Ione Sala: "Some Nethysian exploded the wrong person, I might guess?  I don't feel like I'd guess.  I'd want to know.  Nethys is god of knowledge, not god of guesses.  AlterIone would ask Maillol herself, though maybe not this fast."

Asmodia: "OldCheliax required all Nethysians to be registered and was sometimes known to kill them en masse if a noble felt like it.  Ione's mother thought it was safer not to register.  She was wrong."

"She'd probably have died when Ione was too young to remember, though?  So that wouldn't have traumatized her much if at all?  Do non-Asmodeans get attached to parents that way even if they're too young to remember?"

Ione Sala: "Don't ask me that, I was just thinking we should actually kill my mother for consistency purposes."

Carissa Sevar: "We should have a non-Chelish person on call for these sorts of things. Ione would've been...four, if it was right before the war? I don't think four year olds have emotional attachments unless you're trying to raise them dependent on you for some reason."

Asmodia: Asmodia is now inspecting her wall.  That remark about Ione wanting her mother dead sparked a memory, she'd heard something about Ione's parents before this...

"Moot point, this doesn't fly.  Ione, you told Keltham over a meal that your parents were a couple of low-level bureaucrats who wizard-tracked you because they didn't know what to do with you."

Ione Sala: "Oh, right.  Sorry, I -"

Asmodia: "Don't fucking OH RIGHT me, if you fuck up like that during a real conversation everybody on this Project DIES."

Carissa Sevar: "Well done, Asmodia. Ione, spend some time tonight reading everything you've said to Keltham. 

Is there a way to convince Keltham the project does not have transcripts from before the Zon-Kuthon war, because the copies sent out were destroy-on-receipt and the copies on site were destroyed by the attack?"

Asmodia: "We'd probably take... let's call it a 4-to-1 hit on Conspiracy, as I'd guess Keltham's guesses.  I'm hard-pressed to guess if that's better or worse than trying to subtly edit the transcript instead."

"I think we can probably get away with claiming that there's only transcripts of Keltham's lectures, plus a bunch of particular not-very-detailed reports that people submitted about private conversations that Keltham knows we know about or that would've been written up in alterCheliax.  I can write up outlines of those, but people should actually write their own reports, so the tone will be right and people will know what's in them."

"Ah... this should theoretically include the Queen, if she would have reported on any of her own interactions."

Carissa Sevar: "I'll put in the report to Egorian that we're compiling alter Cheliax documentation. In your judgment does the Queen of alter Cheliax submit such."

Asmodia: "Keltham pitched her on what the Project could do.  I think the alterQueen probably reports something about that, especially if there was anything in there she hadn't already heard.  I admit, I'm having some trouble remembering in my own head what Keltham said versus what got picked up in his thoughts, most of the really interesting and reportable stuff was in his thoughts..."

Ione Sala: "I don't need to be present for this part of the conversation.  Keltham is inquiring about my 'romantic route', I need to know how specifically I got scared to the point where I acted like I did.  Maybe my librarian got burned when I was four... would I remember that?  Fuck all this, why couldn't the Church have taken over alterCheliax ten years ago instead?" 

Carissa Sevar: "I told Keltham I was twelve. ...I guess I could shave a couple of years off my age, though I also told him I'm on my second deployment."

Asmodia: "I suppose we'd have to fake all your paperwork and everyone else's paperwork anyways, I doubt our files in realCheliax would pass... no, I'm pretty sure somebody's told Keltham at some point how long ago the Church took over.  Ah.  Maillol told him it was fifteen years.  I think somebody else told him before then, probably you, don't remember when."

"THIS is why I keep wishing people would STOP TELLING KELTHAM THINGS.  Yes I know that's IMPOSSIBLE."

"Oh, and you know what else?  Scries don't work in the palace.  Two-way mirrors don't easily communicate inside the palace proper, or inside major regional bureaucracy headquarters.  Because otherwise Keltham could demand to see paperwork, and then more referenced paperwork, and just keep on looking until he went past what we could fake, and found something whose inconsistency with alterCheliax runs too deep for blocking out particular sentences from his attention."

Carissa Sevar: " - yep, all right, authorizing that lie to the extent it's even a lie. All major bureaucracy centers are like this site unscryable for security reasons. Could Ione have an older sibling who warned her to not tell the Chelish government she was Nethysian and then mysteriously vanished?"

