lintamande: "Good and Evil both live in every human heart; Pharasma might weigh the balance of them, and a Detect Alignment spell might tell us which predominates, but a person has rarely been born in this world who has only Good or only Evil in them. In other places it is elsewise.

Iomedae is the god of the war on that which has no concern for our values and cannot be bargained with. 

The creatures born natively of the Abyss, which pour through the Worldwound into Golarion, are Chaotic Evil, and not in the way that humans who read Chaotic Evil are Chaotic Evil; their values are Evil, not some blend of Evil and Good. An Evil human, even a Chaotic Evil human who values none of the habits of coordination that can build civilization in the absence of Good, won't generally murder someone for a copper piece; demons would. The native inhabitants of Abaddon eat souls, and this they do because the souls are tasty.

It is said that long ago, when the asuras native to Hell ruled there, it was similar with them, and Asmodeus alone possessed the skill to bargain with them across that gap, so much wider than the gap ordinary bargains must cross; and when He purchased the asuras's departure He had the backing of Good, for his promise to make His devils out of the living. But it might be said falsely; the gods hold information about the god-agreements of the ancient past very dear, and it was long before Iomedae's time.

In Cheliax I think the telling of uncertain-stories about ancient god-agreements is discouraged, lest people remember something false and run off with it; but while I do not confidently assess that the risk of that, with you, is none, if you are of a different Civilization entirely then it is beyond my wisdom to guess your errors, and the best I can do is tell you things that lead people often to error, and warn you that they often do that."

Keltham: Keltham is internally a bit unhappy he didn't get a chance to talk to Oldguy before, obviously, Oldguy read Keltham's transcripts, including for example a recent report clearly filed by Broom specifically; and Keltham notes to himself that everything here is being Rephrased to the Alien's Terms so that it Appeals To Keltham, and, this being Golarion, it is possibly getting skewed along the way.

"Several questions, but first, I note that saying 'even a Chaotic Evil human who values no habits of coordination won't kill for a copper piece' is, one, obviously shaped to talk to Keltham specifically, two, something that sounds visibly false since not killing for a copper piece is exactly one of the habits of coordination, that you don't destroy a lot of someone else's value in exchange for a tiny gain yourself.  Consider not trying as hard to rephrase things in the Alien's own terms and saying things you think are more plainly true and letting me do some of my own work of translation.  The more you try to talk in my unfamiliar conceptual language, the more liable you are to say things that parse out false in my language."

"Next, what exactly was Good paying Asmodeus to do back in the beginning of things?  Make devils from the living as opposed to what, the dead?  I didn't parse that part."

lintamande: "Instead of from scratch, which would make them entities that had values different from those of selfish humans. I can try not to speak in your terms, but it's true, about Chaotic Evil humans, that they don't care about coordination and still won't kill someone for a copper piece, because killing people is unpleasant, if you're a human with human values, even if you are one who is very selfish as humans go."

Keltham: "It's unpleasant because the ancestors of humans who went around killing other humans tended to get killed themselves, and so had fewer children to carry their heritable tendencies, and eventually the survivors' children were people with innate tendencies not to kill people even when it seemed like there was a reason.  Because it just seemed unpleasant.  Stuff like that is how the ingredients for Good got into humans at all in the first place.  We would not say, on our terms, that finding it unpleasant to kill people is sufficient to be Good, but that I would find it unpleasant is an instance of how I value a habit of coordination that allows people to live together even though I am selfish."

"Set that aside, because it's drawing on Law I haven't lectured on as yet.  It sounds like Asmodeus was another being of pure Evil with no humanlike goals in him, on this story.  Obvious Additional Questions then include why Asmodeus appears, on the surface of things, to be helping Cheliax, and how the ancient Good beings ended up wanting to help humans, if they had no humanity in them."

lintamande: "The Church of Iomedae holds that actually the values of ancient Good beings are alien too, which is why you need Iomedae, who was once human. The Church of Sarenrae would say instead that those ancient Good gods that valued humans drew more strength from them, and won ancient wars. The Church of Desna would say that Desna values, for every agent, that it attain its own priorities whatever they are, which makes Her friendly to humans, though also friendly to demons and useless in the war on Evil. The Church of Dou-Bral, when it existed, would have said that Dou-Bral values joy and pleasure, which happen to be things humans value too.

