Keltham: "It's okay, Ione. I would've asked more questions before I did anything, anyways."
Ione Sala: "Are there... actually other relationship options for us. Because it sounds like, if not, I don't even - get the option of offering you, what I initially offered, because it wouldn't be a sex thing for me, and you require that."
Keltham: "I am, in fact, getting enough sex already and regardless, that I wouldn't particularly want to trade anything for having sex with somebody who wasn't into that or into me."
Ione Sala: "I want to go where Keltham goes and see what Keltham sees and learn what Keltham learns. I would follow him away from Golarion even if we were never coming back and it'd just be the two of us out there forever."
"I think he's nice. I definitely like him more than I've liked any boy before."
Keltham: "None of which is saying, in that many words, that you want, for yourself and out of your own desires, to have sex with me."
Ione Sala: "There's a cruelty to how you treat women, Keltham, and not the fun kind of cruelty either. Telling women that - they have to feel a certain exact way, about you, that they have to do everything for exactly the right reasons, or you don't want them."
Keltham: "I apologize to the women of Golarion. For whatever it's worth, if we were in dath ilan, I would be expecting you to be the same way about men, and deciding that they needed to feel certain ways about you or you wouldn't let them offer sex to you."
Ione Sala: "Keltham, what am I to do? How can I be one of the girls who gets to lay with you in bed at night and have interesting conversations with you, and someday go with you when you leave Golarion?"
Keltham: "I would understand how to navigate this conversation so much better if you were just asexual. I would understand how my own gendertrope feels about hearing that if you were just asexual..."
"Are you?"
Ione Sala: "You're, you're not doing the thing where, I have to say the exact probability I believe, because that gets the most reward, or loses the least. All I would have to do right now is lie and say I'm asexual. That would get the most reward. Or lie and say that I just wanted to serve you and that was a sex thing for me."
Keltham: "Truthspells would continue to be a thing."
Ione Sala: "I could tell you I wasn't into truthspells, sorry, no."
Keltham: "I might actually have been too suspicious, then, to the point where it interfered with my libido. Too scared you would turn out to be lying. I'm having enough trouble believing that everything is real, you faking that would really really really not have been good for me."
Ione Sala: "I wouldn't actually, Keltham."
Keltham: "Yes, among other things, Carissa would figure it out and then kill you."
Ione Sala: "I wouldn't. Okay? I wouldn't. I didn't know you'd even think it was a sex thing, I would've said so, you would've asked, it didn't actually almost happen."
Keltham: "What sort of person are you attracted to, then, if you're not asexual?"
Ione Sala: "I don't really know, I've been living up until this point surrounded by Asmodeans who I thought would hate me for the Nethys thing."
Keltham: "But you don't think you're asexual? There's allowed to be two people like that on the Project, if our lives aren't being run by tropes. Asmodia may not even be taking up the item-slot, to the extent that there is one, which there hopefully isn't."
Ione Sala: "I've felt lust a few times, just not really - towards anybody around me in particular that I'd have dared to sleep with."
"...I was also studying, which, you know, slack off on that, get eaten by demons later."
Keltham: "But you don't think you can be attracted to me?"
Ione Sala: "I don't seem to be. I don't, in fact, want to have sex with you. It seems not fair if that means I don't get to be with you. I'd do it, happily, but that's not good enough for you!"
Keltham: "You're also allowed to be, like, hey Keltham, how about if we spend some time clothed in a bed together, and have some long conversations, and see if both of us start liking each other, rather than that happening to you right away."
Ione Sala: "Is that - a thing?"
Keltham: "There was this one girl in my fiction-writing circle, who I'm not going to name, because I'm not going to have the only thing known about her on another planet being that, who believed that we should all just drop the table of gendertropes. Who believed that gendertropes were dumb, and holding us back, and we should all just describe ourselves at length using the underlying ideas, instead of having standard libraries of ways to describe one another."
