Keltham: The backing up and the explaining again and the intelligence enhancement spells will continue until understanding has been achieved.

Keltham: Eventually he writes out the formula...

let PrudentBot(X) = if Provable("X(PrudentBot) == Cooperate") then if Provable-1("X(DefectBot) == Defect") then Cooperate else Defect else Defect

...and lets everyone go to lunch, a minute or two dozen late.

Asmodia: "It's good to know that you did not, yesterday, assign us a problem we were in danger of actually solving well enough to take dath ilani oaths."

Keltham: "Yes, that is correct.  Had I given these lectures in their more intended order, it might, perhaps, have been more obvious that this was the case.  We aren't even using the correct fragment of Law for doing that, this is more like - using a lesser Law that's a shadow of that one, the Law of what you can prove about proofsystems, and not the Law of what you can guess about the math that the proofsystems are about... that would have seriously been easier to say in Baseline.  Oh, well."

Asmodia: "When do we learn the actual Law we'd need?"

Keltham: "I was going to say, when you otherwise strike me as being at around the corresponding level of dath ilani adulthood... but now that I think about it, you don't actually need real oaths for much?  You've got the whole break-an-oath-go-to-Abaddon thing and truthspells.  That covers a lot of the same territory.  I guess at some point Golarion Civilization has to know it?  But I can see it being a Keeper thing instead of an average-citizen thing."

Asmodia: "What actually happens if you break a real oath?"

Keltham: "There's only one copy of the real oath.  Anytime that anybody anywhere breaks it, people over literally all of Reality, the greater Everywhere, everything that there is, become a little less able to trust it."

"Also, in Golarion terms, Asmodeus is probably now really really really pissed at you, and requests the entire country of Cheliax to drop whatever else it's doing and turn you into a statue so you can't ever do it again including in an afterlife.  Though that part is just a guess."

Asmodia: "I don't think you should teach people how to do that."

"I really, really don't think you should teach people how to do that."

Keltham: "If you've got enough people running around as smart as moderately smart dath ilani, some of them will figure it out.  Civilization did."

"Hence, again, the Keepers."

Asmodia: "Fuck this, I'm joining your Keeper classes.  Someone in there needs to be the responsible officer about this sort of thing."

Keltham: "Called it with 85% probability."

Carissa Sevar: "What do they do to people who break oaths in dath ilan?"

Keltham: "I don't seem to know, now that you ask that.  I know that low-ranked Keepers have sworn thirteen million oaths over the last forty years, and broken twenty-three of those, and that most but not all of those cases were due to insanity.  I don't know what happened to them, and don't see a simple way of deducing what the ethical theory of that would be.  But it would not involve threats, punishments, attempts to scare anybody off doing it again.  If what happens to them is that they get put directly into cryonic suspension so they can't do it again and eventually the Future decides what to do with them, maybe we wouldn't be told about that, exactly so that it didn't sound like a threat."

"The Abaddon thing - is sort of sad, you know?  People shouldn't think that's needed.  Shouldn't think that's how oaths work."

Carissa Sevar: "It's - not why I would keep an oath, it's why people who aren't going to believe any confusing math words I say can know I'd keep an oath. It bothers me only in the sense that Abaddon existing bothers me. Asmodeus's working to make sure no one gets sorted there, and if He succeeds oaths won't - be less real - except insofar as people will have a harder time believing them."

Keltham: "In Civilization, with rare exceptions, only Keepers swear true oaths; if you have a job like that - which, mostly, you in fact don't - you employ a Keeper or you don't start up."

"We know about oaths so that we can negotiate with Keepers.  So we can be a FairBot to them, if maybe not a PrudentBot.  And not be CooperateBot, where you just have to hope the other agent is FairBot instead of PrudentBot.  A true oath is between multiple agents, not necessarily symmetrically so, but each must know the other.  If we didn't know the real math inside Keeper oaths, ourselves, we wouldn't be a kind of thing that can meaningfully accept those oaths and do something conditional on the oath.  We'd just be a CooperateBot that maybe the Keeper would decide to be Fair to."

"If in Golarion you have truthspells, and Asmodeus never clerics anyone who'd break a compact, and swearing falsely on Law changes your visible aura in a way other people can detect, maybe you don't need any of that math.  Just - people who make promises and mean them for older reasons, more human reasons, and when you have gods and alignment auras on top of that, maybe that's reliable enough and you don't have to go to further extremes."

"Though, now that I say it, in its own way, that also seems a little sad."