Ione Sala: "That would be an excellent story if the goal was to make Keltham believe in tropes."

"You know, if we're going for shallow stories with deeper trope stories behind them, I'd go with, there was a boy who blackmailed me about being Nethysian and forced sex out of me, deeper story, that boy was my brother.  It would explain my searing hatred and desire to watch him slowly suffer and die, if that showed up in Detect Desires at some point.  Also why I'm not discussing any details and am not telling Keltham his name."

Carissa Sevar: " - might work. I at least like it better than the first version, and Keltham won't pry because he becomes absurdly solicitous at the slightest sign of weakness."

Asmodia: "So remember how Keltham reacted to our story about Manohar?  Remember his thoughts in the transcript just - looking it over, thinking, instinctively feeling that it wasn't reality?  Keltham has - something deeper than words, numbers - that he uses to notice stories.  I think he notices the story here.  Because it is a story.  At best he blames it on tropes, at worst he correctly blames it on us."

Carissa Sevar: "That just brings us back to 'it's really best not to lie to Keltham', which, I agree, that's why personally I didn't betray Asmodeus at the first opportunity and tell Keltham not to let them disappear me. Ione did, so.

She could say she doesn't actually remember that conversation and her recollection of the day before the vision is generally blurry - no, that definitely gets Keltham trying to track down the exact details. 

She could say that, embarrassingly, she seems to have come back from her contact with Takaral exclusively attracted to the undead?"

Ione Sala: "Oh that's not the least bit suspicious.  Happens all the time outside of stories."

Asmodia: "...total changes of sexual orientation could be common as a result of -"

Ione Sala: "Keltham gets suspicious and asks me to have sex with a zombie while checking my arousal levels."

Carissa Sevar: "Well, that'll take some time to arrange during which we can figure out how to fake it."

Ione Sala: "Veto.  Not in my compact.  I'd sooner tell him that I picked up Takaral's sexuality and am now attracted exclusively to voluptuous drow women takaral."

Asmodia: "Ione, what did your brother actually do to you?  Anything dramatic, tropey?"

Ione Sala: "Just got my life as close as he could to Hell without visibly-to-my-parents decreasing my sale value as wizard livestock."  She's not telling them the bird story, these are not friends.  "He didn't actually rape me, if that's what -"

Asmodia: "Okay, see, that?  That is reality.  Right there.  It sounds real because it is real.  Some unspecified boy you were around growing up scared the shit out of you about what happened to Nethysians and you never realized how much he was actually lying to you until now.  Dark reveal, that boy was actually your brother.  That's it, nothing more improbable than that actually happened to you."

Carissa Sevar: "And we don't have a transcript of that conversation, only of the lectures, and we pray Keltham doesn't remember anything but the sexy bit. Done, that's the best we're going to get."

Ione Sala: "I hope you just mean 'done' on the scared-Nethysian backstory because I also need approval on the story of how I got Nethys-touched enough to borrow books from libraries, how I found out about Nethys and became a worshipper in the first place, I am going to have to figure out Nethysian theology from scratch and write down what I would obviously know about it unless you can get the Most High to reconsider the damage she's doing to alterCheliax by not letting me have real Nethysian theology that will fit with everything else, and also if I didn't get sex extracted from me, we have not explained why I offered myself to Keltham that completely when that's not in fact my sexuality and that's going to show up in my arousal levels.  That he can read."

Carissa Sevar: "Did you in fact possess a convenient childhood passion for libraries or learning or something. Run away from home because they wouldn't let you read books, anything interesting like that."

Ione Sala: "I read what I could get my hands on.  Thought about running away from home all the time, it never seemed like actually the correct strategic move compared to becoming a powerful wizard and eventually coming back for my revenge."

Carissa Sevar: "And at some point when you were reading everything and thinking about that, you had a religious experience, and then just knew you could get books from the library without going."

