Keltham: Does a Splendour headband... make people prettier?

lintamande: ....it doesn't literally affect, like, their bone structure, but a lot of prettiness is - presentation, subtleties in how you incline your head and hold your shoulders and move your body, and Splendour absolutely affects those things. 

Keltham: Gosh.  Keltham has never looked into Hotness Theory before.  It must certainly be a science out of dath ilan, somewhere in Civilization's vast knowledge, but it's probably classified above his own sexual-jadedness level.

Should he try running an Eagle's Splendour himself during sex?  But maybe he should save that for when he's not already maxed out on interesting things to try.

lintamande: Meritxell has occasionally tried that and been satisfied with the results but she isn't sure Chelish people have the running out of interesting things to try problem. Maybe they would if they couldn't hurt people or tie them up or anything.

Keltham: If you can convert Splendour into hotness, does that mean that Nocticula can be, like... a giant clawed thingydingy like he saw at the Worldwound, and yet, by virtue of sheer presentation and subtleties, incredibly hot.

lintamande: Yes, definitely. Most succubi have fangs and wings and horns in a way that manages to not detract at all from their hotness. The mind is accustomed to getting its hotness-cues from humans but that doesn't mean humans are the thing that actually pushes those buttons the hardest, is how Meritxell guesses a dath ilani would think about it.

Keltham: ...would an illusion of a succubus still look hot?  Keltham is having trouble visualizing how this Splendour thing works.

lintamande: Yes but probably less so, unless it was a moving illusion? - they do mostly look like hot winged horned women, even if you just saw a picture you'd say 'that's a hot winged horned woman', though you'd be missing some of the appeal.

Keltham: Keltham is now less confused.

Nobody had previously mentioned to Keltham at any point that 'succubi' looked at all human.  People need to tell the alien these things.

He was visualizing a giant tentacled clawed fangy thing that was extremely persuasive and presented itself in a way that was super hot.

lintamande: No! Mostly he would see a girl who was super hot, and did have fangs and wings and horns, in a hot way, and mannerisms that were exceptionally compelling, and a voice and scent and way of reacting to him that was very hot. 

Keltham: ...and people just sort of wrap all this up as 'Splendour', even though the kind of Splendour that a headband enhances must be very different - well, it could be doing a similar sort of work, by different methods, and Splendour could be quantifying the work.

The fact that people put numbers on it suggests that they have some way of measuring it, though?

lintamande: There's a divination that gives Splendour! Meritxell doesn't know it because it's an invasive divination - works on objecting targets if they don't have the skill to resist, also gives other information - and the use of those is of course tightly restricted, but it exists. The Splendour scale is like the Intelligence one defined so 10 is the human average and 2 is a useful measure of variance the details of the definition of which she does not know.

Keltham: ...huh.

It is really legitimately actually weird that divinations do that.

Keltham has been focusing a lot on the 'economicmagic' aspects of Golarion magic but maybe he should be looking more into the 'conceptualmagic' aspects.  Where 'economicmagic' is magic that lets you do neat things personally without a huge supply network, and 'conceptualmagic' is magic where it apparently just takes a simple spell to augment incredibly complicated things like Cunning, Wisdom, Splendour.  Those indeed are the subspecies 'mentalisticmagic' of 'conceptualmagic' in which mental quantities are treated as if they were ontologically simple.

In dath ilani serious literature these two are rarely coupled, because they both have Enormous Implications and you usually want to consider the implications Separately.  In Less Serious Literature there is sometimes magic that is both 'economicmagic' and 'conceptualmagic', because both of these things are Cool to many readers, and the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature says that a story can be considered as a framework on which to hang the maximum amount of cool stuff.  So, if he's inside a story, it's not a very serious one, but frankly you could already guess that based on numerous other signs and indicators.

dath ilan: Reminder:  It is possible to keep a dath ilani conversation focused on relatively sexy topics but somebody in that conversation is gonna have to do some steering labor.

lintamande: Meritxell is actually hoping to master Eschew Materials before she next sleeps with Keltham so she can pretend to have known it all along, so she's not going to make the requisite effort to keep the topic sexy. 

Tonia is honestly kind of scared of sleeping with Keltham entirely because there exists a person who has slept with both Keltham and the Queen and so by the transitive theory of kinkiness it'll be way too much for her. 

"Are those meant to be a complete account of the kinds of magic?" she asks instead.

Keltham: "Baseline doesn't have a word that means 'magic'.  It's just got the words economic-magic and conceptual-magic, 'economicmagic' and 'conceptualmagic', of which Golarion magic is both."  There's audibly no syllables shared between the two.  "A superconcept is 'alternatephysics' meaning laws that differ within another world, but that would also include, like, fire working differently."

Carissa Sevar: "I think some of the known planes have that. Like, I don't think fire works on the astral plane. But I'm not sure if the laws are comprehensively different or if there are specific things that don't work in a sort of - large-scale way -"

Keltham: "Can people, like, breathe, on the Astral plane?  Because fire and breathing work off the same principle, that's why they both need air - there's controlled chemical changes happening inside you, that release energy in a more organized way than chaotic heat, to power your movement and thinking."

Carissa Sevar: "You can project your soul to the Astral Plane which does not involve your physical body leaving Golarion. You cannot Plane Shift to the Astral Plane and fly around there, your body would dissolve on you."

Keltham: "I'll chalk that up as an encouraging successful prediction about everything running on the same underlying mechanics here.  From my perspective as an outsider, the first time you thought of someplace fire didn't work, breathing in fact didn't work there either."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know of anywhere where one of fire or breathing works but I'm not a planar specialist."

lintamande: "Can't you not breathe on the Elemental Plane of Fire?" says Gregoria. 