Carissa Sevar: "Or at least, what the further extremes would add wouldn't make them worth -

- people have broken the Worldwound oath. They execute you for it, obviously, and it - degrades the Worldwound oath, and the ability of the people of Golarion to come together and fight when the whole world depends on it, but I wouldn't expect that it weakens Asmodeus, it's not the thing He's doing. It'd be better for us not to have the power to destroy more than we already can."

Keltham: "I see the case, yeah.  It still seems a little sad.  Like asking Golarion not to grow up, ever."

"...well, now that I think about it, when you have native INT 24s wearing artifact headbands, they're just going to know, probably.  Gods and mortals will have to deal with whatever comes of that."

Carissa Sevar: "Golarion can grow up someday once Civilization is running it and all the kids get educated properly and there aren't lots of people running around who'll do whatever you told them is the worst possible idea."

Keltham: "Are there, in fact, a lot of people like that?"

Carissa Sevar: "Not in Cheliax! ....not lots in Cheliax. In, I dunno, Galt, yes definitely. Luckily they're not very smart."

Keltham: "I'll try to remember to avoid certain kinds of trolling, in particular Terrible Terrible Advice, while Golarion isn't its own Civilization yet.  Asmodia, if I forget, you're the one person whose job it is to remind me."

Asmodia: She doesn't complain that she doesn't need another job because alterAsmodia doesn't have that other job.  "Understood."

Keltham: "You know what would be a really bad idea, though?  Baking a giant cake the size of the Palace in Egorian, on the site of that previous villa that got destroyed."

Carissa Sevar: "If that happens, is it evidence for tropes?"

Keltham: "Yes, yes it would be."

Carissa Sevar: "And - evidence for Conspiracy, I think, because it would be much much easier to do in a civilization richer and more competent than Cheliax, and the Conspiracy world would pretty much have to be."

Keltham: "Spoken like somebody from a Conspiracy that's actually poorer than Ordinary Cheliax but putting up an incredibly expensive front for me, so I don't realize how desperate they'd actually be for my knowledge."

Carissa Sevar: "No, see, a Conspiracy that's actually poorer than Ordinary Cheliax would have shown you the palace and claimed it was the home of a particularly vain count. Whereas the Conspiracy that's richer than Ordinary Cheliax didn't show you the palace at all, that's just some average-sized glittery building they have for guests."

Keltham: "Now you've got me trying to figure out what grimdark purpose would best be served by showing me a Palace building of that exact apparent wealth level, and not only is this not what I want to be doing with my lunch, it's obviously what the Conspiracy wants me to be doing with my lunch.  So I'm not going to do it."

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

Keltham: So has Cheliax actually managed to get him any domain experts like metal refiners, steel forgers, existing chemists, roadmakers, spellsilver miners, or people who can tell him about the current state of anti-epidemic prophylaxis in cities?

Or will he be seeing what he can do to vinegar, using Prestidigitation to try to make added bases more basic?  If they've even got vinegar, food here is kinda basic.

lintamande: They have several of those but suggest the spellsilver miners go first; if it gets anywhere it's by far the most valuable.

The spellsilver miners have brought samples of purified spellsilver, in glass vials in oil because it oxidizes, and samples of the sand that spellsilver is most easily purified from, a heavy dark sand called monazite. They can describe their purification process at some length: the ore is washed with acids, precipitated, heated, mixed with salts, and then reduced with bone to get them in metallic form. You have to do the process repeatedly to get adequate purity.

Keltham: THAT certainly SOUNDS like 'spellsilver' is one particular element on the Periodic Table.  A series of chemical reactions like that is one that filters atoms by which chemical reactions they participate in, which goes by the behavior of their electron shells and orbitals.

If this were a novel, Keltham would be figuring out how to get a known number of atoms of spellsilver, into some measuring-volume he can weigh, precisely relative to Civilization's known weights and measures that he would have cleverly recovered by various means, so that he could figure out the atomic weight, thence the atomic number, then deploy his encyclopedic knowledge of how best to mine every single element.

Since Keltham has not memorized how to mine every element, he's not actually prioritizing figuring out which element this is.

Questions immediately to mind:

Which part of this process is the most expensive one - finding new sand deposits, the cost of acid, the cost of labor?

Is the purity of the resulting metal important - is there such a thing as higher-purity spellsilver that's more expensive and useful for more powerful magic?

Are there any other kinds or variants known of spellsilver?