Ione Sala: "On theology as I know it, I should've been a pretty devout Nethysian before that point... I guess Nethys could've just foreseen I'd be on Project Lawful someday and have been looking for an excuse?  That implies more foresight than I think people have been attributing to Nethys, I don't think Nethys can predict actualities rather than possibilities that finely -"

Asmodia: "Veto, it implies too much else if Nethys can do that.  What if you only got those powers after you became a wizard and were already a Nethysian?  Then you're already in Ostenso academy, Nethys guesses where Project Lawful gets located... still seems like a lot, but Nethys could've been making multiple tries."

Ione Sala: "Works for me.  If I'm already a wizard it's more plausible that Nethys is being even slightly nice to me."

"Look, if we're trying stories neighboring to reality, how about if I was terrified that we'd be sent back at any moment and replaced with better researchers and more seductive women, I was absolutely certain that Nethys wanted me to stay with Keltham, and I was trying to offer him the most I possibly could so as to try not to be sent away from him?"

Carissa Sevar: "...maybe? But I think that's just not what an alter Cheliax girl goes for, when she's trying to be as seductive as possible."

Ione Sala: "I can consistently not be able to seduce anyone worth a fuck.  That does lie within my acting abilities."

Carissa Sevar: "Were you, when you said that, actually just trying to seduce Keltham from your best model of how to do it or were you doing something more complicated."

Ione Sala: "Trying to seduce Keltham in one minute, while so terrified that producing an outward appearance of not being terrified was the limit of my acting abilities and I couldn't fake any other emotions."

"I knew Nethys had made me an oracle, I knew that'd give me an alignment aura of Lawful Evil from my personal aura only, I knew that might look at first like I just got a single Lawful Evil cleric circle but that I wouldn't be able to get past the subsequent investigation, I knew that if I couldn't attach myself to Keltham before he left the room I was dead and that Nethys would shatter my soul if I didn't try.  I couldn't be seductive under those circumstances, all I could do was make Keltham the biggest offer I knew how to make."

Carissa Sevar: "So alter Ione gets added to this project. She's a Nethysian and her brother has told her to keep quiet about it, and she knows he hates her but she doesn't know if he's lying about that. Then it immediately becomes clear that this warrants more resources than are currently pointed at it and she wants to be among the people who gets to stay very very badly and she decides that the thing to do is seduce Keltham in one minute and tries it. 

What...else does that produce, what else is that alter Ione up to, how would that alter Ione address her error when she realized that actually being a Nethysian was fine and that she's not going to get discarded from the project as long as she can keep learning the math."

Ione Sala: "...I mean, as near as I can tell, the answer to that is alterIone, who I've been keeping as close to realIone as possible?  She saved the Project from Nidal in the process of completely blowing her cover as a Nethysian, and everybody accepted her because she was powerful and useful.  Then she was freed of all the horrible fears that had cowed her over her whole life before, and burst out of her shell like a phoenix rising.  This, by the way, is also incredibly visibly true of Asmodia if you have any before-and-after comparison."

Carissa Sevar: "Asmodia went to Hell and it was good for her," Carissa says flatly. "She can decide for herself if she's going to have a more detailed story prepared than that, but it's what the rest of us observed and it is unsurprising to us because Hell is often equipped to help people notice ways they were holding themselves back."

Ione Sala: "Gosh, I wonder what interesting thing will happen to Yaisa, that causes her to stop being afraid of Hell, and that we'll have to cover up from Keltham so he doesn't notice the tropes densely pressing in on him from all directions."

"Do I have approval here?  It sounded like I have approval."

Carissa Sevar: "You're dismissed; come to us if there's anything else of note in the transcripts of all your conversations with Keltham you're going to go read."

Ione Sala: She'll walk out without further ado, then.

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Maybe the secret Keltham possesses is the secret of getting Cheliax to not write outrageously manipulative and deceptive contracts."

Merenre: "If you think I'm underpaid you can just pay me more, you know, you don't have to lose bets to me."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "All right, what's your interpretation."

Merenre: "I don't think he can possibly have been warned that Cheliax usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts, because he'd just leave. I checked that assumption by reaching out to our Church in Lingshen, where I figured most people wouldn't be apprised of Inner Sea politics, and asking them to ask all their priests what they'd do in a similar situation, and none of them would stay in the country that usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts. Because it's inherently appalling and because why would you want to make them richer even if you could. 

