Carissa Sevar: It is not the most promising starting point from which to seduce someone to Evil. She's not giving up, obviously; Hell has corrupted literal angels, and plenty of paladins. Lots of carefully-reflected-on endorsed values possessed by teenagers are not those of the people they'll grow up to be, even when a great deal of effort isn't pointed at changing them.
But it's about as un-Asmodean as an ideology can be. And it is coherent, it's not just reflexive regurgitation of the things dath ilan went to great lengths to instill.
And he's going to be so furious, when he realizes that Cheliax has been playing 'defect' this whole time.
(Lawful Evil ilanism, obviously, uses the complicated Law here; it does not Cooperate just because someone else is Cooperating; it tries to get as many coppers as it can. That's not the problem; Keltham could work with that. The problem is the lying. And the - the inadequacy of Cheliax, its fundamental deficiency at building a society in which people can reason, which Lawful Evil ilanism solves though she still doesn't know how.
....maybe a question for tomorrow. No one told her, this time, to be gentle with herself and take time to cry, but if that's good advice the reasons for it probably generalize to here.)
Keltham: By the time Keltham is back, the Silent Proctor is done with her results, and tells Keltham the tally of earnings. Keltham gives that amount to Paxti plus two coppers for her own. (It seems low to him, but you cannot give people friendly bonuses in a bidding situation; they'll learn that, and then adjust their bids, in which case you've added unpleasant volatility and zero income for them!)
The results that Paxti tells Keltham: Two Defected, Six Cooperated.
Okay, that's better than zero Defections in terms of how well anybody really understood or followed the instructions... he didn't want to call Pilar on it because (a) he was not in all rooms simultaneously and didn't want to introduce asymmetries by his own presence in the learning experience, (b) it was obvious she didn't think she was cheating, and (c) everybody comes up with some silly invalid reason to Cooperate the first time, that's part of the learning experience...
Actually. On reflection, Keltham is plausibly looking more at his own illusion-of-transparency failure to explicitly specify what dath ilani children would already implicitly know. For example, that "only try to get as many coppers as possible" in the context of talking about purely selfish agents implicitly includes "you don't care enough about the Law or Asmodean compacts in your utilityfunction that you could use that as an easy public commitment mechanism". Pilar may have legit just not understood that part. Keltham is not on reflection sure that he said out loud anything a reasonable Golarionite could use to work that out, given lack of background context.
Anyways, Keltham calls back the class to get their rewards and hear the results.
Carissa Sevar: But does he look suspicious about said results.
Keltham: Nope! Seems pretty cheerful about them.
(Maybe his Bluff is so high he can fool Detect Thoughts and truthspells. If they'd perhaps gotten an eighth-rank Keeper from dath ilan, instead, reincarnated as a younger version of himself, maybe somebody like that would pretend to be Keltham.)
Keltham: Anyways! Once the rewards have been handed out -
"So I realized, after the experiment had already started, that I'd failed to spell out some aspects of the experiment that a dath ilani would know just from ambient culture, but you had no reasonable way of deducing yourselves. For which I apologize."
"What I failed to spell out was that, in the context of us already being talking about purely selfish agents, if I tell you to only try to get as many coppers for yourself as possible, what I obviously-to-a-dath-ilani mean is that you should roleplay an ideal-agent whose utilityfunction contains literally nothing but the number of coppers it gets. It's not just that you're roleplaying an agent that doesn't care about the other player. The agent you're roleplaying also doesn't care enough about Law or Asmodeanism that it has access to the cheap public commitment mechanism of making a promise on its Law or saying that the agreement is an Asmodean compact."
"Some of you Defected anyways, though, so not all was lost in illustrating the underlying problem. In fact, if you exactly roleplay a purely selfish agent that also cares nothing about having a Lawful alignment in the Golarion sense, that only embodies the Law of obtaining the most coppers, the problem is not meant to be solvable at the levels of Law you currently have."
"Within the conversations I overheard, Asmodia had the sharpest sense of what was missing; Ione was the one who got furthest in constructing pieces of what a dath ilani would call the correct solution."
"Also to spell out something where I can't remember if I was explicit enough: you may not tell anyone else what you wrote down, nor reveal what rewards you received, ever. You're free to talk about all the arguments you used, but not say what you wrote at the end, or what payoff you got. The idea is to minimize the extent to which people might be non-self-endorsedly concerned about their reputations, because that concern makes it harder for them to roleplay the selfish agent. Also something else a dath ilani would know from ambient culture, by the time they were playing games like this; again I apologize."
"You are now free to discuss."
Carissa Sevar: "Are you saying that the perfectly selfish agents that only care about coppers and don't even care about Law or their reputations still don't defect, if they know enough Law?"
Keltham: "Yep! They embody the Law but they don't care about being Lawful. Which is sort of what you'd expect the conditions to be in dath ilan, where Lawfulness is not, after all, a thing. Just Law."
Ione Sala: "I'm not sure why the problem isn't solvable at the levels of Law we have. Compared to us both Defecting against each other, it makes sense for me to say to Tonia, 'I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate', and be telling the truth about that, if I think Tonia can read me better than I can bluff - or probably can, enough to make it not worth the risk for me. And then it makes sense for Tonia to say to me, 'Well, now that you've said that, I'll Cooperate', and be telling the truth about that, if she thinks I can read her better than she can bluff, or well enough to not be worth the risk for her. It looks to me like you could do that even if you were both Chaotic Neutral. What am I missing?"
