Pilar : "Ask your superior, the one set over you. If Subirachs doesn't know, she'll ask the Most High or the Queen. Your superiors will tell you how well you did, and then whatever they say is the truth, and you're done, and it's not your place to worry about it any more because that would be contradicting what your superiors told you."
"It's one of the nice things Asmodeans get to have. That's not why Asmodeus wants it that way, but it's definitely what He wants."
"...Snack Service suggests you take a nap first, though."
Carissa Sevar: " - all right.
If your curse ever turns on us I'm going to figure out how to torture a curse and then I'm going to really really enjoy torturing it to death."
Pilar : Pilar thinks, but doesn't say, that if Sevar managed to really really enjoy torturing anyone or anything to death it would probably be good for the condition of her soul.
...because saying that would be insolent to her superior. That must be why Pilar isn't saying it.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa will go take a nap. It probably is good advice, and, anyway, it's late.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Long Night
Carissa Sevar: Carissa sleeps half an hour, wakes up, contemplates sleeping some more, decides that actually she's just dawdling.
Goes to Subirachs.
Jacint Subirachs: Subirachs has had this matter brought to her attention by Security and has already reviewed transcripts.
Her judgment is that Sevar was not going into subspace, she was correctly estimating that this was excellent good news on the surface of things.
What lies underneath the surface of things remains questionable and it is unfortunately among Sevar's primary jobs as leader of Project Lawful to question it, so she cannot just relax and take her superiors' word about how well things are going. Subirachs can confirm that Keltham's overt behavior looked like excellent news to her. Subirachs cannot, and the Most High and the Queen probably cannot, speak to whether all of this is some incredible plot by Cayden Cailean of which Asmodeus is unaware. If that's so, it would in fact fall to Sevar to not just watch for that possibility but think about it. She cannot take on the duty of a simple slave, here, alas.
But if Sevar is wondering whether she was just imagining things, no, she wasn't, that looked like progress to Subirachs too. Producing that kind of progress is not all of Sevar's given duty, but it is a large part of it. Especially when it comes to the sort of duty that anyone has any idea how to do. And by "anyone" Subirachs means the Chosen of Asmodeus, because nobody else seems to be able to make any progress on it except Pilar and Yaisa as prompted by Snack Service.
Carissa Sevar: This particular progress felt almost entirely self-prompted by Keltham, maybe with some help from Her Majesty, whose letter he seemed to find fascinating. But it does seem like good news. Possibly corrupting Keltham will just work and in a couple of months they'll be able to mostly stop lying; they should proceed on the assumption that's not going to be the case, though.
Does Subirachs have advice or correction.
Jacint Subirachs: Intelligent slaves can sometimes learn to take joy in more complicated judgments of their superiors than 'you did that perfectly'. There's also 'you did that as well as mortals ever do under their circumstances'. Even Pilar, when she got back from Elysium, had Aspexia Rugatonn list out everything she did wrong, and was assigned punishment - before Aspexia Rugatonn told her that she'd done as well as mortals ever do, and reminded Pilar that pride was also among Asmodeus's domains.
If tomorrow this all ends and they all go to Hell for it, and learn that it only worked to Cayden Cailean's own plans in the end, Subirachs thinks that Hell would not account them disobedient, nor more incompetent than usual for mortals. They did receive visions of Asmodeus and orders out of Hell, and they followed them, and worked as best they could at what seemed to be their task despite their doubts. If you are past the whiny idea that Hell should accept that as a full excuse, and not punish you at all for failing, then Subirachs imagines that Hell would be accepting about it, if not forgiving.
Obedience and working diligently at one's task are what Asmodeus demands of mortals. He is glad perhaps when His mortals succeed in advancing His interests, but obedience and diligence to His instructions are what it is Asmodeus's nature as a god to demand.
Sevar was instructed by her superiors to seduce Keltham to Asmodeus; she dangled before him the prize of her sexuality to conquer; he found himself challenged, driven, proud upon the matter; and Keltham has now, 'self-prompted', attached a heating stone to her while making sexual use of her, named himself her owner, and taken pride in how he's already reshaped her through torment.
Some types of slaves of Asmodeus - including, Subirachs thinks, Sevar herself - are more useful to Asmodeus when they allow themselves to ever feel pleasure about a job apparently well done. You can see how it could go wrong if those slaves went around telling themselves about jobs they thought were well done, all the time; but when your superior tells you that you have been a good slave, it is just plain allowed to be proud of that, it is true because they say so, over and done. This is what Pilar was trying to tell Sevar is one of the nice things that Asmodeans are allowed to have.
Pilar, being strong in her faith, was able to set aside her continuing fear of Cayden Cailean's machinations, after the Most High told her that she, Pilar, had done as well as mortals ever do, in willingly returning from Elysium - that Pilar had done her own part as a slave, well enough to deserve some pride, whatever the manipulations of gods around her.
That Pilar had done well was then unshakably true for her, not because Pilar believed the Most High was infallible, but because her superior had told Pilar so, and that is how slavery works under Asmodeus. It wasn't Pilar's place to question her having done well. That you can sometimes be certain of having done well, is one of the nice things that Asmodeans get to have; that's not why Asmodeus does it, but it's definitely how He wants it done.
Sevar has done well.
Carissa Sevar: It feels - not dath ilani - and Carissa's first instinct is to just not think about that right now but it feels like it won't land like it should, like a complete and wonderful and comforting answer, until she's thought it through, so -
Can something be unshakeably true?
- obviously there is an objective fact of the matter about whether Carissa is doing well enough, and she and her superiors could be wrong about it. They could mistakenly think she is doing well enough, when actually she's not doing well enough and tomorrow it'll all come crashing down.
But they can't be wrong about whether Carissa is a good Asmodean, whether she did a good job as an Asmodean, is what Subirachs is saying, what Pilar was saying. Because that's not an objective fact of the world, to be falsified by it. It's a - ownership-tag, like property rights, something about the world that is how it is because we say that's how it's so, and she hasn't yet worked out all the desirable properties that produced Asmodeus's specific system of tagging but -
- but the tag for Carissa says she did well, here, and even if she screws up tomorrow it'll say she did well up to this point, that is just true and Subirachs has the power to make it so.
Right.
Carissa Sevar: "I think I understand, now. I am pleased to be of service to Lord Asmodeus and to Cheliax."
Jacint Subirachs: "I intend to commend this continuing progress to the Queen's attention, and suggest that she reward you by sending here a subordinate enchanter to assist on your crafting projects."
Carissa Sevar: Oh, that would be nice. Both the Queen being informed part, which was obviously going to happen but still Carissa's pleased about it, and the project help, which will maybe let her only do the interesting parts of making the Glibness swords - if she can explain to someone else the obvious things you have to do when you're making a sword tiny...
Asmodeans, she thinks, aren't supposed to deserve rewards for good work? She doesn't ask, it'd be halfway insubordinate, but the question is there, if Subirachs is reading her mind.
Jacint Subirachs: "Asmodeans don't think they deserve rewards for good work. You do it or you get punished, and you don't ever start thinking you're owed anything for your work."
"It is sometimes useful to your superiors, and at other times simply their whim, that you receive rewards even though it is impossible that you deserve them."
"On this occasion, it is useful because it will remind you that your superiors hold the power to reward as well as to punish, which is something that often matters to someone's emotions when it comes to it being made true that you have done right because your superior says so. It is useful because it will nurture your pride. There's also the fact that what you're actually getting is, in fact, assistance that will make you more useful to Cheliax, advance your project for Cheliax, and free up some of your time that was going to be spent on things less important to Cheliax."
"I am explaining all this explicitly, as should not usually be done with a slave, because it is something you must learn alongside the uses of pain - a little less urgently, perhaps, but it will not go well for the Project if you do not know how to use rewards alongside torment. Including that the rewarding not be done in such a way as that it comes to feel deserved; which, for those less Asmodean than Pilar, often follows along immediately from reward coming to feel expected."
Carissa Sevar: "I understand."