All would say that Asmodeus was, of many agents like Him, the one whose values happened by coincidence to overlap the most with the values of humans, and thus that those Good powers concerned with humans backed Him for that reason. I think the Church of Asmodeus tells it differently, emphasizing that Asmodeus bargained cleverly with Good, winning their support in exchange for an ongoing commitment to their concerns. Again I know little; it was before Iomedae's time, and none of the ancient gods can speak to humans easily."

Keltham: "Desna's strategies aren't parsing for me.  If she purely values beings obtaining their own priorities, she should be engaging in wars of extermination to eliminate everything whose behavior tends to interfere with other beings obtaining their priorities, in hopes of a much longer-term better future from her standpoint.  Depending on the exact form of her values, Desna might try to exterminate everything that has priorities that are hard to obtain, so the future will be full of things with priorities that are easy to obtain instead.  Even if Desna can't get everything she wants, because of other gods, she should still be backing Iomedae in a war on demons, if she singlemindedly and not in a human way wants beings to have their priorities obtained."

lintamande: "That is a reasonable criticism of Desna; I don't know how She would answer it. If I had to guess I might guess something like that destroying an entity against its will is so undesirable that most plans that feature it won't measure out well. In practice She doesn't try to exterminate humans or demons."

Keltham: "What are Asmodeus's goals?"

lintamande: "Asmodeus in His concern for contracts wants Hell to be prosperous and invent lots of things and develop complex financial instruments, and participates in such so as to grow His own wealth; Asmodeus in His concern for power wants through His wealth to command the efforts of others for His own benefit; Asmodeus in His concern for Law wants the flaws of mortals to be corrected that He may reveal to them more of His domain and that they will be easier to contract with."

Keltham: "Asmodeus isn't obviously benefiting in any way from what he's doing for Cheliax; it's been represented to me that Asmodeus prefers it when I exercise power over Carissa, which suggests that he doesn't want power to be exercised for himself, so much as power of anyone over anyone.  Similarly, Asmodeus's concern for contracts sounds like he wants anyone to make contracts with anyone, not like he wants them to form contracts benefiting Asmodeus in particular.  Is Asmodeus a god of Evil or an Evil god?"

lintamande: "When people in Cheliax have values closer to those of Asmodeus, and conduct themselves more like how Asmodeus does, that strengthens Him; He can see them more clearly and anticipate their actions at lower cost. More of them will have the habits of mind suited to being His clerics, so He can select among a higher quality pool, and when it is necessary for Him to communicate, communication is much less costly with an aligned agent. It is the desire of Asmodeus that the people of Cheliax be Evil for His own benefit, and He doesn't care if they're Evil in ways that don't align them more with Him.

- Iomedaens disapprove of this. You might seek an account from one who approves of it, for balance."

Keltham: "Don't know where I'd find one of those in Cheliax.  Tell me about the Iomedans' disapproval."

lintamande: "There is a city in Abaddon called Awaiting Consumption. They raise humans there, in cages, and when they are grown they set some aside for breeding the next generation, and they consume them, their souls included. By some estimates there are more humans there than in any city in Golarion.

Asmodeus does not think this is His problem. Because of the way He raises people, in Cheliax, they're less likely than people in other place to pledge their lives to the battle against it. But it must be stopped, and Good is the only force in the universe that will do it."

Keltham: Pretty clear why Carissa didn't tell him that.  Keltham thinks he approves of the decision.  Good thing that he strongly suspects that what happened to Keltham out of dath ilan in his plane crash is something that works for anyone anywhere, or that news might be enough to shake him -

Keltham catches a glimpse of something out of the corner of his mind, a thought about Zon-Kuthon's afterlife and Owl's Wisdom.  He's pretty sure of what it says.  There isn't much need to think it.

"What was the plan for taking out Awaiting Consumption and Zon-Kuthon's afterlife?  You talk about there needing to be someone to pledge their lives to the battle against it; out of dath ilan we would say you needed someone to win."