Keltham: "Asmodia."
Asmodia: "Um."
"Okay I may actually need to take a minute about that."
"Does it - actually matter at all, if I say some clever nitpicky thing like, Ione left out that - for her to say 'I'll Cooperate if you Cooperate' - she has to believe, not just that Tonia can read her, but that - she can read Tonia. And the same with Tonia needing to believe that she can read Ione, not just that Ione can read her, for Tonia to say 'I'll Cooperate'."
Keltham: "Ione's exact wording was, 'I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate'. If Ione doesn't think she can read Tonia, then even if Tonia says 'I'll Cooperate', Ione won't think Tonia will Cooperate, and Ione won't Cooperate, even though she was being truthful in her promise. So Tonia also has to believe that Ione believes she can read her.”
”But if Ione does think she can read Tonia, and Tonia can read Ione, Ione can solve that just by adding, 'I think I can read you'. Which, in their real discussion, Ione did in fact say."
Asmodia: "Ione won't be certain of her ability to read Tonia, though. It has to be about probabilities."
Keltham: "Ione did put some probabilities in there."
Asmodia: "Which ones?"
Keltham: "Which ones should they be?"
Asmodia: "So the first thing that comes to mind is just saying, 'I'll Cooperate with whatever probability I think you'll Cooperate', and... that gives me a nervous uneasy feeling but I can't actually see anything wrong with it. I'd rather live in a world where you Cooperated with 1/3 probability and I Cooperated with 1/3 probability than one where we both always Defected, right?"
Keltham: "That sounds like a very useful nervous uneasy feeling that you have there! You should hang out with it for a while and learn to hear what it's trying to whisper to you. I would be doing you a disservice if I just told you, really. A proverb out of dath ilan: 'I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.'"
Asmodia: Asmodia does not say that if she started listening to all of her quiet nagging doubts, she'd never stop, because alterAsmodia has a lot fewer of those.
Keltham: "That's not actually the main problem with carrying out Ione's solution if you're roleplaying an ideal selfish agent, though. There's another couple of missing assumptions there."
Asmodia: "Not seeing it."
Keltham: "Ione and Tonia have to believe that the other person's self-reports are accurate. When Tonia finally says 'I'll Cooperate' and means it, Ione still has to believe that, because Tonia believes she'll Cooperate, she's right. Being very good at reading Tonia doesn't solve that. Tonia could say 'my self-reports are very accurate' and accurately read as sincerely believing that, and still be wrong, because she had false beliefs about how accurate her self-reports were. That's part of what might start to go wrong with Chaotic Neutral agents, though I don't know much about what that'd be like -"
Ione Sala: "No, I admit fault there, that's a pretty good reason it wouldn't work with Chaotic Neutral outsiders."
Keltham: "And finally there's the question of why Tonia or Ione could be right in expecting themselves to Cooperate. Why wouldn't they, when they got to the moment of finally writing the word Cooperate on paper, just throw away all the reasoning they did previously and write Defect instead? And wouldn't they know that, and be unable to say truthfully, to the other person reading them, that they'd Cooperate?"
"Purely selfish agents, with nothing else in their utility functions, don't care about keeping promises they made to themselves."
Carissa Sevar: "Isn't there - I don't know how to pin it down exactly - but say I am perfectly selfish, and only care about getting the most copper, and the way to get the most copper is to put on a magic helm of mind control that'll make me a sincere worshipper of Coppos, god of copper - and Coppos has other values, and I will too once I put the magic helm on, but I calculated it out and I'll get lots more copper this way than any other way, so I put the magic helm on -"
Keltham: "One of the Law-fragments, coherence principles, that generates the Law you'd need here, states that Lawful agents never have to do that. They have no need for magic helms, not unless somebody's doing the equivalent of offering them a billion gold pieces specifically to put on the magic helm."
"They'd no more pay a copper to force their future selves to Cooperate, so that some other agent would predict that their future selves would Cooperate, than they'd pay coppers to trade green and red and blue in a circle."
"If you put a magic helm like that on me and transformed me into something utterly selfish, that didn't care about keeping promises even to myself, and then somebody swore upon their Law to cooperate if they believed I would cooperate, I would still be able to say under truthspell to them that I'd cooperate."
Keltham: "Uh, also if that happens, you need to kill me extremely quickly. Like, literally faster than I can speak or take any other actions. Just saying."
Carissa Sevar: That was what Carissa was getting at, that you shouldn't need the magic helm, but now she is distracted by imagining that Keltham wakes up one day perfectly selfish. That'd be...good? Probably?
"- that's a fair ask and no magic like that exists so I'm not very worried about it but - why? I'd - rather you get me back, obviously, if something happened to change my values, but I wouldn't want the new Carissa to stop existing unless she'd gotten Zon-Kuthon style utility flipped in which case she'd also want to stop existing."
Keltham: "I do not think you properly realize how dangerous a dath ilani would be to Golarion, absent any constraints on how they tried to achieve their goals. Broom, in the unlikely event something turns me perfectly selfish, you're actually the one person on Project Lawful who's responsible for killing me literally as fast as possible, right? I'm not expecting you to confirm or deny that, but you should know that hypothetical perfectly selfish Keltham will know it."