Carissa Sevar: "Well, you'd have to bring air with you, but the air would work in your lungs normally, the basic principle that makes lungs work still works, even if there isn't any air. Similarly there isn't any air among the stars and that makes both breathing and fire not work but the principles of natural law aren't different among the stars."

Keltham: "Yep, same in dath ilan.  No air among the stars, but underlying Laws of motion and chemistry and matter all exactly the same.  If you take air into space and burn something it burns exactly the same way."

Discussion continues for a bit, and then Keltham queries Carissa about retiring to bedroom/cuddleroom/nevermind.  He doesn't find within himself a strong preference to draw upon, and his meta-desire is to see if Carissa has a preference before he spends any more effort on unearthing his own.

Carissa Sevar: "The mood I am in if I don't do some steering to be in a different mood is 'cuddle and have some of the conversations we keep putting off for killing the mood'."

Keltham: "Sounds terrifying, but it has to happen sometime and today seems like one of the better days.  I've got an Early Judgment queued if necessary, and if my mood gets killed far enough, I'll maybe try that Security test with the heating stone attached to my wrist, so long as I'm in a killed mood anyways."

Carissa Sevar: "See, that's how I know you're an alien, that you don't think it's at least a little bit sexy to do magic while in pain."

Keltham: "Not while I'm in pain, but your hint has been noted."

Off they go to the bedroom, then, with a stop along the way to collect that heating stone.  Keltham does think he should try that and see what happens - dip his toe in the waters of 'damage isn't permanent, how are you at psychologically adjusting to that fact' - and it's something he would only try with Carissa.

Carissa Sevar: "Congratulations on the contract, by the way. It feels like everything is finally really happening. I know that probably the first thing won't work out and the mountains of spellsilver are still a ways off, but - still."

Keltham: "Great time to not be Good, so I can be all like, 'I have somebody I love and a full-time sex worker' and not 'oh no what if this project gets delayed an additional day by anything'.  I think a lot of other dath ilani in my shoes would be going fairly insane about now and requesting artifact headbands and trying to turn themselves into half-assed Keepers."

Carissa Sevar: " - I'm really glad you're not doing that. We'll get around to fixing all the bad things, if only because they're really personally annoying, but I don't want a half-assed Keeper, I want Keltham, and I want him to get rich."

Keltham: "Yeah."

Bedroom ahoy.  What's up?  Carissa has the agenda.

Carissa Sevar: "Keep thinking it might be useful to try to explain - the world my mother grew up in, the world she thought she was raising me to live in, until I was twelve."

Keltham: He's mentally braced.  Go ahead.

Carissa Sevar: "Cheliax wasn't an unusually terrible place. From how people at the Worldwound from other countries describe their countries I think it was a mostly typical place. No one's described anything that sounded significantly better; many people have described places that sounded significantly worse. It was illegal to address a noble with insufficient deference, but that was illegal everywhere else, too. It was illegal to claim that a noble had committed a crime, but that's illegal everywhere else, too."

Keltham: "There are no Lawful Good countries?  Or - what goes wrong inside them?"

Carissa Sevar: "There are. Mendev and Lastwall conscript everyone to serve in the armies fighting against Evil, unless you're pregnant or breastfeeding. They'll tell you that their nobles don't abuse their power, and I don't know how true it is - probably truer than most other places - but you aren't allowed to -" Shrug. "I mean, I was fighting at the Worldwound anyway. But Cheliax asked, and they pay me."

Keltham: "Do you know how Lawful Good squares up the thing with 'It's illegal to claim a noble committed a crime?'  I can't parse that as any form of Good or Lawfulness."

Carissa Sevar: "I mean, that's not how those laws are written, how they write them is that it's illegal to slander nobles by claiming falsely that they committed a crime, and then they ask the noble who says 'no, I certainly did not commit a crime', and then they determine the claim was false and arrest you for slander."

Keltham: "Okay, but... what makes a country Lawful Good if... the people running it without asking anyone else's opinion are neither Lawful nor Good?"

Carissa Sevar: "- maybe it would be useful to compare a specific single Lawful Good country to a specific single country of the other alignments? Pick one of Mendev or Lastwall so Conspiracy Carissa would've had to prepare two different sets of lies, and one other country I've mentioned for the same reason?"

Keltham: "I've decided I'm not actually doing Conspiracy reasoning while in bed with you, I mean, I'll be processing your own statements offline while I'm playing this with Asmodia or Maillol, but not right now."

"This isn't Conspiracy checking, it's consistency checking.  All the - words and definitions are still not matching up with each other.  But, uh, Lastwall versus Absalom?"

Carissa Sevar: "Lastwall is a former province of Taldor. It was founded in the war against the necromancer Tar-Baphon, a thousand years ago, the war in which Iomedae ascended. It was founded as a military outpost of Taldor to hold back the surrounding monsters and threats to civilization in Ustalav and the Hold of Belkzen. At first, people were only sent there if they were committed to joining and serving in the military orders that would risk their own lives to hold that land for Civilization. So, Lawful Good. The churches established there doing - functions like healing - were the churches of the Lawful Good gods, mostly. 

Of course, that was a thousand years ago, and people had children in Lastwall, and Taldor went through a bunch of internal reorganizations and isn't very friendly to Lastwall anymore, and Lastwall's not getting money from elsewhere and its people can't easily go settle elsewhere but they bravely solder on with universal conscription for the greater Good, and gradually a class of elites entrenches itself because that's - how things happen, rich people who have ways to get away with things, and whose support is needed to keep paying for Civilization, get exceptions, because otherwise who would keep the troops armored and armed? And then the Worldwound opened, and Lastwall got more extreme, because the whole future of life on Golarion was under threat, and conscripted more people for longer, and needed more money and was willing to negotiate exceptions for more people who had money. 