Iomedae: (That is, of course, the teaching of the ACTUAL Iomedae, concisely enough expressed there that a flicker of her attention alights briefly on the room.)

lintamande: "The original plan began a hundred years ago with Aroden's manifestation on Golarion, and went wrong when He was murdered and prophecy shattered. He was an older and more powerful god; His death left Iomedae alone in the fight, and responsible also for containing the Worldwound. We will regroup, eventually, and marshal the forces to attack again Abaddon and Zon-Kuthon's afterlife, but right now our resources are barely adequate to not be destroyed ourselves. It is our hope that the wisdom of your Lawful Good society could change that."

Keltham: Okay, check the obvious simple paths to victory to see why they don't work.  "Somebody mentioned to me that a misphrased Wish spell could produce a flaming crater a Teleport radius across, which I think is seven hundred miles or something like that?  If they weren't mistaken or exaggerating, that's a fairly respectably-sized explosion even for my Civilization.  What goes wrong if the plan is, say, sending a suicide volunteer into Awaiting-Consumption and doing that?  And if they rebuild the city, do it again."

lintamande: "In a god's domain, magic works as that god intends; Awaiting Consumption is part of the domain of Urgathoa, goddess of gluttony, and She would not permit our magic to work in Her lands."

Keltham: "Huh.  Why was there any hope at all then, barring new fundamental discoveries in magic?"

lintamande: "Well, Iomedae'll probably have to kill Urgathoa first, but gods do succeed at that sort of thing sometimes."

Keltham: "Do enormous explosions help with that at all?  Strictly nonmagical ones, say, if the problem is that magic per se stops working."

lintamande: "Nonmagical explosions...well, they might kill all the captives presently in Awaiting Consumption. I don't know that she would be able to prevent that."

Keltham: "Thing that explodes a lot as soon as anybody tries to nullify the magic on it, or after a few seconds if nobody does.  Can you teleport it into Awaiting Consumption from a safe distance?"

lintamande: "...maybe. The explosion itself is still nonmagical?"

Keltham: "Correct."

lintamande: "I think that is at least likely enough to work that we would do it if we knew how."

Carissa Sevar: It can't possibly be this easy to get Keltham to teach them weaponry.

Keltham: "You would not particularly want to do this if it would possibly not work and leave them with an interesting weapon to analyze."

"I am, on further reflection, unsure that taking out Awaiting Consumption is much of a useful thing to do, unless there's some reason they wouldn't just distribute the production process over a thousand other places we couldn't all hit at once.  As it happens, you misunderstood my original question; I was asking if a very very very large nonmagical explosion would kill or at least wound Urgathoa."

lintamande: "It'd take them some time to get millions of humans again if their existing population was nearly all killed, and if they do it outside Urgathoa's domain, which isn't that large, it'd be harder for them to prevent interference. 

A very large nonmagical explosion would significantly wound a god only if they had made themselves vulnerable for some reason; by default gods have no physical form that can come to harm."

Keltham: "Any obvious shenanigans you could pull that would trick Urgathoa into manifesting physically, if she wasn't otherwise warned of what happened after that?  Actually, pause, how secure are we from Urgathoa listening to this conversation somehow?  I've been assuming in the back of my mind that you would've stopped me if we shouldn't be talking about this, but that was a stupid assumption not to verify out loud.  There was an earlier event making it deducible that Nidal or Zon-Kuthon had eyes on the place the Project was then located, as in, immediate and ongoing monitoring."

lintamande: "Urgathoa is not one of the gods who appears to possess particular capacity to surveil humans, which is costly to different gods to different degrees. She will not learn of this conversation through listening in on it, and she does not have an organized Church like that of Zon-Kuthon to carry out large-scale missions on her behalf. There are not obvious ways to trick a god into manifesting physically. They are cautious of it."

Keltham: "Talk to me about how Iomedae turned into a god and why there aren't another hundred of her to back her up against Urgathoa."

lintamande: "She ascended via the Starstone after becoming extraordinarily powerful during the Shining Crusade, as a paladin of Aroden. Most who attempt the test of the Starstone fail. None among our number have the power that she did at the point where she successfully ascended. We do keep trying, though, in case someone gets through."

Keltham: "Was Cayden Cailean very powerful at the point he ascended on what I'm told was a drunken bet?"

lintamande: "He was a talented adventurer but nothing like Iomedae. No one is entirely sure how He made it but it's part of why we keep trying."