So - he's this cautious when not warned that Cheliax usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts, or this is standard language where he's from, and he's very financially sophisticated. We knew his civilization was very financially sophisticated, but he must individually work in contracts within it, to have been able to reproduce all this from memory, or else have some way to access its information and records, or to speak - perhaps via Sending - with the people of his home world. If he has that I'm guessing it's very limited - Sending would be limited enough - because he would hire a bunch of advisors there to review everything, if it weren't too limited, and they'd have caught Cheliax in a lie by now."

Hemaka: "Or Cheliax is also communicating with this other world on their own and, for example, bribing his team of advisors to assure him everything is fine, or manipulating their communications to him."

Merenre: "Maybe? I lean against that whole class of theories because Cheliax is behaving like if he dies or leaves the interdiction zone they're out of the game forever, which is less true if they have contact with his world."

Hemaka: "In what sense are they behaving like that?"

Merenre: "I'm at 90% now that everyone identified as associated with the project is still on-site in the fortress in the interdiction zone, despite having skillsets that'd be incredibly useful elsewhere. They aren't yet observed to be increasing the number of Project Lawful girls. They wrote this notably conciliatory contract, and sold him an option on Sevar's soul, which is not something Hell generally does or is willing to be known to do, and that contract was also notably careful. To our best observations he hasn't left the building since he got there. Sevar's been assigned responsibility to a fairly ludicrous degree given what we've been able to learn about her qualifications.

None of those are dispositive but they're 2:1 each, more in some cases, for scenarios where Cheliax does not actually have a plan they think is viable to survive long-term in a world where he leaves. This is a major focus of Intelligence at this time, obviously, since it means that we may have a war on our hands the second we pick him up."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Or the kind of civilized but unpleasant interaction with which two Lawful countries in principle ought to be able to avert war, not that I know it to have ever worked, where we arrive at agreement on how it'd go and pay out accordingly."

Hemaka: "It's Cheliax. I wouldn't trust them with a peace treaty; sure, they won't break it, but it might have a hole I can't see. - relatedly, how sure are we that these contracts are in fact relatively innocuous?"

Merenre: "Not positive but we do have a lot of effort pointed at identifying unexpected interactions of the terms and there are some ways they can cheat him on the margins, but - solid odds, at this point, that they mostly felt constrained to straightforwardness on the core terms, lest they lose him entirely. It's Cheliax, they're lying as much as they can get away with, but the most significant new information from this contract is that there are real limits here to how much they can get away with."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Also that he's going to make Cheliax very rich on fairly short timescales."

Merenre: "Also that."

Hemaka: "So we have to be prepared for a war with Cheliax at the drop of a hat, while they're getting stronger every day and we're not? And they obviously already outmatch us, if not tied up in Nidal and at the Worldwound? Have we asked Nefreti -"

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "We have commissioned a scroll of Wish from Felandrial Morgethai. We gamble that Keltham, when he flees, will knowably to Cheliax know some things we could do with it if they saw fit to go to war."

Merenre: "Which I have at eighty percent."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "And I tried to get further advice from Nefreti and she said, and I quote, 'you're thinking too far ahead, and not far enough', which I could have gotten from a copper-seer."

Merenre: "I have it at ninety percent she'll help, if Osirion's actually at risk of conquest by Cheliax."

Hemaka: "What does the remaining ten percent look like?"

Merenre: "She's following a fairly detailed plan from Nethys and can't step out of it."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Luckily for us, if Nethys has a fairly detailed plan to leverage all this to produce lots of very big explosions, it looks more likely Keltham knows what to do with a scroll of Wish and Cheliax knows it."

Hemaka: "Can we - spy on his lessons to Cheliax, try to directly learn the arts he'll be making them richer with, set a fair payment aside for him contractually until he can claim it -"

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Project's a hard nut to crack. We got confirmation that Sala and Pineda are both in it, despite not having sold their souls, but almost everyone else in the building is committed to Hell. And Cheliax's style of governance imposes many economic disadvantages on them but it does mean it is incredibly expensive to convince anyone to spy on them. All the same.... if Cheliax wants to get rich, they'll have to bring in more people sooner or later, and the contract suggests they're ready for it to be sooner. And as soon as there's someone who we can meaningfully offer Axis..."

Merenre: Merenre shifts his beads, lost in thought. 