I don't know which if any of those might've been the missing piece, or if it's something else that's confusing?"

Keltham: "Where does the earning power of the nobles come from - why do they have the money that the country needs to arm its soldiers?  Why are people being universally conscripted if most of the military power is focused in the most powerful wizards and Lawful Good clerics?"

Asmodia: Asmodia is trying to predict Keltham's questions before he asks them, and she's failing, and only the fact that Carissa Sevar has assumed full command, steering, and responsibility is preventing Asmodia from going into a complete state of panic.  Well.  A more complete state of panic.

Keltham is - she can only get part of it, the process he's using, they should have gotten in an eighth-circle for this, Detect Thoughts would be so useful right now - or not, if his thoughts are just leaping directly there, Law become intuition without words - but Keltham is - he's asking questions of 'why is it like that' and he thinks in, concentrations of money?  Concentrations of power?  Any time you point out a concentration to him, he asks why, because it's not concentrated like that in Civilization, or maybe he just expects concentrated anything to be concentrated for a reason?  Or he notices and remembers when you tell him that power is concentrated in clerics and wizards, and then he expects conscription to be concentrated too.  Like the clouds of probability she's been visualizing, but - clouds of money, power, distributed over a country, arranged by different Laws -

Carissa Sevar: "I know a lot more about the second question than the first one. Firstly, you need a number of people doing military operations for every one directly stabbing demons with sharp sticks or hitting them with spells. You need people providing healing, armor, weapons, communications, bringing food and water to the front lines, digging fortifications, guarding the camps. You can have very small strike forces of four or five powerful spellcasters with no logistics network behind them, doing a single day of operations and then teleporting to safety at the end of it, but if you're moving any real numbers of troops or if you want to hold a position you generally want ten people who do all that work for every one who is directly fighting. Secondly, the way you get a few powerful casters is by having lots and lots of weak casters try to fight. Some of them die, some of them stall out, some of them make it; Cheliax does that too, though without conscription. Lastwall doesn't care if people die, except insofar as they are weaker for it; Heaven is understood to be nicer than this world anyway. So sending off a hundred conscripts one of which will return as a powerful spellcaster and the rest of whom will die is a perfectly good deal.

For earning power - foreign connections, mostly? The younger son of a noble in Taldor has lots of money but no title, so he decides to go to Lastwall and lead a little soirée into Ustalav, and if it succeeds, then he's got some land, and can rent it to people, and can buy respectability and exemptions from the laws. And if it fails then his money is inherited by his younger brother who can have his own try."

Keltham: "Illegal to address a noble with insufficient - deference - I'm not really able to visualize what that is, but - it does sound like it'd have to be an explicit regulation?  Again, how does that square up with a country being Lawful Good?"

Carissa Sevar: "Well, they're structured as a military, and everyone is in the military, and the nobles are officers, and in any military it's against regulations to address a superior officer in an insubordinate manner, that's true in modern Cheliax also, the difference in modern Cheliax is that not everyone is in the military and if you're not then obviously military regulations don't apply to you.

But if, while I was in the army, my superior had walked by and I'd said 'hey, Alex, looks like you had too much to drink last night', I'd have been whipped, because there is a regulation about that which I agreed to when I joined in the first place."

Keltham: "...why, though?  I assume it's not - a sex thing, this isn't something that applies to masochists only?"

Carissa Sevar: " - no? It's a discipline thing, people break regulations less if you whip people when they break regulations."

Keltham: "I suppose this would also be true in Civilization, in the sense that thirty seconds later there would be no more regulations and everybody would be gathering around trying to reconstruct the principles of Governance from scratch."

"Why is there a regulation against telling your manager they've had... too much to drink?  You're going to have to parse that line too."

Carissa Sevar: "- had too much to drink is, consumed a lot of mind-altering substances recreationally, and is still affected by them. The regulation is against addressing your superior in a not-deferential tone, and by their name, and on a matter you have not been asked to provide commentary on."

Keltham: "I think I'm basically going to fall back on the three-year-old strategy of learning, here, which seems right and proper to somebody at my current level of competence and confusion."

"Why?"

Carissa Sevar: "People have tried lots of different ways to run militaries. It is one of the areas where I think Golarion is actually most - uh, the reasons for things will be better with militaries than with most places? Because armies that have bad policies lose and so having better ones is easy to check and highly motivated. And one of the things that is understood to be important for running a military is discipline, the strong expectation that your soldiers will obey orders, even orders that they don't understand, even orders that will get them killed. A lot of maneuvers only work if all the soldiers do exactly what they're told. And part of having a disciplined military is having rules about how you address superior officers and how you raise complaints when you have them, and about discouraging - a failure mode where your soldiers are constantly complaining about and mocking their superiors and as a result arrive at mutual knowledge that they won't necessarily listen to orders.

I assume that dath ilan if they had this problem would just say, well your soldiers will only arrive at mutual knowledge if it's good that they do that because their commander is genuinely bad, but in Golarion, they will arrive in that state approximately no matter what, and then you'll lose the war, and the commander probably was bad but the demons are literally going to eat us all."

Keltham: "Well, you're getting better at anticipating some dath ilan perspectives, at least."

"Why do Golarion soldiers arrive in that state no matter what?"