Keltham: "So if this were Civilization there'd be a huge ongoing research project to figure out how the Starstone worked.  Is this by any chance totally not the case here at all?"

lintamande: "The magical protections on it also make it very difficult to learn things about. The dead don't remember anything. Iomedae cannot tell us."

Keltham: "Talk to me about the magical protections."

lintamande: "The Starstone is on its own island in Absalom, behind walls that divinations do not reach. When anyone is inside, no entrance is visible; when no one is inside, an entrance is visible, and you can fly right in. Teleportation in doesn't work. Summons vanish on entering. Animals which are sent die when they enter."

Keltham: "How'd that all get there?  Starstone - just appeared one day, with all that stuff around it?"

lintamande: "Aroden built it before He ascended. He said that his intent was that the worthiest could ascend."

Keltham: "Chickenshit.  That's not how anything works when you're fighting Urgathoa."

lintamande: "A reasonable objection. Aroden was Lawful Neutral, not Lawful Good, but still. And even if His intent once made sense, it's possible it doesn't now that He's dead."

Keltham: "Okay, look, considering the Cayden Cailean thing - and wasn't there a fourth person Norwhatever who became a god of crime? - Aroden must have had a really weird definition of 'worthiest', leaving out how dumb that is to do in the first place - for that matter, did either of the Cayden Cailean or Norwhatever events happen before Aroden died?  This whole part makes no sense.  And other things I've been told about Aroden didn't sound like he was generally nonsensical."

"Is there a research project aimed at taking down the protections around the Starstone so that proper research can be done to it?"

lintamande: "There is not. I don't know how you would do it; no one exits the island alive."

Keltham: "I don't mean to sound like a one-note song, but, really large explosion -"

lintamande: "It seems like a lot of things might go badly wrong if you tried to explode the protections around the Starstone. I - suppose we can ask Iomedae whether to go ahead, though."

Keltham: "Any idea what size of explosion it'd take to blow out the protections?  Or, for that matter, the maximum amount you could probably use without damaging the Starstone?  In units of, say, one million million times the energy to lift your hand from waist-height to head-height."

lintamande: "I am not sure that the protections could be destroyed by an explosion at all, and not sure if an explosion would destroy the Starstone, and if it would I have no idea what size of explosion would do it. At that scale you would just destroy the city of Absalom and kill millions of people. I think that this is unlike Awaiting Consumption not really a problem best solved with explosions."

Keltham: "Oh right, Absalom.  Somebody went and built a city next to it.  Great.  Okay, tabling that until we have enough money to pay them all to move out, I guess."

"Zon-Kuthon's afterlife, what does that take to fix now that Zon-Kuthon is sealed."

lintamande: "We'd need to defeat the magical protections on the walls and take the place block-by-block and kill or rescue everyone in it. Lastwall could do it with a hundred thousand soldiers, I expect. - we do not have a hundred thousand soldiers and those we do have are at the Worldwound or aiding in Nidal."

Keltham: "What's your plan on, like - treating somebody who's been in Zon-Kuthon's afterlife for a while?  I'd expect that to be an impossible strain on your resources.  Do you have a way to suspend - however many people are in there - until Golarion's future Civilization has the resources to take care of them?"

lintamande: "Not really, but we can send them on - to Hell, to Heaven, to wherever else is right for them. The afterlives are accustomed to taking in those who have great psychological scars; in fact in a sense I think from the perspective of the afterlives practically all of us are so scarred."

Keltham: "So, again, not to be a one-note song, but, incredibly large nonmagical explosion on the Zon-Kuthon afterlife, does it help at all?"

lintamande: It could maybe take the walls down faster but it would kill all the prisoners???

Keltham: "Souls in the afterlife can be permakilled by large explosions, or for that matter, permakilled at all outside of Abaddon?"

lintamande: It is in general an incredibly rare occurrence - they are much tougher than normal mortals - but an unfathomably large explosion is the sort of thing that would do it.

Keltham: "...huh.  Possibly their next destination would be able to take care of them, I'm not doing too badly here.  But given the number of unknowns, if Hell and Heaven think they can take care of them, then - possibly it's not worth just turning that whole afterlife into a crater, right away..."