Do they know that bone is itself mostly made of a mixture of two other elements, and have they tried each of those two elements separately?

Can spellsilver be magnetized?

Anybody tried messing with this process by running currents of ordered lightning through it?

Does magic get used on any step?

What's everything that's already been tried that doesn't work?

lintamande: The sand is about half the cost by itself. Most of the remaining costs are located in the steps having to be done exactly right or they'll ruin your spellsilver process, so  and ensuring all the ingredients are of appropriate purity and that the complex process is followed exactly right by someone with enough alchemical skill to notice if some desired result isn't happening and to tweak it along the way. 

The purity of the resulting metal is very important, it needs to be very highly pure, but it's a threshold - at some point it's pure enough to interact with magic the right way, and past that point there aren't known gains to higher purity though also they cannot very easily get much higher purity. 

They haven't isolated constituent-bits of bone. Spellsilver can be magnetized though no one has ever thought of that as particularly important that these people know of. ....no one has tried hitting their careful alchemical process with lightning, no, that sounds like probably it would make something go wrong or catch fire! Prestidigitation gets used to separate out the precipitate in acid but you don't have to use it for that, it's just faster. Magic gets used to manipulate things while they're in glass jars not exposed to the air. 

....everything that's been tried and doesn't work is something they can happily spend the rest of the afternoon recounting.

Keltham: If the sand is half the cost, then fixing the rest of this reduces the cost of spellsilver by at most a factor of 2, which isn't very much by Civilizational standards.  Why is the sand expensive - shallow, easily exhausted deposits, no huge deposits ever found?

lintamande: .... a factor of two would still be an enormously huge deal and make him the richest person in the world probably? Monazite is mostly mined from shallow waters; it is believed to form in the breakdown of rocks and, because it's so light, tend to be carried away to the sea, where it'll gather in places. You can find trace amounts of it in any given rock but that's not very useful.

Keltham: Is there a known process, including a known magical process, for telling whether existing ores or strange new rocks would have spellsilver content?

Are there other known spellsilver-containing ores from which nobody has figured out how to extract spellsilver cheaply and reliably, such that the current cheapest process is based on monazite?  Or is monazite the only such ore known?

lintamande: There are definitely other known spellsilver-containing ores - they have on hand a yellowish rock that contains spellsilver ores. Sometimes people try to extract the spellsilver from them. Sometimes they even succeed but it's much costlier than the existing process. Wizards who work with spellsilver a lot can tell that impure spellsilver is meant to be spellsilver, and some of them claim to have the sensitivity to tell from rocks that have only a moderate amount of spellsilver ore.

Keltham: Which ore would make spellsilver cheapest, if extracting all the spellsilver out of that ore was miraculously very cheap?

lintamande: Probably this rock here in their array of example rocks. It's chemically fairly like monazite sand, but a mineral? There's a decent amount of it and it's not primarily mined underwater, which makes it easier to have sl-ow paid employees do the mining. It's not favored because you basically have to turn it into monazite sand to even start, and that does take magic, and you need stronger acids for some reason.

Keltham: Rough price reduction in spellsilver if the spellsilver content of that rock was extractible for free?

lintamande: ...It's hard to guess? People don't try to systematically mine it, and they'd have to start. Significantly more than a factor of two, though.

Keltham: Three?  Four?  Ten?  Twenty?  Two point one?

lintamande: .....probably more like ten than four or twenty?

Keltham: That'll do it for Recursive Headband Production if anything does, since half the cost of headbands is labor anyways.

Do they know the actual purity they need on the metal, like, 99%, 95%, how much of the process expense is getting the metal pure enough vs. turning it into a metal at all, do they know if the impurities are other metals...

lintamande: More like 95%. Most of the expense is getting it pure enough, only real novice alchemists screw up badly enough to fail at turning it into a metal at all. They have some jars with some spellsilver-impurities if he wants to examine them.

The one guy is kind of emotional about this, not that a non-Chelish person would be able to tell.

Keltham: Let's have a look at those jars.  Do their contents look like metal?

lintamande: It looks like there's both some metal and some other stuff in there.

Keltham: That possibly means electrolytic refining shouldn't be his first line of attack.