Carissa Sevar: " - because complaining is lots easier than noticing whether the complaining is justified, and no one wants to say to their complaining friend 'actually I think the thing you're complaining about is fine' so you only hear the complaining and then everyone changes their minds off the fact everyone else believes the orders are unreasonable, even if they haven't themselves seen direct reason to think that. You're going to say dath ilani don't do that and that's good for them, Golarion people do do that."

Keltham: "Hypothetically, what happens if we take a room full of Golarion soldiers, diagram out for them exactly how they're going to arrive in this erroneous state of mind, and ask them to do something else which is not that."

Carissa Sevar: "They'd maybe try for a week and then they'd fall into the normal failure mode. And maybe accuse people they don't like of it."

Keltham: "And the soldiers don't reason that, if they're being told they're not allowed to communicate with each other about how their manager is on mind-altering substances and that's a bad idea, probably everybody else is thinking it, but not able to say it.  Everybody thinks it's just themselves thinking that.  They're Intelligence 10 and that's too low to imagine what somebody else is thinking if they haven't said it out loud."

Carissa Sevar: " - not quite that far? But they don't know for sure if anyone else is thinking it and they do know everyone else is still following orders."

Keltham: "And anybody who says out loud, 'Hey, I bet all of us are thinking what each of us are thinking' is - sent on to Heaven?  Yanked out of the regular army and sent off to wizard lessons so they can be one of the better-paid military elite?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know how Lastwall does it. In modern Cheliax your superiors would ask you what you meant by that and you would say 'I was trying to cause there to be mutual knowledge that we don't think highly of our commander without technically violating the regulation against saying that' and they would rewrite the regulation to include that, if it somehow didn't already. And maybe put you somewhere where that kind of cleverness is an asset, it depends."

Keltham: "...my understanding of this remains at the level where everything seems to be put together entirely out of reasoning errors, and I don't know which reasoning errors people are supposed to make or not make.  If you told me that Lawful Good countries incinerated anybody wearing a blue hat, that would be around as compatible with my current state of knowledge as anything else you're saying."

"I guess you might as well go on describing that world and give up on describing why."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Sorry. Back to Cheliax. It's a place where merchants who are good at what they do can lead prosperous lives, as long as they are respectful of people who have more legal importance than them, and don't get themselves embroiled in government scheming. There is a lot of government scheming. Cheliax changed Kings four times in my mother's life. Everyone who was King was terrified of being assassinated in a fashion that didn't leave them resurrectable, and so they'd do harsh and arbitrary things that seemed to them to make it less likely they'd be assassinated. It was rumored they used mind control a lot. It was impossible to know if that was true, or really what was true in general about the people in power, but people didn't mind, because it was possible to know - that the ports were growing, that foreign invasions weren't likely. There being lots of scheming for power only really matters to most people when two contestants go to a proper war about it, in which cities are destroyed and tens of thousands of people die."

Keltham: "Continues to make as much sense as anything else.  Maybe more so than the military 'discipline' thing."

Asmodia: Asmodia is trying to keep quiet as much as possible and let Sevar work, but she registers that Keltham is going to later consistency-check everything he remembers, and they face a grim tradeoff between encouraging him to ask questions now, in which case he'll ask more questions and do more consistency-checking total, and having no idea what Keltham will consistency-check later until after he's accumulated lots of memorable stuff to check.

Carissa Sevar: Yep! She's going to stick to things that are entirely true about Taldor, so that no matter how many there are they shouldn't require that much effort to make consistent, but of course there keep being ways in which the Taldor-analogy isn't quite perfect or things that actually do work but will register as inconsistent to Keltham. 

"Another thing that is important is that women in Cheliax like in other places were - worse off. Women are physically weaker than men, and much of the work that needs doing in Golarion requires physical strength. Women will spend most of their adult lives pregnant, and so in places where families decide which of their children to invest their limited educating-a-child resource on, they'd choose a boy, who'll be able to work his whole adult life, and is less likely to die young in childbirth."

Keltham: Most of the time pregnant?  "They - literally get pregnant at 13, start a new pregnancy less than 280 days after giving birth, and die shortly after menopause?  Shouldn't breastfeeding suppress - capability to get pregnant - for a couple of years?"

Carissa Sevar: "In the cities well-off women don't breastfeed, they have servants for that. ...do dath ilani get pregnant at 13? Sixteen is more normal, if a girl is having sex at that age. And then, yes, it's not unusual to have eight or even ten live births, and twelve or fifteen pregnancies, in places that are like the way Cheliax used to be. In rural parts of Cheliax, too. You should ask Tonia how many children her mother has, and how many she buried, and at what age she married."

Keltham: "Most dath ilani pass adulthood tests at 13, and at 14 you're considered adult regardless, though at that point you're just starting the entire dating process.  It'd be pretty normal not to find anyone you liked enough to have a kid with, until a lot later than that.  I don't actually know offhand if somebody's body is supposed to do that correctly at age 13, the topic never came up..."

"I guess the moral here is something like - try to have improvements in contraception come before improvements in agricultural productivity come before improvements in, in countermeasures against diseases that kill infants quickly and quietly and before they're actually aware of themselves..."

"Carissa, I'm noticing that a large part of myself wants out of this conversation.  I endorse my overriding it and continuing to listen, but I do want to check that you have - a purpose in mind for things, and a reason to say it now instead of a month later."

Carissa Sevar: "There is a specific further point I was going to get to. I can try to - not digress on the way to it. I'm - sorry. I don't want to hurt you."

Keltham: "It's not that I'm saying, don't hurt me eventually, I'm saying - don't rush it, without a reason."