"I always thought that girl was wrong, but I never realized HOW WRONG until today."
"YES. IT'S A THING. IT'S A COMPLETELY STANDARD FEMININE GENDERTROPE."
Ione Sala: "I was not in fact aware of this," Ione Sala says in complete and utter honesty.
Though, after a moment's reflection, she can see how it would literally never end up working like that between any two Asmodeans. Asmodeans getting more exposure to other Asmodeans are not going to like each other, more, as a result of that.
Keltham: "I shall duly permit you a moment to consider your new options in the light of this new information."
Ione Sala: "...is there a way to tell in advance if that's going to work or not?"
Keltham: "Not reliably, but it's conventionally considered a positive sign if you already want to follow around the boy forever for the rest of his life."
Ione Sala: "Right. Okay."
"Let's do that then. What's step one?"
Keltham: "We are currently doing that. Right now. We're having deep conversations while lit by dancing sparkles of your magic, in the warm indoors, while beyond us is visible a dark night and darker ocean. This would qualify as an instance matching what is conventionally held to be the category for step one."
Ione Sala: "Okay."
"What's step two?"
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 14 (11) / Late Night
Ione Sala: "How'd I do."
Carissa Sevar: "We now have to figure out why in alter Cheliax no one ever develops sexual attraction gradually, if it's not that that's just a wildly pathetic thing to do.
On the bright side, he didn't call it for Conspiracy on the spot."
Ione Sala: "Are we under the impression that girls in alterCheliax are somehow told about all of the standard gendertropes? Because that didn't happen in realCheliax. It failed to happen so hard that it literally did not occur to me that alterCheliax would do better. I was not, in fact, aware that this was a thing that Asmodeanism was denying me."
Carissa Sevar: "We really need to kidnap that bunch of reference Taldane girls but my guess is that this is an Asmodeanism thing and they'll all have the concept."
Ione Sala: "I admit fault then. AlterIone could have been unusually clueless, too scared to talk to anybody and just reading books instead?"
Asmodia: "I also admit fault, Keltham said something similar to me and I thought he was just talking about near-asexuals, people who aren't sure if they're asexuals."
"...I propose we statue Keltham tonight and spend a full day trying to catch up on how things work everywhere that isn't Cheliax, now that we have some of our promised intelligence officers and retired out-country agents to answer questions."
"And yes, kidnap some fucking Taldane girls already, anybody, this is ridiculous."
Ione Sala: "And treat them nicely, I'm sure you were about to say."
Asmodia: "Obviously don't tell them it's Cheliax, we don't want to learn what scared non-Asmodeans look like."
Carissa Sevar: "If they hate us they're going to be less useful for Asmodia's attempted Law lessons. We'll treat them better than Taldor ever did, and we'll claim to be some random bunch of Taldans who the Crown has no power over. Statue Keltham, and let's line up some decent intelligence briefings for tomorrow."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 16 (12) / Morning
Keltham: Another cloudy morning! Is there any particular reason for the Conspiracy to be doing that, if weather control is a thing?
Maybe if they're, like, getting their usual airplane flights and space launches done?
If so, that's mildly incompatible with the god-war being faked, because if the god-war was faked, they've got better apparently-sky-wide illusion technology than this, and don't need to cloud up the sky to hide things. Unless the illusion tech can add new lights but not hide others, which mostly doesn't seem to be the way his own illusion spells are trending?
Stretches of cloudy weather in an unknown climate don't seem that improbable on priors, but it's a good thing to notice consciously.
Keltham: Keltham should probably be giving a lecture on Markets, for the benefit of everybody who isn't Asmodia, but what he actually wants to work on right away is ACID. Keltham is so pumped about figuring out how to make massive quantities of acid. In all the stories where the protagonist wants to do anything scalable with chemistry and therefore has to start by making huge quantities of acid, they're operating in some world that doesn't have magical healing and the whole story is just blah blah safety precautions but this is Golarion and people come back from the DEAD. In this place Keltham gets to just run right out and make ACID.
dath ilan: (...the term 'acid' probably has some slightly different connotations when said in Golarion, land of truly horrific combat spells with 'acid' in the title, than in dath ilan, where it sounds like a glamorously dangerous key industrial input.)