"And then somebody needs to warn my afterlife immediately that nothing under Intelligence 30 should talk to me. I'm not sure it actually takes that, to be clear, but, safety margin."
Carissa Sevar: She doesn't, actually, think she's underestimating that.
But she nods.
Keltham: "If purely selfish Keltham has had longer than 12 seconds in which to work, you need to trap his soul or do something else that stops him from being resurrected, because among the things he can do in 12 seconds is, for example, tap himself with a truthspell and Message somebody that vast riches await them if they resurrect him. And since threats work on people here he'd probably add something Zon-Kuthon-like about what happens if they don't."
"A proverb out of dath ilani fictional novels: You have two and a half seconds to kill the corrupted Keeper."
"To you, he is that."
Carissa Sevar: - oh wait there's a specific strategic thing to do here.
Carissa Sevar: - it's to exchange Meaningful Glances with Meritxell.
lintamande: Meritxell has no idea what's going on but she can do a Meaningful Glance right back, clear enough Keltham can see it since that's what Carissa did.
Keltham: Keltham was not particularly able to decode this, except that whatever it is, it's not meant to be secret. Carissa telling Meritxell that Meritxell needs to start filing regular reports on counterstrategies to use against her if she goes rogue or coherently-insane? If Meritxell makes enough progress that this seems like a live consideration, she'll start filing reports with Pilar, Keltham, and maybe Broom. Well, he can always ask Carissa later what that was about, if he remembers.
Asmodia: Whatever that was, it had BETTER have happened in alterCheliax or she's turning Sevar in to Subirachs over it.
Carissa Sevar: Tell Asmodia alter-Carissa, like real-Carissa, thinks that 'Keltham, who is purely selfish and a danger to all civilization' is the hottest concept she has ever heard of.
Asmodia: All right, Asmodia acknowledges that the sex part of her wall is largely Sevar's personal domain.
Iarwain: And on that note, it's time for lunch.
Keltham: Keltham will use Prestidigitation to float Carissa a note - since telling her so face-to-face seems like too much pressure, and even Message prompts an immediate reply - that he's potentially available if Carissa wants company at lunch, before the Governance representative gets here to sign the Project's articles of incorporation and to-be-replaced interim compact with Cheliax. Also a good time to tell Keltham about whether she's liable to want company of an evening; otherwise he'll probably see about checking in on Ione's romantic route.
Carissa Sevar: She'll come and join him at lunch, then. "Hey."
Keltham: "Hey."
He's deliberately avoided asking anybody what happens when Zon-Kuthon worshippers succeed in trapping your soul. It does not seem like an especially helpful thing for him to know until the war is over.
Carissa Sevar: "How's Yaisa."
Keltham: "This language has some weird ambiguities sometimes. Are you asking how she is or how she was?"
Carissa Sevar: "The latter. Someday you'll have to teach us all Baseline even if teaching classes in it while the magic translation tries to keep up doesn't turn out to work."
Keltham: "Or get an items enchanter whose time is less astronomically valuable than yours to make rings of Share Language (Baseline)*, if I only need to cast the spell once during the making."
"Yaisa was great, to the point where, if I didn't already believe I'd been sent into a world full of people who were improbably-good-matches for my sexuality, I would've inferred that off Yaisa alone. And now you've gotten me thinking how that sentence would have been one-third as long in Baseline, buuuut never mind we didn't need that communications-channel-capacity anyways."
"And then Yaisa said she didn't have any hidden background or problems I needed to solve. Fingers crossed on her not ending up with any experimentally granted superpowers or being the hidden Zon-Kuthon cleric, but I am actually starting to be cheerful about this not being the case. I feel like - I would never fall in love with her, I just really enjoy her a lot, and while that's not impossible given tropes it's a lot less directly and stereotypically tropey."
"If you want additional details I have to bip Yaisa about her own privacy preferences, I forgot to ask her about those. Though she did say in front of me that she planned on telling everyone else about how I was in bed and I did not object to this, so you can also ask her, if you'd like."
(*) Taldane contains a spoken language-marker for the part of a magic item or spell that appears within parentheses.
Carissa Sevar: "I find myself in the fortunate position of not needing to beg Yaisa for intel on how you are in bed. But maybe I'll talk to her later. So, assuming Yaisa doesn't grow a plot, that means - no tropes? We can stop worrying? Things will just happen for normal sorts of reasons, except the fact you're here in the first place?"
Keltham: "We'd still basically be in the world that gave us the god-war and the Cayden Cailean cookies, it just wouldn't be organized and predictable the same way."
"There'd probably be less total weirdness, though."
Carissa Sevar: "Well. I'll take it. Cayden Cailean whatever else you say of him makes good cake."
Keltham: "If I asked where the cake actually came from would that be the sort of question that had an answer?"
Carissa Sevar: "I mean, probably, on some level, there's an answer? I don't know it. He's not drawing on an Elemental Plane of Cake. Maybe He just bakes lots of cakes, in Elysium, and sends some to Pilar."