"What was the further point?"

Carissa Sevar: "Why no one except Yaisa will quote you prices."

Keltham: "Because it's weird, and anybody suggesting a non-average behavior is out to exploit you.  Because - people who do that, aren't seen as anything else -"

"Yaisa told me that, I didn't understand what she meant, still don't, didn't seem like the time then to ask."

Carissa Sevar: "What do you tell your daughters, in Cheliax the way it used to be, if you want them to have any chance of growing up to be anything? 'don't have sex'. And what do you know about a girl if she does have sex? That she's not going to be, or do, anything else."

Keltham: "Is there a particular aspect of this that it's important I understand?  Because I don't understand any of it.  Yaisa is a wizard, all of you are wizards, you can use Alter Self - I don't understand."

Carissa Sevar: " - I was hoping I could skip over some of the things that produce that but I guess the answer is, no, I can't do that. All right. Almost no one, in Cheliax before the Church took over, was a wizard, or would train you to be a wizard. 'Tell your daughters not to have sex until they were second circle wizards' was absurd and unviable. Not for my mother, who's a wizard herself, learned from her own father, but there were maybe five women like her in Corentyn. You couldn't send your daughter to school to be a wizard. You could send her to an apprenticeship, but - that would be sending her off to be vulnerable - ugh, I'm frustrated now, concepts keep having prerequisites - 

- for most people, 'wait until you're a second circle wizard' is an impossible rule. It was not a life path people who didn't happen to get very lucky could reasonably hope to follow. So the advice instead was usually to wait until you are married to a man who has enough money to support you and the children, and contractually obligated to do that. And that is what most reasonable girls would do, if they had any self control or common sense."

Keltham: "Everything in Golarion outside of this fortress is terrible and it was worse in Cheliax before Asmodeus took over, I get that, what does any of that have to do with why somebody wouldn't put a price on sex once they became a second-circle wizard?  Or why you wouldn't have a price before then just a very high one?"

Carissa Sevar: "- you have a price if you need to do that in order to eat, if the fact this probably causes you to have a baby you're not ready for in a year is less urgent than the fact that you will starve tomorrow. That's the circumstances under which people give a price. And that price is not even very high. You're going to have questions about that but I don't know how to answer them. In most countries that work like this it's some copper, maybe a silver."

Keltham: "Everything is worse than I expect even after taking into account that I expect it to be worse than I expect, yes, I'm getting that too, but there's no connection I can understand between the price for people who need to eat being a silver, and other people not being able to name a price higher than that, and then none of that obviously applies to you or Ione or Meritxell or anybody here so why would only Yaisa be able to put prices on things?"

Carissa Sevar: "Because we're not dath ilani, and if you grow up seeing hungry diseased women on the street begging passersby to have sex with them for a single meal - which Ione and Meritxell didn't, but I did, and their parents did, then the thing you tell your daughters is to never ever become that, that we are different and must remain different and must not make the decisions which lead down that path, that people like us are not people like them, that all of the good things in life we have we have because we are not like them.

And then you don't just change your way of thinking when the government introduces wizard education for every child smart enough to learn, because you aren't used to thinking in a way that sees all the hidden connections and sees how when lots of girls are wizards then there'll be an entirely different kind of sex work market that is compatible with the rest of their life ambitions, you aren't used to things having implications. Yaisa almost certainly has not told her parents how she makes her money, or shown them any of the things she buys, because they'd be horrified, because they'd probably kick her out so she stops being a bad influence on her younger siblings. 

And everyone else feels awkward around her, around what she's doing, because it's not that there's anything wrong with it it's just that everyone thinks there is and we've been told there is our whole lives by everyone older than us who grew up when it was true, and people don't know how to stop believing something just because it's not true anymore. My read on Yaisa is that she was very horny and very - Chaotic, frankly, the kind of person who even without the ability to stop believing things just because they're not true anymore goes 'well, just because everyone says that, it doesn't mean I have to listen to them, just because they have an argument doesn't mean I have to care about that argument' - and so she tried it, and nothing went wrong because nothing was wrong with it, but, it's going to take generations, for this particular wound in Cheliax to heal, it's going to heal by means of the people who are used to the old way dying, not by them changing their minds. Unless we make them all ilani."

Keltham: "If Yaisa's Chaotic, pick a time to call her Chaotic when she's not the only person present thinking in the way that I would call Law-shaped."

"My brain is suggesting like, literally just drilling 'how to undo your conclusions when a premise you previously relied on gets falsified', but my intuition is telling me that one step is not the real problem here.  Do you know what is?"

Carissa Sevar: "I think it's a thing where - the conclusion gets distilled without all the associated reasoning? If you went and asked random people in - some neighboring country where things are still like this, they would say things like 'whores are disgusting' or 'whores are worthless', they wouldn't have something they derived from some premises about educational opportunity. They inherit the societal attitude without ever checking where it came from and whether the things that produced it are still true. Telling them to rethink won't help if they weren't thinking in the first place. 

If you mean how do you convince me or Ione or Meritxell - when I try to think how to name a number for you it just feels like I'm being asked how to name a price for breaking a promise. It's not something you do for a price. And if I just tell myself that's stupid and to come up with a number anyway, I can feel myself just - producing random numbers like a beaten prisoner who'll name as many accomplices as you want, not doing something that draws on my wants."

Keltham: "Step one, stop trying that.  I'm not saying that I never beat up my brain and force it to do things it rather wouldn't, but it takes a strong reason and I usually make pretty sure I understand what's going on in there first, if it's not a major emergency."