"Okay, my current impression is that a lot of things won't be fixed enough if I drop a giant explosion on them.  Awaiting Consumption could be destroyed and scattered, but that would potentially warn Urgathoa about an ambush that we'd otherwise want to spring later."

"Your personal judgment about whether Lastwall should be told what I suspect I might be able to do, in case they can think of something to do with it that I can't and you didn't?  Downside, increased risk of tipping off Urgathoa early - I have been wondering a bit about whether she's liable to attack the Project, but what happened to Zon-Kuthon would maybe be something of a warning sign to her.  Upside, Lastwall being able to actually think of something."

"To be clear on the obvious: this is something that would take secrecy oaths, a lot of truthspells, Lawful Neutral clerics and outsiders verifying things, Broom or Broom's people signing off, not sure if you're cleared about that part, possibly my going outside whatever effect is preventing divine interference here so I can get signoff from my god on it."

lintamande: "Of course.  I should think on that for some time, and not give you an answer immediately."

Keltham: "I'd also have additional questions about Lastwall's government.  Somebody mentioned to me that they thought everywhere in Golarion had nobles, and made it illegal to talk 'disrespectfully' to nobles, and this included Lastwall, according to them."

Keltham's thoughts are now moving away from their previous state of extremely Lawful reasoning about whether it's possible to achieve victory over Evil, and not just fight it, using his currently available options.

lintamande: "Lastwall prides itself on having no nobles, in the sense that other countries have them. Every person in Lastwall serves the greater Good, no matter who their parents are or how much money they have. If the Queen of Cheliax joined our noble cause, she would be given the command of a regiment, to prove herself from there. Certainly it is true that we would not permit anyone to treat her disrespectfully."

Keltham: "Define 'treat her disrespectfully'.  If she goes around visibly on drugs and somebody says 'Gosh you look to be visibly on drugs', for example, is that disrespectful?"

lintamande: " - it would depend how they said it, I would think, and what relationship they had with her?"

Keltham: "Stranger, said it as follows:  Gosh, you look to be visibly on drugs."  Keltham's voice is simply-factual.

lintamande: " - I take it it's not the answer you're looking for, but that person would probably get in trouble, for bothering an officer out of the blue. Of course the officer would also be reprimanded, if they were on drugs."

Keltham: "Is there - somebody else who is the one person who you are supposed to talk to, if the Queen of Cheliax was put in charge of your 'regiment', and then she seems to be visibly on drugs."

lintamande: "You could bring it to the attention of her second in command."

Keltham: "If that's translating correctly, her second-in-command would be her direct subordinate?  Somebody who Hypothetical Delinquent Abrogail would have a ton of actual power over, in terms of being able to make that person's life subtly worse if she felt like it?"

lintamande: "Yes, that's correct, though we teach that people should not abuse power over their subordinates."

Keltham: "How do you incentivize that people should not subtly abuse power over their subordinates?"

lintamande: "It's wrong. It makes the world worse. And Lastwall teaches everyone, from childhood, the importance of not doing things that are wrong. And Iomedae chooses only people who act very rightly."

Keltham: "What percentage of all managers in Lastwall have been chosen by Iomedae that way?"  It could work if she's pointing out or passing veto on every manager in the system, Keltham supposes, but that's more comms bandwidth than he thought gods had.

lintamande: "At the regiment level? Perhaps a third."

Keltham: "Sorry, what's a 'regiment' exactly?"

lintamande: "Six hundred soldiers, three battalions."

Keltham: "I... would not expect this system to work if Iomedae only got to select one in eighteen hundred personnel.  My next thought would be to ask if you previously ran really intense heritage-selection on people to not abuse their subordinates, but that would involve having a system for detecting it and then you wouldn't need the heritage-selection process, and also apparently you accept non-Iomedae-selected out-faction people to run regiments.  I'd be shocked to find you had prediction markets running... why does this system work?  Does this system work?  What stops managers from ending up doing wacky shit if people below them aren't supposed to call them on it and can only report to people underneath the manager in the command directed-bunch-of-connections?"

lintamande: "...that for the most part they are Good people who want us to win?"

Keltham: THIS IS NOT OBVIOUSLY A STABLE EQUILIBRIUM.

