed more than one gold piece per Chelish citizen, and the circumstances of this aren't such that Cheliax now has more of those commodities safely on hand, further debt to the Project starts to be payable in title to government-owned lands, as valued by this more reasonable government office on the day before Keltham arrived.  After that, the Project is responsible for finding somebody willing to buy those lands in order to complete the reimbursement process.

...works for him.  Keltham adds a rider about the government of Cheliax not being able to block or regulate land sale as it usually would if the Project wants to override that in order to complete a sale inside or outside Cheliax; and those commodities of payment being deliverable without taxation to ships owned or designated by the Project at Chelish water ports, which ships shall enter and leave without taxation or other hindrance.

It now goes back to Governance and, with any luck, will be ready to be signed tomorrow.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Late Afternoon

Keltham: Further lectures on Probable Utility, practice problems.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Night

Keltham: Quick dinner, Yaisa again, followed by Asmodia.

Asmodia: ...all right, if Keltham is going to that length to make her feel safe - not that Asmodia would've felt even slightly unsafe, after reading Keltham's thought transcripts, and having like any concept whatsoever of who he is, especially as compared to the rest of Cheliax - or that Asmodia would even significantly complain if Keltham tried to have sex with her - then Asmodia will take him up on his offer, made after some spell-warmed and starlit discussion up on the fortress roof, to try having something warm snuggling her in bed under entirely non-ero circumstances.

Is it true in alterCheliax that alterAsmodia never had anyone hold her, hug her, except in a sexual context, for roughly as long as she can remember? That the only flesh-to-flesh contact she's felt in a very long time has been intended to hurt her at worst and use her at best?  It can't have been the same for alterAsmodia as for trueAsmodia in trueCheliax, though Asmodia is having trouble visualizing exactly how it would have been different, the way her life must have gone instead.  But it could be true in alterCheliax that boys wouldn't have a concept of alterAsmodia as an asexual, and wouldn't offer to hold her in bed without thinking that sex might eventually be in the offing.  Keltham clearly assigns high probability that this might be true of alterAsmodia, based on whatever he already believes about alterCheliax.  It is the safer course not to contradict it.

So alterAsmodia hesitates a bit, and then says she's shy about discussing her history, in that way.  But she is definitely interested in taking up Keltham on that offer to see what happens.

It's... nice.

She catches herself thinking that she might want to sometimes Teleport back to wherever Keltham is, so long as it's nowhere near Cheliax, to have this again, if she hasn't found something equally warm and safe by then.

Does this imply the tropes are real?

Even as Asmodia tries to work out conditional probabilities and likelihood ratios in her head, the thought occurs to her that this is what Keltham's inner mental life must be like all the time.

And Asmodia still hasn't figured out how to Lawfully derive probabilities before evidence and it comes up every time she tries to do this.  She knows that things with added complications have to be less probable than the same things without those added complications, and that, unfortunately, is it.  Her entire algorithm for prior probabilities currently consists of making up numbers that maybe sorta sound right.  She should have tried to figure that out while she had the Most High's crown.

Carissa Sevar: "Obviously it feels dangerous to declare success on any element of this house of cards but I'm inclined to say that, to whatever extent our objective was to have most of Keltham's energy and attention occupied in liaisons, that's a success, and to whatever extent our objective was to convince him that masochists are real, that's been accomplished as well. If he were a normal person, I think I'd say we've now driven the probability of a Conspiracy down low enough he'll stop looking for it absent an actual slip-up; of course, he's not, so we're going to have to keep convincingly inhabiting alter-Cheliax. 

But I think we're in the place where we can start thinking about stage 2, where we have a stably contained Keltham teaching a growing group of students, rather than stage 1 where we are scrambling to keep him persuaded for one more day that he's not inside something he should demand out of. 

....that's a request for suggestions. I don't know what stage 2 looks like. I don't know what's most valuable to Cheliax here and I don't know if there are other things like - high risk of all the girls becoming defectors - to look out for. I know stage 5, in which we improve the process of devil-making and enable Asmodeus in the conquest of all, and I think stage 4 involves building Lawful Evil ilani Civilization, but I haven't got detailed stage 2 ideas."

Ferrer Maillol: "I'll be the party's idiot barbarian and suggest that stage 2 looks like Keltham signing his contract with Cheliax, training these girls and the next batch in applying dath ilan's more concrete knowledge, and Cheliax rapidly growing in wealth and power."