"If it seemed to you that Chaotic people were more able to resist failing in that way - then consider the hypothesis floated that what you're calling 'Chaotic' is a different subsection of that Law which neither you nor the so-called Chaotic have mastered in totality and completion.  Nonconformity is something trained in dath ilan and we could not be Law-shaped without that.  If you're conforming to what you were taught, to what other people seem to believe, to what other people seem to want you to believe, to what you think everyone believes, you're not conforming to the Law."

Carissa Sevar: "That does not surprise me, and it would not surprise me if the true thing beneath what we call Chaos is actually a shard of what dath ilan calls Law, since, otherwise you'd sort of think gods wouldn't be Chaotic. Though I don't think Yaisa is - conforming to the Law even when it breaks from everyone around her, that doesn't land quite right as a description of what she's doing.

I agree that she is doing better than the rest of us. And part of why I - didn't want to wait a month - was that I think you ought to know, that she's doing so well, that she's probably suffered socially for it, that she's right, it seemed like the kind of thing you'd want to know."

Keltham: "In all frankness, what I learned is that, first of all, there's some incredible piece of insanity buried into everybody around me, to which Yaisa is immune, and I have to not talk about what Yaisa can do in terms of setting prices, because people might exhibit undefined behaviors.  This was an important fact and I needed to know it."

"The second thing I learned is that, in fact, everybody around me, by extrapolation, probably has a bunch of other - stuff that a dath ilani would think of as completely made out of obviously invalid reasoning steps - and it's possible for you to know about that, without being able to fix it or even manually counter it each time."

"Which was also an important fact I needed to know quickly."

"I think I understand a little better what Ione was worried about, and then Asmodia, but I - don't know how to teach things in an order that minimizes damage as existing thoughts start to break and rearrange, I don't even see - whether I should be trying to fix things a little at a time, or build up a huge stock of sanity technique before anybody tries to do any mental housecleaning, so that people know how to fix the problems they spot -"

"Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly.  None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."  

Carissa Sevar: - nod. 

- tentative success, then, on planting the seeds that seemed most essential for Keltham to flee to a secluded location if he flees, and on making Ione and Asmodia's periodically urging Keltham not to give lectures that destroy too much Asmodeanism less suspicious. Tentative failure on saying only consistent-seeming things, not that he's pointed out an inconsistency yet, but she predicts he will and so she can't call it a tentative success while predicting that -

"I don't think it's your job, by the way, not to break us. Or not to break me, at least, I suppose it's more complicated with everyone else. I don't know what you should be trying to do but - I won't be angry, or feel like I got a worse deal than I expected, if I end up noticing I'm full of lies and not even knowing where to go from there. The alternative isn't not being full of lies, right, just not noticing."

Keltham: "Maybe part of what I'm supposed to do, is frontload teaching positive thinking patterns before teaching the negative counters?  So that, if like, somebody's internal motivations turn out to be totally insane in some way, they can - fall back to knowing how somebody Lawful would think instead?  Instead of just dividing by zero, undefined behavior?"

"...I worry that even a positive shadow of what Civilization does, rather than doesn't do, will include a thousand passing bits of violently anti-Golarion sanity like being able to say how much a sex act is worth to you financially."

Carissa Sevar: "Probably it will. I am not sure there's a way around that, and  - that's okay."

Keltham: "I hadn't actually meant to offer my researchers so much money that they'd commit personality suicide rather than quit the project.  And I - thought the whole point of not being Good, was, not committing personality suicide just because something is wrong elsewhere in the world."

"Or if it's okay to damage them for some other reason - why would it be?"

Carissa Sevar: "- I can't speak for anyone else, on this. But for me - you're right. There is nothing you could pay me to commit personality suicide, since there's nothing I could do with the money anyway. Almost no matter what was happening in the world I wouldn't let anyone take Carissa and replace her with someone else; I am too Evil for that. But - I am an Asmodean. The Church teaches that we are broken in ways it does not know how to fix in life, and can fix only slowly in Hell. I didn't know what that meant, until I met you, but I believed it, because the Church doesn't lie, and I wanted it, very badly. You can refuse to become a devil, if you want, in Hell, everyone's Evil, no one's going to try to get you to for your own good. But Carissa is not - the set of errors I am making now. Carissa is my nature as someone who will do whatever it takes to be smarter, and stronger, and better, someone who heard that becoming some kinds of devil hurts, when she was six or seven, and went and touched a hot coal, just in order to imagine that she was in Hell and being perfected -"

Carissa Sevar: "I"m not in a hurry. I understand your reasons for not wanting us to rush off growing up, and I'm not sure it's the sort of thing where trying to hurry would actually make the important parts happen faster. I'm not trying to do it to myself on purpose. I'm letting go, when I touch anything that might be a hot coal. But if it does happen fast, if I do wake up one day and see through myself with terrible clarity, that's not suicide, that's being born. And babies cry about being born but you can't keep them in the womb forever."

Keltham: "I'm going to be really fucking pissed with Something if I got landed somewhere I get to fall in love and then watch all of my lovers turn into Keepers and leave me behind."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know enough about this to promise you that won't happen, but it's not what I want. I want to be yours, and be better at it."

Keltham: Can Keepers be in love?  Keltham doesn't know, which, now that he reflects on it, seems like the state of affairs that might obtain if Keepers can't.  If restructuring yourself more Law-shaped meant you couldn't let yourself go like that, couldn't believe somebody was righter for you, than she was.  And this was not something you wanted to go around telling people, if they hadn't asked.  Like all the couples that declare their relationship prediction markets closed info, and to not tell them what the numbers are, so long as they stay above 70%.