How much of the expense is acids of required purity?  Including downstream effects from minimum-purity acids making the process finickier?  If very-high-purity acids of all the required types were free, how would that change the non-ore cost of spellsilver?

lintamande: They haven't really tried a wide variety of acids, failing at that stage ruins your materials and it's something of stabbing wildly in the dark to find anything that works better than the recommended procedure, so it's hard to know if it'd be less finicky with better acids. Acids are quite expensive, maybe a quarter of overall costs.

dath ilan: (In the same fashion that the literate, science-fiction-and-fantasy-reading children of another place might know how to make gunpowder (out of 75% saltpeter which is that white stuff found in manure piles that seems to have a cooling effect, 15% sulfur which is that yellow stuff evaporated from hot springs that smell like rotten eggs, and 10% charcoal, along with rules about mixing the powder to a dough and then grinding and sieving it), most dath ilani kids who read isekai fic have some idea how to produce industrial quantities of high-purity sulfuric acid, and purify the nitric and hydrochloric acids that are easy to make downstream of those.)

Keltham: Well, he was basically figuring he'd have to reconstruct mass-quantity high-purity acid production at some point, so maybe that could be among the first things tried.

There's also a pretty obvious idea for something to try instead of bone, if that part of the process is at all finicky.  They've had the conversation about the crazy patentgratuity arrangement on this, where the Project gets 80% of excess profits above 20% increase, and if they want to capture money for scaling production like sane people they need to talk to Chelish Governance or the Project about that, correct?  Keltham is aware this is kind of an insane arrangement, they're working out a more difficult saner one in the background, but the Project needs to capture tons of value so it can reinvest in like 200 different other things that will need doing.

lintamande: That was explained, yes. These researchers don't exactly understand the details of the arrangement but they'll report all their profits and pay what's required.

Keltham: All right, so if the final step of the process seems worth messing with at all - if they're losing spellsilver from it, or it's finicky, or transforming the bone to a usable-purity final ingredient is expensive - try burning seashells to ash and using the ash.  That'll get you a purer version of one underlying component of bone that Keltham would guess is the important one of the two.  Better yet would be 'limestone' but Keltham doesn't remember off the top of the head how to describe which kind of rock that is, short of testing out different kinds of rock to see which ones behave chemically like 'limestone' should.

People have occasionally talked like spellsilver gets depleted in the process of making magic items.  How does depleted spellsilver differ from the non-depleted sort?

lintamande: The usual way of making magic items doesn't deplete the spellsilver. The magic item will have as much spellsilver as was put into it and later you can pull it out and use it to make something else.  If you make a mistake in magic item making, you can ruin the spellsilver. It looks the same, only wizards can tell anything is different, but it won't hold magic anymore. You can also do that deliberately, though it's hard to imagine why anyone would.

Keltham: Carissa, you looked like you were pulling magic out of spellsilver from a distance, which Keltham would sorta expect to deplete that magic?  Did Keltham just totally mismodel what was going on, or is that not the usual way of making a magic item?

Carissa Sevar: That is indeed not the usual way of making a magic item! Usually you want to work the spellsilver into the item, which gives you the option of reusing it later. The way Carissa did it destroyed several thousand gold pieces of spellsilver. There are use cases for that method, usually for making an item you can't work the spellsilver into directly, but it's rare to be willing to waste that much money.

Keltham: Well, that does square with the rough amount of money that the Queen of Cheliax should be willing to spend on sex games, so okeydokey.

Can you pull spellsilver essence into, say, iron, and then pull it back out again as if that iron were spellsilver?  Where to be clear, Keltham is thinking about questions like "Can depleted spellsilver be recharged, can it maybe be recharged with something else that isn't spellsilver and used repeatedly, can he make synthetic spellsilver instead of mining it?"

lintamande: No one has successfully made other metals behave magically as spellsilver does, including by magically transmuting it into spellsilver. It's not known to be impossible.

Keltham: Okay but can you take a lump of depleted spellsilver and recharge it off non-depleted spellsilver that then depletes?

lintamande: No. Depleted spellsilver might as well be some entirely different metal in terms of the kinds of things you can do with it; you can't 'charge' iron, so you can't recharge depleted spellsilver.

Keltham: Interesting.  Keltham is guessing that they've never, say, compared a 1-foot cube of spellsilver to a 1-foot cube of depleted spellsilver to see whether one is 0.1% denser than the other, on grounds like 'Nobody has that much spellsilver' and 'We don't have weighing-instruments fine enough to detect that difference off a 1-inch cube instead'.  But if somebody by any chance has performed that experiment, Keltham would like to know...?

lintamande: ...they have not performed that experiment for both of those reasons. Also even if it were true they've never heard of any theory of alchemy where that'd be useful information.