Hemaka: "The poor kid," Hemaka says, when it's been quiet a while. "He just - wants to make our world rich -"

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "He probably wants a lot of other things. I just hope Cheliax can't give them to him."

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

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham's going to ask whether he should forge ahead at full speed or go slower so as not to leave lots of broken heretics in his wake. I think we want our answer to be 'forge ahead'. More time isn't going to help him much on the broken heretics front since he doesn't even know what specific belief-collapses he's protecting against, and for our hiring purposes it'd be useful to know sooner what share of people shatter on contact with dath ilanism even if they've sold their souls and been warned in advance.

However, I am interested in any opinions to the contrary. In particular, you are each in fact very valuable, and if you think you're near shattering that is a significant strategic consideration we'd want and might be sufficient reason to tell Keltham to slow down."

Ione Sala: "75% that Keltham isn't willing to forge ahead as fast as possible after the first time... what exactly happens to a broken heretic?  I'll also be the one to mention that, for example, sending them to Hell, or putting them in a torture chamber to try to break back, substantially increases the chance that Keltham eventually tells Osirion all about how you make lots and lots and lots of fire to launch things into space or just, you know, get rid of other things on the ground that made you very angry."

Carissa Sevar: "A consideration I'd weight more highly hearing it from someone who isn't a heretic and would only say it if it were true.

The Queen has said already that arrangements have been made in Hell such that anyone who deliberately betrays us will suffer for it as much as possible; anyone who wakes up one night and realizes they hate Asmodeus and want to defect, but who in sensible self-preservation comes and reports this to us, will be unharmed. Probably we'll have you tell Keltham as much of the truth as possible and join the dropout girls, drawing a generous salary, under a Dominate Person but not one that affects you when Keltham's not around.

It is my hope that some of you might find in yourself an instinct of disapproval at that, a sense that you are not a friend to your hypothetical heretic self and don't like the idea of her living in luxury; to see yourself as you'd see any other similarly flawed subordinate is a useful skill, and I highly recommend it. But no one can matter so much I'd risk Keltham to make sure they get what they deserve. 

The precise measures Security will take in the case of a girl who turns on us are not to be known to you. I predict they are adequate."

Ione Sala: "Security, tell Sevar my thoughts are and were sincere.  This isn't alterCheliax, you don't need to rely on reading my facial expression to figure out if I'm Cooperating or not."

"And, Prediction."

Message to Sevar:  Order in which the non-Special girls on the Project break:  Tonia, Peranza, Gregoria, Meritxell.

Security: Security confirms that Sala is sincere, if very contemptuous.  Security also notes that he'd bet money on Peranza breaking before Tonia, judging by how hard Peranza is currently telling herself that she's fine and has nothing to worry about.

Carissa Sevar: "I don't think you're deceiving me, I think you're deceiving yourself. Or being careless with arguments that lead places you like, at least.

Tonia. If you were going to become a broken heretic, what thought process would it probably be over."

lintamande: Who DOES that to someone

Tonia sits there in blankfaced horror for several thousand years, maybe several million years, long enough the universe should really have ended and been replaced by whatever will succeed it. Inexplicably everyone is still here staring at her.  

".....I don't want to have sex with Keltham?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not actually a problem. If he starts getting corrupted in a direction where it might be a problem we can substitute an impersonator for you anyway., if he's going down that slope we want to make sure we are very competently rewarding it."

lintamande: "I don't like it when you ask me questions?"

Carissa Sevar: "Come on, Tonia, that's not even something people sometimes say is heretical."

lintamande: Tonia wishes very very dearly this had never happened to her and she'd just gone to the Worldwou - maybe that's an answer? "I wish I'd - not been chosen for this - and gone to the Worldwound -"

Carissa Sevar: "And not sold your soul, and had at least the fantasy of escaping Hell, and been doing something that even paladins do, and that therefore appeases whatever Good impulses there are inside you?"

lintamande: That sounds very bad and terrible and heretical???? "...no?"

Carissa Sevar: "Thinking, 'wow, I wish I wasn't going to Hell' is not the kind of thing that is going to cause a catastrophic breakdown or make you someone none of the rest of us can ever trust. I have met actual clerics of Asmodeus who wish they weren't going to Hell."

lintamande: What??