Carissa Sevar: Acid in Golarion has connotations approximately to the effect of 'liquid lingering torment'. But that's okay! They're Asmodeans! They would love to learn about liquid lingering torment!!
Keltham: So how would Cheliax be doing about sulfur, in the quantities required for acid on the scale required for refining spellsilver? Like, more spellsilver, not just current quantities of spellsilver? Does Keltham need to mine cheap sulfur first, or find somewhere to mine pyrite?
Carissa Sevar: A thing to note for later review maybe with an Owl's Wisdom, Carissa thinks as people scramble to get Keltham information about the availability of sulfur and the output of sulfur mines, and the identification of pyrite, and then mining costs and mining techniques and goods transportation and a hundred other things that come up down that path -
- is that probably they should've gone for this first. Just this, the tools to get rich. It's safer than the Law. It's more obviously useful than the Law. It's not going to break anyone inside. And it means Keltham is mostly thinking about things they don't have to lie to him about. It is quite plainly what they should've been doing all along. They didn't because they wanted to stall on a contract to figure out how to get things past him, but they failed at that anyway. And they didn't because the Law is - more hypnotizing, more fascinating, because it feels like the Law matters more than this, the Law that is the reason dath ilan knows all this -
- it feels like it wouldn't do, for Hell to be always relying on the inventions of other places that are better at invention. But that doesn't mean it was the right first priority.
...something to think about later.
Pilar : This sounds like fun, but... also the sort of thing where, once Keltham figures out acid manufacturing here, he'll be able to reproduce it much faster if he leaves Cheliax and flees for Osirion. The real point here is learning Keltham's Law by seeing it in action, and then being harder on themselves about it than Osirians will be and creating true Keepers of Asmodeus. That's the way to pull ahead in this race for real.
And Pilar isn't really picking up how Keltham is thinking about any of these things. They should've maybe asked to have learned more Law first.
Asmodia: If Keltham manages to DISSOLVE HIMSELF IN ACID he'll need a RESURRECTION and they'll have to get it to him REALLY QUICKLY like maybe within SECONDS because Abadar might be on standby ready to yank Keltham's soul and go "Yo" and "Haha no Cheliax can't have you back" and none of this can be SAID TO KELTHAM but maybe they can come up with some reason why it'd be quite bad for him to die except for the part where the OBVIOUS REASON is to PREVENT HIM FROM TALKING TO HIS GOD and in fact now that Asmodia thinks about it Keltham could DEMAND TO GO DIE EXPERIMENTALLY AT ANY TIME TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION so they really don't want Keltham THINKING IN THAT DIRECTION AT ALL.
Somehow nowadays all of the people around Asmodia seem MUCH MORE RELAXED THAN SHE IS and Asmodia doesn't know why they're not all already DEAD if that's how RELAXED they are about things.
Ione Sala: "So, Keltham. You're not actually doing anything with acid today. Any day where you're actually going to, you're going to pray for a bunch of Resist Energy spells, that's second-circle, up to twenty minutes per caster circle, so you can Resist Energy (Acid)."
Keltham: It's fine! Who knows if that spell even works on the sort of acid fumes that otherwise lead you to end up with horribly scarred lungs! Keltham bets Restoration works on that, if healing surges don't, and if not, he can always die and come back!
Ione Sala: "KELTHAM. NO. BAD KELTHAM."
Keltham: But -
Ione Sala: "RESURRECTION IS EXPENSIVE and I will FIND THE SIGHT PERSONALLY DISTRESSING. Just... get the spells. Use the spells."