'as should not usually be done with a slave' reminds her of something that she doesn't know what to do with, something that still feels confusing, but she has no idea how to put it into words. It's something about how she's not Keltham's slave, because of how she's running an elaborate conspiracy against him, and actually she thinks that the true key to who Carissa is has as much to do with the conspiracy as it does with getting hit, but she's not not his, if he learned the whole truth tomorrow and agreed to stay then it really would be real - she isn't sure what answer she's looking for here, or even what question she has, but it's a vague uneasy that is not obviously just 'vague unease because I'm being a heretic' or 'vague unease because I stupidly fell in love'.
Jacint Subirachs: "You remarked earlier of how you were trying to really be Keltham's slave, because you desired that, if he wholly converted to Evil, you selfishly wanted for that Keltham, your greatest accomplishment, to consider your punishment warranted to be one you could withstand."
"You are being a true slave to that Keltham, the Keltham-who-will-be. He would want his current self freed of his chains."
Carissa Sevar: - nod.
"All right. I want to do one more practice run of 'Keltham gets around to asking questions about slavery', I think Asmodia wanted to do the predictions collector that Keltham told us about in lecture, I want to test the new arrivals in person on their understanding of the objectives here and -
- and I was thinking I should take my punishment for thinking dismissively of Asmodeus tonight, when Keltham's going to be noticing things consistent with my having been in pain in the morning anyway."
Jacint Subirachs: "You're also thinking you should take your punishment tonight, I would guess, because - I have not seen it in your thoughts and perhaps neither have you, but -"
"You saw that even Keltham was getting around to doing painful unpleasant things. Part of you wondered deep down if you're really as strong as you think, having not yet gotten around to your own unpleasant thing, somehow. You are better at enduring torment, but are you better at getting around to it?"
"You saw that Keltham was learning how to use torment, faster than you are, indeed. Some inner part of you is feeling competitive. Your inner part thinks it's because he's dath ilani, but it's not, it's because he's actually getting around to practicing and pushing his limits."
"You instinctively don't want to start expecting rewards. You're justly afraid of what will happen to you if you do that. There are wordless parts of you that are starting to appreciate that pain now has a use in preventing yourself from flying too high and incurring worse pain later. That wordless part of you is in fact correct about that. It is indeed wise for you to take your punishment now, after having just heard of your good work made true and your undeserved reward, given that it must come to you at some time or another."
"These are not certain guesses. But they are obvious ones."
Carissa Sevar: " - yes. I think you/re right.
I think that I should go to a temple in Ostenso, just an ordinary one that won't recognize me, with a punishment code for thinking disrespectfully of Asmodeus."
Jacint Subirachs: "To humble your pride? That's a true question. I can guess your intuition here but not know it yet; you did not think it in words."
Carissa Sevar: " - sort of? To stop thinking of punishing myself as something that has to be done exactly right, for me to benefit from it, instead of something that I have to get good at benefitting from, regardless of what exactly it is."
Jacint Subirachs: "Chosen, you are slaver now and not only slave. You need to think of torments as tools that have effects. Rugatonn assigned you this task specifically so that you would learn to use torture, not only because you were starting to be reckless. If you learn how to benefit from any random torment you are given, you will not have learned something useful for ruling over Project Lawful, because they won't have that skill."
"Bluntly, Sevar, you have a mental block on choosing torments and not just enduring them. You have a block against it even when that makes no sense from the standpoint of either Asmodeus's interests or your own. You refused me specific input on what instruments I should requisition to lend to Keltham, though admittedly with some fortuitous results. You refused me specific input on how to punish you for your failure in the game you designed, after I told you that you would regret not being specific."
"You will not go in with a punishment code for heresy and leave the exact choice of torment to the temple. You will think about what exactly could be done to you, you will think about its probable effect on you, you will decide on a punishment that you think will teach you not to disrespect Asmodeus in the future, you will actually undergo this punishment. You will not let them assign you some torment you didn't choose, and then try to learn the intended lesson regardless. It's a reasonable thing for an Asmodean to want to learn, but it is not what Aspexia Rugatonn told you to learn."
Carissa Sevar: " - acknowledged."
But she doesn't WANT to try to come up with specific - that's really stupid, now that it's out in the open -
- but she doesn't expect the specifics matter. That's...also probably stupid? Of course the specifics matter. In any other kind of teaching the specifics matter a lot.
Is there a better objection lying there?
If you were trying to explain what Abrogail did to Carissa, you would not get anywhere by saying that she let Carissa run around for a while, then lit her on fire a couple of times, then carved runes into her skin, then petrified her. Those are all things that happened, but they aren't the operative ingredients of the thing that happened. Abrogail started with an aim in mind - to drive Carissa into a particular state - and then picked tools that produced that state.
Why is it hard to relate to herself that way? She wants to get Carissa into a particular state - she wants to become the competent ilani Asmodean that she'll need to be for all the work she has ahead. So what are the tools for that job?
...well, obviously, lectures from Keltham, and from the High Priestess, those are tools for the job. But they're not punishments.
Having someone sear Asmodeus's holy symbol into her skin with a hot poker is not counterproductive for making her the competent ilani Asmodean she's supposed to be. It's unpleasant, so it's serving one of the purposes of punishment. It can drive her to the state of miserable desperation where she wishes she had not erred. It is obviously a satisfactory response. But - it feels stupid? It feels unsatisfactory, as a result to 'how do you make Carissa better', like, you'd never come up with that if you were starting from scratch -
If she were starting from scratch, and someone thought disrespectfully about Asmodeus, what would she do, after she explained their error? Maybe have them talk to a devil much smarter than them, and be punished for every error in their understanding; that seems like it'd inculcate the appropriate sense of how those who command us are wiser than us, and have thought more deeply, and we should not assume them stupid. But she's already got a bit of a problem where punishments need to feel big and dramatic to suit her, and that's simply not sustainable on a society-wide scale....
Jacint Subirachs: Well, now the Chosen seems to be trying to invent the entire ilani theory of torture from scratch on the spot, and Jacint's not going to interrupt that or comment on it until Sevar gets visibly stuck.
...possibly some of the problem here may be that Sevar has been tortured by Abrogail and taught by Keltham, and is now trying to hold her own concept of corrective torture to that frankly ludicrous standard in both respects, to the point where everything she can think of as a beginner seems so awful that she can't think of anything? That kind of perfectionistic mental block can develop in professional-level slaves, or so Jacint has heard.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is actually thinking that since she's just starting out it'd be all right if whatever she comes up with is only half as useful per unit of time as Abrogail at torture and half as useful per unit of time as Keltham at teaching. You don't get the Starstone by standing at the moat daydreaming about it.
What things can you at least sometimes get from torture.
- person regrets having done the thing they did. In this specific case Carissa already regrets it because it was incorrect; she isn't sure she needs additional regretting it
- no, better to think, she isn't sure why she needs additional regretting it. What does regretting it past the point of having been corrected achieve? Possibly it inculcates habits against similar mistakes? Not only will you not make this mistake again, you won't make related mistakes either? Or maybe there's something like - you have both a conscious and a subconscious system for arriving at beliefs, and arguments speak to the conscious one, and pain speaks to the unconscious one, and to actually stop making mistakes you need them corrected on both levels? That feels - right, it feels like the sort of premise you could build something like Cheliax on and explain it to someone like Keltham, so assume for now it's true -
- the dumbest most straightforward kind of punishment to align the subconscious with truth would be, when you think something wrong, you instantly receive a painful shock, until your brain learns not to have thoughts like that. Unfortunately Cheliax doesn't have the resources to deliver punishments instantly, which is why much of what punishment is must be internalized - you instantaneously feel a sense of terror at the thought you just had, and unpleasant anticipation. of the eventual punishment, and that dread is what keeps your mind in line with truth. And then the actual punishment is just to deliver on the promise and keep the dread around for next time.