Keltham: "Speaking of grave mysteries, what was that look you gave Meritxell? Feel free to answer by Message, or I guess not at all, but exchanging an overt glance where other people could see you suggests that, if this is a secret Security issue, the existence of that secret is not itself secret."
Carissa Sevar: "Hmm? No, not secret at all. I was merely of the opinion that hypothetical purely selfish Keltham who is a danger to all Golarion is the hottest thing I have ever contemplated in my entire life, and I was curious if she thought so too. She said back, 'I see your point but am slightly less kinky', or at least that was my translation."
Keltham: "Releasing Rovagug, hot or not hot?"
Carissa Sevar: "What? No! That'd be horrible! Also we'd cease to exist and ceasing to exist cannot be hot."
Keltham: "Good distraction for the gods while purely selfish Keltham goes for the Starstone, just in case the gods would otherwise interfere with that. Sure, it might destroy the world, if the gods now are weaker than during the last Rovagug war, but purely selfish Keltham knows he's on a time limit before the gods catch up with him."
"I don't think you properly appreciate where the saying comes from about killing the corrupted Keeper within two and a half seconds."
Carissa Sevar: "That's not a useful thing to do even if you're purely selfish! The most likely outcome is that you either fail and stop existing or destroy the world and stop existing! How would that possibly - what definition of selfish are you even using -"
Keltham: "He doesn't touch the Starstone immediately, he..."
"Actually, never mind. I have remembered that Golarion is a real place and not a fictional one and that I should not explain out loud how fictional people could wreck it. Even taking into account that my current model could be wrong, I am not that certain of my own wrongness."
"But the basic problem here is that hypothetical corrupted Keltham is able to think of strategies you would not. Which means that, however bad you expect this to be, based on imagining what you would do in hypothetical corrupted Keltham's shoes, real corrupted Keltham is predictably worse than that."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't actually think that Golarion's historical supervillains have been uncreative such that a dath ilani would be worse than we can imagine. But - they have done creative things that accomplish their goals, not creative things that probably get them permanently destroyed. If corrupted Keltham were both selfish and indifferent about getting permanently destroyed, sure, then he'd be terrible and not even in an interesting way, sure, but smart people unleashing their terrible creativity to accomplish their goals is hot, unless they have goals I just inherently can't find interesting or compatible-with-being-valuable, like ceasing to exist."
Keltham: "The same logic implies that I should be unable to speed up spellsilver mining, since Golarion's historical wizards have been creative and would've wanted to speed up spellsilver mining."
Carissa Sevar: "Disagree. A civilization of people much smarter than either of us invented a bunch of stuff - both Law and tools for doing stuff in the world - which we're going to reinvent and it's reasonably likely to speed up spellsilver mining even though if we tried without that backing we'd rightly expect to not stumble upon anything obvious. But the civilization of people much smarter than us never actually crashed their moon into their planet, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never actually ascended to godhood, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never actually conquered a continent and slaughtered every man, woman and child in their path, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never bred a new race of sentients, never fought a war that permanently broke the regularity of physical laws for a couple hundred miles round in the region where it was fought, and those are just the things I'm allowed to know about because they were either too hard to cover up or sufficiently hard to get inspired to do myself. Letting out Rovagug as a distraction to ascend to godhood is horrible and shocking but I bet the people who guard against it run into that annually. Golarion has lots more supervillainy than dath ilan, and does not have lots more metallurgy."
Keltham: "That's not really... adding up for me. These things are not specialized. They draw from deeply general roots. One of those supervillains, at one point during their career, would have had a grimdark plan involving a thousand pounds of spellsilver, and then either they know how to figure that out the same way I'm going to figure it out, or not. If they can't figure that out, and I can, then hypothetical corrupted Keltham can figure out a bunch of other stuff those supervillains didn't figure out either."
"If you're thinking that I can maybe figure out spellsilver is some known thing in dath ilan, and then have memorized how to mine it, that's not particularly how I'm expecting to solve it. I'm expecting to know more about how matter works and how to investigate problems like that than other previous Golarionites who tried to mine, refine, or just analyze spellsilver. I'm expecting that based on all the missing knowledge your world should have grown if those roots were anywhere within it."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa had been assuming that they would in fact be using dath ilani refining/physics knowledge, not just dath ilani Law knowledge, to figure out spellsilver, and she's in fact less optimistic about it if there's nothing applicable from how physics works in dath ilan. Hell doesn't have infinite spellsilver, so Law isn't sufficient.
....but right now that seems like a tangent. "Well, maybe corrupted Keltham'd be the most terrifying supervillain who ever supervillained because of knowing more about how to achieve his terrible goals, which would be hot, or maybe it'd take him a while to discover the true depths of supervillainy, which would be hot, or maybe he'd just ascend immediately, which would be fascinating, or maybe he'd destroy the world, which is totally unappealing on every level. I suppose I'll luckily never find out."
Keltham: "Well, I'm not quite sure things could reasonably play out this way. But if our personal power levels go high enough at some point, and if the rest of Golarion Civilization hasn't caught up to that power level, and if there's still some other country out there at least three percent as bad as Nidal, and if moderate levels of caution permit us to do so sanely, then we could go be supervillains over there for a couple of weeks. Or however long it takes to wreck their capabilities to the point where Cheliax can handle the remaining cleanup with forty Security officers."