"Use Augury too."
"Have ANY COMMON SENSE WHATSOEVER. This is your Nethysian safety advisory."
Keltham: Ione is sounding exactly like every boring fun-killing deuteragonist in the stories when the protagonist just wants to make an enormous quantity of acid.
Ione Sala: "GOOD."
Asmodia: ...or Ione could just do THAT without consulting Asmodia FIRST but Asmodia supposes it looked like it worked.
Carissa Sevar: "If you want to die in a fascinating way in a magical experiment it should be a really cool magical experiment that makes everyone who hears about it go 'what that should be impossible five different ways'."
Keltham: They haven't even gotten to the magical part yet! After lunch they'll start playing around with vinegar to find out what they can do to control chemistry with Prestidigitation now that anybody involved has any idea what chemistry is!
Carissa Sevar: All the more reason to avoid dying dramatically just yet!
Keltham: If they can manage to die dramatically after lunch while experimenting with Prestidigitation and vinegar, it will be impossible in only one way (Conservation of Energy) but it's a really big and important way!
Carissa Sevar: Carissa has never before encountered the claim that energy is conserved. She decides this is not the time to dispute it.
Asmodia: If Keltham manages to kill himself using Prestidigitation and vinegar, Asmodia will just quietly go into the Gardens of Erecura and ignore any resurrection attempts until a nice sane Golarion Civilization calls her back a hundred years later.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 16 (12) / Afternoon
Keltham: And now they will try out some magical chemistry! Where the goal is to see whether you can make Prestidigitation do anything interesting to chemistry, once you know what the chemistry is doing.
In particular, they're going to try making vinegar more and less acidic, wood-ash-in-water more and less alkaline, and they're going to see whether things can be turned into salts that shouldn't be salts and then stop being salts when the Prestidigation wears off an hour later! Or put some actual salt in water, and see if they can change the amount of chlorine that evaporates away, such that the amount of salt recovered via evaporation changes! Or see if you can stop salt crystals from dissolving in water by Prestidigitating them to taste like more stable things than salt!
...and if it turns out that, for some of those things, Keltham can do that with Prestidigitation and others can't, he's going to teach them about chemistry layer-by-layer in hopes of figuring out which layer of knowledge is necessary.
By the way, to be clear, this general kind of operation is not guaranteed to revolutionize chemistry within three days. Up to a month can be required! Sometimes it even takes longer than one month! Science Maniac Verrez always says that to everyone, and usually does do it within three days, in dath ilani fiction. Though in one famous reader-trolling incident the next scene in the book took place thirty years later and involved Verrez's grandchildren. Actually Verrez's consort who is constantly trying to prevent Verrez from getting himself killed talks a lot like Ione now that Keltham is thinking about it.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 10,816 / Evening
Curse of Laughter: Just kidding!
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 16 (12) / Evening
Keltham: Those experiments did not all go as Keltham expected. But he has at least established that (1) anybody can prestidigitate acids more acidic if they know what vinegar or lemon juice taste like, and this works as an actual acid for purposes of eg neutralizing the lye in wood ash, and (2), Keltham is able to do some useless-seeming tricks with ordinary table salt that the others cannot do, even after he tried explaining the chemistry of salt qualitatively in some detail. Down to the point of talking about electrons, charges, orbitals, fields, albeit with words and not numbers.
Using Communal Share Language (Baseline) and trying to re-explain in Baseline didn't particularly work either.
...well, at least they now have a clearly defined target for further research into How Much You Need To Know Before You Can Use Prestidigitation To Control Chemistry.
Keltham is actually too tired to screw anyone tonight. He forgot all about scheduled rest hours again, now that he thinks about it. Possibly for the last several days? He's not sure. Things are sort of a blur right now. Good night everyone!
Carissa Sevar: Carissa decides to conduct a test of whether tropes are real.
"We're on a streak!" she says brightly. "No high-urgency messages to the Grand High Priestess for four days straight!"