"...did this system possibly work better when Aroden was alive and now it's getting a bit worse every year, or something like that?"

lintamande: "I mean, lots of things were better when Aroden was alive, but we're still holding our own at the Worldwound, and in no sense getting worse at that. I think perhaps your view of human nature is too pessimistic. Most people will do the right thing, given guidance and the opportunity."

Keltham: "You're not guarding against randomly selected people, you're guarding against that fraction of people who have the greatest desire and the incentive to try to get promoted to management and then break your system for the rewards."

"If I asked what makes your system robust against bad actors attracted by the unguarded rewards of abuse of power, is there any chance that you'd have a neatly argued standard document explaining the system design, or that you could lecture on it from memory?"

lintamande: "There are not rewards for command roles in Lastwall! People take them out of duty. If you were selfish you would not benefit from having one."

Keltham: "I am... probably going to have to come back to that concept later."

"For the record, that's not even slightly how we do it in dath ilan.  Which, I am beginning to suspect, is not actually whatever weird thing is called here 'Lawful Good', and is instead well-structured according to a mathematical view of reality and full of altruistic people doing altruistic things."

lintamande: "We would be very interested in learning what dath ilan does; if it might aid us in the battle against Abaddon and the Abyss, that would be worth a great deal of effort. But perhaps that is not an immediate concern."

Keltham: "Your society sounds sufficiently alien that I cannot easily see how to reorganize it, and the same is true of Cheliax, really.  I will, for now, focus on such matters as scaling spellsilver production, and possibly when I know this place better we can see about lesser anti-demon weapons.  I would expect those to just work, in a way that our structures of governance might not, perhaps, just work."

"Should there be an urgent emergency or opportunity requiring a giant explosion, let me know.  If that sort of thing comes up in a way where it needs action on the scale of minutes, try to give me a week's notice that this is something that is true, so we can set up oaths and magitech and also I am not especially certain that my idea works at all."

"Aside from that, I think I should go on doing as I've been doing in Cheliax; the early steps of the technology ladder have a lot in common no matter where you're aiming for later.  If you wanted to create lesser anti-demon weapons, the first thing you would do, in fact, is figure out how to make a lot of acid, which happens to also be the thing you do for scaling spellsilver production."

"Were there things you wanted to say to me, or inquire about from me?  I've been doing a lot of questioning myself and not really giving you a turn, I notice."

lintamande: "I am deeply curious about your world, but I do not expect that satisfying my curiosity uses your time well. We also think you should go on doing as you have been doing in Cheliax, though should you come to conclude that Chelish governance is not who you wish to contract with - because they're Evil or for any other reason - the Church of Iomedae would be happy to take you in. Our Church in Ostenso is inside the interdiction zone that protects you against direct divine interference, even."

Keltham: "I have to say, neither Lastwall nor Cheliax have been asking me nearly as many questions as a visitor would be asked in dath ilan.  I wonder if I would've gotten more of those in the kind of country called here Chaotic.  I increasingly suspect that both 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic' are just different fragments of math-about-thinking, and dath ilan is neither of those things or both."

"You've answered some of my questions and I would trade you some answers in a friendly way that doesn't cancel out much informal political capital, if there's anything you're just curious about."

lintamande: "What is dath ilan like? If a person is injured in an accident and can no longer work, what happens to them? If a child is orphaned, what happens to them?"

dath ilan: Serious injuries are rare in Civilization.  Serious injuries that eliminate your ability to work are even rarer; there's a lot of thinky work, and anything that damages your ability to think usually leads to the horrified victim electing to go straight into cryonic suspension.  Insuring against rare bad outcomes is cheap.  Keltham's annual insurance premium against that and a lot of other stuff was one four-hour workday's wages.

That said, five percent of the population ends up just... not fitting into Civilization.  They find the work that Civilization offers unpleasant enough and the standard rewards not really fun enough; they'd just as soon not work and not get those rewards.