Does Asmodeus not have enough people who want to go to Hell He can choose????

That doesn't have anything to do with anything anyway.

Tonia attempts to nod.

Carissa Sevar: "If," Carissa says, "everyone except me on this project decides they want to go to Abaddon as a reward for service on it, then probably that will happen, because you are all very valuable and have lots of bargaining power. - I really hope you'll give me a decade, first, to see if I can make something you'd want to exist for....

...I really really don't want it to end like that, it'd never be all right from there no matter how glorious a thing we built, but, there's so much at stake, as long as we're winning, that almost any stupid thing you want is safe to want. A heretic isn't that much of a problem. A broken heretic is one who's stopped seeing that the heretical things they want they can have."

lintamande: "I want to stop being in the heavy punishments group," says Tonia. 

Carissa Sevar: "I had that coming, didn't I. Let's discuss it after a conclusion is reached on this."

Pilar : If Tonia asked me to get her out of the Project, would she find herself outside the Forbiddance with a teleport scroll a few seconds later, and myself standing here with no idea what happened?

Curse of Laughter: Only if that served Asmodeus!

So no.

Also that's not quite what happened with Tonia last time!  Pilar will probably figure it out herself eventually, once she's got enough ilan in her.

Peranza: Peranza would be fine so long as she could just be alterPeranza all her waking hours and never had to do anything as realPeranza she can't say that everybody will think she's crazy.

Asmodia: "Permission to ask Keltham, tomorrow, about how we can collect a lot of different predictions, into one prediction that summarizes them, if we want to guess which girl he dates next after Ione.  Only without people being able to predict themselves, or know what other people predicted about them."

"Then whatever Keltham says, for how to do that, we do that on everyone's predictions of the probability that anyone else is about to break in the next three days."

Carissa Sevar: " - permission granted, and we'll run the method he suggests with and without Security. With since they're the ones reading minds and without since they might not have the skill for making predictions."

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Morning

Keltham: Keltham wakes up, and now that he's safely no longer at the end of yesterday, with all his healing surges waiting to be used, and Carissa right nearby, and nothing else he needs to do before restorative sleep, his brain helpfully remembers that he hasn't gotten around to attaching a searingly hot object to his arm while trying to run Detect Magic.  Though, obviously, he shouldn't do that right now, he has work to do today and that might take recovery time afterwards.

Gosh.  It's like his brain is reluctant about this for some reason.

Next time Keltham has an evening with Carissa, he'll tell her beforehand to actually remind him about that.

Keltham: After breakfast and convening:

So today he's going to try a lecture in Baseline, approaching some of the mathematics of Decision as is more complicated than the simple cases considered under the Law of Probable Utility.  But don't cast Comprehend Languages just yet, there's a somewhat grimdark question he needs to pose to them first.

He can't think of a very soft way to put this, so he's just going to say it.  There's a risk on this project that Keltham is not at all trained to handle:  Namely, personality damage, caused by new knowledge of Law destroying existing mental structures inside people that got built up by previous unLawful processes and were playing important structural roles as thoughts inside them.  He knows how he was raised as a child, so he didn't end up in that state as an adult.  He has no idea what to do with adults already in that state.  Zero idea.

Option one:  Keltham tries to guess a protocol for preventing this from happening - where, at this point, he doesn't know how to decide even between such macrostrategies as 'Try to snap a few of the springs at a time, slowly and gradually' and 'Try to prevent everything from breaking loose until everyone has a bunch of Law and recovery protocols and maybe a Core Fallback entrained and possibly a separate mental image of what a coherent person looks like' - and proceeds according to that.

Option two:  Keltham proceeds faster and with less caution, unless and until severe damage actually occurs to somebody, hopefully still at a fixable level the first time it happens.  And then backs off and replans after that.

lintamande: "....do you have any examples or anything? It's kind of...hard to imagine," says Gregoria.

Keltham: If he had examples then he would know how anything worked and he would be less nervous!

Keltham's actual direct experience here consists of himself getting an Owl's Wisdom, and realizing that his previous life plans within dath ilan were entirely hopeless and in fact he had enough data to realize this and was lying to himself about it.  Good thing he was in Golarion first!