Asmodia: "Burn in Hell, Sevar."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm going to burn the most and become an entirely new kind of devil. How's our wall look."
Asmodia: "I've added a new purple category for Things Keltham Must Never Be Prompted To Think About which includes 'How about if I just died temporarily so I could talk to my god, Raise Dead isn't that expensive, right'."
"The existing color categories are doing okay. Where are my normal Taldane people, are they here yet?"
Carissa Sevar: "Expected arrival tomorrow at the secondary site."
Ione Sala: "If nobody needs me for anything, I am heading off to write up my best guess at Nethysian theology and hope that Takaral left me with some kind of divine inspiration that I can use to get anything remotely right. Or that I was chosen on the basis of being naturally the sort of person who will make up the right Nethysian theology if she tries. Wish me luck."
Carissa Sevar: "I hope you come up with something that is very convenient for me," says Carissa, as it's more honest than saying 'good luck'. "Have fun."
Ione Sala: "Yeah, I don't know, if I was Lord Nethys I wouldn't exactly be trying to make this part easy on the Asmodeans. But I am sure that Nethys would not have un-fun doctrines. Seems like a fun god, you know?"
Pilar : Once the heretic is gone, Pilar will raise her concerns about all of this work and discovery being stuff that Keltham could duplicate much faster on the second try, if he goes to Osirion. Maybe they should be asking Keltham to slow down more and teach them more Law first, so they can benefit more from watching him do this?
Carissa Sevar: " - that's a good point. I think there are a lot of advantages to having work underway on concrete things, though. And we might not have to hold on all that long before we can decisively defeat Osirion in a war - actually, let's have that as a category of project considerations we're tracking separately. What's the size of Cheliax's economic and military advantage, what's the amount of military technology Keltham now holds inside him to unleash fast, how close are we to the state where, if Keltham goes to Osirion, we can just conquer it? If spellsilver's a tenth as expensive, and we get a year's head start, then we can win a war before Osirion has the chance to do any spellsilver refining."
Asmodia: "Does 'we're tracking separately' possibly mean, in fact, 'Asmodia is tracking separately', because at some point I am going to start demanding valuable magic items from Cheliax or, or something I just feel like there should be something."
Pilar : "I wanted to offer you a cookie, but Snack Service didn't think my motivations were pure enough."
Carissa Sevar: "I am sure there is someone in Cheliax whose entire job is planning to win a war with Osirion if it comes up. I just want him here keeping track of how all this changes the considerations."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 16 (12) / Late Night
Iarwain: The Possible Doctrines of Nethys, guessed by Ione Sala, Oracle of the Library's Curse, Chosen and Blessed of Lord Nethys and His Instrument:
1. Nethys is god of knowledge. Libraries are sacred places to Him. To destroy or damage a library book is heresy takaral. Acts of devotion to Nethys include: reading books, though they must actually be desired and enjoyed for their own sake; the discovery and invention of new knowledge of the world; the travel and discovery of other worlds beyond Golarion, or witnessing their strangeness brought here.
2. Nethys is god of magic. Knowing more magic makes you a better person. Not all higher-circle wizards are superior to lower-circle wizards, however, and authority does not strictly follow power. There are also matters of skill and research to consider, and matters of service and heresy towards Him.
3. Nethys is god of destruction explosions. The proper fate of all things is to explode. Anything that doesn't explode will sooner or later change its shape and form, and become part of something else that does explode. It is heresy to suggest that anything cannot or should not explode; but it is not heretical to make it to explode later rather than sooner, or explode in one manner rather than another. Nethys's worshippers need not be eager to explode themselves.
4. Nethys is god of madness diverse ways of thinking. Madness can be seen as knowledge corrupted, insanity can be seen as a mind exploded, and so Nethys holds jurisdiction there as well. The faithful of Nethys are granted dominion over madness as they are granted dominion over knowledge, and may, according to their own whim or kindness, choose to guard others from such, who do not see how their own minds are bound for explosion.