Carissa Sevar: "That is not exactly the thing but I will keep it in mind."
Keltham: "Remaining difference?"
Carissa Sevar: "Perfectly selfish Keltham, whatever he wants from me, he has, he's not holding any part of himself back because he's scared of what it'd ask for or because he thinks he couldn't afford to pay for it."
Keltham: "I would not be terribly surprised if I could get to that point faster than our being able to wreck the next worst place after Nidal. Actually, hold on a sec -"
Message to Yaisa: Classification status on being able to tell Carissa that you were able to put buying and selling prices on sexual services, and this was incredibly helpful to me and should enable me to feel much less nervous about those same services even in non-financial contexts?
lintamande: - sure, go ahead?
Keltham: "Yaisa says I'm cleared to mention that one of the incredibly helpful things she did was being able to put a financial price on a couple of sex things, both what I'd pay her, and what she'd pay me, under my Fair Pricing spell. I expect to be a lot less nervous now that I have some idea of the order of financial magnitude that goes with some things, even if nobody is actually paying for anything."
"Uh, order of magnitude is the rough number of 10s in a bag of 10s describing the number, like, 4,000 has an order of magnitude of around 1,000 or 10,000."
Carissa Sevar: " - that makes sense. You know, probably the project should've gotten an actual proper sex worker cleared for you ages ago. I'm glad Yaisa's enough of one. Anyway, the thing for me is much more about - you being unleashed, you doing whatever you want - than about the trappings of supervillainy, though probably at some point we will have to conquer some places and I do expect that to be fun. Power is inherently interesting but - internal restrictions on how you use it aren't very different from external ones, in terms of how hot it seems to me?"
Keltham: "Got some trouble parsing that, on dath ilani Law. Where does your sexuality draw the line between internal restriction and internal direction?"
"Like, let's say I'm in a Cooperation-Defection dilemma with Broom, Broom promises upon his Law that he'll Cooperate if he expects I'll Cooperate, I tell him under truthspell that I'll Cooperate, and then it comes my turn. If I write Cooperate, I get Carissa, and if I write Defect, I get Carissa and Yaisa. Had Broom written Defect, though, my choices would have been Cooperate for nothing, or Defect for Yaisa."
"When I write Cooperate, am I internally directed into my choice to win Carissa? Or am I internally restricted by the dull bonds of duty and obligation to my past self, who needed to pass his truthspell, to give up Yaisa?"
Carissa Sevar: "- I don't know what I expected. If I query my 'is this hot or not' opinion about that situation it returns 'it's hot how Keltham is a bizarre alien who is very smart'."
Keltham: "Same Carissa-Yaisa Cooperation-Defection dilemma, but Broom just said he'd Cooperate and I Cooperate back because that's what Kelthams do. Internal direction or internal restriction?"
Carissa Sevar: "Keltham's not on any level wishing he was different and was the kind of entity which would defect and get both? Is he thinking 'well, it'd be really nice if I could get both, but that'd make me a bad person, so I can't'?"
Keltham: "Being motivated by wanting to not be a bad person is something I think of - as a particular flavor of Good that Civilization is kind of ehhhhh about, not least because it goes along with people who are sad that they can't destroy all of reality to make sure nobody ever has to stub their toe again?"
"Hypothetical Keltham definitely wants both Carissa and Yaisa, that's what makes the setup even be interesting. The thought that writing Defect would make him a bad person isn't particularly occurring to him, though, that's just not how he parses things. The situation where Broom wrote Cooperate and Keltham wrote Defect is just one that Keltham intensely does not want, and for him to avoid that is no different than him taking a gift of a million gold pieces if those are on offer. He wouldn't take the million gold pieces because it would make him a bad person to turn them down, he'd take them because he wanted a million gold pieces."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, then that's fine, though it is too complicated to be hot. I am a simple woman and need to have had at least three hours to digest new cooperation-theory before it starts appearing in my sexual fantasies."
Keltham: "If 'too complicated to be hot' was a thing for dath ilani our species would've died out when our average Intelligence went past 15."
Carissa Sevar: "But 'too complicated' is relative to the intelligence of the people involved! Selling you options on my soul is probably too complicated to be hot for someone who doesn't understand what an option is, but I do, so it was the right amount of complicated. Once I understand the deep Law of the Cooperation game then it will find its place in sexual fantasies, it's just not there yet."
Keltham: "I hope at some point you catch up on enough Law that your fancy intelligence headband allows you to start saying very clever things that are clearly just barely beyond where I can presently understand them. Which, in an ordinary and Civilized relationship, would force me to bribe you for an explanation, possibly with sexual services, but in our case I guess I just cuff you to the cuddling surface, bed, and tickle it out of you..."
Keltham: "You know, every now and then I realize that yet another aspect of dath ilani culture is probably - from your standpoint - I guess my standpoint now too - an awful side effect of our having a world of sadists with no masochists. That gendertrope in particular is probably about having a sense of control over another person, in one of the few ways that's possible to do, in a way that makes them still want to be around you, and be benefiting from being around you, in a world where nobody actually wants to submit."
Carissa Sevar: " - huh.
It seems awfully sad, for a whole world to just be like that, built around - something missing.... I don't want to sleep with any of them, I don't really go for Good, but I wish we could trade them."