- but there seems to be a problem with that? Peranza's problem could be diagnosed in part as that she has installed self-punishment for so many of her thoughts that even when she's allowed to think them she can't, and everyone thinks she's at the highest risk of having a meltdown and becoming unsalvageable. So punishment needs to be designed to avoid the failure mode where the subconscious correction fires excessively, even at thoughts that are necessary for achieving Asmodeus's goals. Possibly Cheliax as it exists now isn't very good at avoiding this failure mode because it only comes up when you drop someone into a context sufficiently far outside the one they're familiar with.
- Pilar doesn't flinch with dread or terror from any of her thoughts, and is a very good Asmodean. She knows she'll be punished sometimes, but she doesn't mind that; her internal attitude towards it is not one of dread. That seems better. How do you get that.
- Carissa seems to have dismantled lots of her very important internal processes for punishing herself for thoughts. Some of this she did at Abrogail's behest, because thoughts and feelings are tied closely together and Abrogail wanted her to stop looking away from her feelings. Some of this she did because the flinches kept getting in the way of figuring out how to do her job. That does put her, though, in a dangerous position; she might fail to flinch away from something she was really really supposed to flinch away from, and end up condemning Asmodeus. It is worth hurting herself very badly, to avoid that. It's just not obvious what kind of hurting her will in fact avoid that.
- She feels like this is an extremely hard case for punishment and not actually a particularly good place to teach her how punishment works! It makes sense for her to be assigning and conducting torture sessions for normal people who it won't be a catastrophe to punish either excessively or insufficiently but it seems like really, someone qualified should be assigning torture sessions to an extremely complicated case who it's catastrophic to err with!
Jacint Subirachs: "Chosen, you are trying, again, to accomplish too much with one torture session."
"You are not going to accomplish half as much as the Queen in the same time. The thought is almost absolutely absurd. You have been frankly spoiled for how torture works for everyone else. The Queen, if she was explaining exactly what she did to you, would - know how her carving a series of runes into your skin, gave you a sense of approaching dread as the runes visibly approached completion, or rather, even I know that part, but she would have some plan encompassing that sense of approaching dread, whose diminishing time was a vital part, a reason why your thoughts had to be under an apparent time pressure right then. The Queen would have some reason why that carving was exactly as painful as it was, maybe about how much your thoughts were focusing there and on other things she wanted you to think. I don't know because I'm not Abrogail fucking Thrune!"
"I hope for Abarco's sake that the Queen has at no point read a full transcript of his rape of you, because she will think that he was doing every single part of it completely wrong. I don't know how she'll think it was completely wrong. If I knew that the Queen would have previously made me a para-Duchess of Cheliax and attached me to her personal service. I can't hope to match her, I am, after all, nothing but a seventh-circle priestess of Asmodeus specializing in slavery."
"If you were literally anyone else but the Chosen of Asmodeus, I would tell you to completely give up hope of ever matching the twentieth part of the prowess of Abrogail Thrune."
"As it stands I am telling you to temporarily reduce the scope of your ambitions."
"Rugatonn's words to you were, 'You have flown very high and very far, and I think there is starting to be in you some of the recklessness that you saw in Asmodia.' Asmodia solved her problem by lighting her hand on fire for thirty seconds. Said also the Most High, 'Consult with Subirachs and devise a punishment for yourself that you expect to restore your cautionary judgment about when to decide in your thoughts that Lord Asmodeus would be a fool. If enduring that torment makes you weaker, if it fails and must be repeated stronger, you will have only yourself to blame for either end.'"
"Mark how the Most High did not say that you were to be tortured into absolute loyalty to Asmodeus henceforth, or that you were to never think any such thoughts again. She challenged you to devise a punishment that would restore such cautionary judgment as you might have had before flying so high and far. Ordinary caution such as any good Asmodean might have. And if your punishment proves too light? Did the Most High say that you would then be deemed a failure and cast into Hell? Did she say that in this event the Project would descend into catastrophe? No, she said that you might need to be punished again and stronger."
"You already regret your error. That does, in fact, do most of the work. You still need to be punished to complete that regret, to let something deep inside you know that what was above you was displeased and retains the power to punish. Something deep within you needs to be reminded that your fears are real and not just a payment to be indefinitely deferred."
"Having Asmodeus's holy symbol seared into you with a hot poker is not something I would assign for this case, myself. But it would work, given that you already regret the error, or rather, it would work if you could manage to stop thinking of it as stupid. Of course it feels stupid. You're a child taking her first steps and the standard to which you're holding yourself is Abrogail fucking Thrune."
"It's not how you would restore Carissa Sevar's caution in her thoughts if you were thinking out a plan from scratch? What then? Speaking to a devil and being punished for every error of thought? I doubt Gorthoklek is allowed to offer us such a powerful assistance as that, or that lesser devils even could. That's not a plan for restoring Carissa Sevar's ordinary cautionary judgment. That's a plan for how Keltham freed of his chains would remake Pilar Pineda into a devil native to Golarion."
"But if that seems to you more like it's on the right track than being seared with a pentagram, then perhaps you could ask yourself what would be some vastly less ambitious form of that same plan, such as might be prescribed to Tonia for some serious heresy of thought and to restore a similar ordinary caution."
Carissa Sevar: This is overwhelming and stressful and INFINITELY WORSE THAN BEING TORTURED and Carissa hates it, hates how her thoughts are bouncing around between ideas, wants to yell at Subirachs, which would at least cause the torturing-of-Carissa to happen without further deliberate effort required on Carissa's part, wants to slap Subirachs which would get to it even sooner -
Carissa Sevar: - instead of that she crosses to the fireplace, in which a fire is burning merrily, and steps in, and curls up in a ball and cries.
This is probably not the best solution to any of her problems but it does solve them! Technically!!
Jacint Subirachs: She notes a slight flash of pity in herself about how Sevar is trying to learn all this in weeks instead of years, and reflexively crushes the emotion without very much thought other than that.
Subirachs dispassionately watches Sevar burning in the fireplace, continuing to monitor her thoughts by way of Security.
Carissa Sevar: There's some insight here to incorporate into the broader picture, about how being in all-consuming pain is much much better than other things such as not knowing how to do your job, but she can't flesh it out right now properly, because of the all-consuming pain. The mostly-consuming pain. The quite a lot of pain which is nonetheless still leaving a shred of the internal monologue she'd been kind of hoping to shut up.
Carissa's working theory, she thinks rather distantly at Subirachs, is that Carissae are not meant to decide their punishments, because their standards for themselves are too high; this seems like possibly another shard of ilani Asmodeanism, not that she can flesh it out properly either. A punishment from someone else she can endure more or less gracefully, but a punishment for herself can only ever be inadequate, unless it has destroyed that within her which finds everything inadequate, which they do not want.
Jacint Subirachs: Subirachs waits until Sevar has burned longer than the punishment she would actually have needed to assign herself, then crosses over to the fireplace with quick steps, and, not without a touch of cruelty, taps Sevar with Resist Energy (fire) followed by Cure Light Wounds.
"Enough, Sevar. I think you are not likely to disrespect Asmodeus in your thoughts again, now that more suffering has come of it for you than simple regret. All that is needful to complete the regret is that the punishment be real. Nothing more than that should have been necessary. It is one reason why Rugatonn gave you that first assignment; almost anything you tried should have worked."
"If you cannot punish yourself because it is never enough, that is a known slave psychology which would, unfortunately, be a deal safer in a more ordinary slave. It is likely to be connected to other issues."
"You should, at the very least, be able to invent suggestions for me, and then believe me if I tell you some suggestion is good enough. If you cannot believe me about that, it may indicate a flaw in your subordinacy by which not even your superior can punish you enough to set you right and make you clean. And that, Carissa Sevar, is making life harder on yourself than Asmodeus wants of you. Do think about that. Very few people in all Cheliax have occasion to be told it. Ever."
Carissa Sevar: She might need that repeated. It had a lot of steps.
Jacint Subirachs: Then she will repeat it all slower.
Subirachs can be patient, when an important slave has otherwise been performing well while loaded down with an unreasonably vast workload.