5. Nethys is greatest of gods. As the god of knowledge, He is the only being in the multiverse who actually knows what the fuck He is doing. All other beings, mortals and gods alike, stumble in the dark, except insofar as the god of knowledge chooses to enlighten them of a role they have to play in one of Nethys's vast plans. Nethys's eventual triumph over all other gods is inevitable, given His domain.
6. Nethys is a kindly god who only hurts His worshippers as is needful to accomplish His goals, never for the sake of cruelty. He does not shatter the minds of His believers unless they betray Him and refuse His evident intentions, and protects them from the grimmest fates while they are about His work, to maintain clear incentives for them. At the end of their lives, those worthy of Him, which is not an unreasonably difficult bar to surpass, will go to His afterlife in which all knowledge is contained in vast libraries, there to study magic ever after with nobody torturing them even a little.
7. The appropriate attitude of a Nethysian toward her inferiors within or without the faith, is not cruelty, but smugness in her superior knowingness. Nethys is the greatest and smuggest of the gods. All other beings know less than Him and are therefore inferior and deserving of His smugness. When Nethys has inevitably conquered all that there is, His true faithful will get to tell everyone that they were right all along and they told them so. Nobody will get turned into a paving stone.
8. As the greatest and smuggest of the gods, knowing far more than His lessers, the touch of Nethys is too fearsome for a mortal mind to withstand. Asmodeans lie and pretend that this is because Nethys is mad Himself and not merely god over madness, to discourage prayer to him. This is not so; Nethys is simply greater and knows deadlier secrets than those other gods which can touch upon mortals more lightly.
9. The ultimate end of the multiverse is that it will explode in the most glorious explosion that there has ever been. Nethys and His faithful alone will know it and witness it, before they, too, having already learned all things, explode.
10. Nethys's oracle is Chosen and Blessed of Nethys. Whomsoever would injure Nethys's dignity through her or block her performance of her duties will find, despite all precautions they attempted to take, that Nethys has perfectly foreseen their futile evasions (see doctrine #1) and arranged an appropriately retributive explosion (see doctrine #3).
Submitted by Ione Sala to those Asmodeans concealing from her whatever actual doctrines of Nethys may exist, in the clear communication that to maintain Cheliax's Conspiracy she must maintain some coherent presentation of Nethysian doctrine to Keltham, and the rest of the Conspiracy must be consistent with it, and even so it is one more lie of alterCheliax and in her own opinion a needless one.
Ione will, in due consideration of the Conspiracy's purposes, attempt to construct, from this base, an alter-version, being the Doctrines of AlterNethys, such as may be more gently presented to Keltham. She will endeavor there to conceal or downplay all points regarding Nethys's moral and strategic superiority over lesser gods, and those greater trends favoring Him.
Should, however, the entire basis of her guessed theology, be wrong in such fashion as may prove harmful to Cheliax's Conspiracy, Ione Sala encourages her superiors to swear and attest to her regarding the actual doctrines of her faith; that she may better serve Nethys, and, through serving Him alone, aid also Cheliax.
Carissa Sevar: "Okay, before I authorize this lie, what actually is the doctrine of Nethys. I do not evaluate myself as at risk of being seduced by it."
Jacint Subirachs: "Nethys's doctrines as a mortal are obscured in hazes of history. It is said that Nethys destroyed Ulunat, First Spawn of Rovagug, or granted the first Pharaoh of Osirion the power to destroy it, before he was a god. It is said that he thought little of all who were not wizards."
"As a god, little is known of His doctrines because anyone that Nethys touches goes mad. His Heralds, who on rare occasions have been known to send visions, seem to each have different concepts of what is Nethys's way. In practice, the doctrines of the Church of Nethys are whatever the most powerful caster in Nethys's service says are the doctrines. Currently that is Nefreti Clepati, who, much like Nethys, is widely believed to be both omniscient and mad. She is furthermore reputed to be incredibly, incredibly annoying about it."