Keltham: If spellsilver is the kind of thing it sounds like, where you can filter it out using a series of chemical reactions, then spellsilver has not always existed since the beginning of time.  It got turned from non-spellsilver into spellsilver at some point.

Unfortunately 'at some point' is billions of years ago inside the centers of exploding stars, in processes that are beyond what even Keltham knows how to cheaply duplicate at scale.

But the point is, spellsilver exists; most things that exist can be made out of other things that are not themselves.  The question is, what is the cheapest way of getting more of a material?  And this, for spellsilver, is almost surely mining it and purifying it with acids.  That doesn't mean Keltham isn't going to check the other routes, before he spends a ton of time on cheap high-purity acid.

If what distinguishes spellsilver from depleted spellsilver is a tiny weight difference between two metals that otherwise seem chemically to be exactly equivalent, this means Keltham cannot realistically figure out how to recharge depleted spellsilver.  If it's not that, he should go on thinking.  They don't know, so he'll go on thinking.

If there were, say, a ten-thousand-pound mass of pure spellsilver lying around, would there be any good way to detect that from a hundred thousand miles away?

lintamande: From a hundred thousand miles away? No. There are divinations for finding objects but you have to be quite close, within half a mile or so.

Keltham: All right, for now he'll stick to the plan of getting spellsilver on-planet instead of trying to figure out whether this solar system has an asteroid belt.

Keltham will ask a few more incredibly strange questions, then have them go through every single step of the process with ingredient costs and labor costs and success reliability and lost masses attached to each step, then ask about every other process that has ever worked for refining spellsilver out of any ore no matter how expensive that was, then spend any remaining time until dinner listening to summaries of bright ideas that definitely don't work.

lintamande: Sometimes apprentices will get the idea that you can use prestidigitation to separate out the spellsilver instead of coaxing it to precipitate in the acid; this seems like it should work but doesn't. The bones of lots of different animals and people have been tried in case some bones have more potent alchemical properties than others, but they don't seem to. Prayer does not help. Replacing acid with fire seems like it should obviously work but does not. Having the work carried out by holy men doesn't make it more efficient....and so on in this vein, because the set of things you try from a Golarion worldview are mostly not the set you try from a dath ilani worldview. 

Keltham: Message to Carissa:  These people are NOT trying the things a dath ilani would try and you should continue to be terrified of Hypothetical Corrupted Keltham's supervillainy.

(He doesn't particularly notice the part about trying bones from different people; you could get those in Civilization too, for a price, so long as you weren't trying to get skulls.  Actual human skulls are famous for only being in museums, in sections screened off by competence tests, with very somber stories attached to each.)

Carissa Sevar: - noted. 

(They all seem like perfectly reasonable things to try to her.)

Keltham: Dinnertime seems to have arrived.  Uh, Security question: do these people get invited to dinner?  Or Keltham says bye for now, and they should call him when they've tried the seashell thing or he'll call them when he's got cheaper or higher-purity acids?

lintamande: If he has further questions he can ask those over dinner; if he's done, then they can depart to try the things he suggested.

Keltham: ...he obviously has an unbounded quantity of Additional Questions, but he was careful to ask his most urgent ones first.  Dinnertime is also generally, by the customs of his own people, a time for freer-form conversation rather than focused Q&A.  Which in this case is going to be a little odd because of the Security restrictions on what they can ask him; but generally, if they opt to come to dinner, they should expect more questions like 'So what was your most interesting day on this job?' or 'How do you hire people for this kind of work?'

lintamande: In that case they'll probably just get to work? They're very eager to try the things he suggested and the best Security is not thinking much about things they aren't supposed to know about.

Keltham: He didn't really suggest very much besides the seashell-ash business, but okeydokey again.  See them later.

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

Asmodia: "So you kept on asking about the prices of things and it was incredibly obvious you were using some Law.  This Law is one that I desire to know.  Right now, not when you get around to it eventually."

Keltham: "Any particular reason -"

Asmodia: "From the way you're talking it's REALLY OBVIOUS all those prices are related by Laws to THINGS and EACH OTHER and I DO NOT KNOW what those relations ARE and this BOTHERS ME."

Carissa Sevar: The Conspiracy would totally need to know, to make up their prices, but you can't not be curious about anything the Conspiracy'd want to know.

Keltham: "You were surrounded by prices your whole life before you got to Project Lawful.  You weren't curious about them then?"