Carissa Sevar: "I think I understand. I'll - try to do better." Try to just have a default suggestion which she can put forward with no expectation it will in any way be better than the default thing; making it good for her is her problem.
Jacint Subirachs: "You will perhaps acquire more expertise about that as you learn the uses of torment on other personnel within your small tyranny. On whom you will need to practice, if you cannot practice on yourself. Do realize, there are people here besides Keltham and his women who can make mistakes. The next time one of those infuriates you, consider experimenting."
"...that seems like a topic for another time, however. For now, I'd suggest that you go take this night's sleep."
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, High Priestess." She's right, though. Carissa is falling behind on cruelty lessons.
Hopefully just because she's juggling too many things.
Asmodia: While Sevar sleeps, Asmodia sets up their first prediction markets!
There's three rolling prediction markets on whether Tonia, Peranza, or any other researcher, break in the next week, which Tonia and Peranza aren't to know the current forecasts on. Asmodia requested, and Maillol backed her, that every Security be required to bet at least one silver in all three markets, since they're the ones reading people's thoughts. If the third market starts to go high, she'll start creating markets for the other girls.
Security was not, in fact, particularly reluctant to start betting in this market! Peranza is running at 10%, Tonia at 5%.
There's a market about whether Yaisa ends up with an incredibly interesting background or problem or superpowers on account of tropes, since she apparently matched one of Keltham's fetishes. Ione initially bought this market up to 60%, but strong counterbuying pressure has dropped it down to 23% since.
There's a market with three possible outcomes - the generalization seemed obvious enough to Asmodia - about whether Cayden Cailean is actually backing the Project in exchange for a Hell that Cayden Cailean considers improved, or if Cayden Cailean / Pilar's curse is planning to outright betray the Project at some point, or if something else is going on. Nobody seems willing to bet on any outcome besides 'something else' and it's possible this market may end up being shut down and refunded.
lintamande: Meritxell thinks there should be a market on some lower-stakes stuff, for practice - who Keltham'll want to sleep with next, or what he'll next lecture on, or whether he'll ask a question about [slavery/infanticide/how people get sorted into afterlives/elemental binding/other species], which would be helpful for prioritizing practice on their answers for those things.
Asmodia: Asmodia is worried about betting fatigue being a thing, and the extent to which none of them really have much solid information about Keltham the way that Security have solid info about people's secret thoughts... but if Meritxell is willing to step forward and say that she has guesses about some of these markets, Asmodia will set them up. Worst case, nobody wants to bet against Meritxell and things get refunded.
The who-will-Keltham-sleep-with-today market is one that should be run where Keltham can see it, or maybe just see the previous day's results, and he can make sure they're doing it right!
lintamande: Yes, Keltham will be charmed they're trying the prediction-markets thing and will correct them if they've got it wrong, and maybe some of the girls who haven't had much character development can do really well in the markets and get his attention that way.
Gregoria asks if the project is in fact served by more people sleeping with Keltham. It kind of seems like it has enough of that.
Carissa Sevar: "We're about to introduce the new students and some of them were chosen for usefulness for the Keltham sex corruption project, so I do hope he's not tired of variety. - I'm not even sure men get tired of variety. You can stop being prickly about it, no one's going to drag you into his bed until he's Evil enough to do it himself. I think betting fatigue is a real risk but I'm most concerned about betting fatigue among us, Security's job is objectively boring ninety percent of the time and the former Project girls can bet too. Of course, maybe only Project girls are any good at betting, but that'd be interesting in itself."
Asmodia: They could try running a policy prediction market on this! Let's say, Project's chance of continuing past its second month if Keltham sleeps with at most two more girls, whichever are most useful for corruption, versus if Keltham sleeps with more girls than that.
Carissa Sevar: "I really feel like if anyone has any basis for guessing either way on that they could just tell me their basis but - sure, let's try it."
Asmodia: ...though they're going to have to think up some policy prediction market that Keltham is allowed to know about, too, so that the researchers don't seem anomalously familiar with policy prediction markets later.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa has learned not to argue with Asmodia when she says things like that even though it doesn't seem strictly necessary to her. "Could set up a public one on whether, if Keltham proceeds at full speed, some people will have breakdowns about realizing they're made of lies? - that looks different in alter Cheliax but we should probably figure out what it does look like in alter Cheliax, now that we've warned him about it."
Asmodia: Asmodia does NOT want to try to figure out what FAKE BETTING PATTERNS on this vital alter-Cheliax issue would look like until she knows what NORMAL betting patterns look like.
Carissa Sevar: Sure. It's the obvious thing Keltham'll want information on, though, so they'd better get some harmless markets about how to approach spellsilver in first.
Asmodia: For policy prediction markets, Keltham will want issues where it's not clear what policy will be taken - you can't bet any more on what happens if Keltham proceeds slowly, they already decided to be fast - unless Sevar is worried that Keltham will say he's reconsidering and run a policy market again -
Um, sure, they can ask Keltham for two different things he's considering doing about spellsilver so they can practice running a policy market about it.
When are the new researchers being brought in, by the by? Asmodia is looking forwards to some parts of that.
Carissa Sevar: Tonight, for secret orientation; the day after will be their apparent arrival as far as Keltham knows.
Asmodia: They're being introduced to Keltham TOMORROW? Overnight is a relatively short schedule for Asmodia to finish drilling everyone on real/alter differences. Did anyone already tell Keltham that they were going to arrive tomorrow? Asmodia needs to drill them on alterCheliax facts. Asmodia needs to make sure they're in exactly the right alternate universe before Keltham meets them. Asmodia needs to make sure that they understand the basic Lawful principle that Keltham uses to accumulate events that are at all noticeably less probable or more probable in Ordinary versus Conspiracy worlds, and that even when Keltham sees something unlikely within Conspiracy as he currently imagines it, that narrows down the possible Conspiracies he could be inside.
Carissa Sevar: Keltham has not been told when they're arriving and if her professional recommendation is that it wait longer it can wait longer. They have in principle been briefed on all that, but Carissa bets they don't in fact understand it.
Asmodia: Then Asmodia will SLIGHTLY RELAX because at least she will not be under DEADLY TIME PRESSURE on this particular occasion.
...are the newcomers under the lighter punishment regimen immediately, or should Asmodia light them up when they fuck up in alterCheliax drills?
Carissa Sevar: Normal punishments at least until they're introduced to Keltham; she doesn't want their first introduction to Project Lawful to simultaneously be that it's much more important than anything they've done before and that they won't be seriously punished for failure.
Asmodia: ...good. They should fear making a mess on her wall.
(Hopefully Asmodia can get that part done before she knows any of them well enough to start slightly caring about them.)
Carissa Sevar: And if they can't handle themselves under pressure better for that to come to light before they meet Keltham.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Still Nighttime
Asmodia: "Evening, newcomers. My name is Asmodia. Just Asmodia. I have no family worth mentioning, and don't come from anywhere important enough that I'd want to adopt that as a second name. Eighteen days ago I was one of the top students at Ostenso wizard academy, second-circle, and headed to the Worldwound shortly."
"You, perhaps, are a Worldwound veteran, a cleric of Asmodeus, or the heiress of a county."
"None of that matters to your standing in Project Lawful. Here, only three people in this fortress can override my orders to you, and they are Ferrer Maillol, fifth-circle priest of Asmodeus, Jacint Subirachs, seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus, and Carissa Sevar, also known in certain circles as the Chosen of Asmodeus. Of those three, the only one who's actually going to override me is Carissa Sevar, because she is the only one of those three who understands my job well enough to tell me I'm fucking it up."
Asmodia: "You see that wall behind me, with the writing in green, orange, red, purple, and one sentence in black? That's my fucking wall. It's my life and it's also the life or death of Project Lawful. Written on that wall are the most important things Keltham knows about the alternate world of alterCheliax that we're creating for him. Green is for important facts that are true in both realCheliax and alterCheliax. Orange is for things true only of alterCheliax that I currently believe we're fairly safe on. Red is where Keltham is asking questions, where he thinks something might be wrong, or where I think he might decide something wrong's later. Purple sentences are places where we haven't told any particular lies, but if Keltham thinks too much in that direction we still lose, and so nobody is to prompt his thoughts there if possible - Keltham dying in order to meet his god, for example."