Keltham: "Your world would not at all lack for tradeables even if it had no magic, yes."
"If Yaisa alone fell into a portal to Civilization, then even if none of her magic worked there, even if she couldn't remember any of her past to sell memories, she would still end up very very very rich."
"Though possibly not if there were any existing masochists around at all, as I misdoubt but do not disbelieve. They could be real there but rare. In that case she'd only be very very rich."
Carissa Sevar: "I have a feeling she's going to manage to swing that here, too. And good for her."
There's no chance all the powerful people just go around sexually unfulfilled when they could just grab someone.
...there's some chance. It still doesn't feel likely but dath ilan is very different and there's some chance of all kinds of strange things.
Iarwain: (Lunchtime is ending.)
Keltham: Time to go sign some IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS!
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 13 (10) / Early Afternoon
Keltham: Somehow it takes HOURS for the Governance representative to cough out TWO SIGNATURES.
How is that even POSSIBLE.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 13 (10) / Late Afternoon
Keltham: Keltham staggers out battered but triumphant. He now has a stock corporation, and his stock corporation now has an interim meant-to-be-replaced contract with Cheliax.
Time to get his first 8 employees in to look over their employment contracts. They're pretty simple by Civilizational standards. He's still not expecting them to sign right away, obviously. There's less urgency about that aspect of things, if they're willing to trust to a handshake deal that current work gets retroactively covered by the contracts when signed, and they're already being paid in mere money without having to wait on that.
Carissa Sevar: They definitely don't want to sign right away but this all makes sense and looks pretty good and they're happy to trust to the handshake deal if he is.
Keltham: Great! He now has a CORPORATION and a CONTRACT and EMPLOYEES. And a MISSION and someone he LOVES and a FULL-TIME SEX WORKER. Anyone who requires more than this to be happy in life is DOING IT WRONG.
Keltham: Now, a lot of the stuff they try to do, is liable to have to go through chemistry at one point or another.
So now that there's an interim contract, how about if, first, Keltham quickly summarizes to them about protons, neutrons, electrons, the Periodic Table of Elements, covalent bonds, molecules, conservation of elemental atoms under almost all ordinary reactions that rearrange the same elements into different molecules, electromagnetic attractions and repulsions, chemical potential energy, potential energy surfaces, activation energies for chemical reactions, acidity and basicness as examples of how the weirdly-shaped electromagnetic energy fields that develop around weirdly-shaped molecules interact and do interesting things, photons as electromagnetic waves, photons have frequencies, photon frequencies get absorbed or emitted based on electron level transitions and that's why the same kind of material stuff usually ends up with the same color, your tongue contains tiny sensors that analyze the surface chemical properties of the stuff that comes into contact with them.
Everybody clear on that?
Great!
Those, to be clear, are just the normal Laws of physics. All that is just the way things worked back in dath ilan.
The real trick is going to be figuring out how to use Prestidigitation - which can, apparently, change the color and taste and clinginess of things, and therefore, obviously, influence the surface shapes of electromagnetic potential enveloping molecules and materials - to take the inconvenient rules of normal dath ilani chemistry and snap them like twigs.
Carissa Sevar: They, uh, might need him to repeat that chemistry stuff.
Keltham: If they can’t understand it from hearing it once, people from Golarion are too stupid for this Project to work. Dath ilani four-year-olds master all this stuff within minutes, the failures are never heard from again, and the next day there's meat for lunch in the dining hall.
Keltham isn’t expecting them to get all that from such an absurdly rapid summary, he’s trying to convey which subject matters exist to ask him questions about. If he later starts in again on the Periodic Table, people may now have any vague idea that this matters because it’s about the elementary constituents of the molecules that make up everything else. If he starts running experiments on vinegar, Prestidigitation, and stuff that makes vinegar foam up, they’ll know how that might relate to refining spellsilver from ores.
lintamande: That makes sense.
His students look thrilled and terrified. It feels like this is the bit that will prove to all of Cheliax that they're doing something different, something important, something that'll transform the world.
He's joking. About the dath ilani four year olds. These students are not that easy to troll. (Though it's not a bad way to run a country, if you're going for quality over quantity....)
Peranza: Peranza wishes Keltham wouldn't make jokes like that. She Messages Asmodia to ask if that's a sort of thing alterPeranza would say.
Asmodia: Return message: You probably feel that way because you want Civilization to be different from Cheliax. AlterPeranza doesn't have the same emotion at the same strength. So no.
AlterPeranza: Acknowledged.
(That's okay. This is okay. RealPeranza just needs to never think anything ever again.)
Keltham: Keltham will now explain the kinetic theory of heat, which he verified shortly after arriving in Golarion by testing if he could warm up his hands by rubbing them together. Since different arrangements of the same elements are bound more tightly together and have lower chemical potential energies, transforming molecules in permitted ways means that those molecules end up moving faster. Energy is conserved by the way, that's really understating a principle of vast power and beauty buuuut they're not gonna get that part for a while. So if you transform things to be more tightly bound, they release energy.
If you increase the heat and the amount of random motion, more molecules break apart their current arrangements and get a chance to rearrange themselves into more tightly bound configurations, shifting more of the conserved energy from potential to kinetic, producing more heat. This, obviously, can spark a chain reaction: heat produces chemical rearrangements produces more heat produces more chemical rearrangements.