And then there's Asmodia, who got an artifact headband put on herself, invented a lot of Law and wound up spontaneously relating to it in a specifically Keeper-like fashion.  Keeper-thinking has effects that people like Keltham deliberately don't get told about.  Keltham does not, among other things, know whether or not it's possible for Keepers to fall in love.  For example.  Keltham initially thought this was probably because Keepers couldn't, and you don't want to tell all the nonKeepers who are in love that their love is unLawful; but on reflection it's much more likely that the Keepers have some well-phrased blanket policy of hiding everything that might be like that from the perspective of nonKeepers, so that their pattern of secrets doesn't leak information.

lintamande: "It seems to me like it's going to be kind of impossible to be usefully careful without an idea what might go wrong, so we should go ahead until something does go wrong and we actually know what problem we're trying to solve," Meritxell says.

Keltham: Uh, so it's supposed to be socially obvious, if only everyone here had grown up in Civilization, that nobody here actually makes it obvious what their opinion on the topic is.  They can bring up considerations the group should know about, but carefully saying it in a way that doesn't indicate whether or not they think it's a decisive consideration, or whether other considerations lean the same way.  Then everybody writes their opinion on a piece of paper without putting their name on it, folds it up, and hands it to Keltham, and he jumbles those up before reading them.

Iarwain: There's some further discussion the gist of which is that Chelish people don't seem able to figure out how this really damages somebody as opposed to giving them a bad day and maybe Pilar showing up with a piece of cake for them but not... like... something Terrible?  So far this is all sounding like, "As many as several fates are known in Golarion that are worse than this fate"?  But if somebody ends up sad and depressed and failing out of the project - and, in the very worst case, going to Hell to see if Hell can fix things, and staying in Hell if Hell can't - then probably everybody on this project is willing to risk being the first person that happens to -

Keltham: Don't state your final opinion.  Especially don't state what you think everyone else's opinions are supposed to be.

But yes, the final form of the question could be, 'Are you willing to risk being the first person on the project who ends up staying in Hell due to unfixable personality damage?'

lintamande: Everyone will write 'yes' on a piece of paper, then!

Keltham: He'd have more Conspiracy worries about this if not for, like, the Asmodeus thing and Keltham having now ever met Asmodeans.

Ione, Keltham was kind of expecting more backup here.

Ione Sala: Ione is not actually the type to tell people they can't volunteer for dangerous things, just to warn them about the dangers being there.  It's when she sees people walking blindly into things that she starts scolding people.

And the final question was about whether Ione herself wanted things slowed down for herself, of which the answer is in truth no.

Keltham: Asmodia, you too?

Asmodia: She guessed a few times about what would probably be dangerous to others, and was told by Keltham she was wrong a few times.  Asmodia is now waiting on seeing concrete things happening that she can start to update about.

As for the final form of the question, Asmodia's own personal level of risk tolerance... has already been made clear by her various life decisions.  Not the least of which was signing up for Worldwound duty after graduation, and then diverting from that to a mysterious high-risk high-pay high-Security project.  Asmodia has tried to play a cautious game on particular occasions, but she's not under the impression that a cautious life is what they are all here to live.

Keltham: On to today's lectures, then.  Everyone now cast Comprehend Languages.

Keltham: To begin our entry into what Civilization considers the Law of Decision, consider this mathheavier special_case-rigged_demo treatment of the simplest cooperation-defection-dilemma...

Keltham: Keltham's treatment of this, to actually be understood, is going to end up requiring:

- The concept of a programminglanguage;- The concept of a proofsystem that can formally verify things about programs in the programminglanguage;- And the Assumable Provability Theorem stating that, in most proofsystems, you can freely assume something is provable in order to prove it.

That is, if something is provable within a proofsystem, starting from the premise that the quoted statement is provable inside the quoted proofsystem, then it's thereby provable within the system...

Keltham: (He's drawing the cheerful cartoons that older kids draw to explain Assumable Provability to dath ilani children, because he did not in fact go back and learn any more serious-looking proofs as an adult.)

lintamande: This is not at all a kind of math that any of these students have been exposed to at all!! It's not even something they'd previously have defined as math!!! 

Keltham: Judging by the looks he's currently getting, Keltham should maybe back up and talk more about proofsystems and provability and quoting first.