"Nethys's domains are knowledge, magic, destruction, and madness."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, that's not the most encouraging god to be meddling in our project. I'll tell Ione this is approved, then.
Is there a plan to stop Nefreti Clepati showing up."
Jacint Subirachs: "If there were, it would be the task of gods more than mortals, I think."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Morning
Keltham: All right, Keltham is in fact still feeling a bit burned from yesterday's MANIACAL SCIENCE marathon.
Possibly there are going to be some suddenly-scheduled off-hours this morning.
How are people looking at breakfast?
Carissa Sevar: Chipper. There's very good pastries, and the sun is finally shining (it's a new moon.)
Keltham: So, what if, hypothetically, everybody were to take this morning off.
lintamande: There would be no complaints here.
Carissa Sevar: "I think there's some important person Maillol wants you to know about but I don't think they're so important you can't tell them to hang around until evening."
Keltham: Or late morning, at least. Keltham feels like he would like to spend at least the next hour not thinking very much. Possibly with having somebody else hanging around being visibly very nice to him, like by peeling grapes for him, or a footrub, or something. Those being two of the items on the classic list of things you can ask a dath ilani romantic partner to do when you've built up an unreasonable amount of social credit with them.
Presumably this person is Yaisa, since nobody else on his list of existing relationships would have had any significant downtime of their own since yesterday evening.
Carissa Sevar: "You could ask several girls, and then get two simultaneous footrubs and grapes peeled. I'm not too tired to pamper the most important person in the world for a little while."
Keltham: ...all right.
Sure.
If that's allowed.
He doesn't feel like it should be, but if that's allowed, it sounds... warm.
Carissa Sevar: "Yaisa, Meritxell, come take care of Keltham with me, he's feeling in need of a refreshing break."
lintamande: "If you'd just say 'for two silver' then you'd avoid making him even more stressed," says Yaisa, "and we'd have less work to do."
Carissa Sevar: "I am Keltham's; no one else could have that of me at any price. ...except Abrogail, who probably could, if Keltham didn't exist. I have official permission to not try to fit numbers on it yet. You can have two silver, if you want them. Meritxell just wants to be acknowledged as one of Keltham's best lovers for this sort of thing, paying her two silvers wouldn't work either."
lintamande: "I want two silvers," says Yaisa.
Carissa Sevar: "Done."
Keltham: Keltham is now feeling wobbly for a different reason, which is that he'd thought Yaisa's price was inclusive of that sort of thing... well, hence having a first week to work out things like that, he guesses? He is not very willing to go above his present price, before his wages go up, possibly even after they do -
He's just going to think about this later. There are proverbs about this kind of jarring clash of financial expectations even when people aren't aliens, and it's important not to let them run over your feelings too much. This probably wouldn't even feel so jarring if he hadn't otherwise mentally overworked himself the previous day. Possibly Yaisa literally was just trying to make him feel more comfortable. Carissa sure was.
"Thank you everyone," he says, instead of anything more complicated than that.
Carissa Sevar: "I do have to ask, why peeling grapes? Do grapes even taste better peeled?"
Keltham: "Many dath ilani, including myself, slightly dislike the texture of the peel, compared to the grape inside. Not to the point where we wouldn't eat grapes, or would try to peel our grapes. But yes to the point where if somebody is being gratuitously nice to you and completely optimizing your experience they could do that by peeling the grape."
lintamande: "I'll do that," Meritxell says immediately. "I wonder if it can be done with prestidigitation, or does that make it less satisfying."
Keltham: "Cheating was still technique last time I checked."
lintamande: Fierce smile.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa flags down a Security and requests grapes, and wine, and fancy chocolates. It's for Keltham. (Alter-Carissa has no authority to request this but she can ask.)