Does anyone want to guess what people did with this terrifying principle, after it was discovered in dath ilan?
lintamande: "...exploded some of their enemies?" Gregoria suggests.
Keltham: Possibly! It was long enough ago that nobody actually knows now. Keltham is describing fire.
lintamande: .....did dath ilan invent fire from first principles instead of by noticing it was just there in the world being useful?
Keltham: He really, really, really super duper doubts it.
People don't always know what they've discovered. But when somebody figured out how to make the Light cantrip work, they didn't need to know about photons to say that they'd discovered a Light cantrip.
Keltham: Like, you could imagine a universe in which the very first person to start using fire was an incredible genius who thought to themselves, "Well, this requires fuel, that gets transformed, and in the process of being transformed gets used up which is why fires don't just go on burning forever, and you need to make things hotter before they start rearranging themselves in the way that produces heat, so if you get a hot-enough fire you can feed a bunch of things into it that get transformed and used as fuel and release a lot more heat."
But it's a publicly known fact that fire was invented by the ancestors of humanity before they started looking completely human, before continuing heritage-selection had transformed their shapes in a direction that ended up human. So on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. People would have been actually genuinely legitimately stupider back then.
They might not have had language to describe the bright-pretty-hot-thing, only known that it was bright and pretty and hot.
lintamande: That makes more sense.
Golarion also does not know when fire was first invented; it was too long ago. In some stories the gods gave it to mortals but no god has specifically claimed credit so that might just be a story, or it might be that the god in question is now dead.
Keltham: The humans here are sufficiently similar in appearance and behavior to dath ilani humans that the copying time of their ancestors couldn't have been more than a few tens of thousands of years ago, relative to Keltham's now-time out of dath ilan. Those humans would have already been adapted to eat cooked meat, and brought fire with them.
It's probably been around in Golarion for as long as humans have been around in Golarion, which isn't actually very long.
lintamande: That....doesn't sound right but no one knows enough to argue.
Keltham: Where Keltham was actually going with this is that burning fuel does not raise the surrounding temperature by a constant amount. Chemical reactions don't produce a particular temperature. They produce heat...
...He should probably actually define those things. Temperature is how hot or cold something is, the average speed of the randomly vibrating molecules inside it. Heat is, abstractly, the energy you add to make molecules vibrate faster and the temperature go up. Heat flows from hotter things to colder things because the molecules in contact bump into each other, and the slow molecules slow down the faster ones in the collision, and the fast molecules speed up the slower ones in the collision.
So if you put colder fuel into a fire, more of that heat gets used up to heat the materials of the fuel itself, and the resulting temperature is lower.
The same thing goes for blowing colder air onto the fire - oh, air carries Element-8, which is a constituent in most ways that fuels made from the remains of living things, like wood or coal, rearrange themselves tighter and release heat, because living things have a lot of Element-6 that binds tightly to Element-8, among other things - so you have to allow air into a fire to let it go on burning - but if it's colder air, the resulting fire will have a lower temperature.
Nobody has gotten Keltham any proper experts on metal forging to talk to, but the very preliminary glances he's had out of a couple of books, suggest that they are not trying to warm the air or fuel before burning it, which means that the reaction needs to use more fuel or more powerful fuel than is financially optimal.
One way to warm up the air and fuel is the reverse-flow method, where you take the exhausted air from the burning-chamber and run that past the incoming air, so heat gets transferred from the exhausted air to the fresh air. You can also do that to warm up the fuel before burning.
The other method, this being Golarion, might be to 'bind' a 'fire elemental', the same thing that powered hot water in the villa and presumably powers it here in this fortress, and get it to heat the fuel and air separately before they combust.
Given that forges don't just run off fire elementals in the first place, Keltham is guessing that fire elementals have a temperature rather than a heat output, and that this maximum temperature is too low to melt metal. When you burn coal or other fuel, that in principle can just keep adding more and more heat, because the molecules go on rearranging themselves tighter, and that energy is conserved and must go somewhere. The limiting factors are the starting temperature of the fuel and air; and heat that gets lost into the environment, which gets lost faster the higher the temperature goes.
On the other hand, Keltham is guessing that, once a fire elemental gets up to a certain temperature, it doesn't add any more heat than that.
So you need to use coal or other fuel, not just a fire elemental, to get a temperature high enough to refine iron ore or forge steel.
But people may not have realized that a forge could use less fuel, and maybe less expensive fuel, if they used a fire elemental to first heat up the ores, fuels, and airs, as high as the fire elemental's temperature, and maybe then used some reverse-flow from the furnace exhausts to heat the inputs higher than that, before finally adding the fixed amount of heat from the fuel-burning reaction.
All of this does presume that fuel costs are significant at all in forged metal costs. Which is an example of why Keltham needs to talk to some actual folks currently making and selling metal, at scale, in order to make any progress here.
Or if no single refinery or forge in Cheliax uses enough fuel to make it worth the cost of adding a fire elemental, Keltham is going to have to introduce the concept of "economies of scale", which is when you have a large-enough refinery or forge to make it worth adding a fire elemental.