How's the whole Baseline thing doing?  From Keltham's perspective, he gets to communicate using preciselyfitting categorizingwords a lot, without that taking forever, but he's not sure how that feels from the other side of Comprehend Languages.

lintamande: It is maybe hard to evaluate how much of this lesson being very confusing is the Baseline and how much is the subject matter. 

Keltham: All right, let's see what happens if he tries doing this next part in Taldane...

Iarwain: (30-40 minutes later, students' Comprehend Languages start running out.  It's not particularly clear that it was really helping.)

Keltham: ...he wonders if something different happens if he tries Share Language (Baseline).

That would be an inconvenient thing to have be super helpful; only Keltham can cast it, and he doesn't have enough 2nd-circle spells to tap the whole class even if he borrows against 3rd and 4th spells.

Ione Sala: Share Language (Communal), 3rd-circle, will let Keltham divide up 24 hours in one-hour increments among any number of recipients by touch.  With 8 of them, that's 3 hours each.

Keltham: Is there a reason Ione didn't mention this spell when Keltham told everyone yesterday to prepare Comprehend Languages today?

Ione Sala: Because it makes sense to test Comprehend Languages first?  It's easier to get more of that, than more of Share Language (Baseline), if Keltham is trying to teach more people.

Keltham: Don't assume that Keltham's actions make sense.  This is a dangerous assumption.  He's an alien.

Keltham: Well, onward his brave researchers.

Keltham: Some considerable amount of struggle and a number of Fox's Cunnings and Owl's Wisdoms later, the class maybe, possibly, understands how, if you had crisp formal agents...

let CooperateBot(_) = Cooperatelet DefectBot(_) = Defectlet FairBot (X) = if Provable( "X(Fairbot) == Cooperate" ) then Cooperate else Defect

...then FairBot(FairBot) == Cooperate.

Because of Assumable Provability:  If you assume Provable("Fairbot(Fairbot) == Cooperate"), then it would follow that Fairbot(Fairbot) == Cooperate.  Therefore, Fairbot(Fairbot) == Cooperate.

Now this is obviously not a shadow of the Law they seek, because Fairbot(CooperateBot) == Cooperate.

Even Keltham doesn't cooperate with a rock that has 'Cooperate' written on it.  It's not a person.  It definitely violates the assumption that the agent only seeks to earn as many coppers for itself as possible, and doesn't care about fairness.  That's why this is called Fairbot and not CopperBot.

lintamande: "We want Law describing a - why are we calling them 'Bot' - that cooperates with FairBot, but not with CooperateBot? ...and there'd be other cases but that'd be a start."

Keltham: "Uh, 'robot' is what Civilization calls... Civilization's equivalent of golems, is what I'd like to say, except I know nothing about golems except that 'robot' translates to that."  (The 'Bot' suffix as translated is literally the final syllable of Taldane's word for 'golem'.)

"And we don't literally have 'robots' doing this, probably not literally golems either, it's just - the name for a very simple thing that is pretending to be a person by following very simple rules, if that makes sense."

"In this case, we're not so much looking for a new piece of Law - the Law we're going to use is just Assumable Provability, which almost always ends up true of any proof-system you're not deliberately keeping it out of.  We're looking for a bot under that Law.

We're looking for a bot that mutually cooperates with itself, mutually cooperates with FairBot, defects against DefectBot, and defects against CooperateBot.  This is the simplest bot that we could say is acting like a shadow, inside this simpler realm, of a bigger and more complicated sane agent that seeks as much copper as possible."

"That bot is made out of pieces like the pieces I've already shown you, plus one more.  The final piece you need is the Provable-1 predicate, where..."

let Provable-1("X") = Provable(" ~Provable(0=1) -> X")

"...and what this means, is that it describes what you can prove assuming that the base system is consistent - that it never proves both a proposition, and its negation.  In this case, what it means is that Provable-1, but not Provable, can prove, for example, that FairBot defects against DefectBot.  You might say that Provable-1 is the proofsystem that trusts Provable."

"This matters, because you need the extra assumption that Provable is consistent, to derive inside Provable that, just because DefectBot always Defects, there's no proof inside Provable that DefectBot Cooperates..."

lintamande: ...they're lost again.