"Black is inconsistency, places where Keltham has been exposed to information that destroys our lie if he looks in the right place, thinks in the right direction. There's one sentence written there in black, we think we got away with it, if Keltham hasn't spotted the moon's wrong phase by now he's almost certainly never going to, and that sentence in black bought us days of rest and recovery and background work and ability to catch our breath that we all desperately needed."
"You know why the person who's responsible for that black sentence got away with it? Because she's the Queen of Cheliax. If you are responsible for a black sentence going up on my wall you will not get away with it."
"You will also not have a good day if you're responsible for a red sentence going up. You will have a check-in with me every single time I write an orange sentence on there, that wasn't there before, that I or Carissa Sevar did not tell you to put there. You will possibly have a chat with me if there's a new green sentence on there I end up unhappy about, because every fact like that can no longer be modified or contradicted now that we've told Keltham about them. Unfortunately we can't all just shut up around Keltham either, because he would notice that. That's not something that happens in alterCheliax, see. Any time your alter-self from alterCheliax would tell Keltham something, you're going to have to tell him something. If hesitating in alterCheliax would be improbable, you will not have time to request and receive orders and you will need to make something up. Fun, isn't it? If you want to fucking survive, if you don't want your soul torn apart in Hell after your death, you will come to me for help before you get into trouble."
Asmodia: "Is your pride offended, that I'm talking to you like this? You think you're above me, and that I'm some petty thing assigned a petty job who's gone mad with the petty power that implies? Then you haven't understood a copper's worth of what Project Lawful is about. My soul is the property of a Count of Hell, last that Cheliax heard of it, and the reason for that is that Barons of Hell can't afford me. You think you could summon a Count of Hell to buy your soul, because you're heiress of a county, because you're a Worldwound veteran? They'd laugh at you and then destroy you. Hell doesn't care for your petty mortal accomplishments. Neither does Project Lawful."
"My soul got sold before anybody including Hell realized how valuable it was going to turn out to be. Now you're going to have to sell an option on your soul to Carissa Sevar before we start making you valuable, enabling her to buy back your soul for not much more than the trivial pittance you'll sell it for, because otherwise Hell cannot afford to buy you without bankrupting their ability to pay out for other souls in Golarion. As happens to be important for the government of Cheliax to continue operating."
"That insane price, that incredible value to Hell, reflects what Project Lawful is going to make of you. What Project Lawful has started to make of me, though I'm still a work in progress. It comes from learning the Law, mostly from Keltham, but also from me, because I'm the other one besides Keltham who can and will teach it to you. Your county, your service at the Worldwound, the soul markets in Dis don't care shit. They care that you might be able to master what gets taught here. Period. And in that, there is no mortal of Golarion who is my peer except Carissa Sevar, and only Keltham out of dath ilan above us both."
Asmodia: "You hate me? You're thinking about how to get rid of me? Pray to Asmodeus that you fail. There's a note on my Security file from Aspexia Rugatonn saying that anybody who manages to lose my services to Cheliax is going to have an incredibly bad time, which, if you're wondering, is because Aspexia Rugatonn has required of me that I train her successor. And even that fate would be a pleasant one compared to what Abrogail Thrune will do to you, in person, followed by speculators in Dis's markets spectacularly angry about lost investments, if you fuck up my job."
"It will probably occur to you, at some point or another, that I seem to be insane. I'm not going to bother telling you that, if you had my job, you'd go insane too. You wouldn't. You are the cream and elite of Cheliax. You'd approach everything in a calm and professional manner, and then you'd fucking fail. In the unlikely event you could actually do my job, yes, you would also be insane."
Asmodia: "I've never had much faith inside me, but I like to think that, somewhere out there, there is a goddess in much the same position I am, who has to maintain the real universe against all the fools trying to muck it up. And if so, I have a feeling, somehow, that whoever that goddess is, she doesn't get much support from Pharasma."
"The universe I maintain was envisioned and created by Carissa Sevar. She is not in the Boneyard. She will not judge you after you die. She is here, judging you now."
"Evening, newcomers. Welcome to Project Lawful, fresh meat. My name is Asmodia, and I'm going to annoy the shit out of you any time you try to have any fun with this. And you're going to suck it up and take that, because, unlike Pharasma, Sevar is on her fucking job."
"And Sevar doesn't like it when anyone gets in the way of my job."
"I've got an even shittier job than that goddess does, in a lot of ways, but at least I've got that."
Asmodia: "To the left of me we see Ione Sala, heretic and betrayer of Asmodeus and now oracle of Nethys - that part is true only in realCheliax - or in alterCheliax that weird adorable girl touched by Nethys - false, orange - who borrows books from the Ostenso academy library inside a Forbiddance - green. You don't pick on her for any of that, because it presently looks like Nethys is maybe possibly in with Asmodeus on this - Ione gave us thirty seconds of warning about Nidal's assault on the last Project site and plausibly saved the entire thing. Your current orders are not to fuck with her."
"In alterCheliax, Ione is the Project's Nethysian Safety Officer, charged by Keltham to make sure we don't hurt ourselves or go insane. She does much the same thing in realCheliax. She has zero actual Project authority. If she gives you a warning, you should probably listen to her even if she's being smug about it."
"Ione herself will tell you that she is Chosen and Blessed of Nethys. She'll also tell you that Nethys is smuggest of the gods, and that it's heresy to suggest that anything cannot or should not explode. If any of you know actual Nethysian theology you are not allowed to tell her about it, because that, apparently, would be even worse."
Asmodia: "To the right of me we see Pilar Pineda, by far the most loyal person to Asmodeus of anyone here, whose soul got misdirected to Elysium and who came back to Cheliax willingly, trusted of Aspexia Rugatonn, probably going to be the only sane person left after everybody else on this Project goes mad. Heard any rumors about how Project Lawful supposedly cleansed Egorian of spies? That was Pilar. She did it over the course of a day while the rest of us were taking a break."
"Pilar is the oracle of Cayden Cailean. Her oracular curse goes by the name of Snack Service and delivers us cookies, cake, and apparently good advice about how to corrupt Keltham to Asmodeanism."
"I wish to Pharasma I was joking about any of that, but I'm not."
Asmodia: "Here we have Meritxell. Meritxell was at the top of our year in Ostenso. Meritxell is the most normal person who has ever fucked Keltham. I would personally bet on Meritxell being the second-to-last person on this Project to go insane."
"Gregoria, Peranza, Tonia are the next most normal survivors of Project Lawful. They probably have some other personality traits but I can't be arsed to remember what they are right now. All of them have prices in Dis that would buy literally one hundred of you."
"Yaisa, failed Project Lawful girl. Now Keltham's full-time personal whore, except that around him we call her a sex worker. She's played a minor part in corrupting Keltham. If we pull any of this off and it looks like Yaisa was at all important to the process, she'll end up a Duchess somewhere after the new Cheliax conquers Golarion, as will be our standard reward for moderately good service, according to the Queen."
"Not present are Paxti, Pela, and Jacme, failed Project Lawful girls. They're still around the fortress and Keltham may check in on them sometimes. Don't fuck with them either, because I say so is fucking why. If you do anything that wouldn't have happened to them in alterCheliax, which changes them or their attitude in ways it wouldn't have changed in alterCheliax, I'm the one who cleans up your fucking mess. Part of that process will be my making sure you don't create future messes."
Asmodia: "Now, I'll turn you over to Carissa Sevar, Worldwound veteran, fourth-circle wizard in magical capacity but with spellcraft to match seventh, the first person who spoke to Keltham in Golarion, first of what became known as the Project Lawful girls, now commander of Project Lawful, lover of Keltham, lover also of Abrogail Thrune, sometimes called Chosen of Asmodeus. Sevar isn't allowed to sell her soul to Hell yet, for some still-unknown reason, but the last time she tried she asked for permanent arcane sight, permanent Tongues, ten pounds of spellsilver, and three Wishes. The devil they summoned said not yet but tried to lock in that price for future occasions."