Well, it's not like they're asking to be Keepers, Pilar and Meritxell excepted.  The Cheliax-rebuilding question is whether they can become, like, 20% of a regular dath ilani without their personalities disintegrating.  That's probably around the level they're actually thinking of, when he talks about Keepers, anyways.

Keltham automatically labels this as a thought originally suggested by optimism and an internal search for consolation in the face of a previous input producing emotional distress, and has the disconcerting experience of realizing that probably nobody else on Golarion knows how to do that.

"Next item on tonight's agenda of awful relationship conversations?  I can keep going."

Carissa Sevar: "No further awful relationship conversations! That is all the awful relationship conversation ideas I had. I have a separate list of kinky relationship conversations which should perhaps be for some other night."

Keltham: He'll just hold her for a while, then.

The thought occurs to him that among the solutions he could apply here, given infinite time, would be to write a fictional book containing a Civilizational hero as a viewpoint character.  So people could pick up, the rhythm of Civilization's thought processes, have that positive vision inside them as a potential replacement, before they started learning things that might risk doing internal damage.  Not the best use of his time as it stands.  Probably also the result of the well-known Rationalizing Reasons To Write A Book Bias to which he is no more immune than any other dath ilani.  Maybe if he ran out literally all of his better ideas over the course of twenty-six years he'd eventually resort to that one because at least books are fun to write.

"Oh," Keltham says after an interval of quiet.  "Small bit of progress... actually, first, does anything awful happen inside your mind, if Yaisa got something nice from me before you did, and you probably can't have it for a while?  Though Yaisa said she intended to spread the word, so you'll probably hear about it at some point, unless you tell me to tell Yaisa to label the information a Carissa infohazard as it spreads."

Carissa Sevar: "Like a completely typical Golarion woman I have flashes of jealousy about all your other lovers and like a moderately competent one I tell them that I am witnessing the consequences of my strategic decision to go for the most valuable man in the world. I am not sure if that's the kind of anything awful you mean."

Keltham: "Okay but in terms of policy, does that work out to my labeling infohazardous the details of things my other cuddle-partners got and you can't have yet, because it causes you mental pain that there isn't a sufficiently strong reason for you to take on... I guess the answer is probably 'Carissa, pain, have you met her' but I want to verify it's the kind of pain that qualifies for that."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't want you to avoid telling me things that cause me jealousy."

Keltham: Keltham describes that thing he did, that Yaisa liked.  For which she later quoted him a price, under Fairness, that was more than an order of magnitude more than any sex that Keltham had to offer in dath ilan was worth to anyone from Civilization.

He realized while doing that, this was probably the feeling of power that Carissa had talked about wanting him to feel, that he felt while controlling Yaisa that way.

So he'll be able to feel it with Carissa, once he... is actually capable of making her respond the way he wants.  Which is sort of a key ingredient in that feeling of being powerful.

He does not say this to add pressure from his side.  Keltham has that with Yaisa; he is not himself starving for it, if Carissa cannot give it to him, for a time.

Carissa Sevar: " - I'm in fact not jealous. Just - glad for you, glad you got a chance to have it. 

I have not been putting any mental effort into working out why it's so hard for me to relax in bed. I meant to, but then a lot of things happened. Does the prohibition on me having sex with other people extend to me seeing someone in the Church who specializes in sexual hangups for the purpose of getting advice about it? - where by seeing someone I mean doing sex things with the expert in order to see if they can figure anything out. It is fine if that is not allowed, and fine if you want to achieve this yourself, but if it's allowed I might try it."

Keltham: "Well, the correct answer is, sure, go ahead, but my actual answer is, I would prefer to know them first.  And maybe I'd prefer to hear out what they want to do to you, if it's not much more awful than what we've done so far, in case I do want to do that myself."

"If you're open to consulting outside experts, I'm sort of tempted to write Isidre and ask.  I'm sort of tempted to write Abrogail and ask."

Carissa Sevar: " - Abrogail might be a great person to ask, actually. I -

- she has more expertise in this than I knew it was possible to have. She didn't fix that thing, she wasn't trying to, but I would absolutely predict she knows how. And I know she's curious how I've been doing because Subirachs asked if she could pass along what I told her. - I said yes."

Keltham: "Verify even if you trust:  I trust my personal details weren't in there, just yours?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, correct, I have been telling Subirachs only my personal details. You can ask me to stop that too, of course, if you'd like; it was strongly recommended when I first got back from Egorian but I don't think it's nearly as important now."

Keltham: "I'm fine with it."

"Though amused with my brain over how probably at least 30% of this fineness is powered by Subirachs and Abrogail being hot."

Carissa Sevar: "Aren't they???? I had never seen anyone that attractive before I joined this project. I don't know how Abrogail isn't constantly sexually distracted by looking in the mirror, or catching glimpses of her reflection on her dinnerware, or bathing...."

Keltham: "Thought two:  To whatever extent this is powered by Splendour, its reverse can also probably be powered by Splendour, to present yourself as less sexy.  In fact, I'm guessing that Abrogail sexied you a looooot harder than she sexied me, by the sound of things."

"Thought one:  Why discard this prediction of what seems like a perfectly good hypothesis?  Perhaps Abrogail is, in fact, constantly sexually distracted by herself while bathing."

Security: Sometimes, no matter how much heresy you think you've already heard on Project Lawful, you still have to tamp down a reflexive impulse to incinerate somebody.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 13 (10) / Night

Ione Sala: Everyone's Rings have kicked tonight!  Ione is pumped about this.  She's gonna have 3 hours a night of personal time.  She's gonna get to read books and not explode.