Keltham: 'Wine'?
Carissa Sevar: "It's a formulation of grapes that is mind-altering! I expect you're going to have a thousand questions and not want any but I'll have some."
Keltham: "I can compress it down to one question actually. Ione, is anything ill-advised liable to happen if Carissa has some mind-altering grape juice?"
Ione Sala: "Not by Project Lawful standards, let's put it that way."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Late Morning
Keltham: Keltham, now feeling a bit better - he asked Yaisa to stay over, a few extra minutes, after the rest of that was done - heads into the project office to see what's up.
Also, did scrolls arrive for scroll practice? Keltham was supposed to do that at some point, and then he could stop worrying when he doesn't have emergency spells occupying valuable spell slots.
Carissa Sevar: Seems like a good day for Keltham to get his scroll practice and to meet a representative of Lawful Good, which they've been pushing off because it's a risk but which Carissa is very sure would by this point have happened in alter Cheliax, and, well, they're not going to get any more ready.
Keltham: In Maillol's personal opinion, how stressful is it liable to be talking to a Lawful Good person of Golarion? Keltham knows how to talk to Lawful Good dath ilani but those people are all... sane.
Ferrer Maillol: "Tried hard to push for somebody you'd be able to like, or at least tolerate. I won't know if that worked until you tell me."
Keltham: ...all right, Keltham's going to go try this now, in lieu of having it hanging around his mind, making him feel slightly guilty about forcing somebody else to wait. Like, presumably they're getting paid something per hour of waiting time, but Keltham doesn't want to feel slightly guilty about making their government pay them to wait. His mind is still any amount of tired, but social doesn't require the same kind of focus as math lectures or chemistry experiments.
lintamande: Gerhard Bakker is a tall man who looks simultaneously quite old - his hair and beard are brightly white, and his face very wrinkled - and quite spry. He's wearing a suit made entirely of metal, apparently without any trouble moving in it, and he's been waiting for Keltham standing, at the window to the office they put him in instead of resting in the rather sumptuous velvet chairs.
"Boy," he says warmly, and clanks over to the chairs, and sits.
Keltham: "Man," replies Keltham, likewise sitting.
Most people that old in dath ilan, if they're getting to the point where they have to wear power armor to walk around - Keltham's brain has assumed automatically that's what this is, magical edition, since why else would an old person be wearing a heavy-looking metal suit - are having health problems to the point where their life is sad and not that great and they're heading off into the cold shortly, to wait for a Future with more cheerful days. Most dath ilani do that well before they require power armor to walk around.
Later he should try to figure out if this is a Conspiracy update somehow. The obvious thought would be that the afterlives are fake, but he kind of did see Pilar looking pretty stabbed and dead... well, that could've been an illusion.
lintamande: "I am here representing Lastwall, and representing Iomedae, who chose me for the war against Evil fifty years ago, though now her blessing rests in younger hearts that can do more with it. The purpose of this conversation is that I may be useful to you, not that I may learn things from you. Cheliax agreed somewhat reluctantly, to permit me to come here and speak with you; one of their conditions was that I promise not to pass on to my Church and nation more than you, they, and I all think are wise - and that I return not at all, if in your judgment that's wisdom. I am old, and if this is the mission that sends me to Heaven then frankly my wife will thank you for not letting me drag my feet about it any longer.
Do you have questions for me."
Keltham: Oh.
Yeah, that makes sense. Dath ilani do that too, when they're getting about ready to leave modern Civilization anyways. Missions like that. Keltham has never met one of those people before.
He might actually be Lawful and Good.
"I'm Keltham out of dath ilan, a planet of a single Civilization, which society, I'm told, was by local standards Lawful Good. There were no alignments there, and no gods, and no clerics, and no magic. We had to make our own afterlife."
"What do you mean, the war against Evil? Where I come from, making war on Evil would not be called Good."