Asmodia: "No because I had 6 fewer Wisdom" and 1 less Intelligence "and didn't realize that Law was a kind of thing that could exist, and was busy studying to be a Worldwound wizard, and most importantly there was not a BOY walking around who clearly DID KNOW and wasn't SAYING.  If everything about this relationship were completely different, I'd assume you were holding out against me offering you sex about it.  I'd offer you sex about it if that was something I thought you wanted from me."

Keltham: Right then.

This is, in fact, going to take a proper future Law lecture.  But consider the point that if there weren't equal numbers of men and women, or rather, equal parental investment in men and women as a means of producing grandchildren, there'd be other strategies that genes could influence people towards, hence heritable strategies, that would yield a greater return on investment, so it wouldn't be stable in the face of natural heritage-selection.

The spellsilver makers are presumably trying to carry out their own process in the way that's cheapest per pound of yielded spellsilver, which means that everything about it should also be the cheapest way to do that step, relative to their options, and there might be alternative ways of doing the same thing but they should all be more expensive.

Keltham may be able to figure out how to do some things with chemistry more cheaply or reliably.  But this potentially changes which steps or ways of doing things are cheapest, not just how to do the same steps more cheaply or reliably.  So Keltham tried to get information about more expensive alternative ways to do the same thing, in case Keltham knows some way to make those alternative roads, cheaper, more easily than he could optimize the standard steps.

There's also the basic point that before you spend a lot of time optimizing something, you should make sure it's an expensive part of the problem.  Cutting the price of something by a factor of two doesn't help a lot if it was only 1% of the original cost.

The prices are sort of like 'how important is this' or 'how much do I even care' labels over the whole process, as well as implying things about other prices being higher if they were the costs of other known ways to accomplish the same thing.

Asmodia: WHERE DO PRICES COME FROM.  WHAT DO THEY MEAN.  WHERE DO ANY PRICES COME FROM LITERALLY AT ALL.

Keltham: Prices are equalizers of supply and demand functions.  The more you offer to pay for something, the greater the supply of it you can get for that price.  The cheaper you offer to sell something, the more people want to buy it.

If you consider all the apples being sold inside a city, then the numbers of apples bought, and apples sold, are always equal.  So the price of apples is the price that causes the amount of apples wanted to equal the amount of apples that can get supplied.  Though, to have this always be true, you might need to include implicit costs, like, if you want a special kind of apple that takes an additional five minutes to get shipped to you, the cost of the apple to you is five minutes plus some copper, not just the copper.

Asmodia: Oh.

Hm.

Asmodia will think about this (with boosted Cunning and Splendour, she does not say) and then probably return with Additional Questions.

Keltham: ...it is occurring to Keltham that, if Asmodia has not previously known this, nothing to do with money or economics must have made any sense to her at all.

Asmodia: No it DIDN'T but that was LESS OF A PROBLEM when she was just studying to fight DEMONS and not trying to CONSTRUCT GOLARION CIVILIZATION in a way that wouldn't result in AN ENDLESS SERIES OF DISASTERS.

Keltham: Asmodia.  Relax at least slightly.

Doing this in a way that doesn't produce an endless series of disasters is primarily Keltham's responsibility, plus the Very Serious People in Chelish governance.  Nobody is expecting Asmodia to handle it singlehandedly.

Asmodia: Asmodia keeps her eternal screaming internal.  It is internal eternal screaming.

Carissa Sevar: "The curriculum at school to be a Worldwound wizard doesn't have...much else. Because you'll get a good salary as a soldier, and you're a minimum of three years away from doing anything else."

Keltham: Does Carissa happen to know whether Golarion in general has the concept of 'price' == 'supply-demand equalizer'?

Carissa Sevar: "I think I've heard people say things that might've been more or less the same thing as that? I doubt my father would be taken aback if you told him that."

Asmodia: Security, pass this thought to Sevar:

THEN SOMEBODY WHO KNOWS THIS STUFF NEEDS TO BE INSIDE THIS FORTRESS WHERE ASMODIA CAN ASK THEM QUESTIONS AND THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE FOUR DAYS EARLIER

Carissa Sevar: ABADARANS. THE PEOPLE WHO COME UP WITH AND KNOW STUFF LIKE THAT ARE ABADARANS. I THINK ABADAR LITERALLY CHOOSES YOU IF YOU THINK OF IT YOURSELF.

Asmodia: AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Asmodia: Asmodia politely requests any and all available books of Abadaran theology, now, uncensored, even if they have to be teleported in from the fucking moon.