Jacint Subirachs: "And when Keltham in time finds out, leaves us in fury, and raises up Osirion or Lastwall or both as instruments of vengeance on Cheliax and Hell itself?  The Chosen does have some reason for spending so much effort in corrupting Keltham, even at the expense of slowing Cheliax's rise."

Ferrer Maillol: "Can we maybe manage to keep Keltham contained for five years?  In that time Cheliax might be powerful enough to ruin Osirion and Lastwall, if necessary, before Keltham could raise them up against us; or force them to treaty."

"I'm frankly not seeing how to get Keltham corrupted far enough.  But then I don't understand how the Chosen corrupted him as far as she did, so."

Carissa Sevar: "We should solicit everyone's predictions but I bet we don't get five years. That's just a very long time without a slip-up, even if it'd take a slip-up, and it might not. Stabler outcomes include - when he leaves it's because he's fed up with Governance but not in a conspiracy way, he doesn't expect Osirion or Lastwall to be better, and he takes the girls with him intending to build his own independent power base somewhere.... when he leaves he's not blazingly furious with us enough to go to war, or in love with enough of the people he'd be going to war with to hesitate -"

Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodeus's will on this does prohibit us deliberately taking direct hostages against him."

"Thinking about it, though, I'm certain Asmodeus's instruction does not prohibit us ruining or destroying any country Keltham tries to set up in, until no country will take him.  Not in a way of us being clever and working around those instructions, it's just plain allowed.  If we could make even a hundredfold-smaller version of that Radiance beam weapon Keltham showed you, the one that his Civilization uses to launch things into space -"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels an unpleasant lurch of something. Which is childish; Asmodeus's conquest of all is going to involve some killing. That's how that sort of thing goes. "So that's a win condition, then, having dath ilani weaponry. Maybe the one Asmodeus intends. And Keltham becoming Evil enough he can learn the truth and decide to stay is a different win condition. And Keltham deciding he trusts no country and will go hide out with his girls in a secret location is a different win condition. And losing looks like him deciding to go to Osirion before we have the ability to destroy Osirion or force them to terms, or him dying and being resurrected by them."

Ferrer Maillol: "What is it that makes him hiding out with a few girls so much more sustainable over years than the current Project?  Sorry if that's a stupid question."

Carissa Sevar: "It is weird we can't provide him with an entire library of well-written books; it wouldn't be weird for a tiny project to be limited to Ione's book-getting ability. It is weird we can't provide him with clerics of many different gods - where are we on faking that, by the way - and wouldn't be weird for a tiny project. If he ends up deciding to retreat with his girls and take over the world, he's going to be teaching weaponry, and I bet otherwise it's going to be very very hard to entice him to teach that. It's not as good as him staying here, I don't think we should bring it about on purpose, but I do think it's a win condition if well-executed."

Ferrer Maillol: "Fake paladin's ready at your will, I expect we could turn up a Lawful Evil cleric of Irori who'd swear to work with us, maybe a genuine Lawful Neutral of Erecura who'd be cooperative with Cheliax but could also show off channeling positive energy, anything else is just calling in an impersonator and hoping they're good enough.  Got told the same about fake envoys, it's standard impersonation and the question is just whether standard impersonation works on Keltham."

"I'll register my own thought that if it looks sufficiently sure that Keltham's going to break containment, we ought to have his girls take the initiative on doing that.  We get a lot more control over results if it's under our initiative rather than his."

Carissa Sevar: "Agreed. We might want a book pointing at a Conspiracy that the girls are uninvolved in, for Ione to stumble across and show him, or something Yaisa can point out to him, he really likes her. We should do some test runs of escaping with Keltham, see what errors come up in the course of doing something that complex. And we'll need the Glibness swords. I should have those worked out in a couple of weeks."

Ferrer Maillol: He is a little suspicious that, somehow, the best use of some of Carissa Sevar's time has ended up as her using her admittedly very high Spellcraft to craft magical weapons.  But it is no longer his place to say that.  Subirachs would be the one to point that out, and she'd probably do it in private rather than now with Maillol watching.

"Acknowledged," Maillol says.

Iarwain: (Continued in my fun research project has more existential risk than I anticipated.)

Iarwain: (There is now a Discord channel which, only on the hour, notifies of new Planecrash updates if at least 25 tags have accumulated since the last such update.  I suggest setting yourself up to get push notifications from this Discord channel, if you would like to avoid constant-refreshing habits.)