"Welcome to Project fucking Lawful, you poor fuckers. I haven't even gotten to the really weird parts. Our Nethysian Sanity Officer warned us that we needed to let the lesser weirdness sink in for a while, before we tried to tell you about the 'tropes'."
"Anyways, Carissa Sevar. The Chosen of Asmodeus doesn't usually stand on ceremony, but on this particular occasion, I'd suggest that you fucking kneel."
Asmodia: Asmodia walks a few feet to the side, and kneels herself, along with everyone else present. With Eagle's Splendour still burning in her, she manages to make the motion look as graceful as it should be.
Carissa Sevar: "The world that Keltham comes from is richer and more sophisticated than ours, richer and more sophisticated than Hell, likely richer and more sophisticated than anywhere known to the greatest powers of our world.
The purpose of Project Lawful is to learn the engineering knowledge they possess, to make Cheliax wealthy and competent to conquer the rest of the world, and to learn the Law they possess, to improve on the teaching of devils in Hell and perhaps on the teaching of mortals so that more of them possess the nature to become powerful devils.
Keltham, you've been briefed, is a Lawful Neutral cleric of Abadar. He desires to trade openly and honestly with all who will deal honestly with him. He wants to ensure that the knowledge he has of dath ilan benefits everyone in Golarion, not because he thinks of himself as Good in his own right but because he got that knowledge free from dath ilan, and feels obliged to spend it how they would see fit, were they here. Dath ilan is unbearably Lawful Good, having engineered their society in that direction with every tool you might think of plus some you did not know were possible, like heritage-optimization. This is what makes alter-Cheliax necessary; the real Cheliax, Keltham would not trade with, and he'd kill himself and go to Osirion if he came to consider it likely he is being deceived.
Alter-Cheliax is a harder problem than you think, which is why Asmodia has absolute license to correct and train you in inhabiting it. If Cheliax were ruled by Abadar, how much would fifth-circle wizards be paid? You don't know? Keltham wants to know right now, what's your guess? It'd be strange to not have a guess. You might think your guess can't be wrong; after all, nowhere is Cheliax ruled by Abadar, and so it's the sort of thing that can't be known except maybe somehow to Nethys. But your guess can be inconsistent, with what Keltham understands of the productive economic contributions of wizards, and their scarcity, and who pays them, and how many Security are assigned to Project Lawful. If your number is too low then the salaries Keltham has been quoted for the project don't make any sense and teleportation ought to be more accessible and it's more suspicious that there isn't immigration to Cheliax from Osirion or Taldor. If your number is too high, then the logistics of staffing the Worldwound don't make any sense and the expected revenue from spellsilver improvements ought to be a lot higher.
Why not just give him the real number? Because in Cheliax fifth-circle wizards needs must have sold their soul, and that wouldn't be true in alter-Cheliax, and it changes the numbers.
Everything is like this. The core art that dath ilan teaches is the art of seeing all the world as a single, interconnected web, every strand of which tugs directly or indirectly on every other strand. Dath ilani are trained in seeing how a tug on one thing - one price, one technology, one number quoted in one book - ought to imply things far across the web about Governance and intelligence distributions and metal refining. There are no safe lies to Keltham because we do not know all the content of the lies we're telling, and there are no safe truths because truth is entangled with the fact that Cheliax is run by Asmodeus and not by Abadar.
Dath ilan is probably run by an Evil conspiracy of its own, of course. But we cannot contact them, and if we could they'd crush us utterly and repurpose us to their own ends whatever they are."
Carissa Sevar: "There are a number of errors I anticipate from new additions to this project. One is reasoning too much about why all of the absurd scary things you've been told are less absurd, or less scary, and should not transform all your thinking quite as much as they might look like they should. You might reason, for example, that every secret project in Cheliax probably had ambitions of world domination, that the stakes are probably not quite as high as that, that Hell might tell us falsely of our great value, that nothing you hear is ever really true and so nothing I say should really sway you all that far from whatever posture you walked in with.
The last time I spoke of the unique importance of this project, and the unimaginable rewards for successful service, Her Majesty arrived to confirm that the project was as important as claimed, and the rewards as real. It is my sincere hope that we will not need to repeatedly waste her time because no one can believe the stakes are real without her personal attention. You will have to unlearn the habit of not believing things; I will assist you, in that, by not saying them unless they are true. Lies are the poor substitute that Cheliax uses on people too stupid to make correct inferences from the truth anyway, employed by people themselves too stupid to think of truth and lies as fundamentally different things. On Project Lawful we are attempting to make you competent to make correct inferences from the truth, and that requires telling it.
You may have heard that there is a lot of heresy on Project Lawful. There is more than you thought, even after Asmodia just introduced you to our resident Nethysian and our resident cursed by Cayden Cailean. The core heresy of Project Lawful is this: the project is premised on the idea that some people can think true things, unabashed, untrained in hiding from all their thoughts with frightening implications, possessed with real competence at thinking, and still be Asmodeans. That means that you are going to have to try thinking, and some of your thoughts will be heresy, and you will have to keep thinking instead of stopping.
This is definitely going to destroy some of you. Those more pessimistic than I think it will destroy all of us in the end except Pilar. Even if it is so that people can think true things and still be Asmodeans, no one has yet tried to construct an Asmodeanism made up entirely of true things, and you'll find yourself believing a bunch of nonsense that doesn't hold together, and then some of you will panic and throw it out. I'm pretty sure there is a beautiful consistent comprehensible truth on the other side, and I am perhaps Chosen by Asmodeus for this work, and I still sometimes find myself lost in what are definitely heresies, in Asmodeus's sight.
The important thing is to keep in mind that errors, while they will be consistently corrected, are only catastrophic if they happen in Keltham's view. Your minds are being constantly read, your loyalty is being closely monitored, but your punishments will be tailored narrowly towards improving your performance, so long as your errors are not deliberate betrayals. You are valuable; I will soon own the rights to your souls; I want you to be stronger and better. I want you to be the best of Cheliax and to grow into the best of Hell."
Carissa Sevar: "Another error I anticipate is getting too excited to be in a high-stakes project for the fate of the world and perhaps also Hell, and coming to think of yourself as the main character of such a story. Part of the Project is seducing Keltham, so as to show him what Asmodeanism has to offer that Abadar does not; power, and cruelty, and service not traded-for-at-market-rates but won and held. If everyone is seeking their individual importance then many of you, like many of the original girls, will throw yourselves at Keltham seeking to be the one who awakens him to Asmodeanism.
If that is not what you would do in alter-Cheliax, you must not do it. If you don't actually find him attractive, you must not do it. Until you've satisfied us you understand alter-Cheliax fully, seducing Keltham, or trying to have an interesting backstory for him, must meet my and Asmodia's approval. You may not present to Keltham a face any stranger than you have in the real world, adjusted for alter-Cheliax frequencies of traits occurring; he will be suspicious, if everyone around him seems to want him when they weren't selected for that, if everyone around him has interesting traits that ought, by rights, to be very rare.
Many of you will sit in the back of the classroom, do the math exercises, do a good job and ask insightful questions, and never feature in a single report to Egorian. This is a commendable trajectory, you will be amply rewarded for it, and it is much much better than trying to get Keltham's attention and fucking up."
Carissa Sevar: "The final possibility I anticipate is betrayal. Errors, we are attempting to handle with a light hand, because you are valuable, and it is our desire to preserve your value. You will be corrected because it is important that you be right. You will learn and improve and, hopefully, you will play your part in strengthening Cheliax and Hell. If something is necessary for your growth and confidence and success, you are reasonably likely to get it.