Carissa Sevar: Get them to her, keep an eye on her to make sure they're not defection-inspiring somehow.

"That does make me think, though," she says, "that it shouldn't work to ban high prices for bread in times of famine, but it does work, so there's got to be something else going on."

Keltham: ...that sounds like literally the textbook example of something that's impossible?  If you impose a ceiling on the legible financial price of a good, it just adds on other inconveniences that are part of the full implicit price until demand decreases far enough to match supply.

Carissa Sevar: Yes she noticed that implication of the thing he just said, but every famine she's heard of the country having the famine bans raising the price of bread. 

Keltham: So like all the bread sells out in the first minute and then everybody who didn't order fast enough goes to the afterlife, but at least the survivors get to keep most of their money?

Or all the bread sells out in the first minute and then everybody else scrambles to illegally rebuy bread from the fastest bread buyers at the supply-demand equalizing price, and fast-bread-buying is an incredibly competitive and profitable line of criminal work?

Or people stop making bread and instead make 'wheatcake' which is totally not bread because it has a different sugar-to-salt ratio, and therefore can sell at a higher price when oops all the 'bread' they made earlier has sold out at the legal price sorry about that?

...Keltham literally does not see how someplace as uncoordinated as Golarion could do this literally at all, or why they would be trying to, for that matter.

Carissa Sevar: She thinks mostly the bakers make the loaves smaller. But also they do it because otherwise people will get very angry about rising bread prices and riot, and if bread prices haven't risen they won't riot.

Keltham: ...and Governance is regulating the price, per 'loaf', of loaves of unregulated size, because this fools people with Intelligence 10 and Governance has Intelligence 16+headbands?

Keltham is frankly starting to see why people in Golarion would be afraid of hearing arguments from smart people.

Carissa Sevar: ...yeah pretty much that.

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

Ione Sala: "Um.  Hi."

"...I'm not actually very good at seductive.  Per se.  I don't know if you've already noticed this fact about me."

Keltham: They're sitting in the Keltham Seduction Room, which is still mildly pretty at night.  It'd be prettier if it wasn't cloudy out, and the ocean was lit by moonlight.  As it stands, they're lit by Ione's Dancing Lights, which are good for evening quality, but still bright enough to reflect off the window and prevent the dim beach from really being seen, from here.

It's still more romantic than anywhere else in the fortress, anyways.

"It'd be easier to notice in a less romantically crowded environment."

"Civilization does have any gendertropes for people who aren't great at coming up with seductive lines, or coming up with things to say when the silence stretches.  Mostly, the gendertrope is that you declare yourself to be bad at filling silences, and then it's the other person's responsibility to come up with things to say."

Ione Sala: "I mean I have an infinite supply of questions, just... the romantic ones aren't coming so much to mind.  Like, right now I'm wondering, what happens when two people both declare themselves to be bad at filling silences?"

Keltham: "You either both declare yourselves to actually enjoy long silences, or you break off your doomed relationship.  People usually try to check that sort of thing before getting to the first date.  That's half the point of gendertropes.  To the extent you can be captured by a simple standard description, you can compare your gendertropes quickly and before spending too much effort on things."

"Us both having an infinite supply of conversation and both being bad at steering the topic back to romance is a separate gendertrope, however.  And then you have to check whether both people are okay with dates that turn into fascinating conversations, that continue later and later, until eventually, sixteen minutes before the hard deadline on bedtime, somebody finally raises the question of whether they were possibly supposed to remove any items of clothing a few hours earlier."

Ione Sala: That sounds great, if not for the part where it probably results in less emotional attachment of Keltham to her.  The Asmodia thing - probably only applies to girls who are asexual, Ione is guessing?  Like you can't have sex with other people, or be able to have sex with other people, and not have sex with Keltham.  Probably?

"I think I'm okay with that happening sometimes.  If it happened always, that would be a problem..."

"I wonder if that happens a lot when Nethysians marry each other."

Keltham: "That's not something you've already got lots of data on?  The Nethysian sub-gendertropes, or whatever the equivalent of that knowledge is for Golarion."

Ione Sala: "I know about Nethys only - what I could find mentioned in books.  Books that I could find without mentioning to anybody what I was looking for."

Keltham: "Library magic not good for that?"

Ione Sala: "Didn't get that until after I was a wizard.  And then, even after I knew every title that was in the library at the Ostenso wizard academy and could read those books more privately, there weren't any books specifically about Nethys, or books about all the gods either.  Just a handful of books about particular gods whose churches nobody had ordered purged recently."