The planet of dath ilan is something that nobody out of dath ilan created.  Land on which to put houses, land in which to mine metal ores - people who don't want to work have as much prior claim on those resources as people who do.  And if the rest of Civilization hasn't presented you with anything you really want to participate in, if your parents decided to marry some other person who was similarly weird to themselves and roll the dice on the dangers of assortative mating producing weird neurotypes, there is some logic by which you might hold yourself injured by having been brought into a world like that, being the person that you are.  The policy prediction markets, in fact, are targeting at most five percent people going to Quiet Cities, as was voted-upon; which means that the people who do end up going Quiet are persons that in some sense Civilization has elected to sacrifice in that way, as the cost of other people doing more what they want, and other policies not being more tightly constrained.  The Quiet Cities are cheap; someone's moral share of all the rents on all the lands is sufficient to insure against their possible lifelong need for food and shelter and clothing, there.

The gotcha is that you cannot have kids, and then go to a Quiet City; when you have children, the right to be supported by Civilization passes out of you and to them.  They can go to a Quiet City, you can't.  If you're not very confident in your ability to support yourself and explicitly pay insurance premiums, you're definitely not properly confident in your ability to support kids.

Anyone, always, no matter who they are, or what they have done, or what else has happened, has the absolute right to go into cryonic preservation and pick things up again in the Future.

If both parents die and didn't earlier find anyone who seemed like a great fit to take over their kid - and who actually wanted a Sudden Extra Child in that event - the right to raise that child goes up for sale to some fairly competitive bidding among people who want to raise a child but don't want the Moral Responsibility of Creating a Counterfactual Child.  Obviously a subsidized prediction market needs to forecast that the child will end up okay with those parents before they're allowed to bid.

lintamande: Well, that doesn't seem very compassionate but it does seem like it might protect against many bad outcomes all the same.

Keltham: Inquiring minds desire to know what is more compassionate than that.  Civilization thought it was going pretty hard on the compassion.

lintamande: ....well, if someone has children and also can't work, Lastwall would help as best it could to feed and shelter them, and if a child is without a home then even people who don't want children would do their best to ensure the child has one, because they are Good. 

Keltham: Rogue actor has twenty kids that Lastwall has to support, with no personal consequences to them.  Turns out that's heritable, all their kids have twenty kids.  ?

Keltham can see the Lawful Good case for taking in children you didn't really want, in a world where there's too many kids like that, and not enough people who want kids to bid on them.  Civilization's compassion in this regard is that it got rich enough for that to stop happening.  Probably some of the people working on improving metal refining were like 'We must make our world richer, so that there will be fewer orphans, and more people with enough extra wealth that they could raise orphans if they wanted to!' and then that totally worked, good for them.  Keltham's going to do the same thing in order to get rich, but more as a moral point in favor of Evil than one against Good.  He can respect the Good thing.

lintamande: It's true that some people recklessly go around impregnating and abandoning women. Lastwall might send them to prison for that, but wouldn't stop providing them with food. And the tendency turns out not to be that heritable, fortunately; most children created by such a father aspire to be different from him.

Keltham: Maybe it's not that heritable on average if you only run the process for one generation.  Keep it up and you'll start to have difficulties; you'll come across cases that are heritable.  Some of the kids born that way will marry each other.

Keltham is confused about why you'd lock people up and provide them with food, instead of shrugging and telling them that if they're hungry Heaven is like right there.

lintamande: Well, often young men are idiots, and if they spend ten years in prison doing hard labor then they grow out of it and can contribute to society, which seems much better than denying them the opportunity, though of course you kill them if they prefer that. 

Keltham: It hadn't even occurred to Keltham that they wouldn't be allowed to die if they wanted, but good.

Young men aren't idiots in dath ilan because if they want to know which actions have which consequences they can always subsidize a prediction market about that.

lintamande: ...fascinating. Young men everywhere in Golarion are often idiots. But drunken brawling, or rape, or vandalism, are all crimes that practically vanish by middle age, so if you just keep people out of trouble until they're older they're entirely redeemable.

Keltham: Right then.  Never mind.  Keltham apologizes for criticizing anything you've managed to build out of component parts like that.  Keltham is sure that Lastwall would be a lovely Lawful Good place if it had Lawful Good citizens to work with.

Shall they wrap up?

lintamande: Sure. He appreciates the opportunity to speak with Keltham, and will be available if Keltham wishes to speak further.

Iomedae: That's not a candidate to become a cleric of Iomedae, and is in the interdiction zone anyway. But a fragment of Iomedae's attention sends a note of something-of-interest to a larger fragment; Iomedae is tired, and stretched thin, but it'll be seen by a greater part of her, eventually.