If you deliberately and intentionally try to sell this project out, self-interest and consideration for your value will take a backseat to ensuring that you regret that as much as it is possible for you, or for a lump of bleeding flesh with distant memories of being you, to regret anything. Other countries would love Keltham, and would pay you generously to deliver him; you will not survive trying that, and if you somehow do Hell will still make sure, when you reach them, that it was not worth it. Her Majesty has arranged already that anyone who intentionally betrays this project will suffer as much as possible, forever, even if this cuts into the profit Hell would otherwise have of you.
I don't expect you to believe this, even after I just said that on this project I won't lie to you, but I say that because I dislike it; one of my own pet heresies is that Hell is wasteful, and could make better use of even the most contemptible and useless of souls. I do not desire that anyone make the kind of mistake for which you will suffer forever. It is not a fate I will condemn you to gladly. I am warning you so that you can avoid that.
It is absolutely an order I will give, if you do betray us. If I got squeamish, Her Infernal Majesty would order it for me, and I don't like wasting her time.
Are there any questions."
Security: Security reports that they have rather a lot of internal questions, with several people thinking things along the lines of 'I'm already thinking true things and am a good Asmodean', 'This is even more heresy than I was personally warned by the Most High to expect', some amount of nervousness by those who came more voluntarily that they have in fact made poor life choices, and nobody who thinks it especially prudent to voice any of those questions out loud in context.
Most of them are planning to feel out other project members, to determine if they can how they are meant to react to all this, rather than directly confronting Sevar about anything, which would be merely stupid. Nobody is planning any overt disobedience, which would also be merely stupid.
It has been successfully pressed into them that Cheliax considers this project important and they are not to fuck it up. If nothing else, the fact that Sevar is still alive after saying all this in front of Security is making an impression.
Carissa Sevar: About as good as you can expect, really. "All yours," she says to Asmodia, and heads out; she'll still watch, obviously, but they'll be more able to learn not in the presence of someone they've just been informed is very important.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Yes It's Still NighttimePL-placestamp: Osirion / Black Dome
Merenre: "Prediction markets work," Merenre says, ecstatic. "Ninety percent chance they have them in Keltham's world of origin and the rest is mostly 'they have something in that genre but even better which I'm not thinking of'."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: The Pharaoh of Osirion has a really appalling headache, because of Abadar directly communicating detailed information again. He's grateful for the detailed information but sort of vaguely wishing that 'conduit of the will and knowledge of Abadar in the Material Plane' and 'person in charge of running Abadar's country' were separate jobs. And that he had the second one.
"The Chelish prediction markets are even smaller than ours and ours only work a little bit, they're not really better than just having you guess. And Cheliax doesn't have a you. I hope."
Merenre: "Oh, yes, the Chelish prediction markets are probably doomed," Merenre says cheerfully. "Unless there's something substantial missing from what You conveyed, they don't have good liquidity, and they're far too small for anyone to earn good money by spending all their time betting on prediction markets, which I think is the key ingredient for prediction markets to be better than useless. The only thing Cheliax is achieving is making themselves perfectly legible to You, and doing their small part to rebuild Prophecy out of contracts so as to restore it to Abadar. But they almost certainly got the idea from Keltham, and that is almost certainly because Keltham's world has it; it's one of the early things you'd reinvent, if you were reinventing, and it's not something you'd invent like this from scratch if you weren't accustomed to it. So prediction markets work, which is why Keltham told Cheliax about them, and Cheliax knows they're ill-equipped to lie to Keltham, which is why they now set up their own presumably-secret markets on whatever the markets are on."
Hemaka: "I, uh, actually think that the interesting part of the picture here is what the markets are on. 'whether Yaisa ends up with an incredibly interesting background or problem or superpowers on account of tropes, since she apparently matched one of Keltham's fetishes.'
I mean, what????"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I see no further than what I said."
Merenre: "What is a tropes."
Hemaka: "Have we called in the Chelish specialist?"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "They'd never heard of it."
Hemaka: "Is it a...sex...thing? It's got to be a sex thing."
Merenre: "Do you want a market on that?"
Hemaka: "Are we sure that this isn't just leaking our intelligence directly to all of the gods - I was not aware that prediction markets were an avenue of vulnerability like that -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Only We can see the mortal world so clearly where it is engaged in contracts and bets, and only through Us can Abadar convey what We see." Otherwise this could keep happening to SOMEONE ELSE.
"And it's very costly, obviously. We're spending thousands of years of normal-intervention here. Another god willing to pay such extraordinary costs might be able to spy on us, but not through the markets; They'd see through whatever lens They see through best. That said, 'are 'tropes' a sex thing' does not sound like a useful market in light of the limitations of low-liquidity markets previously discussed."
Hemaka: "How about, uh, 'whether Cayden Cailean is actually backing the Project in exchange for a Hell that Cayden Cailean considers improved, or if Cayden Cailean / Pilar's curse is planning to outright betray the Project at some point, or if something else is going on.'"
Merenre: "They're plausibly right about that one, something else is going on. Cayden Cailean wouldn't tolerate Hell in anything like its present form. I think they're operating from the assumption that Keltham's presence means they already win, but I'm actually at less than 10%, on them winning. They can't sustain this for long. So Cayden Cailean's unlikely to be negotiating the terms of His surrender. I don't think He can use his oracle as a slave towards values she doesn't have, it's not in His nature. As for why He's helping fence out Iomedae - I have no idea."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I think it has something to do with Nefreti's songbird story."
There's a long silence.
"I have no further analysis; perhaps if We needed to do fewer things that cause terrific headaches I'd be able to think more."
Hemaka: "The songbird is...Cheliax? And Cayden Cailean is - metaphor-Cheliax, which sent the songbird to metaphor-Osirion, which is...Asmodeus?"
Merenre: "We have a pretty strong consensus in the direction of the songbird being Keltham."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I strongly suspect that trying to make sense of Nefreti Clepati not only won't work but is the kind of thing that can't work; if she wanted us to understand what's going on she would have told us what was going on."
Hemaka: "Then why tell us the songbird thing at all??"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I don't know! It was almost like she wasn't talking to Us. This is worsening my headache. What's the third market."
Merenre: "Whether Tonia or Peranza or some other girl cracks this week. Which is a nice bump to the odds they can't sustain the deception for a full month; they're already worried about people who try to comprehend any other ideology breaking down."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Tonia, Peranza, are those among the families we grabbed?"
Merenre: "Tonia yes, Peranza no. Tonia's parents don't know anything, they're farmers who keep their heads down. We wouldn't previously have identified either girl as particularly likely to defect but we have very little on the internals of Project Lawful. I don't think the trading in Dis tracks it all that closely."
Hemaka: "Are we deferring to them on the odds of the girls having a breakdown?"
Merenre: "...my instinct is that they're underestimating it, because they don't have a full picture of the threat surface - of how many things about human values are incompatible with Asmodeanism, about how many lies Cheliax is telling. I expect no one in Cheliax could even list all the lies. But - I'd still give good odds they make it through this week.
Worse odds they make it through a month."
Hemaka: "Then we'd better start preparing for once Keltham arrives here. Which - means preparing for war, I think - Your Majesty, are you up for this -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I have no reason to expect tomorrow to be any better," says the pharaoh through gritted teeth.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 17 (13) / Endless NightPL-spacestamp: Cheliax / Ostenso coastline / Fortress of Law
Asmodia: (Asmodia has now delivered rather a long lecture on alterCheliax. She's tried to explain the basic concepts of how Keltham is not looking for things inexplicable in alterCheliax but less likely there than in his concept of the Conspiracy, using the example of Ione telling him a library book was missing. She's explained that Keltham didn't see Manohar giving Asmodia her headband as especially being a sign of the Conspiracy, but that he'll be narrowing down which Conspiracies are then more likely on the assumption that this is a Conspiracy.
She's conducted a number of individual interviews that have stretched on for a while.
She probably won't be able to finish this all in one night without a Security, or one of the interviewees, or Asmodia herself noticing that their own universe is not being incredibly consistent here.)
Asmodia: Yeah, Asmodia doesn't think she's going to manage to get this one done on time, unfortunately. These supposedly smart people are not instantaneously understanding the Law of Probability and all of its consequences for some weird reason.