Buuut, before Personal Hours begin, Ione needs to have a much more dreaded conversation with Carissa, about how to successfully retcon a personal confession to Keltham that... is not entirely conformant with the alterCheliax canon that currently seems to be developing.

(It's not her fault.  It's not.  If the Asmodeans didn't want Ione Sala to sound so much more terrified, back then, they shouldn't have fucking terrified her.)

Carissa Sevar: "I honestly don't have a good idea what to do with this. You could claim to think you were worried you'd be removed from the project over being a Nethysian? I am not sure if he'll remember things that contradict that; he well might."

Asmodia: "Keltham requesting all of his transcripts, or worse, somehow finding out about magical memory aids and demanding one of those, is one of my enduring nightmares about how this Project ends.  It should probably be in black on the wall, that we were too visibly making up alterCheliax as we went along, if Keltham could actually review all the dialogue from then and compare it to the more complete-sounding world from now."

"Sala's transcript is one of the worst ones from that perspective.  We are purely hoping that Keltham doesn't remember it well enough.  Keltham asks how much trouble she's in, if the Chelish government finds out about her.  She doesn't say she got truthspelled by Security already.  She says she doesn't know.  It's halfway between red and black, we can maybe gloss that, even if Keltham remembers.  But Ione is just not acting like someone from alterCheliax there, and that overall impression is one that he may be able to notice in retrospect."

"And Keltham is going to remember that Sala was too scared to tell anyone she was a Nethysian, because that was central to her confession.  That - has to be a mistake, Sala made, somehow, because here she is now in alterCheliax doing great about that, so why was she so scared before then -"

"If Keltham wasn't already asking to check in on Ione, I'd tell Sala to fuck off.  If she hadn't already pledged herself to Keltham, I'd tell her to tell Keltham to fuck off.  Failing both of those, I'm not sure what our good options are here.  I hope Sala has thought about this for longer and has something amazing to propose."

Ione Sala: "Horrible past personal trauma that I outgrew over the last nine days, once I was out as a Nethysian and everybody accepted that about me because I saved all their asses from Nidal?  Nobody else on the alter-Project has a horrible past personal trauma, right?"

Carissa Sevar: "None disclosed yet."

Ione Sala: "Okay.  I told a boy once, he'd been raised on his parents' stories of Old Cheliax and sincerely believed that if he turned me into the authorities I was done for, now that Asmodeus was running the country.  He told me that, I correctly read his sincerity and stupidly believed him and was too scared to ask any authorities, he blackmailed me into sexual service for a couple of years, I eventually broke loose... not sure how, I probably didn't just kill him... I ended up thinking that was what men just wanted and tried to offer it to Keltham, but I now realize this was probably some kind of lingering insanity and actually Keltham can just have a normal relationship with me."

Carissa Sevar: "Iiiiii don't like it but I'm having a hard time predicting specific Keltham objections. I couldn't even predict Keltham's specific objections to the concept of military discipline so I shouldn't expect to get them here."

Asmodia: "I don't like it, and I want something better but I don't know - what's better."

"No, I do, it's what's more normal.  What happens to more people than this happens to?  In alterCheliax, I realize it happens all the time in realCheliax."

"This is way too close to being a trope.  If it happened to alterIone, she should be hiding it, and presenting Keltham with some more normal story, that we can reveal this trope hiding behind, if at some point we want him to believe in tropes so his girlfriends can extract him from the Project."

Carissa Sevar: "One of her parents got executed for being a Nethysian under the old regime? And she knows the new one says it's different but she didn't really believe it until it came out and they were like 'yeah, fine'?"

Asmodia: "I like it more but why did oldCheliax execute Nethysians?  RealTaldor doesn't, as far as I know?"

Carissa Sevar: "I don't think it does, no. The ....Church of Nethys sided with a claimant to the throne and the retaliation included retaliation against the Church? Is there precedent for that in Taldor?"

Ione Sala: "Not in the histories I've read, except for the part where Taldor is so big, so old, and so internally divided that there's precedent for anything?"

"I'm not sure about the theology on this, my actual sense of Nethys is that we don't really do the thing about siding with throne claimants.  Side with a wizard, sure, or side with a library.  The Church of Nethys ran a library in my hometown of Wark-by-Laecastel, the Count of Laecastel decided he liked the librarian or didn't like the books, stuff happened, every registered Nethysian in the city got executed..."

"No, that wouldn't make me scared when I got to Ostenso, I don't think?  It wouldn't be general prejudice against Nethysians, everybody thinking Nethysians are alter-Manohar."

Asmodia: "A general prejudice against Nethysians in alterCheliax does seem plausible.  I must personally say that some of your early charms were lost on me after I had to construct a universe which would somehow contain you inside it."

Carissa Sevar: "The old regime banned the church after some incidents that aren't spoken of so that no one gets any ideas, and even under the new regime you're supposed to have gone in to promise under Truth Spell you're not doing various classes of thing like Wishes, and your parents were scared and had preferred to practice in secret - though not on anything dangerous?"

Ione Sala: "If I'd been a Nethysian my whole life I'd damn well find out, under the new regime, what the incidents were... I guess maybe not if I was hiding and didn't dare ask suspicious questions."

Asmodia: "Let's go ask Maillol right now, says Keltham.  We don't do unspecified incidents on my wall.  We always know ourselves specifically what happened even if our alter-selves don't."

Carissa Sevar: "Let's first figure out what alter-Ione believed and then we can figure out what was true, I think the second part's going to be substantially easy especially as she can be wrong."