Asmodia: "I want to know whether an actual paladin would have said that thing about Lastwall not having rewards for command duty, as in, literally dispatch somebody in disguise to ask a paladin that.  If the real paladin gives a better answer, I want this fake paladin to regret their inadequacy."

Carissa Sevar: "Sure, send someone. It didn't ring to me as the kind of thing the paladins I've talked to wouldn't say but I don't know if it's true."

Asmodia: "KELTHAM MADE FACES.  BAD FACES."

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham is used to societies incentivizing Good but I actually think real honest paladin orders suck at that, because it's expensive and they're poor, and because they associate money with - greed as a motive - we'll check, but I think there's a Good society there that holds together and is really making that mistake."

Asmodia: "If Keltham decides we're the Conspiracy and kills himself to talk to his god because REAL LASTWALL WAS ACTUALLY THAT INCOMPETENT I will figure out the Law of Giant Explosions and DESTROY ALL OF LASTWALL."

Carissa Sevar: "On the to-do list anyway, I expect. But by all means."

Keltham: As usual, it's only after ending the conversation that Keltham realizes a tactic he could have used for finding good questions.

"Well, that was tiring at a time when I was already tired."

"I deserve a cookie."

Pilar : "What now."

Keltham: Keltham first hands Pilar a silver, before taking the cookie even.  "Inconvenience fee slash fee that I'm paying so that I notice when I bother you and don't do that without a reason.  Feel free to negotiate about that."

"I'm wondering if you've got any input on what Cayden Cailean thinks of Lastwall or Iomedae, or a city in Abaddon called Awaiting Consumption which I wouldn't ordinarily mention in front of you but you said you wanted to be a Keeper."

Pilar : "I'm not my curse, I don't have input.  I suppose I could see if my curse wanted to volunteer information.  It almost never does, don't get your hopes up."

Keltham: "Pilar?"

Pilar : "Give me another few seconds here."

Pilar needs a go or a no-go on saying this, NOW, Keltham is noticing the delay, and if he asks what her curse was saying in the meanwhile Pilar may not be able to make up something that sounds quite right.

Carissa Sevar: - go.

The curse may well just be trying to lull her into a sense of complacency and eventually betray her, she has nothing to go off but its promise that's not what it's doing, but she can't reason these out one by one on the spot and right now the standing principle she's using is to let the curse talk.

Pilar : "Snack service says that Cayden Cailean is willing to accept outcomes that Iomedae wouldn't consider enough of a victory over Evil, and that's the ultimate root of the reason why Cayden Cailean is going in on this but not Iomedae.  Snack service also says that you're willing to accept outcomes Cayden Cailean isn't okay with, and that's the ultimate reason why, while Cayden Cailean won't hinder you, he'll only help you where your interests overlap with Asmodeus's interests.  Snack service says it's only allowed to tell you this because you'd reach the same conclusions yourself eventually, and it's just speeding you up along the way.  Snack service says Cayden Cailean wasn't feeling great about Iomedae's chances of doing something about Awaiting Consumption if you hadn't shown up.  Snack service says not to expect answers to any of your many additional questions."

Keltham: "Do you have to put up with this sort of thing all the time?"

Pilar : "No, this was pretty bad even for my curse."

It is in fact completely fucking routine but all that other stuff didn't happen in alterCheliax.

Keltham: "Think you should get an additional silver here."  He's suiting actions to words already, of course.

Pilar : "Thanks.  Have an additional fucking cookie."

Pilar : Pilar wishes to note for the record that she bets that this is because of Sevar's remark about not generating any Grand High Priestess reports in four days, and it's happening after exactly enough of a delay that the tropes have preserved their plausible deniability.

Carissa Sevar: Neither of them predicted that in advance, though. 

Nonetheless it is of course written up for the Grand High Priestess. 

One theory is that the Civilization they're going to build counts as a victory over Evil to Cayden Cailean, maybe because it'll have lots of sex and drugs? And not to Iomedae, who cares more about, you know, Hell. It's a nice reassuring interpretation. She wouldn't bet on it.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 17 (13) / Afternoon