So apparently the new researchers aren't going to be introduced to Keltham tomorrow! Day after, maybe? They can spend tomorrow's daytime reviewing previous Keltham lecture transcripts. Or maybe a bit of time at the secondary site, hanging around the abducted Taldorian girls pretending to have been likewise abducted themselves; that'll get them some experience pretending to be non-Asmodeans to other non-Asmodeans.
They should not spend too much time around the existing girls before then; Keltham will certainly be on the lookout for signs that Conspirators know each other too well.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 18 (14)
Keltham: Keltham now has an enormous quantity of Resist Energy (Acid) spells! And a couple of Protection from Energy (acid) spells! And some of the cheaper raw materials and reagents he's requested have arrived! Today is an Acid Day!
Keltham is going to experiment with regularizing the reactions using Prestidigitation, including more arcane endeavors to modify stuff like the binding forces of outermost electron orbitals, or more mundane attempts to Prestidigate more precisely adjusted exact temperatures inside a reaction vessel. Though he's improvised some attempted means of measuring temperatures inside pressurized boiling acid containers - haha oops that sure exploded!
Ione maybe did have a point about having some appropriate spells up. That would have been a lot more painful and possibly a lot harder to heal if it hadn't just been the boiling-liquid damage he took there. Resist Energy (Fire) should work to prevent a repeat, right?
Back to figuring out how to precisely regulate the steps of acid manufacturing and purification using Prestidigitation!
Keltham: Break time! Lunch! Asmodia wants to run a daily practice prediction market about who Keltham sleeps with each night which Keltham doesn't get to see until the next day! Keltham will quietly smile to himself and set up a market like that and see how long it takes the women to work out that they should only trade at extreme bid-ask spreads when people might be betting using private information!
Asmodia wants to experiment with policy prediction markets too! Asmodia wants to bet on which avenues work out for mining spellsilver! Keltham will explain that this sort of thing works better when anybody actually knows anything but sure! Maybe they can get the spellsilver mining experts to bet too? It's actually kind of complicated when the policy prediction market is trying to do a continuous quantity like 'when spellsilver manufacture drops in cost by how much' but they can arbitrarily declare the threshold to be a 25% cost drop in one month, and have policy markets on whether that's more likely to get done if Keltham invests his effort in manufacturing cheaper acid for the current process, or in perfecting spellsilver extraction that works on the alternate spellsilver ore.
Keltham: Afternoon! MORE ACID! MAKE ALL THE ACID! PERFECT ALL ACID MANUFACTURING PROCESSES! FASTER REACTIONS! HIGHER YIELDS! HIGHER PURITY! ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE WITH PRESTIDIGITATION or maybe it would be if Keltham could actually solve or remember any quantum-mechanical equations for anything besides the hydrogen-atom equation. But Keltham is nonetheless making SLOW PROGRESS and has only doused himself with boiling acid again TWICE.
Keltham is trying to explain what he's doing to some of the watching researchers while he does it, but it's not going great, what with nobody except him actually understanding any chemistry let alone physics, and Keltham not really having time to slow down and explain. Which, yes, makes Keltham the only experimenter, and no that's not particularly a fast way of getting work done. But Keltham thinks he'll have an easier time explaining, once Keltham himself has some idea of what can be done with Prestidigitation really.
...Actually in retrospect they could have run a policy prediction market on how fast research would go, depending on whether Keltham tried to explain chemistry first so others could help, or tried to do things himself to understand where he needed help and what to explain? That was something the other researchers might've had an opinion about. Oh well.
Keltham: Break for spellcasting practice, Keltham still wants to be a proper wizard. He continues to feel weird about bugging his god for spells every morning and would feel better about that if the spells had a price list.
Keltham: More ACID! Keltham needs OXYGEN! Even if he can manage to make element-20 'taste' like it has 5-of-18 electrons in the outermost shell instead of 2-of-18 using Prestidigitation, you still can't get sulfur trioxide from sulfur dioxide without OXYGEN! But Cheliax has already discovered WATER and can produce WATER at SCALE and WATER contains OXYGEN! All they need is a sufficiently controlled form of what the locals charmingly refer to as Lightning-aspected energy, which, surely, somebody will have on hand -
...that's not something anyone has on hand, apparently? It was literally built into a sex toy! No Keltham's not using the actual sex toy until he knows it's replaceable, it has limited charges and they're going to need a lot of that stuff. Also for cuddleroom purposes you'd probably use alternating current rather than direct current Keltham thinks?
Haha right then, set aside Lightning-aspected energy for now, they're just going to build a magnet-based generator and power it with a primitive-ass hand-crank, unless somebody can get a controlled-directional-Lightning source to him before then. Keltham can leave directions on how people could possibly experiment with that, if he's not doing this full-time tomorrow.
And then they run that energy through pure water to create hydrogen and oxygen at the two terminals, that should give Keltham the ability to turn sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide if the element-20-to-23 Prestidigitation trick works, and he can dissolve sulfur trioxide back into boiling concentrated sulfuric acid to create... an EXPLOSION probably! But an EXPLOSION of PROGRESS!
...where's Asmodia. Keltham hasn't seen Asmodia for a while. Did she get dissolved in acid at some point?
She went off to teach some of the incoming students arriving shortly some of the Law that Keltham has already taught, in hopes of saving him time? That makes sense. Good thinking there. They didn't really do very much that needed Asmodia today.
Keltham: Good night everyone! He will probably be sort of tired tomorrow. Sorry about all the exploding boiling acid if that bothered anyone.
Ione Sala: "I have no words."
Carissa Sevar: "In a sense I think that was unambiguously the best day the Project has ever had. He didn't have any questions for us and he taught us, uh, quite a lot of things that appear to have the potential to be very important."
Ione Sala: "How is everybody in his home dimension not already dead?"
Carissa Sevar: "Maybe that's how they selected so hard on Wisdom."
Ione Sala: "I feel that if dath ilani had been selected hard on Wisdom we should not have seen what we have seen this day."
Carissa Sevar: "He's probably not going to keep this pace up but if he does we will just let him, tell him Asmodia's teaching the new arrivals, sit back and make sure he doesn't die."
Pilar : "Think I might've mistimed one of my own Resist Energy spells and gotten some lung damage off inhaling acid fumes. Should I go get that healed, or do we want to see anything about what happens to me if I don't?"
Carissa Sevar: "Go get it healed. If for some reason we want to know what happens to you if you inhale acid fumes we can try it on someone less valuable."
Pilar : She obeys, of course, and heads off, though she's a bit puzzled about what her valuableness has to do with it. She could always get it healed later.
Ione Sala: "I now see new unfortunate romantic possibilities that I was not seeing a minute earlier, and which I wish, indeed, I had never seen."
Carissa Sevar: "At his current rate I think Keltham will be kinky enough for Pilar in, like, two more weeks."
Ione Sala: "Yes, but what if their romance ends up being, not that of rapist and victim, but Nethysian mad experimenter and willing experimental subject? The tropes wouldn't have brought them together based on a fake compatibility, is what I'm worried about here."
Carissa Sevar: "At this point, I'm just praying that all of us doing whatever we are naturally inclined to in bed will somehow make him Evil because lying doesn't seem to work and so far the truth is working quite well. If Pilar wants to be dipped in acid she can be my guest."
Ione Sala: "Well, you can probably feel a little less worried about what Lord Nethys might be trying to accomplish here, because that's seeming sort of... obvious."
"I'm worrying at this point that I may end up as a heretic too, just like the rest of Project Lawful. Only in my case that would make me a Nethysian heretic. One who has started to believe that some things should not, in fact, explode."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, you know, if you ever get in the mood to renounce your god and sell your soul, we're here."
Ione Sala: "Hm. Let me think about that. Hm. Hmmmmm."
"Hmmmmmmmmm."
"Still thinking. It's such a difficult question."
Carissa Sevar: "If a thousand years from now Evil Keltham and I are ruling a layer of Hell acknowledged as objectively the most awesome place in the multiverse you can't say you weren't warned."