Just to state the obvious out loud, all these ideas, should they not already be in circulation, are covered by the compact the Project has signed with Cheliax; and may not be used within Cheliax except by paying the Project enormous patentgratuities on them; and are to be held under lesser-but-real conditions of Security, so as to lengthen the amount of time they may be profited-from before Chaotic people start using them without paying patentgratuities and thus undercutting the market.
lintamande: Understood.
Carissa Sevar: They should get him his metalworkers and figure out the logistics of building a very big on-site forge. Obviously.
Keltham: To be clear, none of this stuff is going to work on the first try. The Project is a research-and-prototyping facility. It's the place which tries out ways of doing this stuff in practice, and gets it working well enough for a major refinery or forge to be built -
- presumably somewhere else, next to an iron-ore mine, or a coal mine for coal fuel, or a forest for wood fuel if adding fire elementals can make wood fires suitable for refining or forging. Unless Teleport logistics are very different from what Keltham suspects they are; people talk about the Worldwound in a way that suggests Teleporting lots of stuff is a significant expense.
Project employees, Law-wielders, are not distinguished by their knowing about engineering tricks like reverse-flow or bright ideas like preheating fuel and air using a fire elemental. The domain experts brought on-site can be told about that part simply enough and without a lot of prior background. The tier-2s and tier-1s and Keltham himself, have the job of meta-learning how to try things, tweak things, observe things, and get them to actually work; and, to a lesser extent, understanding what is actually going on with heat and temperature and tiny vibrating molecules, and using that knowledge to organize their experiments.
Keltham: Keltham thinks to check his watch and finds that dinnertime theoretically ended an hour ago.
Keltham is pretty sure he knows the answer to this question, but is there a reason why Ione didn't warn him he was going overtime?
Ione Sala: Ione continues to be a Nethysian, yes. She's pretty sure she doesn't get to go on being one, if an alien from outside known reality is talking about how the universe is secretly put together, and you interrupt him so that you can go eat food.
Ione Messaged Security to tell them to make sure food went on existing whenever Keltham got done, though.
Keltham: ...a belated dinner it is, then.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 13 (10) / Evening
Keltham: Dinnertime! It's a time and they're having dinner during it, so it is, by definition, dinnertime.
Carissa has first claim on Keltham's attention if this is a time when cuddling is desirable; he will otherwise approach Ione to check in on his route progress there.
Carissa Sevar: "I always want you." Also Carissa's slightly concerned what with how alter Ione probably didn't offer herself to Keltham for protection; that's still in red on the wall, something not entirely satisfactory. "I admit to also wanting to learn the results of all your adventures with Golarion sexualities but less urgently."
Keltham: Then Ione's route can wait. Keltham is trying to give his existing relationships as much time as they seem to need, before assuming that he has available item-equipping-slots for new ones.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not really understand the stories Keltham is drawing on in how he conceptualizes romance, and she'd like to, but - not a priority for right this minute, probably.
Keltham: He shall see her of an evening, then. Wishes she also Keltham's dinnertime exclusively? If not he's going to try sitting with Meritxell and Tonia for reasons of cognitive diversity.
Carissa Sevar: Normally she would roll her eyes at this degree of solicitousness but right now it's sort of soothing. "Predict my answer."
Keltham: 20% she wants just him for dinnertime, 80% go sit with Meritxell and Tonia.
70% she thinks Keltham is asking her too much for decisions instead of him just making those on the basis of what he prefers more, but Keltham disagrees with Hypothetical Carissa about this because they are aliens and any time Carissa enters a possibly not-previously-explored state Keltham needs to re-ask annoying questions to figure out what is going on inside people. If she were a dath ilani or Yaisa, Keltham would be offering to pay her a copper per annoying question.
Carissa Sevar: "What is going on inside your Carissa is that I am slightly morose about the fact we can't finish the whole project and build Civilization tomorrow, and indignant about how the world is just going to go on being stupid until we personally fix it, and I am not interested in trying to run your dinner decisions through that filter, that doesn't sound - like a policy you can follow for the whole deployment without going crazy. Which suggests you should make dinner decisions using some other process."
Keltham: Meritxell and Tonia it is, then.
Keltham can't promise that he'll only ask his too-many-questions once, any more than people can get chemistry from hearing it summarized once. But he is learning and orienting and the constant questions will diminish over time.
lintamande: Meritxell and Tonia are debating who the hottest person in the world is. Meritxell feels that it is the Queen, and Tonia thinks that this just seems kind of unlikely on principle even though she has heard that the Queen is very hot.
(This conversation is from the brainstormed list of alter-Cheliax conversation topics.)
Keltham: Assuming they seem okay with Keltham joining this conversation:
Keltham will register that the Queen is the hottest person he's seen in Golarion; and dath ilan tries to avoid exposing people who can't afford them to professional incredibly hot people so he doesn't know what the dath ilani peak of that would be. But the Queen is also relatively young, and people have occasionally mentioned the existence of, like, very old ninth-circle-wizards, who if they get to go on optimizing their appearance would probably look hotter...?
lintamande: - well, wizards don't tend to invest in headbands for Splendour, because if you're a wizard Intelligence is more useful, so you wouldn't expect any of the ancient wizards to have +6 to Splendour like the Queen does, Meritxell objects.