"I realize now that this was entirely down to old Cheliax but, at the time, it didn't - really help me be less nervous about anything.  I was just thinking about how all the Nethys books were missing.  Not how also all the Iomedae books were missing, and the Milani books, and the Abadar and Irori books, and all the Asmodeus books looked newer than most books in what was left of the theology section."

Keltham: "They had something against Lawfulness?"

Ione Sala: "I don't know.  It's not like they'd say so.  I can guess why they might've done that but, you could guess too?  Or maybe not, if you're an alien...  Lawful churches, Lawful people, are the ones who might point to old Cheliax and say, how about if we try something else which is not that."

"Which eventually the Church of Asmodeus did, so it's not like their fears were unfounded."

Keltham: "There's a lot of dath ilani proverbs about fears that realize themselves, because that's a kind of - self-sustaining phenomenon that's more likely to persist.  In this case, I'd ask, would in fact the Church of Asmodeus have done that, if old Cheliax hadn't first purged their books, and probably, I'm guessing, some of their people."

Ione Sala: Oh, Keltham.  He really is way too nice for Cheliax... well, Ione just has to make sure he wants her with him after this inevitably blows up.  Until then of course Ione will very carefully and properly act only to delay that day, not hasten it, while that continues to serve Nethys's unknown purposes.

"My fear about how Asmodeans - would treat somebody openly Nethysian - was the same way, I guess.  I didn't - ask the right questions, try any experiments, before this, because I was afraid of how it would look if I asked..."

Ione looks down at her hands.  "Stupid," she says quietly but with some contained heat.

Keltham: "If you don't particularly want to talk about this part, I observe that we're not presently discussing romantic things.  If our lives aren't governed by tropes then you do not actually need to tell me your hidden backstory if you don't want to."

He's noticed that Ione possibly seems to be trying to work around to this discussion topic, which, if it's not tropes...

Ione Sala: "It's - relevant to a romance-related thing -"

"This is really hard to say."

Keltham: Then he'll wait quietly and with a neutral expression while she organizes her thoughts to say it, as is only polite.

Ione Sala: "We were a bunch of second-circles pulled out of Ostenso wizard academy and after you explained about heritage-selection it was becoming clear that you knew a lot of important things and you rated more resources than a bunch of second-circles and I thought once that became apparent to whoever was in charge they'd pull us all right out of the project and replace us with women who were prettier or smarter or more knowledgeable or all three, and, I wanted to stay, I wanted to go on learning, so I -"

"I tried to make you the best offer I could."

Ione Sala: "It was a sincere offer!  Don't get me wrong!  If you still wanted that from me, as the price of leaving Golarion with you, someday, or even just - getting to go on learning from you, for now - I'd pay it in a heartbeat, and your spell for fair pricing, should show that -"

"If you tell me that, what I offered, is the reason you were interested in me, and you're not interested otherwise, then I'll just do it that way, and I won't be mad."

"But if I'd known then that, things would turn out, the way they did, that what I was afraid of, wouldn't happen, if I thought that there'd be - other options than what I said -"

"I wouldn't actually have said, what I said, it's not what I want most, if there's other options, I'm really really sorry."

Ione Sala: "Keltham please say something."

Keltham: "I think you're scared of some things that, once again, are not in fact going to happen to you."

Ione Sala: "Okay.  Good."

"Details?"

Keltham: "Wasn't actually sure I wanted complete unreciprocated service from you anyways, my new gendertrope was sort of ambiguous about it.  Especially if you're doing it in trade for knowledge and not as a sex thing, because then there are questions about whether you would've gotten that anyways, or what more than the default you were expecting to receive in return...  I was going to check if it was a sex thing before even trying to proceed with testing a relationship like that, because if it's not a sex thing there are so many additional questions."

"Actually now that I say it, I don't know if a relationship like that could work for my gendertrope if it's a sex thing.  But I'm sure it doesn't work for my gendertrope if it's not a sex thing."

Ione Sala: "Okay.  Okay.  I didn't say it was a sex thing for me, please note, I wasn't - trying to lie about that, at all, I wasn't thinking about trying to lie about that, I told you that I wanted to give you anything you wanted from me, because of the value from listening to you and hearing things and that's - that was true - I guess I should've said it wasn't a sex thing but I didn't know you would think it was.  I was just trying to trade - to give enough that I'd be worth keeping around."